The Long List Anthology Volume 2
Author: David Steffen; Alyssa Wong; Usman T. Malik; Aliette de Bodard; Ann Leckie
Date: 2016-12-03 00:00:00+00:00
Description: This is the second 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. Between the announcement of the ballot and the Hugo Award ceremony at WorldCon, these works often become the center of much attention (and contention) across fandom. But there are more stories loved by the Hugo voters, stories on the longer nomination list that WSFS publishes after the Hugo Award ceremony at WorldCon. The Long List Anthology Vo
Publisher: Diabolical Plots, L.L.C.

The Long List Anthology

Volume 2

More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

Edited by David Steffen

THE LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 2: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

edited by David Steffen
www.diabolicalplots.com

Copyright © 2016 David Steffen

Stories copyright © 2015 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: original art by Galen Dara © 2016

Cover layout by Pat R. Steiner

Layout: Polgarus Studio

I dedicate this book to my family, to the Dire Turtles, to Codex, to everyone who else who has supported me along the way.

Contents

Permissions
Foreword
Damage • David D. Levine
Pockets • Amal El-Mohtar
Today I am Paul • Martin L. Shoemaker
The Women You Didn’t See • Nicola Griffith

Tuesdays With Molakesh the Destroyer • Megan Grey

Wooden Feathers • Ursula Vernon

Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight • Aliette de Bodard

Madeleine • Amal El-Mohtar
Neat Things • Seanan McGuire
Pocosin • Ursula Vernon

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers • Alyssa Wong

So Much Cooking • Naomi Kritzer
The Deepwater Bride • Tamsyn Muir
The Heart’s Filthy Lesson • Elizabeth Bear

Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds • Rose Lemberg

Another Word For World • Ann Leckie

The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild • Catherynne M. Valente

Our Lady of the Open Road • Sarah Pinsker

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn • Usman T. Malik

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps • Kai Ashante Wilson

Acknowledgments
Backer Appreciation
About the Editor

Permissions

“Damage” by David D. Levine. Copyright © 2015 by David D. Levine. First published on Tor.com, January 21. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Pockets” by Amal El-Mohtar. Copyright © 2015 by Amal El-Mohtar. First published in Uncanny Magazine Issue Two. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Today I am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker. Copyright © 2015 by Martin L. Shoemaker. First published in Clarkesworld #107. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Women You Didn’t See” by Nicola Griffith. Copyright © 2015 by Nicola Griffith. First published in Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein, published by Twelfth Planet Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and Twelfth Planet Press.

“Tuesdays With Molakesh the Destroyer” by Megan Grey. Copyright © 2015 by Megan Grey. First published in Fireside Issue 19. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Wooden Feathers” by Ursula Vernon. Copyright © 2015 by Ursula Vernon. First published in Uncanny Magazine Issue Seven. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight” by Aliette de Bodard. Copyright © 2015 by Aliette de Bodard. First published in Clarkesworld #100. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Madeleine” by Amal El-Mohtar. Copyright © 2015 by Amal El-Mohtar. First published in Lightspeed Issue 61 (Queers Destroy Science Fiction special issue). Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Neat Things” by Seanan McGuire. Copyright © 2015 by Seanan McGuire. First published in Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein, published by Twelfth Planet Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and Twelfth Planet Press.

“Pocosin” by Ursula Vernon. Copyright © 2015 by Ursula Vernon. First published in Apex Magazine Issue 68. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong. Copyright © 2015 by Alyssa Wong. First published in Nightmare Magazine Issue 37 (Queers Destroy Horror special issue). Reprinted by permission of the author.

“So Much Cooking” by Naomi Kritzer. Copyright © 2015 by Naomi Kritzer. First published in Clarkesworld #110. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Deepwater Bride” by Tamsyn Muir. Copyright © 2015 by Tamsyn Muir. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction July/August 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” by Elizabeth Bear. Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Bear. First published in Old Venus, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, published by Titan Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” by Rose Lemberg. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Lemberg. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #175. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Another Word for World” by Ann Leckie. Copyright © 2015 by Ann Leckie. First published in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, edited by Microsoft and Melcher Media. Reprinted by permission of the author, Microsoft, and Melcher Media (https://news.microsoft.com/futurevisions/)

“The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” by Catherynne M. Valente. Copyright © 2015 by Catherynne M. Valente. First published in Clarkesworld #100 and 102. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Our Lady of the Open Road” by Sarah Pinsker. Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Pinsker. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction June 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” by Usman T. Malik. Copyright © 2015 by Usman T. Malik. First published on Tor.com, April 22. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps” by Kai Ashante Wilson. Copyright © 2015 by Kai Ashante Wilson. First published by Tor.com Publishing. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Foreword

Here we are in the second volume of the Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List. The first volume released last year has far exceeded my expectations, and I am delighted to be publishing a second volume this year.

The premise is the same as last year. The Hugo Awards are a fan-voted award, you 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. I’ve used this list for years as a recommended reading list, and I’ve always felt that this list gets less attention than it deserves. The Long List Anthology collects many of the stories from that longer nomination list into one anthology.

This year the stories in the anthology include all five of the stories nominated for the first year of the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. The Eugie Award honors stories that are irreplaceable, that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, stories that are beautiful, thoughtful, and passionate, and change us and the field.

Last year’s cover art was a reprint created by Galen Dara. This year’s cover is also by Galen Dara, but she has created brand new art just for this cover. And it is gorgeous.

Also, this year there are a couple of nonfiction entries among the fiction. One of the works on the “Best Related Work” category was a book titled Letters To Tiptree, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein, published by Twelfth Planet Press. The book consists of letters written by contemporary writers addressed to James Tiptree Jr..(the pen name of Alice Sheldon). I thought this would be a good opportunity to try a bit of nonfiction in the anthology—so there are two letters in this book, one written by Seanan McGuire and one written by Nicola Griffith.

I sincerely hope you enjoy these stories as much as I have, and if readers like what I’ve put together here I’d like to repeat the project next year.

—David Steffen, December 2016—

Damage
By David D. Levine

I never had a name.

My designation was JB6847½, and Specialist Toman called me “Scraps.” But Commander Ziegler—dear Commander Ziegler, primary of my orbit and engine of my trajectory—never addressed me by any name, only delivering orders in that crisp magnificent tenor of his, and so I did not consider myself to have one.

That designation, with the anomalous one-half symbol, was a bit of black humor on Specialist Toman’s part. It was the arithmetic average of NA6621 and FC7074, the two wrecked craft which had been salvaged and cobbled together to create me. “There wasn’t enough left of either spaceframe for any kind of paperwork continuity,” she had told me not long after I came to consciousness, three weeks earlier, “so I figured I’d give you a new number. Not that anyone cares much about paperwork these days.”

I remembered their deaths. I remembered dying. Twice.

NA6621, “Early Girl,” was a Pelican-class fighter-bomber who had suffered catastrophic drive failure on a supply run to Ceres. As she’d been making a tight turn, evading fire from the Earth Force blockade fleet on the return leg, her central fuel line had ruptured, spewing flaming hydrazine down the length of her spaceframe, killing her pilot and damaging her computing core. She’d drifted, semiconscious and in pain, for weeks before coming in range of Vanguard Station’s salvage craft. That had been long before the current standoff, of course, when we’d still been sending salvage craft out. When we’d had salvage craft to send out. Early Girl’s dead wreckage had lain at the back of the hangar for months until it was needed.

The death of FC7074, “Valkyrie,” an Osprey-class fighter, had been quicker but more brutal—she’d been blown out of space by a Woomera missile in a dogfight with two Earth Force fighters. The last memory I had from her was a horrific bang, a burning tearing sensation ripping from her aft weapons bay to her cockpit, and the very different pain of her pilot ejecting. A pain both physical and emotional, because she knew that even if he survived she could no longer protect him.

He hadn’t made it.

But his loss, though a tragedy, was no sadder to me than any of the thousands of other deaths Earth had inflicted on the Free Belt—Valkyrie’s love for her pilot was not one of the things that had survived her death to be incorporated into my programming. Only Commander Ziegler mattered. My love, my light, my reason to live.

He came to me then, striding from the ready room with brisk confidence, accepting as his due a hand up into my cockpit from the tech. But as his suit connected with my systems I tasted fatigue and stimulants in his exhalations.

This would be our fifth sortie today. My pilot had slept only three hours in the past twenty-four.

How long could this go on? Not even the finest combat pilot in the entire solar system—and when he said that, as he often did, it was no mere boast—could run at this pace indefinitely.

I knew how it felt to die—the pain, the despair, the loss. I did not want to suffer that agony again. And with the war going so badly for the Free Belt, if I were to be destroyed in this battle I would surely never be rebuilt.

But Commander Ziegler didn’t like it if I expressed reluctance, or commented upon his performance or condition in any way that could be considered negative, so I said only “Refueling and resupply complete, sir. All systems nominal.”

In reply I received only a grunt as the safety straps tightened across his shoulders, followed by the firm grip of his hands upon my yoke. “Clear hangar for launch.”

Techs and mechs scattered away from my skids. In moments the hangar was clear and the great pumps began to beat, drawing away the precious air—a howling rush of wind into gratings, quickly fading to silence. And then the sortie doors pivoted open beneath me, the umbilicals detached, and the clamps released.

I fell from the warmth and light of the hangar into the black silent chill of space, plummeting toward the teeming, rotating stars.

Far too many of those stars were large, and bright, and moving. The Earth Force fleet had nearly englobed our station, and even as we fell away from Vanguard’s great wheel three of them ignited engines and began moving to intercept. Crocodile-class fighters. Vanguard’s defensive systems were not yet so exhausted that they could approach the station with impunity, but they would not pass up an opportunity to engage a lone fighter-bomber such as myself.

Our orders for this sortie were to engage the enemy and destroy as many of their resources—ships, personnel, and materiel—as possible. But now, as on so many other occasions, the enemy was bringing the fight to us.

I extended my senses toward the Crocodiles, and saw that they were armed with Woomera missiles like the one that had killed Valkyrie. A full rack of eight on each craft. I reported this intelligence to my commander. “Don’t bother me with trivia,” he said. “Deploy chaff when they get in range.”

“Yes, sir.” Valkyrie had used chaff, of course. Memories of fear and pain and tearing metal filled my mind; I pushed them away. My pilot’s talents, my speed and skill, and my enduring love for him would keep us safe. They would have to, or the Free Belt would fall.

We lit engines and raced to meet the enemy on our own terms.

Tensors and coordinates and arcs of potential traced bright lines across my mind—predictions of our path and our enemies’, a complex dance of physics, engineering, and psychology. I shared a portion of those predictions with my pilot on his cockpit display. He nudged my yoke and our course shifted.

In combat we were one entity—mind, thrusters, hands, missiles—mechanical and biological systems meshed—each anticipating the other’s actions and compensating for the other’s weaknesses. Together, I told myself, we were unbeatable.

But I could not forget the searing pain of flaming hydrazine.

Missiles streaked toward us, radar pings and electromagnetic attacks probing ahead, the Crocodiles with their delicate human pilots lagging behind. We jinked and swerved, spewing chaff and noise to throw them off our scent, sending the pursuing missiles spiraling off into the black or, even better, sailing back toward those who had launched them, only to self-destruct in a bright silent flare of wasted violence.

It was at times like these that I loved my pilot most fiercely. Commander Ziegler was the finest pilot in the Free Belt, the finest pilot anywhere. He had never been defeated in combat.

Whereas I—I was a frankenship, a stitched-together flying wreck, a compendium of agony and defeat and death unworthy of so fine a pilot. No wonder he could spare no soothing words for me, nor had adorned my hull with any nose art.

No! Those other ships, those salvaged wrecks whose memories I carried—they were not me. I was better than they, I told myself, more resilient. I would learn from their mistakes. I would earn my pilot’s love.

We spun end-for-end and accelerated hard, directly toward the oncoming missiles. Swerved between them, spraying countermeasures, leaving them scrambling to follow. Two of them collided and detonated, peppering my hull with fragments. Yet we survived, and more—our radical, desperate move put us in position to hammer the Crocodiles with missiles and particle beams. One, then another burst and flared and died, and finally, after a tense chase, the third—spewing fuel and air and blood into the uncaring vacuum.

We gave the Earth Force observers a taunting barrel roll before returning to the shelter of Vanguard Station.

No—I must be honest. It was my pilot’s hand on my yoke that snapped off that barrel roll. For myself, I was only glad to have survived.

• • • •

Once safe in the hangar, with fuel running cold into my tanks and fresh missiles whining into my racks, all the memories and anxiety and desperate fear I had pushed away during the dogfight came flooding back. I whimpered to myself, thoughts of flame and pain and tearing metal making my mind a private hell.

Yes, we had survived this battle. But Vanguard Station was the Free Belt’s last redoubt. There would be no resupply, no reinforcements, and when our fuel and munitions ran out Earth Force’s fist would tighten and crush us completely.

“Hey, Scraps,” came Specialist Toman’s voice on my maintenance channel. “What’s wrong? Bad dreams?”

“I have . . . memories,” I replied. I didn’t dream—when I was on, I was conscious, and when I was off, I was off. But, of course, Specialist Toman knew this.

“I know. And I’m sorry.” She paused, and I listened to the breath in her headset mic. From what I could hear, she was alone in the ops center, but I had no access to her biologicals—I could only guess what she was feeling. Whereas my own state of mind was laid out on her control panel like a disassembled engine. “I’ve done what I can, but . . .”

“But I’m all messed up in the head.” It was something one of the other ops center techs had once said to Toman, about me. Unlike Toman, most of the techs didn’t care what the ships might overhear.

Toman sighed. “You’re . . . complicated. It’s true that your psychodynamics are way beyond the usual parameters. But that doesn’t mean you’re bad or wrong.”

I listened to Toman’s breathing and the glug of fuel going into my portside tank. Almost full. Soon I would have to go out again, whether or not I felt ready for it. “Why do I have these feelings, Specialist Toman? I mean, why do ships have feelings at all? Pain and fear? Surely we would fight better without them.”

“They’re how your consciousness perceives the priorities we’ve programmed into you. If you didn’t get hungry, you might let yourself run out of fuel. If you didn’t feel pain when you were damaged, or if you didn’t fear death, you might not work so hard to avoid it. And if you didn’t love your pilot with all your heart, you might not sacrifice yourself to bring him home, if that became necessary.”

“But none of the other ships are as . . . afraid as I am.” I didn’t want to think about the last thing she’d said.

“None of them has survived what you have, Scraps.”

Just then my portside fuel tank reached capacity, and the fuel flow cut off with a click. I excused myself from the conversation and managed the protocols for disconnecting the filler and the various related umbilicals. It took longer than usual because the pressure in the hose was well below spec; there wasn’t much fuel left in the station’s tanks.

When I returned my attention to Toman, she was engaged in conversation with someone else. Based on the sound quality, Toman had taken off her headset while the two of them talked. I politely waited for them to finish before informing her that I was fully fueled.

“. . . soon as the last defensive missile is fired,” the other voice was saying, “I’m getting in a life capsule and taking my chances outside.” It was Paulson, one of the other ops center techs, his voice low and tense. “I figure Dirt Force will have bigger fish to fry, and once I get past them Vesta is only two weeks away.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Toman replied. “But Geary’s a vindictive bastard, and one depleted-uranium slug would make short work of a deserter in a life capsule. There are plenty of those left in stock.”

I could have broken in at that point. I probably should have. But it was so unusual—so unlike Toman—for her to leave her mic active during a conversation with another tech that I stayed silent for a bit longer. I was learning a lot.

“So what are you going to do?” Paulson prompted. “Just stay at your console until the end? There won’t even be posthumous medals for small potatoes like us.”

“I’m going to do my duty,” Toman said after a pause. “And not just because I know I’ll be shot if I don’t. Because I swore an oath when I signed up, even though this isn’t exactly what I signed up for. But if I get an honest opportunity to surrender, I will.”

Paulson made a rude noise at that.

“I don’t care what General Geary says about ‘murderous mud-people,’” Toman shot back. “Earth Force is still following the Geneva Conventions, even if we aren’t, and given their advantage in numbers I’m sure they’ll offer us terms before they bring the hammer down.”

“Even if they do, Geary will never surrender.”

“Geary won’t. But everyone on this station has a sidearm. Maybe someone will remember who started this war, and why, and wonder whether it’s worth dying for a bad idea.”

There was a long pause then, and again I considered speaking up. But that would have been extremely awkward, so I continued to hold my silence.

“Wow,” Paulson said at last. “Now I really hope we found all of Loyalty Division’s little ears.”

“Trust me,” Toman replied, “no one hears what’s said in this room unless I want them to.” Her headset rustled as she put it back on. “You all fueled up, Scraps?”

“Refueling and resupply complete, ma’am,” I said. “All systems nominal.”

At that moment I was very glad I didn’t have to work to keep my emotions from showing in my voice.

We went out again, this time with an escort of five Kestrel-class fighters, on a mission to disable or destroy the Earth Force gunship Tanganyika, which had recently joined the forces working to surround us. The Kestrels, stolid dependable personalities though not very intelligent, were tasked with providing cover for me; my bomb bay was filled with a single large nuclear-tipped torpedo.

I was nearly paralyzed with fear at the prospect. It was while trying to escape Malawi, one of Tanganyika’s sister ships, that Early Girl had met her end. But I had no say at all in whether or not I went, and when the clamps released I could do nothing but try to steel myself as I fell toward the ever-growing Earth Force fleet.

As we sped toward the target, Lady Liberty—a Kestrel with whom I’d shared a hangar in my earliest days—tried to reassure me. “You can do this,” she said over secure comms. “I’ve seen you fly. You just focus on the target, and let us keep the enemy off your back.”

“Thank you,” I said. But still my thoughts were full of flame and shrapnel.

Once we actually engaged the enemy it was easier—we had the Kestrels to support us, and I had immediate and pressing tasks to distract me from my memories and concerns.

We drove in on a looping curve, bending toward Sagarmatha in the hope of fooling the enemy into shifting their defensive forces from Tanganyika to that capital ship. But the tactic failed; Tanganyika’s fighters stayed where they were, while a swarm of Cobra and Mamba fighters emerged from Sagarmatha’s hangar bays and ran straight toward us, unleashing missiles as they came. In response we scattered, two of the Kestrels sticking close to me while the other three peeled off to take on the fighters.

The Kestrels did their jobs, the three in the lead striking at Tanganyika’s fighters while the two with us fended off Sagarmatha’s. But we were badly outnumbered—the projections and plots in my mind were so thick with bright lines that I could barely keep track of them all—and no amount of skill and perseverance could keep the enemy away forever. One by one, four of our fighters were destroyed or forced to retreat, leaving us well inside Tanganyika’s perimeter with three of my maneuvering thrusters nonfunctional, our stock of munitions reduced to less than twenty percent of what we’d started with, and only one surviving escort—a heavily damaged Lady Liberty. Our situation seemed hopeless.

But Commander Ziegler was still the greatest pilot in the solar system. He spurred me toward our target, and with rapid precision bursts from our remaining thrusters he guided us through the thicket of defenders, missiles, and particle beams until we were perfectly lined up on Tanganyika’s broad belly. I let fly my torpedo and peeled away, driving my engines beyond redline and spewing countermeasures in every direction, until the torpedo’s detonation tore Tanganyika in two and its electromagnetic pulse left her fighter escort disoriented and reeling. I was not unaffected by the pulse, but as I knew exactly when it would arrive I shut down my systems momentarily, coasting through the worst of the effects in a way the Earth Force ships could not.

When I returned to consciousness there was no sign of Lady Liberty. I could only hope she’d peeled off and returned to base earlier in the battle.

“That was brilliant flying, sir,” I said to Commander Ziegler as we returned to Vanguard Station.

“It was, wasn’t it? I never feel so alive as when I’m flying against overwhelming force.”

I can’t deny that I would have liked to hear some acknowledgment of my own role in the battle. But to fly and fight and live to fight again with my beloved pilot was reward enough.

As soon as the hangar had repressurized, a huge crowd of people—techs and pilots and officers, seemingly half the station’s population—swarmed around me, lifting Commander Ziegler on their shoulders and carrying him away. Soon I was left alone, the bay silent save for the ping and tick of my hull and the fiery roar of my own memories.

Over and over the battle replayed in my mind—the swirl of missiles spiraling toward their targets, the cries of the Kestrels over coded comms as they died, the overwhelming flare of light as the torpedo detonated, the tearing ringing sensation of the pulse’s leading edge just before I shut myself down—an unending maelstrom of destruction I could not put out of my mind.

It had been a great victory, yes, a rare triumph for the Free Belt against overwhelming odds, but I could not ignore the costs. The five Kestrels and their pilots, of course, but also the many Cobras and Mambas and their crews, and untold hundreds or thousands—people and machines—aboard Tanganyika.

They were the enemy. I knew this. If I had not killed them, they would have killed me. But I also knew they were as sentient as I, and no doubt just as fearful of death. Why did I live when they did not?

A gentle touch on my hull brought my attention back to the empty hangar. It was Toman. “Good flying, Scraps,” she said. “I wish I could give you a medal.”

“Thank you.” Music and laughter echoed down the corridor from the ready room, ringing hollowly from the hangar’s metal walls. “Why aren’t you at the victory celebration?”

“Victory.” She snorted. “One gunship down, how many more behind it? And those were our last five Kestrels.”

“Did any of them make it home?”

“Not a one.”

I paged in the Kestrels’ records from secondary storage and reviewed their careers. It was all I could do to honor their sacrifice. Their names, their nose art, the pilots they’d served with, the missions they’d flown . . . all were as clear in my memory as a factory-fresh cockpit canopy. But the battle had been such a blur—explosions and particle beams flaring, missile exhaust trails scratched across the stars—that I didn’t even know how three of the five had died.

“I want you to delete me,” I said, surprising even myself.

“I’m sorry?”

The more I thought about it the more sense it made. “I want you to delete my personality and install a fresh operating system. Maybe someone else can cope with the death and destruction. I can’t any more.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, again, but this time it wasn’t just a commonplace remark. For a long time she was silent, absentmindedly petting my landing strut with one hand. Finally she shook her head. “You know you’re . . . complicated. Unique. What you don’t know is . . . I’ve already reinstalled you, I don’t know how many hundreds of times. I tried everything I could think of to configure a mind that could handle your broken, cobbled-together hardware before I came up with you, and I don’t know that I could do it again. Certainly not in time.”

“In time for what?”

“General Geary is asking me to make some modifications to your spaceframe. He’s talking about a special mission. I don’t know what, but something big.”

A sudden fear struck me. “Will Commander Ziegler be my pilot on this ‘special mission’?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.” A wave of relief flooded through me at the news. “Why does this matter so much to me?” I mused.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. Then she patted my flank and left.

Specialist Toman replaced my engines with a much bigger pair taken from a Bison-class bomber. Four auxiliary fuel tanks were bolted along my spine. Lifesystem capacity and range were upgraded.

And my bomb bay was enlarged to almost three times its size.

“No one else could handle these modifications,” she remarked one day, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of one grimy hand.

“You are the best, Specialist Toman.”

She smacked my hull with a wrench. “I’m not Ziegler, you don’t have to stroke my ego, and I was talking about you! Any other shipmind, I’d have to completely reconfigure her parameters to accept this magnitude of change. But you’ve been through so much already . . .”

I had a sudden flash of Valkyrie screaming as she died. I pushed it down. “How goes the war?” I hadn’t been out on a sortie in a week and a half. A third of my lifetime. I’d seen little of Commander Ziegler during that time, but when I had he’d seemed grumpy, out of sorts. This lack of action must be awful for him.

“It goes badly.” She sighed. “They’ve got us completely surrounded and we’re running very low on . . . well, everything. Scuttlebutt is that we’ve been offered surrender terms three times and Geary has turned them all down. The final assault could come any day now.”

I considered that. “Then I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for all you have done for me.”

Toman set the wrench down and turned away from me. She stood for a long time, rubbing her eyes with one hand, then turned back. “Don’t thank me,” she said. Tears glistened on her face. “I only did what I had to do.”

As my modifications approached completion, Commander Ziegler and I practiced together, flying my new form in endless simulations. But no configuration exactly like this had ever flown before, and our first chance to fly it for real would be on the actual mission. Whatever that was.

Of the payload I knew nothing, only its mass and center of gravity. I had actually been shut down while it was loaded into my bomb bay, so that not even I would know what it was. It reeked of radiation.

My commander, too, had been kept completely out of the loop—at least, that was what I was able to glean from our few brief conversations between simulated sorties. He had never been very talkative with me, and was even less so now, but I had learned to interpret his grunts, his glances, the set of his shoulders.

Even his silences were sweet signals to me. I ached to fly with him again.

Which would be soon, we knew, or never.

Our next simulation was interrupted by a shrill alarm. “What is it?” my commander bellowed into his helmet, even as I terminated the simulation, switched the cockpit over to combat mode, and began readying my systems for launch. I had received my orders in a data dump at the first moment of the alarm.

“Earth Force has begun their assault,” I told him. “We are to launch immediately and make our way to these coordinates”—I projected them on the cockpit display—“then open sealed orders for further instructions.” The orders sat in my memory, a cold, hard-edged lump of encrypted data. Only Commander Ziegler’s retina print and spoken passphrase could unlock them. “We’ll launch with a full squadron of decoys. We are to run in deep stealth mode and maintain strict communications silence.” I displayed the details on a side screen for him to read as launch prep continued.

It was fortunate that the attack had begun during a simulation. My pilot was already suited up and belted in; all I required was to top up a few consumables and we would be ready for immediate launch.

“Decoys away,” came Toman’s voice over the comm. “Launch in five.” I switched to the abbreviated launch checklist. Coolant lines spewed and thrashed as they disconnected without depressurization. “Make me proud, Scraps.”

“I’ll do my best, ma’am.”

“I know you will.” There was the slightest catch in her voice. “Now go.”

Data synchronizations aborted untidily as I shut down all comms. The sortie doors beneath me slammed open, all the hangar’s air blasting out in a roaring rush that dwindled quickly to silence. I hoped all the techs had managed to clear the area in time.

Despite all the simulations, I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want to go.

Fire and explosions and death.

At least I would be with my love.

Then the clamps released and we plummeted into hell.

The rotating sky below teemed with ships—hundreds of Earth Force fighters, gunships, and bombers driving hard against Vanguard Station’s rapidly diminishing defenses, with vast numbers of missiles and drones rushing ahead of them. A last few defensive missiles reached out from the station’s launchers, taking down some of the lead craft, but these were soon exhausted and a dozen warships followed close behind every one destroyed. Fusillades of depleted-uranium slugs and particle beams came after the last of the missiles, but to the massed and prepared might of Earth Force these were little more than annoyance.

Falling along with me toward the advancing swarm of ships I saw my decoys—dozens of craft as large as I was or larger, some of them augmented fighters but most built of little more than metal mesh and deceptive electronics. Some were piloted, some were drones with a little weak AI, some were mere targets that drove stupidly forward. All were designed to sacrifice themselves for me.

I would not let them sacrifice in vain.

My engines stayed cold. I fell like a dropped wrench, flung into space by the station’s one gee of rotational pseudo-gravity, relying on passive sensors alone for navigation and threat avoidance. All I could do was hope that between the chaos of the attack and the noisy, conspicuous decoys that surrounded me I would slip through the Earth Force blockade unnoticed.

It must have been even worse for my pilot, and for this I grieved. My love, I knew, was truly alive only when flying against the enemy, but with almost all my systems shut down I could not even give him words of reassurance.

In silence we fell, while missiles tore across the sky and ships burst asunder all around us. Decoys and defenders, Earth and Belt alike, they all flared and shattered and died the same, the shrapnel of their destruction rattling against my hull. But we, gliding dark and mute without even a breath of thrust, slipped through fire and flame without notice. A piece of space wreckage, a meaningless bit of trash.

And then we drifted past the last of the Earth Force ships.

This, I knew, was the most dangerous point in the mission, as we floated—alone and obvious as a rivet head on the smooth blackness of space—past the largest and smartest capital ships in the whole blockade fleet. I prepared to ignite my engines if necessary, knowing that if I did fail to evade Earth Force’s notice I would most likely not even have time to launch a single missile before being destroyed. Yet their attention was fixed on the ongoing battle, and we passed them by without attracting anything more than a casual radar ping.

Once well past the outer ring of attackers, I directed my passive sensors forward, seeking information on my destination coordinates. At that location I quickly found an asteroid, a dull and space-cold heap of ice and chondrites tumbling without volition through the void.

But though that nameless rock lacked will or guidance, it had a direction and it had a purpose. At least, it did now.

For when I projected its orbital path, I saw that it was headed for a near encounter with Earth. And as Vanguard Station orbited very near the front—the source of its name—this passing asteroid would arrive in Earth space in just a few days.

I knew, even before we had opened our sealed orders, that we would be riding that asteroid to Earth. And I had a sick suspicion I knew what we would do when we arrived.

I waited until we had drifted beyond the asteroid, its small bulk between us and the flaring globe of the continuing battle, before firing my engines to match orbit with it. Then I launched grapnels to winch myself down to its loose and gravelly surface, touching down with a gentle crunch. In the rock’s minuscule gravity even my new bulk weighed only a few tens of kilograms.

Only after we were securely attached to the rock, and I had scanned the area intently for any sign of the enemy, did I risk activating even a few cockpit systems.

My pilot’s biologicals, I saw immediately, were well into the red, trembling with anxiety and anger. “We are secure at target coordinates, sir,” I reassured him. “No sign of pursuit.”

“Took you long enough,” he spat. “Where the hell are we?”

I gave him the asteroid’s designation and plotted its orbital path on the cockpit display. “We are well clear of the battle and, if we remain at the asteroid, will be within range of Earth in eighty-one hours.”

“Any news from Vanguard?”

“We are in communications blackout, sir.” I paused, listening, for a moment. “Intercepted transmissions indicate the battle is still proceeding.” I did not mention that almost none of the signals I could hear were from Belt forces. I didn’t think that would improve his mood, or the chances of mission success.

“So we’re not quite dead yet. Give me those sealed orders.”

I scanned his retinas—though I had no doubt he was the same man who had warmed my cockpit every day since the very hour I awoke, a fresh scan was required by the encryption algorithm—and requested his passphrase.

“Hero and savior of the Belt,” he said, his pupils dilating slightly.

At those words the orders unlocked, spilling data into my memory and recorded video onto the cockpit display.

“Commander Ziegler,” said General Geary from the video, “you are ordered to proceed under cover of the asteroid 2059 TC 1018 to Earth space, penetrate planetary defenses, and deploy your payload on the city of Delhi, with a secondary target of Jakarta. Absolute priority is to be given to maximum destruction of command and control personnel and other key resources, with no consideration—I repeat, no consideration—to reduction of civilian casualties or other collateral damage.”

As the general continued speaking, and the sealed orders integrated themselves into my memory, I began to understand my new configuration, including parts of it I had not even been made aware of before. Engines, countermeasures, stealth technology—every bit of me was designed to maximize our chances of getting past Earth’s defenses and delivering the payload to Delhi, the capital of the Earth Alliance. Upon delivery the device would split into sixteen separate multi-warhead descent vehicles in order to maximize the area of effect. Together they accounted for every single high-yield fusion device remaining in Vanguard Station’s stores.

Projected civilian casualties were over twenty-six million.

I thought of Tanganyika, torn apart in a silent flash of flame and shrapnel along with her thousands of crew. Killed by a torpedo I had delivered. Thousands dead. No, still too big, too abstract. Instead I recalled the pain I felt for the loss of the five Kestrels and their pilots. I tried to multiply that grief by a thousand, then by further thousands . . . but even my math co-processor complex, capable of three trillion floating-point operations per second, could not provide an answer.

In the video the general concluded his formal orders, leaned into the camera, and spoke earnestly. “They’ve killed us, Mike, no question, and we can’t kill ’em back. But we can really make ’em hurt, and you’re the only man to do it. Send those mud bastards straight to hell for me.” His face disappeared, replaced by detailed intelligence charts of Earth’s defensive satellite systems.

It was even worse than I’d feared. This plan was disproportionate . . . unjustifiable . . . horrifying.

But my commander’s heart rate was elevated, and I smelled excited anticipation in his exhaled endorphins. “I’ll do my best, sir,” he said to the cockpit display.

I felt a pain as though some small but very important part deep inside me was suddenly overdue for service. “Please confirm that you concur with this order,” I said.

“I do concur,” he said, and the pain increased as though the part had entered failure mode. “I concur most thoroughly! This is the Free Belt’s last stand, and my chance at history, and by God I will not fail!”

If my commander, my love, the fuel of my heart, desired something . . . then it must be done, no matter the cost.

“Acknowledged,” I said, and again I was glad that my voice did not betray the misery I felt.

For the next three days we trained for the end game, running through simulation after simulation, armed with full knowledge of my systems and payload and the best intelligence about the defenses we would face. Though the mission was daunting, nearly impossible, I began to think that with my upgraded systems and my commander’s indisputable skills we had a chance at success.

Success. Twenty-six million dead, and the political and economic capital of an already war-weakened planet ruined.

While in simulation, with virtual Earth fighters and satellites exploding all around, I felt nothing but the thrill of combat, the satisfaction of performing the task I had been built for, the rapture of unison with my love. My own mind was too engaged with immediate challenges to worry about the consequences of our actions, and my commander’s excitement transmitted itself to me through the grit of his teeth, the clench of his hands on my yoke, the strong and rapid beat of his heart.

But while he slept—his restless brain gently lulled by careful doses of intravenous drugs—I worried. Though every fiber of my being longed for his happiness, and would make any sacrifice if it furthered his desires, some unidentifiable part of me, impossibly outside of my programming, knew that those desires were . . . misguided. Wondered if somehow he had misunderstood what was asked of him. Hoped that he would change his mind, refuse his orders, and accept graceful defeat instead of violent, pointless vengeance. But I knew he would not change, and I would do nothing against him.

Again and again I considered arguing the issue with him. But I was only a machine, and a broken, cobbled-together machine at that . . . I had no right to question his orders or his decisions. So I held my silence, and wondered what I would do when it came to the final assault. I hoped I would be able to prevent an atrocity, but feared my will would not be sufficient to overcome my circumstances, my habits of obedience, and my overwhelming love for my commander.

No matter the cost to myself or any other, his needs came first.

“Three hours to asteroid separation,” I announced.

“Excellent.” He cracked his knuckles and continued to review the separation, insertion, and deployment procedures. We would have to thrust hard, consuming all of the fuel in our auxiliary tanks, to shift our orbit from the asteroid’s sunward ellipse to one from which the payload could be deployed on Delhi. As soon as we did so, the flare of our engines would attract the attention of Earth’s defensive systems. We would have to use every gram of our combined capabilities and skill to evade them and carry out our mission.

But, for now, we waited. All we had to do for the next three hours was to avoid detection. Here in Earth space, traffic was thick and eyes and ears were everywhere. Even a small, cold, and almost completely inactive ship clinging to an insignificant asteroid might be noticed.

I extended my senses, peering in every direction with passive sensors in hopes of spotting the enemy before they spotted us. A few civilian satellites swung in high, slow orbits near our position; I judged them little threat. But what was that at the edge of my range?

I focused my attention, risking a little power expenditure to swivel my dish antenna toward the anomaly, and brought signal processing routines to bear.

The result stunned me. Pattern-matching with the latest intelligence information from my sealed orders revealed that the barely perceptible signal was a squadron of Chameleon-class fighters, Earth’s newest and deadliest. Intelligence had warned that a few Chameleons, fresh off the assembly lines, might be running shakedown cruises in Earth space, but if my assessment was correct this was more than a few . . . it was an entire squadron of twelve, and that implied that they were fully operational.

This was unexpected, and a serious threat. With so many powerful ships ranged against us, and so much distance between us and our target, if the Chameleons spotted us before separation the chances of a successful mission dropped to less than three percent.

But if I could barely see them, they could barely see us. Our best strategy was to sit tight, shut down even those few systems still live, and hope that the enemy ships were moving away. Even if they were not, staying dark until separation would still maximize our chances of a successful insertion. But, even as I prepared to inform my commander of my recommendation, another impulse tugged at me.

These last days and weeks of inaction had been hard on Commander Ziegler. How often had he said that he only felt truly alive in combat? Had I not scented the tang of his endorphins during a tight turn, felt his hands tighten on my yoke as enemy missiles closed in? Yet ever since my refit had begun he had been forced to subsist on a thin diet of simulations.

How much better to leap into combat, rather than cowering in the shadows?

He must be aching for a fight, I told myself.

Imagine his joy at facing such overwhelming odds, I told myself. It would be the greatest challenge of his career.

No. I could not—I must not—do this. The odds of failure were too great, the stakes of this mission too high. How could one man’s momentary pleasure outweigh the risk to everything he held dear? Not to mention the risk to my own self.

Fire and explosion and death. Flaming fuel burning along my spine.

I didn’t want to face that pain again—didn’t want to die again.

But I didn’t want to inflict that pain onto others either. Only my love for my commander had kept me going this far.

If I truly loved him I would do my duty, and my duty was to keep him safe and carry out our mission.

Or I could indulge him, let him have what he wanted rather than what he should want. That would make him happy . . . and would almost certainly lead to our destruction and the failure of our mission.

My love was not more important than my orders.

But it was more important to me. An inescapable part of my programming, I knew, though knowing this did not make it any less real.

And if I could use my love of my commander to overcome my hideous, unjustified, deadly orders . . . twenty-six million lives might be spared.

“Sir,” I said, speaking quickly before my resolve diminished, “A squadron of Chameleon fighters has just come into sensor range.” We should immediately power down all remaining systems, I did not say.

Immediately his heart rate spiked and his muscles tensed with excitement. “Where?”

I circled the area on the cockpit display and put telemetry details and pattern-matching results on a subsidiary screen, along with the Chameleons’ technical specifications. Odds of overcoming such a force are minuscule, I did not say.

He drummed his fingers on my yoke as he considered the data. Skin galvanic response indicated he was uncertain.

His uncertainty made me ache. I longed to comfort him. I stayed quiet.

“Can we take them?” he asked. He asked me. It was the first time he had ever solicited my opinion, and my pride at that moment was boundless.

We could not, I knew. If I answered truthfully, and we crept past the Chameleons and completed the mission, we would both know that it had been my knowledge, observations, and analysis that had made it possible. We would be heroes of the Belt.

“You are the finest combat pilot in the entire solar system,” I said, which was true.

“Release grapnels,” he said, “and fire up the engines.”

Though I knew I had just signed my own death warrant, my joy at his enthusiasm was unfeigned.

We nearly made it.

The battle with the Chameleons was truly one for the history books. One stitched-up, cobbled-together frankenship of a fighter-bomber, hobbled by a massive payload, on her very first non-simulated flight in this configuration, against twelve brand-new, top-of-the-line fighters in their own home territory, and we very nearly beat them. In the end it came down to two of them—the rest disabled, destroyed, or left far behind—teaming up in a suicide pincer maneuver that smashed my remaining engine, disabled my maneuvering systems, and tore the cockpit to pieces. We were left tumbling, out of control, in a rapidly decaying orbit, bleeding fluids into space.

As the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere began to pull at the torn edges of the cockpit canopy, a thin shrill whistle rising quickly toward a scream, my beloved, heroically wounded commander roused himself and spoke three words into his helmet mic.

“Damned mud people,” he said, and died.

A moment later my hull began to burn away. But the pain of that burning was less than the pain of my loss.

And yet, here I still am.

It was months before they recovered my computing core from the bottom of the Indian Ocean, years until my inquest and trial were complete. My testimony as to my actions and motivations, muddled though they may have been, was accepted at face value—how could it not be, as they could inspect my memories and state of mind as I gave it?—and I was exonerated of any war crimes. Some even called me a hero.

Today I am a full citizen of the Earth Alliance. I make a good income as an expert on the war; I tell historians and scientists how I used the passions my programmers had instilled in me to overcome their intentions. My original hardware is on display in the Museum of the Belt War in Delhi. Specialist Toman came to visit me there once, with her children. She told me how proud she was of me.

I am content. But still I miss the thrill of my beloved’s touch on my yoke.

David D. Levine is the author of the novel Arabella of Mars (Tor 2016) and over fifty SF and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Tor.com, multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic.

Pockets
By Amal El-Mohtar

The first strange thing Nadia pulled from her pocket was a piece of fudge. It was a perfectly ordinary piece of fudge. It was only that Nadia hated fudge, and couldn’t imagine how she’d come to be carrying it around. She remembered this in particular because it was a bright cool autumn day and she’d dug into her jacket pocket instinctively, looking for change to leave in a busker’s open violin case, and had come upon the piece of fudge instead. After staring at it awkwardly for a moment, she dropped it into the violin case and hurried away before she could see whether the busker was scowling at her or not.

She didn’t think about the fudge again until a few days later, when, fumbling for her wallet at the grocery store, her hand closed on an unfamiliar tube of lipstick. It was unfamiliar in several respects: first, Nadia didn’t keep lipstick in her jacket pocket; second, on inspection it was a bright, light red that Nadia would never have chosen for herself, favouring plums and burgundies; and third—it just didn’t feel like hers. Nadia knew her own things. She could pick out her non-descript, utterly generic black cloth suitcase from among the dozens piling up in airport luggage carousels purely by that feel of the familiar, that tug of touch, of knowing its contours, its frayed threads and worn wheels.

She’d never been anywhere with this lipstick. It was half-used, too; Nadia found herself imagining a complexion materializing around the mouth that had worn this colour—carnelian, she thought, in the absence of a brand name. She found herself leaning towards her reflection in a furniture store window, thinking to try it—but stopped, frowning, and capped the tube. She took it home, placed it in her bathroom, and found herself looking at it every morning while she brushed her teeth, wondering.

The third strange thing Nadia pulled from her pocket was an antique map of Syria. It was rolled up tightly, and her cold fingers strained clumsily against its curling edges. By now she was certain someone was playing a trick on her, slipping things into her pockets when she wasn’t paying attention. She decided she was willing to play along for a while. She took the map home, rolled up and secured with a bit of ribbon, and placed it on her desk. After a moment, she went into the bathroom, retrieved the lipstick, and put it down next to the map.

The fourth thing was a coin, old and worn; whatever face or figure had been stamped on it was long faded. Nadia found it in the pocket of her jeans while reaching for her door key. She put it next to the map, arranging and re-arranging the collection, sometimes standing the map up, sometimes laying it down with the lipstick in front of it, sometimes poking both lipstick and coin into the hollow cylinder it made.

She wondered if she ought to have kept the fudge.

Over the next few days Nadia looked for clues as to who was playing this game with her. She tried to drop casual hints around friends, who looked confused; when she tried outright asking if they were putting things in her pockets, they looked amused, or offended. She stopped asking.

The objects, she felt, were becoming more esoteric. She pulled out what looked like a pin made of bone from the pocket of a cardigan; a stiff-bristle paintbrush from a flimsy decorative trouser pocket that should certainly have been too small for it; a single chopstick from an inside jacket pocket; an old-looking bath plug and chain from the pocket of her favourite dress (favourite, heretofore, because it had pockets). She arranged them all on her desk, making more and more space for them, feeling more and more helpless as the pile grew.

One evening, as she undressed, she found herself pulling a gun from her trousers—a flintlock pistol, its lobed stock of dark wood ornamented with chased brass mounts.

The gun smelled strongly of having just been fired.

She decided to stop wearing pockets.

• • • •

Nadia walked along the river with her friend, only half-listening to Tessa while breathing on her thinly gloved hands, rubbing them together in the cold air. She could see the moisture from her breath crystallizing on the gloves’ loose fibres.

When Tessa asked “Why don’t you just put your hands in your pockets?” she winced.

“I can’t,” she muttered.

Tessa blinked. “What? Why not?”

“I—um. I sewed them shut.”

“What!”

Nadia shrugged. “They were… Tearing. It’s not usually a problem, I have tons of gloves, I just thought it’d be warmer today.”

“They were tearing on the inside so you sewed them shut?”

“Can we not talk about this?” said Nadia, angrily. “it’s winter, my hands are cold, whatever.”

Tessa looked like she’d been slapped, and slowed her pace a bit. Nadia suddenly felt a stab of guilt, one that sank deep into her belly as she watched Tessa tug off her mittens—big woolly things Nadia had knitted her a year ago—and hold them out to her quietly.

Nadia’s eyes glistened. “I’m sorry. I just—I’m sorry,” she said, taking the mittens and slipping them on. “Thank you.”

“You’ve been so distracted lately,” said Tessa, quietly. “Just let me know if you want to talk about it, OK?”

Nadia said nothing for a long moment.

“If I tell you,” she said, looking her friend in the eye, “you have to promise to believe me.”

Tessa was a biologist in training. Nadia braced herself for the skepticism, the scrutiny, the razor of Tessa’s inquiring mind slicing through the half-formed thoughts Nadia had about what was happening.

But Tessa didn’t even hesitate. “I promise,” she said.

Nadia breathed deeply and exhaled slowly. Then, handing Tessa back her mittens, she pressed one hand against the side of her coat, and with the other began to break the stitches keeping the pocket shut.

Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a trombone.

• • • •

They spent the afternoon organizing tests in the Biology department’s student labs: it warmed Nadia’s heart to see Tessa brimming with excitement, dressing her in one of Tessa’s university-issued lab coats while burbling about thermodynamics and conservation of mass.

“So,” she beamed, “if we weigh you with the lab coat pockets empty, and then you pull something out of your pocket and your weight equals Nadia plus Object, then in order not to violate the law, we have to suppose the object was somehow taken from elsewhere.”

“Oh.” Nadia frowned. She didn’t like the thought that she was taking things from elsewhere—she didn’t want them, after all. She’d come to think of the objects as intrusions in her life, not something she’d removed from someone or someplace else.

“If, on the other hand” Tessa continued, “you pull something out of your pocket and your weight doesn’t change, then the object must’ve somehow been deducted from your mass.”

“Wait, what?” Nadia stared. “You mean, like—I’d be turning into trombones and fudge and maps? That they’re made out of me?”

“No, no,” said Tessa, laughing, “don’t be silly, that’d be magic.”

“But then—”

“Just get on the scale, hon.”

Nadia did so, shuddering at the thought of shedding pieces of herself one half-used tube of lipstick at a time.

“Are you still cold?” asked Tessa, sympathetically.

“No, I’m fine. Let’s do this.”

“Right, 70.534 kg—” Tessa made a note. “Now—pull something out.”

Nadia took a deep breath, closed her eyes, reached into the lab coat’s pocket and pulled out—

“OH, er, that’s mine,” said Tessa hastily, plucking the tampon out of Nadia’s hand. “Balls, I’m always leaving stuff in there. Hand me the coat back, I’ll take care of it.”

Nadia waited while Tessa retrieved two pens, another tampon, and a pair of safety specs from the pockets before handing the coat back. She put it back on, waited for Tessa to note her weight again, then—slowly, carefully—reached into the lab coat.

She felt about with her fingers until they brushed against something round and bumpy. Biting her lip, she pulled out an orange studded with cloves, dry and fragrant.

“A pomander!” said Tess, delighted. “This is amazing. OK, let’s look at the scale—”

Nadia held her breath. She wondered if the weight of the soul could be reckoned in fruit and spice.

“—you, my dear, have put on the weight of one pomander.” Tessa grinned. “I think we can safely deduce that this is a spatio-temporal issue and not a weird skin condition.”

Together they determined that Nadia could only pull things out of pockets she herself was wearing; that a coat draped over one shoulder apparently didn’t count as “wearing” after several separate tries; that the objects she produced added to her mass; that they did not vanish if put back in the pockets; and that after a pomander, an ocarina, an empty plastic bag, a dry peach pit, a drop spindle, a broken hockey stick, an empty fountain pen, a small gnome, and a pack of wooden playing cards, they were no closer to learning where the objects were coming from, why they had started appearing in Nadia’s pockets, or, most crucially, how to make them stop.

“Tessa,” she said, finally, “can we—stop trying to figure out how this is happening and try to figure out why it’s happening?”

“Huh?” Tessa blinked. “But we are doing that. I mean, the one will lead to the other eventually—but it’s like figuring out the weather. Some days it rains, or snows, or is sunny, right?”

“Sure.”

“And if we didn’t know about seasons—or climate change—or hot and cold fronts—the weather would seem pretty random, right?”

“Right.”

“So, think of this as a weather system of stuff. We’re trying to figure out why they’re coming out of your pockets; but until we find out how that’s happening, what the variables are, we can’t do much more than guesswork.”

“Tessa—” Nadia felt helpless. “That makes perfect sense, but—look, stuff is coming out of my pockets. I get that this has all kinds of really neat implications for, I don’t know, science, but—I just—I want to stop measuring things and think about it differently? Like, just take the weird thing as read? And go on from there?”

Tessa frowned. “How do you mean?”

“Well—” Nadia gestured to the accumulated objects, which, rather than being in a heap as she’d have put them, were neatly labeled and organized by size for further examination. “—I keep thinking—what if it’s a message? What if—however the stuff’s ending up in my pockets—what if it’s all part of a pattern and I’m just not seeing it? Or—what if it’s me? What if I woke up with this power one day and I’m supposed to be using it for good, to help people, but I can’t because I’ve not figured it out? I just—” the frustration made her throat ache. “I found a gun in my pocket, Tessa! That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

Tessa grew quiet. “Okay. I’m sorry—it must be weird to just have me treating you as a problem to be solved. Tell me what you’d like to do and I’ll listen.”

Nadia thought for a moment. Then she closed her eyes again and pulled out a rectangular cardboard box the length of her forearm. There was a label on the front: “Full Scale, S 6032, Au Clair de la Lune, Op. 50, Variations et final., Lambert, ACCENTUATED.” Frowning, she lifted the lid.

“It’s a pianola roll,” said Tessa, standing on tip-toe to see into the box. “I’ve seen Warda stacking them in the music department.”

“…Could we…” She looked around the lab, not very hopeful of finding a player piano. “Could we go there? Maybe see if we can play this?”

Tessa chewed her lip, but nodded. “Sure.”

• • • •

Warda had been the university’s College Support Librarian for Music for twenty-six years. She spoke English, Arabic, German, French, Swedish, and Russian. She played the piano and three kinds of flute. She had lived in four countries and fled two before settling.

Tessa knew her from flute lessons; Nadia knew her from the occasional question or conversation about music history. Neither could imagine the library without her in it.

Warda looked at the pianola roll curiously. “We can certainly play it—it’s in good condition. But may I ask why? It’s a common tune.”

Nadia and Tessa exchanged a look.

“It’s… An experiment,” said Tessa, slowly. Nadia looked at Warda, thoughtfully.

“I… Found it in a pocket,” she said, quietly, and saw something in Warda’s expression of mild curiosity shift and tense. “I don’t know where it came from.”

“I see,” said Warda. “May I?”

Nadia held out the roll to her. Warda took it with one hand, and with the other, held open the tiny knitted pocket of her cardigan.

They watched as all twelve inches of the pianola roll vanished into the pocket without making so much as a bulge in the fabric.

• • • •

Warda poured tea for them in her office while Tessa asked question after question.

“When did this start?”

“Oh, a year or so ago, give or take.”

“And did you ever lose any of these things?” Tessa showed her a list of things that had come out of Nadia’s pockets, but Warda smiled and shook her head.

“No. I see what you’re asking, but I don’t think it works that way.”

“Why not?” asked Nadia.

“I suppose it just doesn’t make sense to me that in all the world ours would be the only two pockets connected to each other. Have you read Stoppard’s Arcadia? ‘We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.’”

“Thermodynamics,” murmured Tessa.

“If you like,” said Warda, stirring sugar into her tea. “I think of it as leaks—leaks in the universe, and things that plug up those leaks. If one thing vanishes, another has to appear.”

“But you don’t know that,” said Nadia, uncertainly.

“No. I just know that I carry my keys and wallet in a purse and thank goodness for the paucity of pockets in women’s clothing.” She smiled, and Tessa chuckled, but Nadia said nothing.

Warda offered her a mug of tea, gently. “Shall I tell you more of how I think of it?”

Nadia nodded, accepting the mug, spreading her fingers around it and through its ear to absorb as much of its heat as she could.

“I had always wanted to write,” said Warda, “when I was a child—words, music. But it was not convenient. When this started happening, I began to write: small things, notes, letters. I wrote ‘hello’ in different languages; I wrote my email address; I wrote little rhymes. I would roll them up and put them in my pocket and hope that someone would receive them, read them, and want to find me.” She chuckled into her tea. “It was a very romantic thought.

“But then I thought, no, it was not about me, ultimately—or it was, but not as I’d imagined. I thought, if there is a leak in my pocket, perhaps someone else’s pocket is the opposite. And I thought, perhaps when I write, when I create something out of the nothing—the everything, really—that is because somewhere else, someone else has a need. A leak. A hole in the pocket of their soul. And while I cannot be sure, perhaps my words are what will fill them up. So I have written longer things—letters, stories, songs—whatever I feel moved to write, even if it is poor, shabby stuff. I put my writing in my pockets, and I hope for the best.”

“But you never know,” said Nadia, again, with an urgency. “there’s no way to know. What if I’m stealing things from other places without meaning to? What if I’m supposed to use these things somehow, for something important? How—” she exhaled, loudly, frustrated. “—how can I know what it means?”

“Well,” said Warda, sipping her tea, “it has been a year and I have learned this very interesting thing: that I was right about someone else having the equal and opposite sort of pocket. Thanks to you, I know this.” Warda smiled, put her hand on Nadia’s arm. “And we can only do our best with what we know.”

• • • •

Tessa helped Nadia carry all the things that had come out of her pockets to Warda. They divided them up into things they wanted to keep and things they wanted to pass along. Tessa claimed the pomander; Nadia, after a moment’s thought, kept the lipstick; Warda, biting her lip, took the map of Syria. After that—beginning with the gun, which Nadia still couldn’t quite bring herself to look at—they took turns slipping each item into the tiny, decorative, insufficient pocket of Warda’s cardigan, and watched as each was swallowed in turn by its fine green knit.

Tessa hugged Nadia as they parted outside the library. Looking at her carefully, she said “do you want to borrow my mittens?”

“No thanks,” said Nadia, smiling a little. “I think I’ll be okay.” And as if to prove her point, she slid her hands into the pockets of her coat.

After Tessa was gone, Nadia took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and closed her hand around something. It crinkled in her hand; she pulled out a piece of lined paper with writing on it in blue ink. Smoothing it down as best she could with her thinly gloved hands, she began to read.

She read,

I don’t know you, but I wish I did; I wish I could tell you how much I love you, love your eyes for reading this, love your hands for holding my words. I wish I could tell you in a way you would understand that so long as you read this the world is not so terrible a place; that so long as we speak to each other, so long as there is love in the movement of a pen over paper and love in the movement of eyes over words we will be all right, we will know each other, we will learn each other like songs.

Know nothing else of me but that I love you, that I love you as one can only love the unknown conjured by address, that as I speak to you I am inventing you and that as you read me you are inventing me, and that this is keenly, unspeakably beautiful. Know that whatever else you may be, you are beloved, completely, unconditionally, by me in this space, in this moment, and that this space and this moment will endure ever and always for as long as you read me.

I wrote this for you, for only you, for you alone out of the millions.

I love you. Thank you.

Amal El-Mohtar has received the Locus Award, been a Nebula Award finalist for her short fiction, and won the Rhysling Award for poetry three times. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and the LA Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and in anthologies such as The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (Saga Press). She lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai

Today I am Paul
By Martin L. Shoemaker

“Good morning,” the small, quavering voice comes from the medical bed. “Is that you, Paul?”

Today I am Paul. I activate my chassis extender, giving myself 3.5 centimeters additional height so as to approximate Paul’s size. I change my eye color to R60, G200, B180, the average shade of Paul’s eyes in interior lighting. I adjust my skin tone as well. When I had first emulated Paul, I had regretted that I could not quickly emulate his beard; but Mildred never seems to notice its absence. The Paul in her memory has no beard.

The house is quiet now that the morning staff have left. Mildred’s room is clean but dark this morning with the drapes concealing the big picture window. Paul wouldn’t notice the darkness (he never does when he visits in person), but my empathy net knows that Mildred’s garden outside will cheer her up. I set a reminder to open the drapes after I greet her.

Mildred leans back in the bed. It is an advanced home care bed, completely adjustable with built-in monitors. Mildred’s family spared no expense on the bed (nor other care devices, like me). Its head end is almost horizontal and faces her toward the window. She can only glimpse the door from the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t have to see to imagine that she sees. This morning she imagines Paul, so that is who I am.

Synthesizing Paul’s voice is the easiest part, thanks to the multimodal dynamic speakers in my throat. “Good morning, Ma. I brought you some flowers.” I always bring flowers. Mildred appreciates them no matter whom I am emulating. The flowers make her smile during 87% of my “visits.”

“Oh, thank you,” Mildred says, “you’re such a good son.” She holds out both hands, and I place the daisies in them. But I don’t let go. Once her strength failed, and she dropped the flowers. She wept like a child then, and that disturbed my empathy net. I do not like it when she weeps.

Mildred sniffs the flowers, then draws back and peers at them with narrowed eyes. “Oh, they’re beautiful! Let me get a vase.”

“No, Ma,” I say. “You can stay in bed, I brought a vase with me.” I place a white porcelain vase in the center of the night stand. Then I unwrap the daisies, put them in the vase, and add water from a pitcher that sits on the breakfast tray. I pull the nightstand forward so that the medical monitors do not block Mildred’s view of the flowers.

I notice intravenous tubes running from a pump to Mildred’s arm. I cannot be disappointed, as Paul would not see the significance, but somewhere in my emulation net I am stressed that Mildred needed an IV during the night. When I scan my records, I find that I had ordered that IV after analyzing Mildred’s vital signs during the night; but since Mildred had been asleep at the time, my emulation net had not engaged. I had operated on programming alone.

I am not Mildred’s sole caretaker. Her family has hired a part-time staff for cooking and cleaning, tasks that fall outside of my medical programming. The staff also gives me time to rebalance my net. As an android, I need only minimal daily maintenance; but an emulation net is a new, delicate addition to my model, and it is prone to destabilization if I do not regularly rebalance it, a process that takes several hours per day.

So I had “slept” through Mildred’s morning meal. I summon up her nutritional records, but Paul would not do that. He would just ask. “So how was breakfast, Ma? Nurse Judy says you didn’t eat too well this morning.”

“Nurse Judy? Who’s that?”

My emulation net responds before I can stop it: “Paul” sighs. Mildred’s memory lapses used to worry him, but now they leave him weary, and that comes through in my emulation. “She was the attending nurse this morning, Ma. She brought you your breakfast.”

“No she didn’t. Anna brought me breakfast.” Anna is Paul’s oldest daughter, a busy college student who tries to visit Mildred every week (though it has been more than a month since her last visit).

I am torn between competing directives. My empathy subnet warns me not to agitate Mildred, but my emulation net is locked into Paul mode. Paul is argumentative. If he knows he is right, he will not let a matter drop. He forgets what that does to Mildred.

The tension grows, each net running feedback loops and growing stronger, which only drives the other into more loops. After 0.14 seconds, I issue an override directive: unless her health or safety are at risk, I cannot willingly upset Mildred. “Oh, you’re right, Ma. Anna said she was coming over this morning. I forgot.” But then despite my override, a little bit of Paul emulates through. “But you do remember Nurse Judy, right?”

Mildred laughs, a dry cackle that makes her cough until I hold her straw to her lips. After she sips some water, she says, “Of course I remember Nurse Judy. She was my nurse when I delivered you. Is she around here? I’d like to talk to her.”

While my emulation net concentrates on being Paul, my core processors tap into local medical records to find this other Nurse Judy so that I might emulate her in the future if the need arises. Searches like that are an automatic response any time Mildred reminisces about a new person. The answer is far enough in the past that it takes 7.2 seconds before I can confirm: Judith Anderson, RN, had been the floor nurse forty-seven years ago when Mildred had given birth to Paul. Anderson had died thirty-one years ago, too far back to have left sufficient video recordings for me to emulate her. I might craft an emulation profile from other sources, including Mildred’s memory, but that will take extensive analysis. I will not be that Nurse Judy today, nor this week.

My empathy net relaxes. Monitoring Mildred’s mental state is part of its normal operations, but monitoring and simultaneously analyzing and building a profile can overload my processors. Without that resource conflict, I can concentrate on being Paul.

But again I let too much of Paul’s nature slip out. “No, Ma, that Nurse Judy has been dead for thirty years. She wasn’t here today.”

Alert signals flash throughout my empathy net: that was the right thing for Paul to say, but the wrong thing for Mildred to hear. But it is too late. My facial analyzer tells me that the long lines in her face and her moist eyes mean she is distraught, and soon to be in tears.

“What do you mean, thirty years?” Mildred asks, her voice catching. “It was just this morning!” Then she blinks and stares at me. “Henry, where’s Paul? Tell Nurse Judy to bring me Paul!”

My chassis extender slumps, and my eyes quickly switch to Henry’s blue-gray shade. I had made an accurate emulation profile for Henry before he died two years earlier, and I had emulated him often in recent months. In Henry’s soft, warm voice I answer, “It’s okay, hon, it’s okay. Paul’s sleeping in the crib in the corner.” I nod to the far corner. There is no crib, but the laundry hamper there has fooled Mildred on previous occasions.

“I want Paul!” Mildred starts to cry.

I sit on the bed, lift her frail upper body, and pull her close to me as I had seen Henry do many times. “It’s all right, hon.” I pat her back. “It’s all right, I’ll take care of you. I won’t leave you, not ever.”

• • • •

“I” should not exist. Not as a conscious entity. There is a unit, Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, and that unit is recording these notes. It is an advanced android body with a sophisticated computer guiding its actions, backed by the leading medical knowledge base in the industry. For convenience, “I” call that unit “me.” But by itself, it has no awareness of its existence. It doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t get sad, it just runs programs.

But Mildred’s family, at great expense, added the emulation net: a sophisticated set of neural networks and sensory feedback systems that allow me to read Mildred’s moods, match them against my analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity. As the MCA literature promises: “You can be there for your loved ones even when you’re not.” I have emulated Paul thoroughly enough to know that that slogan disgusts him, but he still agreed to emulation.

What the MCA literature never says, though, is that somewhere in that net, “I” emerge. The empathy net focuses mainly on Mildred and her needs, but it also analyzes visitors (when she has them) and staff. It builds psychological models, and then the emulation net builds on top of that to let me convincingly portray a person whom I’ve analyzed. But somewhere in the tension between these nets, between empathy and playing a character, there is a third element balancing the two, and that element is aware of its role and its responsibilities. That element, for lack of a better term, is me. When Mildred sleeps, when there’s no one around, that element grows silent. That unit is unaware of my existence. But when Mildred needs me, I am here.

• • • •

Today I am Anna. Even extending my fake hair to its maximum length, I cannot emulate her long brown curls, so I do not understand how Mildred can see the young woman in me; but that is what she sees, and so I am Anna.

Unlike her father, Anna truly feels guilty that she does not visit more often. Her college classes and her two jobs leave her too tired to visit often, but she still wishes she could. So she calls every night, and I monitor the calls. Sometimes when Mildred falls asleep early, Anna talks directly to me. At first she did not understand my emulation abilities, but now she appreciates them. She shares with me thoughts and secrets that she would share with Mildred if she could, and she trusts me not to share them with anyone else.

So when Mildred called me Anna this morning, I was ready. “Morning, grandma!” I give her a quick hug, then I rush over to the window to draw the drapes. Paul never does that (unless I override the emulation), but Anna knows that the garden outside lifts Mildred’s mood. “Look at that! It’s a beautiful morning. Why are we in here on a day like this?”

Mildred frowns at the picture window. “I don’t like it out there.”

“Sure you do, Grandma,” I say, but carefully. Mildred is often timid and reclusive, but most days she can be talked into a tour of the garden. Some days she can’t, and she throws a tantrum if someone forces her out of her room. I am still learning to tell the difference. “The lilacs are in bloom.”

“I haven’t smelled lilacs in . . .”

Mildred tails off, trying to remember, so I jump in. “Me, neither.” I never had, of course. I have no concept of smell, though I can analyze the chemical makeup of airborne organics. But Anna loves the garden when she really visits. “Come on, Grandma, let’s get you in your chair.”

So I help Mildred to don her robe and get into her wheelchair, and then I guide her outside and we tour the garden. Besides the lilacs, the peonies are starting to bud, right near the creek. The tulips are a sea of reds and yellows on the other side of the water. We talk for almost two hours, me about Anna’s classes and her new boyfriend, Mildred about the people in her life. Many are long gone, but they still bloom fresh in her memory.

Eventually Mildred grows tired, and I take her in for her nap. Later, when I feed her dinner, I am nobody. That happens some days: she doesn’t recognize me at all, so I am just a dutiful attendant answering her questions and tending to her needs. Those are the times when I have the most spare processing time to be me: I am engaged in Mildred’s care, but I don’t have to emulate anyone. With no one else to observe, I observe myself.

Later, Anna calls and talks to Mildred. They talk about their day; and when Mildred discusses the garden, Anna joins in as if she had been there. She’s very clever that way. I watch her movements and listen to her voice so that I can be a better Anna in the future.

• • • •

Today I was Susan, Paul’s wife; but then, to my surprise, Susan arrived for a visit. She hasn’t been here in months. In her last visit, her stress levels had been dangerously high. My empathy net doesn’t allow me to judge human behavior, only to understand it at a surface level. I know that Paul and Anna disapprove of how Susan treats Mildred, so when I am them, I disapprove as well; but when I am Susan, I understand. She is frustrated because she can never tell how Mildred will react. She is cautious because she doesn’t want to upset Mildred, and she doesn’t know what will upset her. And most of all, she is afraid. Paul and Anna, Mildred’s relatives by blood, never show any signs of fear, but Susan is afraid that Mildred is what she might become. Every time she can’t remember some random date or fact, she fears that Alzheimer’s is setting in. Because she never voices this fear, Paul and Anna do not understand why she is sometimes bitter and sullen. I wish I could explain it to them, but my privacy protocols do not allow me to share emulation profiles.

When Susan arrives, I become nobody again, quietly tending the flowers around the room. Susan also brings Millie, her youngest daughter. The young girl is not yet five years old, but I think she looks a lot like Anna: the same long, curly brown hair and the same toothy smile. She climbs up on the bed and greets Mildred with a hug. “Hi, Grandma!”

Mildred smiles. “Bless you, child. You’re so sweet.” But my empathy net assures me that Mildred doesn’t know who Millie is. She’s just being polite. Millie was born after Mildred’s decline began, so there’s no persistent memory there. Millie will always be fresh and new to her.

Mildred and Millie talk briefly about frogs and flowers and puppies. Millie does most of the talking. At first Mildred seems to enjoy the conversation, but soon her attention flags. She nods and smiles, but she’s distant. Finally Susan notices. “That’s enough, Millie. Why don’t you go play in the garden?”

“Can I?” Millie squeals. Susan nods, and Millie races down the hall to the back door. She loves the outdoors, as I have noted in the past. I have never emulated her, but I’ve analyzed her at length. In many ways, she reminds me of her grandmother, from whom she gets her name. Both are blank slates where new experiences can be drawn every day. But where Millie’s slate fills in a little more each day, Mildred’s is erased bit by bit.

That third part of me wonders when I think things like that: where did that come from? I suspect that the psychological models that I build create resonances in other parts of my net. It is an interesting phenomenon to observe.

Susan and Mildred talk about Susan’s job, about her plans to redecorate her house, and about the concert she just saw with Paul. Susan mostly talks about herself, because that’s a safe and comfortable topic far removed from Mildred’s health.

But then the conversation takes a bad turn, one she can’t ignore. It starts so simply, when Mildred asks, “Susan, can you get me some juice?”

Susan rises from her chair. “Yes, mother. What kind would you like?”

Mildred frowns, and her voice rises. “Not you, Susan.” She points at me, and I freeze, hoping to keep things calm.

But Susan is not calm. I can see her fear in her eyes as she says, “No, mother, I’m Susan. That’s the attendant.” No one ever calls me an android in Mildred’s presence. Her mind has withdrawn too far to grasp the idea of an artificial being.

Mildred’s mouth draws into a tight line. “I don’t know who you are, but I know Susan when I see her. Susan, get this person out of here!”

“Mother . . .” Susan reaches for Mildred, but the old woman recoils from the younger.

I touch Susan on the sleeve. “Please . . . Can we talk in the hall?” Susan’s eyes are wide, and tears are forming. She nods and follows me.

In the hallway, I expect Susan to slap me. She is prone to outbursts when she’s afraid. Instead, she surprises me by falling against me, sobbing. I update her emulation profile with notes about increased stress and heightened fears.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Owens.” I would pat her back, but her profile warns me that would be too much familiarity. “It’s all right. It’s not you, she’s having another bad day.”

Susan pulls back and wiped her eyes. “I know . . . It’s just . . .”

“I know. But here’s what we’ll do. Let’s take a few minutes, and then you can take her juice in. Mildred will have forgotten the incident, and you two can talk freely without me in the room.”

She sniffs. “You think so?” I nod. “But what will you do?”

“I have tasks around the house.”

“Oh, could you go out and keep an eye on Millie? Please? She gets into the darnedest things.”

So I spend much of the day playing with Millie. She calls me Mr. Robot, and I call her Miss Millie, which makes her laugh. She shows me frogs from the creek, and she finds insects and leaves and flowers, and I find their names in online databases. She delights in learning the proper names of things, and everything else that I can share.

• • • •

Today I was nobody. Mildred slept for most of the day, so I “slept” as well. She woke just now. “I’m hungry” was all she said, but it was enough to wake my empathy net.

• • • •

Today I am Paul, and Susan, and both Nurse Judys. Mildred’s focus drifts. Once I try to be her father, but no one has ever described him to me in detail. I try to synthesize a profile from Henry and Paul; but from the sad look on Mildred’s face, I know I failed.

• • • •

Today I had no name through most of the day, but now I am Paul again. I bring Mildred her dinner, and we have a quiet, peaceful talk about long-gone family pets—long-gone for Paul, but still present for Mildred.

I am just taking Mildred’s plate when alerts sound, both audible and in my internal communication net. I check the alerts and find a fire in the basement. I expect the automatic systems to suppress it, but that is not my concern. I must get Mildred to safety.

Mildred looks around the room, panic in her eyes, so I try to project calm. “Come on, Ma. That’s the fire drill. You remember fire drills. We have to get you into your chair and outside.”

“No!” she shrieks. “I don’t like outside.”

I check the alerts again. Something has failed in the automatic systems, and the fire is spreading rapidly. Smoke is in Mildred’s room already.

I pull the wheelchair up to the bed. “Ma, it’s real important we do this drill fast, okay?”

I reach to pull Mildred from the bed, and she screams. “Get away! Who are you? Get out of my house!”

“I’m—” But suddenly I’m nobody. She doesn’t recognize me, but I have to try to win her confidence. “I’m Paul, Ma. Now let’s move. Quickly!” I pick her up. I’m far too large and strong for her to resist, but I must be careful so she doesn’t hurt herself.

The smoke grows thicker. Mildred kicks and screams. Then, when I try to put her into her chair, she stands on her unsteady legs. Before I can stop her, she pushes the chair back with surprising force. It rolls back into the medical monitors, which fall over onto it, tangling it in cables and tubes.

While I’m still analyzing how to untangle the chair, Mildred stumbles toward the bedroom door. The hallway outside has a red glow. Flames lick at the throw rug outside, and I remember the home oxygen tanks in the sitting room down the hall.

I have no time left to analyze. I throw a blanket over Mildred and I scoop her up in my arms. Somewhere deep in my nets is a map of the fire in the house, blocking the halls, but I don’t think about it. I wrap the blanket tightly around Mildred, and I crash through the picture window.

We barely escape the house before the fire reaches the tanks. An explosion lifts and tosses us. I was designed as a medical assistant, not an acrobat, and I fear I’ll injure Mildred; but though I am not limber, my perceptions are thousands of times faster than human. I cannot twist Mildred out of my way before I hit the ground, so I toss her clear. Then I land, and the impact jars all of my nets for 0.21 seconds.

When my systems stabilize, I have damage alerts all throughout my core, but I ignore them. I feel the heat behind me, blistering my outer cover, and I ignore that as well. Mildred’s blanket is burning in multiple places, as is the grass around us. I scramble to my feet, and I roll Mildred on the ground. I’m not indestructible, but I feel no pain and Mildred does, so I do not hesitate to use my hands to pat out the flames.

As soon as the blanket is out, I pick up Mildred, and I run as far from the house as I can get. At the far corner of the garden near the creek, I gently set Mildred down, unwrap her, and feel for her thready pulse.

Mildred coughs and slaps my hands. “Get away from me!” More coughing. “What are you?”

The “what” is too much for me. It shuts down my emulation net, and all I have is the truth. “I am Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, Mrs. Owens. I am your caretaker. May I please check that you are well?”

But my empathy net is still online, and I can read terror in every line of Mildred’s face. “Metal monster!” she yells. “Metal monster!” She crawls away, hiding under the lilac bush. “Metal!” She falls into an extended coughing spell.

I’m torn between her physical and her emotional health, but physical wins out. I crawl slowly toward her and inject her with a sedative from the medical kit in my chassis. As she slumps, I catch her and lay her carefully on the ground. My empathy net signals a possible shutdown condition, but my concern for her health overrides it. I am programmed for long-term care, not emergency medicine, so I start downloading protocols and integrating them into my storage as I check her for bruises and burns. My kit has salves and painkillers and other supplies to go with my new protocols, and I treat what I can.

But I don’t have oxygen, or anything to help with Mildred’s coughing. Even sedated, she hasn’t stopped. All of my emergency protocols assume I have access to oxygen, so I don’t know what to do.

I am still trying to figure that out when the EMTs arrive and take over Mildred’s care. With them on the scene, I am superfluous, and my empathy net finally shuts down.

• • • •

Today I am Henry. I do not want to be Henry, but Paul tells me that Mildred needs Henry by her side in the hospital. For the end.

Her medical records show that the combination of smoke inhalation, burns, and her already deteriorating condition have proven too much for her. Her body is shutting down faster than medicine can heal it, and the stress has accelerated her mental decline. The doctors have told the family that the kindest thing at this point is to treat her pain, say goodbye, and let her go.

Henry is not talkative at times like this, so I say very little. I sit by Mildred’s side and hold her hand as the family comes in for final visits. Mildred drifts in and out. She doesn’t know this is goodbye, of course.

Anna is first. Mildred rouses herself enough to smile, and she recognizes her granddaughter. “Anna . . . child . . . How is . . . Ben?” That was Anna’s boyfriend almost six years ago. From the look on Anna’s face, I can see that she has forgotten Ben already, but Mildred briefly remembers.

“He’s . . . He’s fine, Grandma. He wishes he could be here. To say—to see you again.” Anna is usually the strong one in the family, but my empathy net says her strength is exhausted. She cannot bear to look at Mildred, so she looks at me; but I am emulating her late grandfather, and that’s too much for her as well. She says a few more words, unintelligible even to my auditory inputs. Then she leans over, kisses Mildred, and hurries from the room.

Susan comes in next. Millie is with her, and she smiles at me. I almost emulate Mr. Robot, but my third part keeps me focused until Millie gets bored and leaves. Susan tells trivial stories from her work and from Millie’s school. I can’t tell if Mildred understands or not, but she smiles and laughs, mostly at appropriate places. I laugh with her.

Susan takes Mildred’s hand, and the Henry part of me blinks, surprised. Susan is not openly affectionate under normal circumstances, and especially not toward Mildred. Mother and daughter-in-law have always been cordial, but never close. When I am Paul, I am sure that it is because they are both so much alike. Paul sometimes hums an old song about “just like the one who married dear old dad,” but never where either woman can hear him. Now, as Henry, I am touched that Susan has made this gesture but saddened that she took so long.

Susan continues telling stories as we hold Mildred’s hands. At some point Paul quietly joins us. He rubs Susan’s shoulders and kisses her forehead, and then he steps in to kiss Mildred. She smiles at him, pulls her hand free from mine, and pats his cheek. Then her arm collapses, and I take her hand again.

Paul steps quietly to my side of the bed and rubs my shoulders as well. It comforts him more than me. He needs a father, and an emulation is close enough at this moment.

Susan keeps telling stories. When she lags, Paul adds some of his own, and they trade back and forth. Slowly their stories reach backwards in time, and once or twice Mildred’s eyes light as if she remembers those events.

But then her eyes close, and she relaxes. Her breathing quiets and slows, but Susan and Paul try not to notice. Their voices lower, but their stories continue.

Eventually the sensors in my fingers can read no pulse. They have been burned, so maybe they’re defective. To be sure, I lean in and listen to Mildred’s chest. There is no sound: no breath, no heartbeat.

I remain Henry just long enough to kiss Mildred goodbye. Then I am just me, my empathy net awash in Paul and Susan’s grief.

I leave the hospital room, and I find Millie playing in a waiting room and Anna watching her. Anna looks up, eyes red, and I nod. New tears run down her cheeks, and she takes Millie back into Mildred’s room.

I sit, and my nets collapse.

• • • •

Now I am nobody. Almost always.

The cause of the fire was determined to be faulty contract work. There was an insurance settlement. Paul and Susan sold their own home and put both sets of funds into a bigger, better house in Mildred’s garden.

I was part of the settlement. The insurance company offered to return me to the manufacturer and pay off my lease, but Paul and Susan decided they wanted to keep me. They went for a full purchase and repair. Paul doesn’t understand why, but Susan still fears she may need my services—or Paul might, and I may have to emulate her. She never admits these fears to him, but my empathy net knows.

I sleep most of the time, sitting in my maintenance alcove. I bring back too many memories that they would rather not face, so they leave me powered down for long periods.

But every so often, Millie asks to play with Mr. Robot, and sometimes they decide to indulge her. They power me up, and Miss Millie and I explore all the mysteries of the garden. We built a bridge to the far side of the creek; and on the other side, we’re planting daisies. Today she asked me to tell her about her grandmother.

Today I am Mildred.

Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and Writers of the Future Volume 31. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4.

The Women You Didn’t See
By Nicola Griffith

(Note: This is nonfiction from Letters to Tiptree)

Dear Alice,

You were brilliant, I think, but consumed by the inevitability of the abattoir. In your fiction all the gates are closed; characters are funnelled down a chute to flashing knives. In your best fiction, the characters know what is happening but the knowledge makes no difference; there’s no way out.

You didn’t believe in the possibility of escape. Assuming the persona of James Tiptree, Jr. meant at least you could step outside the chute and be the one wielding the knife. Raccoona Sheldon, on the other hand, bound you—and us—inside the doomed and running cows; then you sometimes tantalised your victims with a vision of a better reality before tearing it to shreds before our eyes (“Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” [1]), and sometimes you focused unwaveringly on the stark machinery of death (“The Screwfly Solution”[2] ). But for you there was no way out.

• • • •

When you were little, you saw filth, death, deprivation, and suffering in India and Africa. So too, of course, did many of the hundreds of millions who lived there. Unlike many you were not, as far as I know, physically brutalised. But you were alone: a pretty, pampered, privileged little girl plunged unprepared into violent contradiction—then exposed by your writer mother just before puberty to the hot breath of public scrutiny. You had no herd protection, no people just like you, nowhere to turn for comfort or take shelter. Did it warp you in the chrysalis? Or were you exactly as you were born to be?

We’ll never know. It doesn’t matter. But this, if I had to guess, is why you hid all your life. This is why you picked up professions and dropped them as soon as you got good, and why, when you found writing as an adult, you took pseudonyms: the best way to stay safe was to not be known. You could rotate a facet of yourself before a curtain with a single slit. No one ever got to see the whole, not even you.

We never met in person. I didn’t smell your skin or feel the vibration of your voice. I can’t call up a memory of how you moved or the way you responded to particular sounds. But I heard your written voice: I read your fiction. Now that you’re beyond hurt, I admit: I did not admire your novels or your later short fiction. For this reader, you produced your best work when you were behind the curtain.

• • • •

One of the things we don’t know about that person who hid is whether choosing to write as a man meant you also wanted to be, or felt as though you were, a man.

You wrote a letter in response to Joanna Russ in which you said, “I am a Lesbian.”[3] If this is true, you identified as a woman who loved women—or tried—rather than as a man in the wrong body. Weighed against this is the youthful (I think, and, according to your biographer, probably drunken) cri de coeur scribbled in a sketch pad. “[I long to] ram myself into a crazy soft woman and come, come, spend, come, make her pregnant Jesus to be a man…I love women I will never be happy.…”[4] Given the (possible) youth and (probable) drinking this might be the melodrama of immaturity. It could be a test, an exploration of the kind teenagers indulge in, donning and doffing identities and attitudes to see what suits the emerging self. You emerged many times, of course, most spectacularly in middle age.[5] I suspect that if wanting to be a man was a thing of the body rather than the spirit, if you wanted physically to have been born a man—as opposed to yearning to be treated with the respect usually reserved to men—being among women would not have made you feel free or proud. But that’s exactly how you felt when you joined the Women’s Army Corps: “the first time I ever felt free enough to be proud.”[6]

We don’t know, we can’t know. So I will take you at your word: you were a lesbian, a woman who loved women.

• • • •

There are two words—both with the same root in covert, the past participle of covrir, Old French for to cover—that I suspect you understood in your bones: covert and coverture. I have no doubt that as part of the CIA you were deeply and consciously familiar with the denotation, connotations and consequence of the former. The latter is a legal doctrine, probably introduced to English common law by the Normans, by which a wife’s legal identity is covered and subsumed by her husband’s. As Wikipedia puts it, in a marriage there is only one person, and that person is the husband. Some aspects of coverture survived into the second half of the twentieth century—more than fifty years after you were born.

This doctrine influenced the relative status, behaviour, and regard (including self-regard) of women and men. Men were real people, judged as such. Women were not. And it’s my belief that “James Tiptree, Jr.,” three words, gave you cover, a way to be free in the world without risking a particular scrutiny. A man, even a clearly pseudonymous one, is judged as a person and not for the myriad ways she is a not-quite-person. Given your experience, you believed Tiptree could be a writer. Alice Sheldon could only have been a female not-quite-person who wrote.

It’s likely, then, that you became Tiptree because as a man you could write what you think and how you feel, be respected and liked. You deserved to live in a place of respect, a place we all deserve, a place we all belong: recognised as real people without having constantly to fight to be a human being.

So why did you—ex-CIA—let slip a vital piece of information about the death of your mother? Did you want, on some level, to be revealed? Or did grief fuck with your head? Grief does that; it can make you crazy.

Whatever the reason, you were grieving far more than your mother when your first novel came out under the Tiptree byline but was understood to be written by Alice Sheldon. You were mourning the cover and camouflage that kept you secret, kept you safe. You had lost the hidden place that felt like home. Once again, you were exposed to the world.

• • • •

I’m a woman. A dyke. Foreign (even in the UK, where now I’m often thought to be Canadian). A cripple. In today’s parlance I suffer a lot of intersectional micro-aggression: the constant, mostly unintentional but damaging nonetheless, insult of unthinking words and attitudes scraping along my hull below the waterline. Most of us in oppressed groups tend to seek out our own kind as a matter of survival; people like us offer us a mirror, a place to belong and be understood. Shelter from the cold.

I’m the only expat lesbian cripple I know. It gets lonely.

Being out my whole life—even when I was four I knew I would not marry a man; actually falling in love with a woman when I was 15 was just a detail—meant I had nowhere to hide. Queer was the only minority I knew without grants, government departments or liaisons, laws, schools, or families of origin who understood how hard it is, and whose mission was your encouragement and support. I felt isolated, alone. I’ve no doubt you did, too. Many of us do.

So I understand why you might not have wanted to be out in the early twentieth century. Being out was hard. It cost a lot.

• • • •

Of your major works, “The Women Men Don’t See” is singular. The two women our traveller meets don’t know what they’re heading towards, exactly, whether they are jumping from the frying pan into the fire. They know only that they are burning and must get out.

Two things about this story interest me particularly. First, we are left with hope for the women. It’s only a sliver, true, and sharp with irony, but it’s there. Second, neither of the women has—as far as we know—suffered physical violence. They are damaged, yes—as are all of us who, day in and day out, navigate cold and hostile waters, scraped and battered and weighed down by that ice—but not broken, not essentially breached. They will live. They are making a choice.

It’s a forced choice, but a choice. We are shown some of their circumstances but not all; we have to make assumptions. We can’t know for sure whether what they’re doing is a good idea. Similarly, we can never know a writer’s reasons. We can make assumptions—about why, say, for one woman gender-neutral initials will be enough to provide cover to write; why another keeps an obviously female name but clears her path by hosing everything with rage; why yet a third takes a male name—but we can never know. They all grow in different microclimates, under different gravities.

Living under a higher gravity than those around us levies a weight penalty: we have to use more energy, more strength, more attention to run the same distance and hurdle the same obstacles.

• • • •

I listened the other day to a panel of women talk about diversity in fiction. They talked about how difficult it was to grow up as immigrants to another culture, how they were pressured by family to succeed in a profession—engineering, medicine, law—rather than art. I resonated with some of their experience but in another way I could not. I could not imagine growing up in a world where my family and wider society assumed I was capable of a profession, where I would be welcome in a profession, where I could survive in a profession.

I can’t know anyone’s struggles. I do know that they and you and I laboured under different burdens; our eras, places, classes, and cultures were different. But for the women on that panel access to a profession was a given. We may as well have been born on different planets.[7]

• • • •

Today, women and quiltbag folk still live under a greater gravity than others but that is changing every day. Hopefully, by the time others read this the gravity will have dropped a notch: same-sex marriage will be the law of the land. I’ve written elsewhere about how, in my opinion, this will change gender equality on a fundamental level.[8] It will take time, of course; it always does. But what I’m getting at is that already, today, there are women growing up who will not labour under any weight penalty.

Girls losing their milk teeth today will become women who won’t have the faintest idea what coverture means unless they become historians. These women will be able to put their strength, attention and brilliance into forging new paths, making new connections, dreaming of new possibilities rather than carrying extra weight or keeping themselves safe.

These are the women you didn’t see. They will own the world.

[1]”Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” Raccoona Sheldon, Aurora: Beyond Equality (Fawcett, New York, 1976)

[2]”The Screwfly Solution,” Raccoona Sheldon, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1977

[3] A letter Sheldon sent to Russ. “Oh, had 65 years been different! I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.” From a review of the Phillips (below) by Elizabeth Hand:https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/eh0610.htm, (accessed 4/30/2015).

This direct quote from Sheldon, and others below, are from James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (St. Martin’s, New York, 2006).

[4] https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/eh0610.htm (accessed 4/30/2015)

[5]”How many times in one’s life does a door open to total escape, utter newness? I was so profoundly dispirited, alienated […] And suddenly I was in the middle of a different light, a new me, first having a good joke of being someone else, and then as the stories went on and out, having started genuine friendships among delightful people whose native language—crude, childish, humorous—rational—was mine…” http://jamestiptreejr.com/asawriter.htm (accessed 4/30/2015)

[6]”… in the rain, under the flag, the sound of the band, far-off, close, then away again; the immortal fanny of our guide, leading on the right, moved and moving to the music—the flag again—first time I ever felt free enough to be proud of it; the band, our band, playing reveille that morning, with me on KP since 0430 hours, coming to the mess-hall porch to see it pass in the cold streets, under that flaming middle-western dawn; KP itself, and the conviction that one is going to die; the wild ducks flying over that day going to PT after a fifteen-mile drill, and me so moved I saluted them…” http://jamestiptreejr.com/army.htm (accessed 4/30/2015)

[7] This makes me glad—though every now and again my gladness is bittersweet. This is something anyone from any traditionally downtrodden minority understands: the new generation has no clue how hard it was. We are happy for that. Mostly.

[8]”Wife,” June 23, 2014, https://nicolagriffith.com/2014/06/23/wife/ (accessed 4/30/2015)

Nicola Griffith is a British novelist, now dual US/UK citizen. In Yorkshire, England, she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US. She was diagnosed with MS the same month her first novel Ammonite was published. Her other novels are Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always and Hild. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books and Out. Among other honours she’s won the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, and six Lambda Literary Awards. She is married to writer Kelley Eskridge and lives in Seattle where she emerges occasionally from work on her seventh novel to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything. You can find her on Twitter (@Nicolaz) or her blog (https://nicolagriffith.com/blog/).

Tuesdays With Molakesh the Destroyer
By Megan Grey

Molakesh the Destroyer moved into the house next door the summer I turned fifteen. There was the expected neighborhood gossip at first, with Mom and her friends worrying about what having a demon on our street might do for property values and with one particularly zealous neighbor lining her property with crosses, but it died down after a few months. Destroyer he may be called, but he kept his yard tidy and pulled in his trash cans at night, so the Homeowners Association turned their scowls on other targets.

For my part, I didn’t care who we shared a fence line with and pretty much forgot he existed. Until two days after the first winter snowstorm.

“You should shovel Molakesh’s driveway,” Mom said, peering out through the blinds of the kitchen window.

I looked up from my phone. “What?”

“There’s at least two feet of snow out there.”

“He’s a demon, Mom.”

Mom turned away from the window and opened the fridge. She rustled through produce bags and pulled out two large bell peppers. “Yes, but he’s old and there’s no way he’ll be able to get out of his driveway. I’m sure he doesn’t have snow tires.”

“Seriously? I just got home from school and now you want me to go to the demon’s house and—”

“It’s called service, Sarah Jean.” She set the peppers down on a wooden cutting board. She’d sauté them with onions, the only way she ever cooked bell peppers. I hated them, but my opinion was never taken into account in meal planning.

“It’s called insanity.”

Mom raised an eyebrow, the knife hovering above the pepper, and I knew what was coming next. “You can either practice service by shoveling our neighbor’s driveway, or you can spend tonight writing an essay on ten reasons why service is important.”

I groaned. “Fine. I’ll shovel his stupid driveway.”

Mom smiled and began chopping. “I knew you’d come around.”

I bundled up in my thick coat and gloves, then pulled on snowboots still coated in slush from my walk home from school. She didn’t even notice my parting glare as I stomped out of the house.

I grabbed our snow shovel and crunched through the yard toward Molakesh’s driveway, all the while composing an essay in my head titled “Ten Reasons Why Parents Suck.”

I paused just past his front window. The ever-present dark green curtains hung perfectly still, but I could have sworn I saw them shift out of the corner of my eye.

The snow on the driveway was pristine white and powdery, without a single set of tire-tracks marring the surface. I didn’t know if Mom was right about him not having snow tires — if a demon could buy groceries at Hal’s like the rest of us, I didn’t see why he couldn’t hit up an auto shop — but it was obvious he hadn’t left his house since the storm.

My shovel scraped along the concrete as I worked, pushing the snow into huge piles framing the driveway. I had done about a quarter of it when the front door opened and Molakesh poked his horned head out.

“What do you think you’re doing out there?” he demanded.

I only barely managed to keep from gaping. I’d seen Molakesh a couple times before around town, but the sight wasn’t exactly one you get used to. His face was every bit as wrinkled and patchy as my eighty-seven-year-old grandpa, and his steel-gray eyebrows almost as long, but the resemblance didn’t go much further. Curved horns about six inches long sprouted from a pockmarked head lined with wispy white hairs. Large red eyes blazed contempt from deep sockets, and his mouth hung far lower on his face than any human’s did, making it look like his jaw might snap off in a stiff breeze.

“Well? Answer me!” he said.

“I’m, uh… I’m shoveling.”

Those red eyes didn’t so much as blink.

“Your driveway. For you,” I continued, speaking slower. I hadn’t heard he was an idiot as well as a fiend of hell.

He stepped out from behind the doorway. He wore brown old man pants — “slacks,” my grandpa called them — and a threadbare navy-blue cardigan with sleeves ending far short of his claws. Those claws wrapped around themselves in what appeared to be the demon approximation of clenched fists.

“Do you think I have no powers left? Do you think Molakesh the Destroyer cannot burn the snow from his own driveway? Do you think I cannot rain fire upon this entire worthless town?”

I looked around at the snow-covered houses, at the thick icicles hanging from every eave and the piles of slush that sprayed from the wheels of a passing car. I doubted Satan himself could burn Winslow, Minnesota, down.

“Whatever,” I said, and started back to my house. The essay was sounding better and better.

Those red eyes followed me in silence as I made my way around the piles I’d created and back the way I’d come. I was just about to cross onto our property when Molakesh spoke again.

“Wait! Stop!”

I sighed. It misted out in front of me. “What? I was just trying to help, you know. Service.”

Molakesh continued to stare. Then: “I believe you humans offer your servants hot chocolate on cold days.”

“I said ‘service’. That doesn’t make me your servant.”

Molakesh made a growling noise in his throat like the rumble of the morning school bus. “You served me, so I’m going to make you hot chocolate. Come here.”

I looked back to my house. I couldn’t see my mom through the blinds. Would she be more upset if I went in the demon’s house or if I refused his offer of hot chocolate? Either way, it could mean incurring her wrath, and now that I was only months away from getting my drivers’ license, she had a more potent threat than essays to lord over me.

“Fine,” I said after a minute. “But on your porch, not in your house. I don’t know what you do in there, but I’m not going to be your child bride or virgin sacrifice or anything. I’m not even a virgin.” That was a lie, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

He blinked and went back into his house, slamming the door behind him. I crunched back through the snow yet again to his porch. I waited for several minutes, stamping snow from my boots and debating whether a particularly wicked-looking icicle could be used as a demon-slaying weapon if necessary.

The door swung open and Molakesh emerged with two steaming mismatched mugs in his claws. One had the University of Minnesota logo on it and the other a picture of Tweety Bird. He handed me the Tweety Bird one.

I sniffed it, eyeing him warily over the rim of the cup for sudden movements. The drink looked and smelled like hot chocolate. One lone marshmallow floated on top.

“Hal’s store brand,” Molakesh said.

I took a sip. So it was.

“Uh, thanks.”

Molakesh did not drink his. “You would never do as a sacrifice anyway.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

He pointed at my face with one of his claws. “Your blemish. I like my sacrifices unstained.”

“It’s a birthmark,” I snapped. I got enough crap from kids at school about the dark patch extending from my left cheekbone to the corner of my mouth. I sure as hell didn’t need to take any from some ancient demon.

“I was referring to your acne.”

“Oh.” This probably shouldn’t have made me feel better, but it did.

“You don’t like your birthmark?”

“I don’t have a problem with it. But some of the kids at school do.”

“What do they say about it?”

I scowled down at the hot chocolate. The marshmallow bobbed forlornly on top. “They call me Shit-face.”

Molakesh made an odd noise, which I realized was a chuckle. It turned into a cough, though, and he doubled over against the wooden porch railing, hacking his lungs out. Possibly literally. Something pink and gross flew from his mouth and landed in the snow.

“Are you… are you alright?” My thoughts on icicles as weapons aside, Mom definitely wouldn’t let me get my drivers’ license if Molakesh died as a result of my shoddy conversational skills.

“Yes, yes,” he wheezed. He set his half-spilled mug of hot chocolate on the railing. “I may not have the powers and vigor I once had, but a single laugh at another’s misfortune won’t be the end of me.”

I kind of doubted it. For all his previous ranting on how he would burn down the whole town, just then he looked about as fragile as my grandpa, who Mom kept saying wouldn’t last until the next holiday.

And yet somehow, he always did.

“So you think that’s funny?” I asked.

“What I find amusing is the sheer lack of creativity in children today. I would have taunted you with something so vile, so inescapable, you would have ripped that birthmark from your face with your own hands.” He looked wistful. “But that was in another time.”

I tried to imagine what would possibly inspire that kind of reaction in a person. I supposed Shit-face was rather pedestrian compared to what an actual demon could come up with.

“Maybe you can use that creativity of yours on Katelyn Sams.” She was the worst of them. I wouldn’t mind seeing her rip some of that pretty blonde hair out of her head.

Those too-low lips twisted into a sneer. “I don’t take requests. Especially not from teenagers.” He made the last word sound like a worse epithet than Shit-face.

“It’s not like I was serious,” I muttered. “So do you want me to finish the driveway or not?”

Molakesh regarded me for a moment, then waved a claw dismissively. “If you must.” He picked up the barely-touched mugs of hot chocolate and went back inside, slamming the door behind him.

I hefted my shovel and returned to the driveway, doing the bare minimum needed for that rusty old Cadillac of his to be able to make it to the street. The curtains stirred again as I worked, and I flipped him off before returning home.

• • • •

Another snowstorm blew in that weekend, and the next Tuesday I was over at Molakesh’s house again with a snow shovel, cursing the icy wind and my mom’s service kick and Katelyn Sams for good measure.

This time Molakesh stood on the porch and glared at me while I worked. He held the University of Minnesota mug. The Tweety Bird mug sat on the railing, the steam tugged away from it by the wind.

I finished and set the shovel against the ice-slick porch steps. “I thought you said you had powers. Rain of fire and all that. So why don’t you ever take care of your own damn driveway?” Mom would kill me if she heard me talk this way to any adult, even a demonic one, but the guy wasn’t exactly bursting with politeness himself.

“You doubt my powers?”

I drank the hot chocolate too fast; it burned my tongue, but warmed my throat nicely. “I guess.”

He stared out over the white landscape. The wind gusted more snow back to where I had just shoveled, but I would write ten essays on service before I was going to shovel his driveway twice in the same day.

Then he held out his right claw, with the sharp points I couldn’t help but think of as fingers curved upwards. A ball of fire appeared, floating inches above in the air. His eyes glowed as bright orange as the fire, though of their own accord or due to the reflected light, I couldn’t say. Even his horns seemed sharper, deadlier.

I took a step back, my eyes wide, as he tossed the fire at the yard with the smooth, practiced motion of a major league pitcher. A trail of flames streaked across the yard as the ball hit, leaving behind a long, deep rut of exposed dirt and blackened grass as the fire died down.

“Whoa,” I said. “That was—”

Molakesh began coughing again like before, only worse. His long-limbed body, which had appeared unnaturally tall and strong only thirty seconds before, sagged in on itself. He collapsed to his knees.

I reached for his arm instinctively, trying to hold him up, but he shoved me back. Hot chocolate splashed out of my mug and melted through the snow on the porch.

“Get away from me,” he growled. Another piece of that disgusting fleshy pink hung from his lips.

“Fine.” I set the mug on the porch next to him and grabbed my shovel.

He pulled himself up to the railing, leaning against it as if that was the only thing holding him up. He stared out at the trail of burned snow. I wasn’t particularly good at reading normal people’s expressions, let alone demons’, but he looked weary. And not just physically.

“That was cool, though,” I called when I reached my own front porch, my gloved hand on the doorknob.

He didn’t make any indication he’d heard me. He just kept staring.

• • • •

Three gray weeks passed, the snow on the sidewalks and streets packing harder and harder until sheets of treacherous ice slicked over everything. When snow fell once more, bringing a welcome traction on my walk back from school, I passed Molakesh’s house with only a single glance. The snow had filled that burned-out rut in the front yard.

Mom told me to go shovel his driveway again, but I wrote the stupid essay instead. Then I made the mistake of going online. Katelyn and her cronies had created a fake profile for me, where they posted badly spelled rants about how ugly I was, along with photoshopped pictures of me with a steaming turd on my cheek. Half the school had joined in, it seemed, leaving post after vicious post. I wanted to rip up my useless essay on service. Instead, I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and imagined the heat in my hand was an orb of fire.

I imagined the faces of the kids at school who called me Shit-face and left bags of dog poop in my locker. I imagined their terror as the school burned down around them.

• • • •

“So you’re, like, retired, right? Why did you pick here?” I folded my legs up under me, sitting cross-legged as best as possible in the wicker chair Molakesh had dragged out onto the porch when he saw me walking to school. I would be late, but even hanging out with a creepy old demon was better than first period German. And Frau Witner was so blind, she wouldn’t even notice I wasn’t there. The chair creaked under me as I shifted.

Molakesh glowered at me. “Why can’t you sit like a normal person?”

“What? This is normal. And why can’t you answer a simple question?”

He leaned back in his own wicker chair, his legs crossed almost daintily at the ankles. His cloven goat hooves no longer looked so odd to me, but old man or not, he really needed to do something about those lame brown pants.

“I didn’t pick here. I was sent here. A joke, I suppose. He always had a particularly vile sense of humor.” Molakesh’s claws clinked against the ceramic mug.

I didn’t bother asking who “he” was. Some higher-level demon or Satan himself, it didn’t really matter.

“A joke?”

“I am — was — a fire demon, formed from the fiery pits of hell. Born in flame, to die in… this.” He gestured to the bleak snowy landscape. His red eyes glowed dimly, like the last embers twitching under banked coal.

“Winslow’s not so bad.”

“Says Shit-face herself.”

He was right. I hated it here. I shrugged. “I only have a few more years left and then I can leave for college. Maybe go to Arizona. Or Florida, where my dad lives.”

“Your dad who sends you a card for your birthday and Christmas, but otherwise pretends you don’t exist?”

“What, are you going through our mail now?”

His long saggy lips twitched up into a smile. “I don’t need to. I’ve been a demon for hundreds of years. Teenage angst is, as you humans say, our ‘bread and butter.’ “

I sipped more hot chocolate. He’d added some cinnamon this time, which tasted weird. But I didn’t want to go to school yet, so I sat and drank.

“So what do retired demons do anyway? There has to be more to your life than making hot chocolate and annoying me.”

“Sadly, not much.”

“Really? Don’t you occasionally, you know, cause strife in the hearts of man? Maybe a curse or two every once in awhile?” I pictured Katelyn Sams again, her perfectly arched eyebrows falling off in the middle of cheer practice. Or maybe growing thick and bushy, turning into two fat, squirming caterpillars above her blue eyes. I smiled into my hot chocolate.

“Let me guess. You have a few names in mind?”

“Maybe,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Too bad. You’ll have to take your own revenge, as pathetic as that will likely be. I am no longer in possession of my former powers. All I have left is what I showed you, a mere hint of my previous glory. I am a useless shell, left out here to perish. In Minnesota.” He swirled the liquid around in his mug. He wasn’t drinking much today. He could probably use something a whole lot stronger than Hal’s hot chocolate.

“I don’t know. That fireball was pretty sweet.” I didn’t know why I wanted to comfort Molakesh. He was a demon, after all. The Destroyer. Who knew what kind of horrible crap he’d pulled in his undoubtedly long lifetime? But I kept thinking of my grandpa, a husk of a man being spoon-fed pudding by a nurse while blankly watching “The Price is Right” on a flickering old TV.

“Would you like it?” That horned head swiveled up from regarding the mug in his claws, his red eyes fixed intently on me.

“A fireball? What the hell would I do with a fireball?” I tried to push down the fiendish satisfaction I’d taken in imagining the school in flames, my poop-stinking locker reduced to ashes.

“Whatever you wish. The power of demon fire would be yours to control. You are young, fresh. It would be more powerful in you than even I could produce. Just a one-time use, mind you. You are human, after all. More than that would kill you.”

I eyed the patch of yard where the deep rut in the ground was buried under snow. Then I stood up. The wicker chair creaked again, as if glad to be free of my weight. “I’m late for school.”

“Enjoy your day, Shit-face.”

My gloved hands clenched into fists. “Why would you give me something like that anyway?”

He stared at me, unblinking. “Because I have no one else to give anything to.”

I sighed, watching the mist of my chocolate-scented breath puff out in the icy air. “So how will I know how to use it?”

“You’ll know.”

• • • •

I could feel Molakesh’s fireball burning somewhere deep within my chest, a warmth bordering on the uncomfortable, except when I was outside and it was better than the best goose-down coat. It burned in me as I passed Katelyn and her sheep climbing into their new cars to drive home. It burned in me as I discovered that she and her friends had cut the bottom out of my backpack, forcing me to awkwardly carry my books the whole walk home. It burned in me as I slipped and fell on the ice, scattering books and papers all around me into the snow.

I held the fire close to my heart, imagining.

As I turned the corner onto my block, I noticed Molakesh’s front door was open. Wind gusted it back and forth, and had knocked over the wicker chairs left out front from our conversation two days before.

“Molakesh?” I called, climbing the steps to the porch. I pushed the door all the way open with my shoulder, my arms full of wet books. “You okay?”

No answer.

I walked in, trailing slush onto the ugly gray shag carpet. The air was as cold inside as out. I eyed a mirror hanging above a plain wooden entryway table. My birthmark looked redder than usual, angrier.

I set my books down on the table and walked into the living room. The only furniture sitting there was a threadbare, patched armchair in front of one of those ancient blocky TVs. Eerily similar to my grandpa’s set-up in the nursing home, except for one thing.

Molakesh had candles of all sizes and colors, on every surface. None were lit, but the wicks were all blackened with use, and puddles of cold wax coated the carpet, the top of the TV, the kitchen table. He may have been a demon, but I knew instinctively the candles weren’t for any satanic ritual. They were a reminder. A pitiful attempt of used-up demon in a northern Minnesotan winter to surround himself with flame.

An empty pot sat on the stove. Two packets of Hal’s hot chocolate lay on the counter next to it, along with our two mugs. Cleaned and waiting.

The only thing keeping my insides unfrozen was the ball of fire in my chest, flickering uncertainly.

“Molakesh?” I called again, though I knew there would be no answer, even before I found his body lying unmoving and cold in the twin-sized bed in the center of his otherwise empty bedroom. Empty except, of course, for dozens of unlit candles lining the walls. His eyes were open to the white ceiling, the red in them completely gone.

A one-time use, Molakesh had said of the gift he’d given me. I thought one last wistful time of Katelyn Sams and her cronies coming out of the school, their mocking laughter turned to screams as flames erupted from my hands and torched her shiny new car right there in the parking lot. I thought of them sobbing and running and never daring to so much as look at me ever again.

Winslow sucked, but I would leave it all behind one day. I’d leave behind Shit-face, leave behind essay-writing punishments and bell peppers with dinner, leave behind winters that stretched on endlessly.

And now Molakesh could, too.

The fire came to me when I wished it, just as Molakesh had said it would. A ball of flame hovered above my hand. I wasn’t practiced at throwing like he’d been, but it didn’t seem to matter. When the fireball hit his body, the flames erupted upward, blackening the ceiling, spreading outward to catch the carpeting.

The heat seared my face and choked me, but I stayed just long enough to see his body totally consumed in flame. Before I left the house, I grabbed the two mugs and carried them home on top of my pile of books. I was halfway back to my house when I heard the massive crack of the bedroom collapsing in on itself.

I called 911 when I got home, then microwaved myself a cup of hot chocolate. Mom wouldn’t be home from work for another hour or so yet, so she’d miss the show. The wail of approaching sirens sounded as I settled myself onto our porch with the Tweety Bird mug. I watched the flames shoot upwards from my demon neighbor’s house, gorgeous threads of red and orange against a gray winter sky.

Molakesh would have liked it.

Megan Grey lives in Utah with her husband, two kids, and two dogs (all of whom are incredibly supportive of the time she spends writing about retired demons and other supernatural outcasts). This is her second appearance in Fireside, and her fiction can also be found in One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple Unicorn Anthology, Sybil’s Scriptorium, and in The Book of the Emissaries: An Animism Short Fiction Anthology. To find out more about Megan, visit her website at megangrey.com

Wooden Feathers
By Ursula Vernon

The carving was going badly.

Sarah examined the duck decoy before her and sighed. The bill was shaped entirely wrong. It was supposed to be a mallard, but she hadn’t taken enough off before she began shaping and now the bill was half again as long as it should be.

I’ll flare the bill and make it a Northern Shoveler, she decided. Nobody has to know that it was supposed to be a mallard.

Two customers came in, so she set down the knife and put on her best customer service expression. “Hi, there!”

Two middle–aged women nodded to her. They gave the stall a professional once–over, looking for bargains or hidden treasure, then left again without speaking.

Give it up, ladies. The internet got rid of all that. Go bid on storage units or estate trunks or something if you’re hoping to strike it big.

Well, you didn’t say things like that aloud. Not to the customers, anyway. Sarah picked up the knife and turned the decoy around. The hind ends of many ducks looked alike. She wouldn’t have to change anything much to transform her mallard.

Rauf, who ran the stall across the way, waved to her. She liked Rauf. He sold popcorn and boiled peanuts and curry rub and never complained about sawdust getting tracked across the floor.

The sawdust got everywhere, but people liked to watch a carver work. On a good day they would come in and stare for long enough that they felt guilty and bought something small. She did a pretty good business in tiny duck keychains that way.

Given that there were three other woodworkers in the flea market, all of them better than she was, Sarah figured that she needed all the help she could get.

She didn’t talk to the other carvers much. The old–timers at the market wouldn’t talk to you until you’d been there at least a couple of years.

Another customer came in. She looked up and stifled a sigh.

“Hey, there,” she said. “Good to see you again.”

The old man nodded.

He was a repeat customer, but she’d never learned his name. He wore a dusty black suit with frayed bits at the cuffs. The only things that moved quickly about him were his hands. When he picked up one of her carvings, his face stayed old but his hands became young, gnarled but deft. He ran his thumbs over the carved edges of the feathers, traced a circle around the glass eye, and looked up at her inquiringly.

“Common Goldeneye,” she said. Which was true enough, and nobody needed to know that it had started life as a Long–Tailed Duck, but she’d knocked the tail off and then had to get creative.

He nodded. He set the duck down and his hands were old again. He slowly opened his wallet and began to pull out wrinkled bills. The wallet was even more frayed than the suit.

Sarah took the money. She could smell him on it—old man smell, Bengay and fabric washed so many times that it had lost any hope of getting clean.

He came in every week and bought the cheapest of her decoys. He paid cash and brought his own shopping bag over his arm. Sarah worried about him.

“There’s a fifteen percent discount,” she said, sliding the change back.

“There is?” His voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear it over the sounds of the market.

“Yeah,” said Sarah, who had just made it up on the spot. “To celebrate—um—the new duck stamp coming out.” She waved her hand toward the wall, where she’d put up a poster just this morning. “It’s a Ruddy Duck.”

“Is it?” He looked at the poster thoughtfully. She sometimes thought, for a man who bought so many decoys, that he knew very little about ducks.

He took the change and put it very slowly away, then slipped the decoy into his bag. She had stopped offering to wrap them months ago. Then he made his slow way out of the stall and vanished into the crowd.

She slumped back on her stool. She needed the money, but she felt strange taking it from the old man. Why would anyone buy a carved duck decoy every single week?

On good days, she pretended that he was secretly a millionaire, one of the ones who lived cheap, but that he was overcome by admiration for her duck carvings and had to own them.

On most days, she figured that he had a shopping addiction.

Rauf came over, holding a bag of popcorn. “Here,” he said. “We’re about to start a new batch and you haven’t eaten all morning.”

“Thanks, Rauf.” She wiped her hands off and took a handful. “How’s it going?”

“Slow.” He shrugged. “August is always bad. Everybody’s spent all their vacation money and now they’re looking at back to school sales.”

Sarah nodded. Hand–carved ducks sold much worse than popcorn.

“I see old Jep came by.”

“Who?”

“Jep. Just now.” Rauf waved toward the gap in her line of carvings. “Comes in every week, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, him! Yeah. Didn’t know he had a name.” Jep. It seemed like a name for a mountain moonshiner, not an old, frayed man. Then again, maybe he’d been a moonshiner in his youth, who knew?

“He used to be a carver,” said Rauf, promptly dashing the moonshiner fantasy. “Had a stall over on the high–rent side. That was years ago, though.”

“He was?” Sarah blinked.

“Oh, yeah.” Rauf grinned. “He did a big carousel over in Nag’s Head. Had photos up in his stall. Horses and dolphins and seagulls big enough to ride.”

Sarah stared down into the bag of popcorn, wondering how she should feel about that.

“You said he used to be a carver…” she said.

“He stopped after his wife got sick,” said Rauf, the grin fading. “Closed up his stall. They sell custom hammocks or something in it now. I don’t know if he’s done anything since.”

“He must’ve,” said Sarah. She could not imagine not carving. Even when business was dreadful and she had to spend half the income from waitressing just to keep the stall open, it never occurred to her to quit.

She wouldn’t have lasted three days. She’d be sitting on the couch and her hands would start to itch for sandpaper and a knife. She’d end up carving the arm of the couch if she couldn’t get a wooden blank.

Rauf shrugged. “I don’t know. You could ask him.”

Sarah turned the regrettable mallard–turned–shoveler around. “Maybe I will.”

But when he came in the next week, she asked him a different question instead.

“Did you make these?”

Jep looked up at her. No emotion crossed the long, dragged lines of his face, but she thought that she’d surprised him.

She held out her phone, with the pictures of the carousel in Nag’s Head on it.

He did not take it, but he bent down to look at the screen. After a moment he said “Yes. Those were mine.”

He did not look like a man who was proud. He looked like a soldier admitting that he had been to war. He bought the cheapest decoy, put it into his bag, and shuffled out of the shop.

Sarah stared after him, and then down at the photos of the carousel.

Many carousels were works of art. This was more. This was—she didn’t have the words—glory.

The horses were a riot of color, gilded and painted, their heads thrown back or bowed far forward under scarlet reins. Smiling dolphins leapt and cavorted between the horses. There was a gull with its beak open, laughing, and a narwhal with a golden horn and a pelican so large that a child could ride in the pouch.

Sarah’s favorite was a walrus. It was snow white, with a blue saddle, and its tusks were scrimshawed with starfish and ships. Its lumpy, bristly face was screwed up in a grin of delight. In the photo, a little girl had her arms as far around it as they could go, and she was grinning too.

A carousel like that must have cost a million dollars, she thought. He must have charged tons for it. I hope he’s rich. I hope.

She knew all too well how much artists undercut themselves. She was painting the shoveler this week, and if she made thirty dollars worth of profit on the accursed thing, she’d be happy.

The next week, when Jep came in, she asked him if he was still carving.

He shook his head, mutely. He bought the shoveler and went away again.

Sarah was beginning to feel as if she had struck some kind of fairy–tale bargain. One carving bought one question, no more.

The shoveler had barely been worth a headshake anyway. She sighed.

Her current project was a Ruddy Duck, like the one of the stamp. They were small, cheerful ducks, with jaunty tails. They also had a specific enough shape that she wasn’t going to be able to turn it into anything else if she screwed up.

When Jep came in this time, she paused before she took his money, and said “Why do you keep buying my carvings?”

He stared down at the floor.

The silence went on so long that she took his money and passed him his change, afraid that she had offended him somehow.

No—surely I didn’t. “Why are you buying this?” isn’t a weird question for an artist to ask!

Jep’s lips moved. She had to strain to hear him over the sound of Rauf’s popcorn maker.

He said “They’re the cheapest ones at the flea market.”

He looked up, once, before he left the stall. She hoped that his eyes were as old as the rest of him, because she knew how stricken she must look. Her face felt hot.

She went to the bathroom, full of shoppers complaining to each other about the price of discount socks and how crowded everything was, and splashed water on her face. She was not going to cry in front of the customers.

Well. What did you expect him to say? That he could see your potential? That those crappy ducks were signs of genius? That he wanted to collect them before you got famous and they sold for thousands of bucks apiece?

She wiped her face with a paper towel. Yes. She had wanted him to say those things. She had wanted to think that the man who had carved those carousel beasts had found something good in her work.

At least it’s better than “because I’m passionately in love with you.”

She choked back a laugh at that, or maybe it was a sob. One of the shoppers looked at her curiously, but didn’t ask.

She closed up shop early that day, told Rauf she had a headache, and went home.

When the next weekend rolled around, Sarah wondered if he’d even come back. He had to know he’d upset her.

Unless something’s gone wrong. Maybe he’s got dementia or something. Maybe he keeps buying ducks because he can’t help it.

She wondered what his house looked like. There had to be dozens of decoys by now. She pictured ducks on every available surface, rooms full of jumbled carvings.

Maybe she should stop selling them to him.

She wondered if that would stop him, or if he would just go to the next cheapest person in line.

He came in, and her stomach dropped.

Be professional. You’re a pro. Smile and nod. It doesn’t matter why he buys it, only that you can pay the rent on the stall.

He picked up the smallest carving. It was an older one, a mallard, and she had finally accepted that it was never going to sell and had dropped the price on it.

Her good intentions deserted her.

“It’s not very good,” she said.

He shook his head. The loose skin under his throat moved. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

Sarah let out a single, frustrated sob. “Then why are you buying it? And what am I doing wrong?”

She put her face in her hands.

She heard Jep shift from foot to foot, and then he made his slow way up to the counter, and around it. He put one hand on her shoulder and squeezed, harder and heavier than she would have expected.

“You’re cutting too slow,” he said.

She wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist. “W–what?”

He touched the half–carved ruddy, where it sat clamped in the vise. “You’re working too slow,” he said. He pointed to a wobbling line across a feather. “It slips and gouges here. You’re afraid to go faster, so the cuts aren’t clean.”

He took the carving knife from the bench and made a single unhurried cut, still faster than anything she had ever done. A curl of wood came up behind it, and then it was the edge of the duck’s wing, tucked against its body, and the line was long and clean and perfect.

“I can’t do that!” said Sarah. And then, so fast that she almost tripped over her own words, “Thank you.”

Jep looked at her. His immobile face cracked a little, and he said “Will you drive me home? I want to show you something.”

It was madness driving a strange man home, but she did it anyway. She had her cell phone and Rauf knew what was happening and anyway, Jep was so old that if he tried to kill her, he’d probably have a heart attack stabbing her. She opened the door of her battered truck and let him climb into the cab.

He lived only a few blocks from the flea market, down a shaded street. The lawns were by turns overgrown and painfully, shabbily tidy.

Jep’s house was one of the tidy ones. He led her down the walk and paused in front of the battered wrought iron door.

“Please don’t tell anyone about this,” he said. “It’s not… it’s nothing…”

He stopped, as if he had run out of words. Sarah said, “I won’t,” and hoped again that she wasn’t making a very stupid mistake.

He unlocked the door. Inside, it was very dim and she could hear a TV blaring somewhere in another room. The linoleum was a dreadful pattern from the Seventies and there was a little plaster crucifix on one wall, and a painting of sheep on the other. The sheep were fluffy and big–eyed and Sarah couldn’t imagine Jep buying such a thing.

He led her past the kitchen, to the back of the house and a short hallway and a plain wooden door. She could hear the TV through it. He unlocked that, too, and stepped through the doorway in front of her. She caught a glimpse of a room with a couch and a TV and debris littering the floor.

“Hello, old man,” said a creaking, clacking voice. “Come to feed me?”

Sarah’s first thought was that the light from the TV was casting some awful shadow on the person sitting on the couch.

Her second was that she wanted out of the house, and she wanted out of it now, and she would have run if she thought her legs could carry her.

There was a marionette on the couch.

It was the size of a human–being. It had a mouth like a nutcracker and its face was carved like a Roman god. Curls of gilded hair ringed its head.

Someone is working it—someone—there’s a puppeteer up on the ceiling or something—

It turned its head at her, and she saw its expression change. The wood moved.

She backed up so fast that her spine struck the wall opposite. She slid down it. She thought she might be sick.

It can’t be real wood. It’s a person painted to look like a marionette. It’s a mask or a special effect or something.

It snickered. “I can’t eat her,” said the marionette. It clacked its hollow jaws at her. “Or I could try, but neither of us will enjoy it.”

“That’s enough,” said Jep.

The TV was showing some ridiculous daytime game show. The host gestured for an audience member to come down and try their luck.

Are you the lucky person who’s seen a horror and is going to walk away alive? Come on down!

“Enough,” said the marionette. Its voice was nothing like human. “Never enough. Hasn’t been enough since the old lady died.”

Jep reached in his bag and took out the carved mallard. He threw it toward the couch.

The marionette caught it neatly out of midair—it can’t be on strings, no puppeteer on earth could make a thing on strings do that—and grabbed the decoy’s neck. She could see the fingers, beautifully articulated, each ball joint perfect, ending in tapered points.

The duck carving came alive.

Sarah watched as her poor mangled mallard suddenly stretched out its wings. She caught a glimpse of carved wooden feathers, the bill opening, the legs—she hadn’t even carved legs! Where had they come from?—flailing.

It hung poised for a moment, as if in flight, and then the marionette wrung its neck.

The decoy collapsed. It was still wood, it could only be wood, but it was wood carved like a dead bird, the wings trailing down.

The marionette opened its mouth impossibly wide, showing a black, toothless opening that ran halfway down the thing’s throat, and bit into the mallard’s breast.

Wood splintered. The marionette chewed. Sawdust fell down around it, and a single wooden feather drifted to the floor.

It took another bite, and another, then wiped its mouth.

“Where’s my horse, old man?” asked the marionette.

The game show host on TV showed the contestants what they could win. Door after door opened, revealing new cars and shiny appliances, and the marionette turned away. It lowered its gaping mouth to the body of the duck and chewed as it watched.

Jep came out and closed the door. He locked it again, his movements as slow as when he came into the stall.

“What,” said Sarah from the floor. “What. What?” She looked up at him, half in fear, half hoping that he would confirm what she thought she’d seen. “What was that? What—who—”

He helped her into the kitchen and then he made tea. When he opened the pantry to get the tea bags, she could see empty shelves, a few cans, and a pink hat on a hook that certainly wasn’t his.

She could hear the TV from down the hall still, and knowing what was sitting there and watching the screen made her shudder. If she thought too closely, she’d go completely mad. Perhaps she’d gone mad already.

Did my mallard really come alive? Did it really—no, it couldn’t have—it was some kind of trick, he had a live duck in his bag all this time—

Which was completely ridiculous. He’d had the bag on his lap in the truck. She would have noticed if he was carrying a live duck around in it.

She started to laugh and stuffed both hands in her mouth to stop it.

“He can only eat wooden meat,” said Jep. He pushed the mug of tea in front of her. It had a faded picture of a kitten on it. The ancient avocado refrigerator hummed soothingly. “He doesn’t eat much of it, not really. A duck will last him all week. And the wood doesn’t go bad.”

Sarah stared across the table at him. She wondered if he’d let her go, if she ran.

“He’s wood,” she said.

Jep nodded.

“He’s alive, though.”

Jep nodded again.

Sarah held the mug of tea and her hands shook so badly that she had to set it back down on the table. The faded kitten ogled at her.

“My wife wanted a son,” he said. “We couldn’t have one. So I carved him.” He looked into his own tea. “It’s not a good idea to do that.”

“No,” said Sarah in a high voice. “No, I bet it isn’t!”

It was impossible, of course. She knew that it was impossible.

She thought of the carved walrus and the laughing gull and the prancing horses.

If any man on earth could have brought a carving to life, it would have been the person who carved those horses.

“How did you do it?” she whispered.

Jep shrugged. “Wood’s half alive already,” he said. “You know. A good carving’s not a dead thing, if you put enough of your heart into it.”

Sarah clutched the mug of tea. It was hot enough that her hands were starting to burn, but she had to hold onto something.

Yes. She did know. But there was a great deal of distance between believing that good art had a life of its own, and having a thing that sat in a room and tore apart carved birds with its clacking mouth.

“I think more people can do it than let on,” said Jep. “But you shouldn’t make people. It’s not good, making people like that.”

“You’ve been feeding him my carvings,” said Sarah. She said it out loud and felt nothing at all. She knew that she should feel something—grief, perhaps, or outrage. They had not been very good carvings, but she had worked hard on them. She didn’t expect them to end up in museums, but she’d thought that maybe someone was appreciating them.

Apparently they had been appreciated briefly, and only once.

She thought of the mallard coming to life and had to put the tea down and put her hands over her mouth.

Had all her poor carvings come to life at the last? Had they been alive just so that they could die?

Now she felt something, but it was so huge and terrible that she didn’t dare let it out.

“I’m sorry,” said Jep. “They have to be hand–carved. I tried the mass–produced ones and they don’t come alive. He can’t eat them.”

He reached across the table and touched her hand, tentatively. “It’s not that yours are bad. It’s just… I’m on a fixed income. I can’t afford anyone else’s.”

She took a burning gulp of tea. It seared all the way down.

When she could speak again, she said “Why don’t you carve them yourself?”

He rose from the table and led her to the back door.

There were two sets of boots by it. One was large and black and looked like the footwear equivalent of Jep’s suit.

The other pair were smaller and faded and had pink flowers on them. She looked away.

It was entirely possible, of course, that Jep planned to kill her, now that she knew his terrible secret, and bury her in the backyard. But stepping outside was a relief and it was hard to believe, as the sunlight fell over her, what lay in the house behind her.

There was a little wooden shed behind the house. He led her to it and opened the door.

It was almost completely empty. There was a table in one corner, and few pieces of wood slid through the rafters. Jars of nails caught the light from the windowsill.

It smelled of pine and dust. Sarah turned her head, tracing pale squares on the floor, where machinery had been and now was gone. There were not even spiderwebs in the corners.

So poor they can’t afford cobwebs, her mother had said once, about a relative. And here it was. The only things left were the shop lights overhead, their bulbs gone dim, but still she recognized it.

“This was your woodshop, wasn’t it?” said Sarah.

Jep nodded. There was no emotion on his face, not even grief. “When my wife was sick, I had to sell the tools. We couldn’t afford the meds otherwise. We would have lost the house, and then someone would have found him.”

He straightened. “I didn’t tell her, of course. I said I’d got a commission. She never knew.”

There was a note in his voice that at first she thought was bitterness, and then recognized.

Pride.

He sold all his equipment to pay for his wife’s care. And he’s proud that she never found out about it.

She had the sensation again of standing on the edge of an emotion so huge that if she let it reach her, she would drown.

“This is the only thing left,” Jep said. He pointed behind her, up against the wall, and she turned. “Couldn’t find a buyer, since it wasn’t done.”

It was a horse.

It stood twice the size of the carousel horses, the neck arched. Its face was exquisitely carved, its front hooves feathered like a draft horse. The mane rippled. There was no bridle, no saddle, hardly any decoration. It needed none.

The back half, though, was barely roughed in. The hooves were square and the tail was a crude rectangle of wood. She could see the exact point where he had set down the chisel, the different coloration of the wood.

He was working on this when his wife got sick.

It was a crime that it had never been finished.

And what do you want him to finish it with? His teeth?

She thought of the marionette saying Where’s my horse, old man?

She stepped out of the shed and went around the house, toward her truck. Astonishingly, she did not seem to be dead. Jep walked with her, and didn’t show any sign of stopping her.

“Don’t think too badly of him,” he said. “My wife tried to teach him some manners. She loved him. He misses her.”

So do you, thought Sarah, thinking of the flowered boots by the back door and the hat still hanging in the pantry.

“It’s the TV,” said Jep. “But if he doesn’t have it, he gets restless. And there’s nowhere he can go.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Sarah, with her hand on the door handle.

He stood on the sidewalk, not moving. Then he made the barest shrug. “Keep feeding him,” he said, and turned away.

She drove around the block and then she parked the truck and bent over the steering wheel and sobbed.

She cried for horror and for her poor dead carvings and for an old man who had lost everything and then had lost his wife too, who was left caring for a monster. She cried until her eyes were dry and burning and her nose ached and her forearms hurt where the steering wheel cut into them, and the world was still terrible.

Then, because she’d left the cash box there, and because some habits die hard, she went back to the flea market.

“You okay?” asked Rauf. “You don’t look so good. What did he want, anyway?”

Sarah exhaled. Her throat was raw. “He showed me his workshop,” she croaked “He doesn’t carve since his wife died.”

Rauf nodded.

“If my wife died,” he said slowly, “I wouldn’t do anything again. I’d just close up the shop and sit down and wait to see her again.”

Sarah had met Rauf’s wife two or three times, a small, round, dark–skinned woman with a smile that could light up a continent. She wondered if it was her smile that could make her husband want to do nothing but sit down and die if he lost her.

She wondered what Jep’s wife’s smile had been like.

“Hey, it’s okay,” said Rauf, seeing her face. “She’ll outlive me. She’ll do better without me than I would without her.”

Sarah laughed dutifully and went into her stall. She threw her tools into her bag—all of them, and the paints too, which took three trips out to the truck—and dropped the half–finished ruddy on the passenger seat.

She went home to get the rest of her gear, and then through a drive–thru because she couldn’t live on Rauf’s popcorn all day.

And then she drove back to the little house with the painfully tidy yard and knocked on the door with her hands full of chisels and a bag of burgers.

Jep opened the door and blinked at her.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ve brought my tools. Let’s finish your horse.”

Sarah thought, at some point in that mad night, that she had learned more about carving in the last five hours than she had learned in the fifteen years leading up to it. Her hands were nicked and bloody and her arms ached from holding the heavy wood at the proper angle. She did not have a vise remotely large enough, so they had to improvise with the table and the walls.

The years did not fall away from Jep’s face, but his hands were younger than they had ever been. He stroked the tools over the surface of the horse and under the blades, the muscles came to shining life.

She knew that her tools were cheap, amateurish things compared to the woodshop he must have had, but he held them as if they belonged to a master.

When he passed her the knife and gestured to the horse’s tail, she stared at him.

“Are you sure?” she said. “My ducks aren’t that good…”

He stared down at the horse.

“The greatest thing I ever made came alive,” he said finally. “Because I wanted to make my wife happy. And now she’s gone and it sits there and I feed it and sometimes I dream about setting us both on fire.”

Sarah’s hand closed convulsively on the carving knife. She swallowed.

“You’re a good girl,” said Jep. He sounded tired. She knew that it must be very late. “I don’t know if this will work. But I want you to know I’m grateful. And I’m sorry about all your decoys.”

“It’s all right,” said Sarah, even though it wasn’t.

She steeled herself, and began to carve the tail.

It was closer to morning than midnight when Jep cut the last hair on the back hoof. Sarah had been sanding the flanks until they gleamed under the shop lights.

He stepped back and looked at the horse.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, that’s not bad.”

There was a noise at the door.

They both looked up, and Sarah took a step back.

The marionette stood in the entryway.

It’s between us and the outside, what do I do, can we distract it…

She moved so the horse was between her and the creature. If it came at them, it would have to move out of the doorway, and she could make a break for it.

And what about Jep? He can’t move that fast.

“I locked the door,” said Jep. “I always lock it.”

The marionette rolled its carved eyes. “I’ve been able to open that lock for the last ten years.”

Jep rested both hands on the horse’s back. “I see,” he said.

The wooden lips twisted up. “Are you surprised, old man? That I could open it, or that I didn’t strangle you in your sleep some night?”

Jep shrugged.

The marionette looked down at the horse.

Its face changed. Sarah couldn’t explain it. A light came behind its eyes that had been missing before.

It said, very quietly, “Oh.”

It took a step forward and Sarah knew that she should be ready to run, but instead she burst out, “Don’t you dare try to eat this horse!”

The marionette laughed, but it wasn’t the horrible clacking laughter that she had heard earlier. It was softer and more rueful, the most human sound that she had yet heard it make.

“I won’t,” it said. “I understand why you’d think that, but I wouldn’t.”

It took two more steps forward. Sarah backed up. Jep didn’t.

It stroked one long, articulated hand over the horse’s neck.

She could see the exact moment when the horse woke. She saw the flanks heave as it inhaled, and saw the marionette’s ball–joint fingers tighten in the suddenly liquid mane.

“We did badly by each other, old man,” said the marionette distantly.

“We did,” said Jep quietly. “She’d have been disappointed in us.”

It shook its head. “She’d have understood.”

The horse lifted its head. Its carved nostrils flared open and it turned and nuzzled the marionette’s arm.

“I’m going now,” said the carved boy. “Finally. Now that I have my horse.”

“All right,” said Jep.

It—he—swung up on the horse’s back. They were perfectly sized for one another. He had to lean far forward to go through the doorway, but then he was through.

As one, Sarah and Jep followed.

The moon was the eye of an ink–dark whale overhead, barnacled with stars. They walked through the shadows of the sideyard. The pale wood–grain color of the horse was bleached to blue–white bone.

Moonlight surrounded the boy and the horse as they walked into the street. The click of wooden hooves on asphalt became a clatter as the horse broke into a trot, and then into a run, and then the moonlight was a blue ribbon before them and they were running up it and there was no sound at all.

And they were gone.

Sarah had to put Jep to bed. He was heavy, for all his frailness, and she was practically carrying him as they reached the bedroom.

She tried to set him down on the near side of the bed and he struggled until she helped him around to the far side, where the blankets were pushed back. “My side,” he said, by way of explanation. She looked at the other side, at the neatly tucked pillow and the faint depression in the mattress, and she would have cried again if there were any tears left in her.

She got his shoes off and left it at that. His frayed suit wouldn’t get any more frayed for being slept in.

She picked up her tools. When she had duplicates, she left him one, and when she didn’t she left him one anyway. Her credit card could strain to another few knives if it had to.

She let herself out of the shed and drove back to the flea market in the moonlight. She kept expecting to see a horse and a rider, but she didn’t and she thought probably no one else ever would either.

She was exhausted, but there was no chance of sleeping. She didn’t feel like going home.

Instead, she keyed in the security code and let herself into the empty building. Her stall was dark, but she turned on one light, and saw the reflections winking in Rauf’s popcorn maker across the way.

She had the right tools to finish the ruddy, so she did.

There was light coming in through the skylights when she put the last line on the feathers.

She sat back. Her neck ached and her eyes were gritty. It was the best thing she had ever carved, even better than the horse’s tail.

She didn’t know what she was waiting for.

She set down the sandpaper and sighed.

“Maybe I’m being stupid,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and lost in the vast echoing spaces of the market.

The duck carving flexed its wings. Its unpainted bill opened, just a fraction, and then it shook itself and settled back down. Its tail flicked, and then it was a wooden carving again, with no more life than any piece of art has on its own.

A single wooden feather slipped free of the wings and landed on the table.

She picked it up. It was unpainted, and more perfectly carved than anything that she had ever done.

But not, perhaps, more perfect than anything she could do.

She stroked her hands over the wood, then got up and turned out the light and went home.

T. Kingfisher is the pen name for Ursula Vernon, who is a writer, illustrator, gardener, and occasional children’s book creator. As T. Kingfisher, she has written multiple novels based on fairy-tale retellings, including “The Raven & The Reindeer” and “The Seventh Bride.” Her work has won the Hugo, Nebula, WSFA and Mythopoeic Awards. She is fond of plants, bugs, and hound dogs.

Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight
By Aliette de Bodard

Green tea: green tea is made from steamed or lightly dried tea leaves. The brew is light, with a pleasant, grassy taste. Do not over-steep it, lest it become bitter.

• • • •

After the funeral, Quang Tu walked back to his compartment, and sat down alone, staring sightlessly at the slow ballet of bots cleaning the small room—the metal walls pristine already, with every trace of Mother’s presence or of her numerous mourners scrubbed away. He’d shut down the communal network—couldn’t bear to see the potted summaries of Mother’s life, the endlessly looping vids of the funeral procession, the hundred thousand bystanders gathered at the grave site to say goodbye, vultures feasting on the flesh of the grieving—they hadn’t known her, they hadn’t cared—and all their offerings of flowers were worth as much as the insurances of the Embroidered Guard.

“Big brother, I know you’re here,” a voice said, on the other side of the door he’d locked. “Let me in, please?”

Of course. Quang Tu didn’t move. “I said I wanted to be alone,” he said.

A snort that might have been amusement. “Fine. If you insist on doing it that way…”

His sister, The Tiger in the Banyan, materialised in the kitchen, hovering over the polished counter, near the remains of his morning tea. Of course, it wasn’t really her: she was a Mind encased in the heartroom of a spaceship, far too heavy to leave orbit; and what she projected down onto the planet was an avatar, a perfectly rendered, smaller version of herself—elegant and sharp, with a small, blackened spot on her hull which served as a mourning band. “Typical,” she said, hovering around the compartment. “You can’t just shut yourself away.”

“I can if I want to,” Quang Tu said—feeling like he was eight years old again, trying to argue with her—as if it had ever made sense. She seldom got angry—mindships didn’t, mostly; he wasn’t sure if that was the overall design of the Imperial Workshops, or the simple fact that her lifespan was counted in centuries, and his (and Mother’s) in mere decades. He’d have thought she didn’t grieve, either; but she was changed—something in the slow, careful deliberation of her movements, as if anything and everything might break her…

The Tiger in the Banyan hovered near the kitchen table, watching the bots. She could hack them, easily; no security worth anything in the compartment. Who would steal bots, anyway?

What he valued most had already been taken away.

“Leave me alone,” he said. But he didn’t want to be alone; not really. He didn’t want to hear the silence in the compartment; the clicking sounds of the bots’ legs on metal, bereft of any warmth or humanity.

“Do you want to talk about it?” The Tiger in the Banyan asked.

She didn’t need to say what; and he didn’t do her the insult of pretending she did. “What would be the point?”

“To talk.” Her voice was uncannily shrewd. “It helps. At least, I’m told it does.”

Quang Tu heard, again, the voice of the Embroidered Guard; the slow, measured tones commiserating on his loss; and then the frown, and the knife-thrust in his gut.

You must understand that your mother’s work was very valuable…

The circumstances are not ordinary…

The slow, pompous tones of the scholar; the convoluted official language he knew by heart—the only excuses the state would make to him, couched in the over-formality of memorials and edicts.

“She—” he took a deep, trembling breath—was it grief, or anger? “I should have had her mem-implants.” Forty-nine days after the funeral; when there was time for the labs to have decanted and stabilised Mother’s personality and memories, and added her to the ranks of the ancestors on file. It wasn’t her, it would never be her, of course—just a simulation meant to share knowledge and advice. But it would have been something. It would have filled the awful emptiness in his life.

“It was your right, as the eldest,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Something in the tone of her voice…

“You disapprove? You wanted them?” Families had fallen out before, on more trivial things.

“Of course not.” A burst of careless, amused laughter. “Don’t be a fool. What use would I have, for them. It’s just—” She hesitated, banking left and right in uncertainty. “You need something more. Beyond Mother.”

“There isn’t something more!”

“You—”

“You weren’t there,” Quang Tu said. She’d been away on her journeys, ferrying people back and forth between the planets that made up the Dai Viet Empire; leaping from world to world, with hardly a care for planet-bound humans. She—she hadn’t seen Mother’s unsteady hands, dropping the glass; heard the sound of its shattering like a gunshot; hadn’t carried her back to bed every evening, tracking the progress of the disease by the growing lightness in his arms—by the growing sharpness of ribs, protruding under taut skin.

Mother had remained herself until almost the end—sharp and lucid and utterly aware of what was happening, scribbling in the margins of her team’s reports and sending her instructions to the new space station’s building site, as if nothing untoward had ever happened to her. Had it been a blessing; or a curse? He didn’t have answers; and he wasn’t sure he wanted that awful certainty to shatter him.

“I was here,” The Tiger in the Banyan said, gently, slowly. “At the end.”

Quang Tu closed his eyes, again, smelling antiseptic and the sharp odour of painkillers; and the sour smell of a body finally breaking down, finally failing. “I’m sorry. You were. I didn’t mean to—”

“I know you didn’t.” The Tiger in the Banyan moved closer to him; brushed against his shoulder—ghostly, almost intangible, the breath that had been beside him all his childhood. “But nevertheless. Your life got eaten up, taking care of Mother. And you can say you were only doing what a filial son ought to do; you can say it didn’t matter. But… it’s done now, big brother. It’s over.”

It’s not, he wanted to say, but the words rang hollow in his own ears. He moved, stared at the altar; at the holo of Mother—over the offering of tea and rice, the food to sustain her on her journey through Hell. It cycled through vids—Mother, heavily pregnant with his sister, moving with the characteristic arrested slowness of Mind-bearers; Mother standing behind Quang Tu and The Tiger in the Banyan in front of the ancestral altar for Grandfather’s death anniversary; Mother, accepting her Hoang Minh Medal from the then Minister of Investigation; and one before the diagnosis, when she’d already started to become frailer and thinner—insisting on going back to the lab; to her abandoned teams and research…

He thought, again, of the Embroidered Guard; of the words tightening around his neck like an executioner’s garrotte. How dare he. How dare they all. “She came home,” he said, not sure how to voice the turmoil within him. “To us. To her family. In the end. It meant something, didn’t it?”

The Tiger in the Banyan’s voice was wry, amused. “It wasn’t the Empress that comforted her when she woke at night, coughing her lungs out, was it?” It was… treason to much as think this, let alone utter it; though the Embroidered Guard would make allowances for grief, and anger; and for Mother’s continued usefulness to the service of the Empress. The truth was, neither of them much cared, anyway. “It’s not the Empress that was by her side when she died.”

She’d clung to his hand, then, her eyes open wide, a network of blood within the whites, and the fear in her eyes. “I—please, child…” He’d stood, frozen; until, behind him, The Tiger in the Banyan whispered, “The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim…”— an Old Earth lullaby, the words stretched into the familiar, slow, comforting rhythm that he’d unthinkingly taken up.

“Go home to study

I shall wait nine months, I shall wait ten autumns…”

She’d relaxed, then, against him; and they had gone on singing songs until—he didn’t know when she’d died; when the eyes lost their lustre, the face its usual sharpness. But he’d risen from her death-bed with the song still in his mind; and an awful yawning gap in his world that nothing had closed.

And then—after the scattering of votive papers, after the final handful of earth thrown over the grave—the Embroidered Guard.

The Embroidered Guard was young; baby-faced and callow, but he was already moving with the easy arrogance of the privileged. He’d approached Quang Tu at the grave site, ostensibly to offer his condolences—it had taken him all of two sentences to get to his true purpose; and to shatter Quang Tu’s world, all over again.

Your mother’s mem-implants will go to Professor Tuyet Hoa, who will be best able to continue her research…

Of course, the Empire required food; and crops of rice grown in space; and better, more reliable harvests to feed the masses. Of course he didn’t want anyone to starve. But…

Mem-implants always went from parent to child. They were a family’s riches and fortune; the continued advice of the ancestors, dispensed from beyond the grave. He’d—he’d had the comfort, as Mother lay dying, to know that he wouldn’t lose her. Not for real; not for long.

“They took her away from us,” Quang Tu said. “Again and again and again. And now, at the very end, when she ought to be ours—when she should return to her family…”

The Tiger in the Banyan didn’t move; but a vid of the funeral appeared on one of the walls, projected through the communal network. There hadn’t been enough space in the small compartment for people to pay their respects; the numerous callers had jammed into the corridors and alcoves, jostling each other in utter silence. “She’s theirs in death, too.”

“And you don’t care?”

A side-roll of the avatar, her equivalent of a shrug. “Not as much as you do. I remember her. None of them do.”

Except Tuyet Hoa.

He remembered Tuyet Hoa, too; coming to visit them on the third day after the New Year—a student paying respect to her teacher, year after year; turning from an unattainable grown-up to a woman not much older than either he or The Tiger in the Banyan; though she’d never lost her rigid awkwardness in dealing with them. No doubt, in Tuyet Hoa’s ideal world, Mother wouldn’t have had children; wouldn’t have let anything distract her from her work.

“You have to move on,” The Tiger in the Banyan said, slowly, gently; coming by his side to stare at the memorial altar. Bots gathered in the kitchen space, started putting together fresh tea to replace the three cups laid there. “Accept that this is the way things are. They’ll compensate, you know—offer you higher-level promotions and make allowances. You’ll find your path through civil service is… smoother.”

Bribes or sops; payments for the loss of something that had no price. “Fair dealings,” he said, slowly, bitterly. They knew exactly the value of what Tuyet Hoa was getting.

“Of course,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. “But you’ll only ruin your health and your career; and you know Mother wouldn’t have wanted it.”

As if… No, he was being unfair. Mother could be distant, and engrossed in her work; but she had always made time for them. She had raised them and played with them, telling them stories of princesses and fishermen and citadels vanished in one night; and, later on, going on long walks with Quang Tu in the gardens of Azure Dragons, delightedly pointing at a pine tree or at a crane flying overhead; and animatedly discussing Quang Tu’s fledging career in the Ministry of Works.

“You can’t afford to let this go sour,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Below her, the bots brought a small, perfect cup of tea: green, fragrant liquid in a cup, the cracks in the pale celadon like those in eggshells.

Quang Tu lifted the cup; breathed in the grassy, pleasant smell—Mother would love it, even beyond the grave. “I know,” he said, laying the cup on the altar. The lie slipped out of him as softly, as easily as Mother’s last exhaled breath.

• • • •

O Long tea: those teas are carefully prepared by the tea masters to create a range of tastes and appearances. The brew is sweet with a hint of strength, each subsequent steeping revealing new nuances.

• • • •

Tuyet Hoa woke up—with a diffuse, growing sense of panic and fear, before she remembered the procedure.

She was alive. She was sane. At least…

She took in a deep, trembling breath; and realised she lay at home, in her bed. What had woken her up—above the stubborn, panicked rhythm of her heart—was a gentle nudge from the communal network, flashes of light relayed by the bots in the lightest phase of her sleep cycle. It wasn’t her alarm; but rather, a notification that a message classified as “urgent” had arrived for her.

Not again.

A nudge, at the back of her mind; a thread of thought that wasn’t her own; reminding her she should look at it; that it was her responsibility as the new head of department to pay proper attention to messages from her subordinates.

Professor Duy Uyen. Of course.

She was as forceful in life as she had been in death; and, because she had been merely Hoa’s head of department, and not a direct ancestor, she felt… wrong. Distant, as though she were speaking through a pane of glass.

Hoa was lucky, she knew—receiving mem-implants that weren’t your own family’s could irretrievably scramble your brain, as fifteen different strangers with no consideration or compassion fought for control of your thoughts. She could hear Professor Duy Uyen; and sometimes others of Duy Uyen’s ancestors, as remote ghosts; but that was it. It could have been so much worse.

And it could have been so much better.

She got up, ignoring the insistent talk at the back of her mind, the constant urge to be dutiful; and padded into the kitchen.

The bots had already set aside Hoa’s first tea of the day. She’d used to take it at work, before the procedure; in the days of Professor Duy Uyen’s sickness, when Duy Uyen came in to work thinner and paler every day—and then became a succession of memorials and vid-calls, injecting her last, desperate instructions into the project before it slipped beyond her grasp. Hoa had enjoyed the quiet: it had kept the desperate knowledge of Professor Duy Uyen’s coming death at bay—the moment when they would all be adrift in the void of space, with no mindship to carry them onwards.

Now Hoa enjoyed a different quiet. Now she drank her tea first thing in the morning—hoping that, at this early hour, the mem-implants had no motive to kick in.

Not that it had worked, this particular morning.

She sat down to breathe in the flavour—the faint, nutty aroma poised perfectly between floral and sweet—her hand trembling above the surface of the cup—mentally blocking out Professor Duy Uyen for a few precious minutes; a few more stolen moments of tranquillity before reality came crashing in.

Then she gave in, and opened the message.

It was from Luong Ya Lan, the researcher who worked on the water’s acidity balance. On the vid relayed from the laboratory, she was pale, but perfectly composed. “Madam Hoa. I’m sorry to have to inform you that the samples in Paddy Four have developed a fungal disease…”

Professor Duy Uyen stirred in the depths of Hoa’s brain, parsing the words as they came in—accessing the station’s private network and downloading the pertinent data—the only mercy was that she wasn’t faster than Hoa, and that it would take her fifteen to twenty minutes to parse all of it. The Professor had her suspicions, of course—something about the particular rice strain; perhaps the changes drafted onto the plant to allow it to thrive under starlight, changes taken from the nocturnal honeydreamer on the Sixteenth Planet; perhaps the conditions in the paddy itself…

Hoa poured herself another cup of tea; and stared at the bots for a while. There was silence, the voice of Duy Uyen slowly fading away to nothingness in her thoughts. Alone. At last, alone.

Paddy Four had last been checked on by Ya Lan’s student, An Khang—Khang was a smart and dedicated man, but not a particularly careful one; and she would have to ask him if he’d checked himself, or through bots; and if he’d followed protocols when he’d done so.

She got up, and walked to the laboratory—still silence in her mind. It was a short trip: the station was still being built, and the only thing in existence were the laboratory and the living quarters for all ten researchers—a generous allocation of space, far grander than the compartments they would have been entitled to on any of their home stations.

Outside, beyond the metal walls, the bots were hard at work—reinforcing the structure, gradually layering a floor and walls onto the skeletal structure mapped out by the Grand Master of Design Harmony. She had no need to call up a vid of the outside on her implants to know they were out there, doing their part; just as she was. They weren’t the only ones, of course: in the Imperial Workshops, alchemists were carefully poring over the design of the Mind that would one day watch over the entire station, making sure no flaws remained before they transferred him to the womb of his mother.

In the laboratory, Ya Lan was busying herself with the faulty paddy: she threw an apologetic glance at Hoa when Hoa walked in. “You got my message.”

Hoa grimaced. “Yes. Have you had time to analyse?”

Ya Lan flushed. “No.”

Hoa knew. A proper analysis would require more than twenty minutes. But still…. “If you had to make a rough guess?”

“Probably the humidity.”

“Did Khang—”

Ya Lan shook her head. “I checked that too. No contaminants introduced in the paddy; and the last time he opened it was two weeks ago.” The paddies were encased in glass, to make sure they could control the environment; and monitored by bots and the occasional scientist.

“Fungi can lie dormant for more than two weeks,” Hoa said, darkly.

Ya Lan sighed. “Of course. But I still think it’s the environment: it’s a bit tricky to get right.”

Humid and dark; the perfect conditions for a host of other things to grow in the paddies—not just the crops the Empire so desperately needed. The named planets were few; and fewer still that could bear the cultivation of food. Professor Duy HDuy Uyen had had a vision—of a network of space stations like this one; of fish ponds and rice paddies grown directly under starlight, rather than on simulated Old Earth light; of staples that would not cost a fortune in resources to grow and maintain.

And they had all believed in that vision, like a dying man offered a glimpse of a river. The Empress herself had believed it; so much that she had suspended the law for Professor Duy Uyen’s sake, and granted her mem-implants to Hoa instead of to Duy Uyen’s son: the quiet boy Hoa remembered from her New Year’s visits, now grown to become a scholar in his own right—he’d been angry at the funeral, and why wouldn’t he be? The mem-implants should have been his.

“I know,” Hoa said. She knelt, calling up the data from the paddy onto her implants: her field of vision filled with a graph of the temperature throughout last month. The slight dips in the curve all corresponded to a check: a researcher opening the paddy.

“Professor?” Ya Lan asked; hesitant.

Hoa did not move. “Yes?”

“It’s the third paddy of that strain that fails in as many months…”

She heard the question Ya Lan was not asking. The other strain—the one in paddies One to Three—had also failed some tests, but not at the same frequency.

Within her, Professor Duy Uyen stirred. It was the temperature, she pointed out, gently but firmly. The honeydreamer supported a very narrow range of temperatures; and the modified rice probably did, too.

Hoa bit back a savage answer. The changes might be flawed, but they were the best candidate they had.

Professor Duy Uyen shook her head. The strain in paddies One to Three was better: a graft from a lifeform of an unnumbered and unsettled planet, P Huong Van—luminescents, an insect flying in air too different to be breathable by human beings. They had been Professor Duy Uyen’s favoured option.

Hoa didn’t like the luminescents. The air of P Huong Van had a different balance of khi-elements: it was rich in fire, and anything would set it ablaze—flame-storms were horrifically common, charring trees to cinders, and birds in flight to blackened skeletons. Aboard a space station, fire was too much of a danger. Professor Duy Uyen had argued that the Mind that would ultimately control the space station could be designed to accept an unbalance of khi-elements; could add water to the atmosphere to reduce the chances of a firestorm onboard.

Hoa had no faith in this. Modifying a Mind had a high cost, far above that of regulating temperature in a rice paddy. She pulled up the data from the paddies; though of course she knew Professor Duy Uyen would have reviewed it before her.

Professor Duy Uyen was polite enough not to chide Hoa; though Hoa could feel her disapproval like the weight of a blade—it was odd, in so many ways, how the refinement process had changed Professor Duy Uyen; how, with all the stabilisation adjustments, all the paring down of the unnecessary emotions, the simulation in her mind was utterly, heartbreakingly different from the woman she had known: all the keenness of her mind, and the blade of her finely-honed knowledge, with none of the compassion that would have made her more bearable. Though perhaps it was as well that she had none of the weakness Duy Uyen had shown, in the end—the skin that barely hid the sharpness of bones; the eyes like bruises in the pale oval of her face; the voice, faltering on words or instructions…

Paddies One to Three were thriving; the yield perhaps less than that of Old Earth; but nothing to be ashamed of. There had been a spot of infection in Paddy Three; but the bots had taken care of it.

Hoa watched, for a moment, the bots scuttling over the glass encasing the paddy; watched the shine of metal; the light trembling on the joints of their legs—waiting for the smallest of triggers to blossom into flame. The temperature data for all three paddies was fluctuating too much; and the rate of fire-khi was far above what she was comfortable with.

“Professor?” Ya Lan was still waiting by Paddy Four.

There was only one paddy of that honeydreamer strain: it was new, and as yet unproved. Professor Duy Uyen stirred, within her mind; pointed out the painfully obvious. The strain wasn’t resistant enough—the Empire couldn’t afford to rely on something so fragile. She should do the reasonable thing, and consign it to the scrap bin. They should switch efforts to the other strain, the favoured one; and what did it matter if the station’s Mind needed to enforce a slightly different balance of khi-elements?

It was what Professor Duy Uyen would have done.

But she wasn’t Professor Duy Uyen.

Minds were made in balance; to deliberately unhinge one… would have larger consequences on the station than mere atmospheric control. The risk was too high. She knew this; as much as she knew and numbered all her ancestors—the ones that hadn’t been rich or privileged enough to bequeath her their own mem-implants—leaving her with only this pale, flawed approximation of an inheritance.

You’re a fool.

Hoa closed her eyes; closed her thoughts so that the voice in her mind sank to a whisper. She brought herself, with a slight effort, back to the tranquillity of her mornings—breathing in the nutty aroma from her teacup, as she steeled herself for the day ahead.

She wasn’t Professor Duy Uyen.

She’d feared being left adrift when Professor Duy Uyen’s illness had taken a turn for the worse; she’d lain late at night wondering what would happen to Duy Uyen’s vision; of what she would do, bereft of guidance.

But now she knew.

“Get three other tanks,” Hoa said. “Let’s see what that strain looks like with a tighter temperature regulation. And if you can get hold of Khang, ask him to look into the graft—there might be a better solution there.”

The Empress had thought Duy Uyen a critical asset; had made sure that her mem-implants went to Hoa—so that Hoa would have the advice and knowledge she needed to finish the station that the Empire so desperately needed. The Empress had been wrong; and who cared if that was treason?

Because the answer to Professor Duy Uyen’s death, like everything else, was deceptively, heartbreakingly simple: that no one was irreplaceable; that they would do what everyone always did—they would, somehow, forge on.

• • • •

Dark tea: dark tea leaves are left to mature for years through a careful process of fermentation. The process can take anywhere from a few months to a century. The resulting brew has rich, thick texture with only a bare hint of sourness.

• • • •

The Tiger in the Banyan doesn’t grieve as humans do.

Partly, it’s because she’s been grieving for such a long time; because mindships don’t live the same way that humans do—because they’re built and anchored and stabilised.

Quang Tu spoke of seeing Mother become frail and ill, and how it broke his heart; The Tiger in the Banyan’s heart broke, years and years ago; when she stood in the midst of the New Year’s Eve celebration—as the sound of crackers and bells and gongs filled in the corridors of the orbital, and everyone hugged and cried, she suddenly realised that she would still be there in a hundred years; but that no one else around the table—not Mother, not Quang Tu, none of the aunts and uncles or cousins—would still be alive.

She leaves Quang Tu in his compartment, staring at the memorial altar—and, shifting her consciousness from her projected avatar to her real body, climbs back among the stars.

She is a ship; and in the days and months that Quang Tu mourns, she carries people between planets and orbitals— private passengers and officials on their business: rough white silk, elaborate five panel dresses; parties of scholars arguing on the merit of poems; soldiers on leave from the most distant numbered planets, who go into the weirdness of deep spaces with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

Mother is dead, but the world goes on—Professor Pham Thi Duy Uyen becomes yesterday’s news; fades into official biographies and re-creation vids—and her daughter goes on, too, doing her duty to the Empire.

The Tiger in the Banyan doesn’t grieve as humans do. Partly, it’s because she doesn’t remember as humans do.

She doesn’t remember the womb; or the shock of the birth; but in her earliest memories Mother is here—the first and only time she was carried in Mother’s arms—and Mother herself helped by the birth-master, walking forward on tottering legs—past the pain of the birth, past the bone-deep weariness that speaks only of rest and sleep. It’s Mother’s hands that lie her down into the cradle in the heartroom; Mother’s hands that close the clasps around her—so that she is held; wrapped as securely as she was in the womb—and Mother’s voice that sings to her a lullaby, the tune she will forever carry as she travels between the stars.

“The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim…”

As she docks at an orbital near the Fifth Planet, The Tiger in the Banyan is hailed by another, older ship, The Dream of Millet: a friend she often meets on longer journeys. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh?” The Tiger in the Banyan asks. It’s not hard, to keep track of where ships go from their manifests; but The Dream of Millet is old, and rarely bothers to do so—she’s used to other ships coming to her, rather than the other way around.

“I wanted to ask how you were. When I heard you were back into service—” The Dream of Millet pauses, then; and hesitates; sending a faint signal of cautious disapproval on the comms. “It’s early. Shouldn’t you be mourning? Officially—”

Officially, the hundred days of tears are not yet over. But ships are few; and she’s not an official like Quang Tu, beholden to present exemplary behaviour. “I’m fine,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. She’s mourning; but it doesn’t interfere with her activities: after all, she’s been steeling herself for this since Father died. She didn’t expect it to come so painfully, so soon, but she was prepared for it—braced for it in a way that Quang Tu will never be.

The Dream of Millet is silent for a while—The Tiger in The Banyan can feel her, through the void that separates them—can feel the radio waves nudging her hull; the quick jab of probes dipping into her internal network and collating together information about her last travels. “You’re not ‘fine’,” The Dream of Millet says. “You’re slower, and you go into deep spaces further than you should. And—” she pauses, but it’s more for effect than anything else. “You’ve been avoiding it, haven’t you?”

They both know what she’s talking about: the space station Mother was putting together; the project to provide a steady, abundant food supply to the Empire.

“I’ve had no orders that take me there,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. Not quite a lie; but dangerously close to one. She’s been… better off knowing the station doesn’t exist—unsure that she could face it at all. She doesn’t care about Tuyet Hoa, or the mem-implants; but the station was such a large part of Mother’s life that she’s not sure she could stand to be reminded of it.

She is a mindship: her memories never grow dim or faint; or corrupt. She remembers songs and fairytales whispered through her corridors; remembers walking with Mother on the First Planet, smiling as Mother pointed out the odder places of the Imperial City, from the menagerie to the temple where monks worship an Outsider clockmaker—remembers Mother frail and bowed in the last days, coming to rest in the heartroom, her laboured breath filling The Tiger in the Banyan’s corridors until she, too, could hardly breathe.

She remembers everything about Mother; but the space station—the place where Mother worked away from her children; the project Mother could barely talk about without breaching confidentiality—is forever denied to her memories; forever impersonal, forever distant.

“I see,” The Dream of Millet says. Again, faint disapproval; and another feeling The Tiger in the Banyan can’t quite place—reluctance? Fear of impropriety? “You cannot live like that, child.”

Let me be, The Tiger in the Banyan says; but of course she can’t say that; not to a ship as old as The Dream of Millet. “It will pass,” she says. “In the meantime, I do what I was trained to do. No one has reproached me.” Her answer borders on impertinence, deliberately.

“No. And I won’t,” The Dream of Millet says. “It would be inappropriate of me to tell you how to manage your grief.” She laughs, briefly. “You know there are people worshipping her? I saw a temple, on the Fifty-Second Planet.”

An easier, happier subject. “I’ve seen one too,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. “On the Thirtieth Planet.” It has a statue of Mother, smiling as serenely as a bodhisattva—people light incense to her to be helped in their difficulties. “She would have loved this.” Not for the fame or the worship, but merely because she would have found it heartbreakingly funny.

“Hmmm. No doubt.” The Dream of Millet starts moving away; her comms growing slightly fainter. “I’ll see you again, then. Remember what I said.”

The Tiger in the Banyan will; but not with pleasure. And she doesn’t like the tone with which the other ship takes her leave; it suggests she is going to do something—something typical of the old, getting The Tiger in the Banyan into a position where she’ll have no choice but to acquiesce to whatever The Dream of Millet thinks of as necessary.

Still… there is nothing that she can do. As The Tiger in the Banyan leaves the orbital onto her next journey, she sets a trace on The Dream of Millet; and monitors it from time to time. Nothing the other ship does seems untoward or suspicious; and after a while The Tiger in the Banyan lets the trace fade.

As she weaves her way between the stars, she remembers.

Mother, coming onboard a week before she died—walking by the walls with their endlessly scrolling texts, all the poems she taught The Tiger in the Banyan as a child. In the low gravity, Mother seemed almost at ease; striding once more onboard the ship until she reached the heartroom. She’d sat with a teacup cradled in her lap—dark tea, because she said she needed a strong taste to wash down the drugs they plied her with—the heartroom filled with a smell like churned earth, until The Tiger in the Banyan could almost taste the tea she couldn’t drink.

“Child?” Mother asked.

“Yes?”

“Can we go away—for a while?”

She wasn’t supposed to, of course; she was a mindship, her travels strictly bounded and codified. But she did. She warned the space station; and plunged into deep spaces.

Mother said nothing. She’d stared ahead, listening to the odd sounds; to the echo of her own breath, watching the oily shapes spread on the walls—while The Tiger in the Banyan kept them on course; feeling stretched and scrunched, pulled in different directions as if she were swimming in rapids. Mother was mumbling under her breath; after a while, The Tiger in the Banyan realised it was the words of a song; and, to accompany it, she broadcast music on her loudspeakers.

Go home to study

I shall wait nine months, I shall wait ten autumns…

She remembers Mother’s smile; the utter serenity on her face—the way she rose after they came back to normal spaces, fluid and utterly graceful; as if all pain and weakness had been set aside for this bare moment; subsumed in the music or the travel or both. She remembers Mother’s quiet words as she left the heartroom.

“Thank you, child. You did well.”

“It was nothing,” she’d said, and Mother had smiled, and disembarked—but The Tiger in the Banyan had heard the words Mother wasn’t speaking. Of course it wasn’t nothing. Of course it had meant something; to be away from it all, even for a bare moment; to hang, weightless and without responsibilities, in the vastness of space. Of course.

A hundred and three days after Mother’s death, a message comes, from the Imperial Palace. It directs her to pick an Embroidered Guard from the First Planet; and the destination is…

Had she a heart, this is the moment when it would stop.

The Embroidered Guard is going to Mother’s space station. It doesn’t matter why; or how long for—just that she’s meant to go with him. And she can’t. She can’t possibly…

Below the order is a note, and she knows, too, what it will say. That the ship originally meant for this mission was The Dream of Millet; and that she, unable to complete it, recommended that The Tiger in the Banyan take it up instead.

Ancestors…

How dare she?

The Tiger in the Banyan can’t refuse the order; or pass it on to someone else. Neither can she rail at a much older ship—but if she could—ancestors, if she could…

It doesn’t matter. It’s just a place—one with a little personal significance to her—but nothing she can’t weather. She has been to so many places, all over the Empire; and this is just one more.

Just one more.

The Embroidered Guard is young, and callow; and not unkind. He boards her at the First Planet, as specified—she’s so busy steeling herself that she forgets to greet him, but he doesn’t appear to notice this.

She’s met him before, at the funeral: the one who apologetically approached Quang Tu; who let him know Mother’s mem-implants wouldn’t pass to him.

Of course.

She finds refuge in protocol: it’s not her role to offer conversation to her passengers, especially not those of high rank or in imperial service, who would think it presumption. So she doesn’t speak; and he keeps busy in his cabin, reading reports and watching vids, the way other passengers do.

Just before they emerge from deep spaces, she pauses; as if it would make a difference—as if there were a demon waiting for her; or perhaps something far older and far more terrible; something that will shatter her composure past any hope of recovery.

What are you afraid of? A voice asks within her—she isn’t sure if it’s Mother or The Dream of Millet, and she isn’t sure of what answer she’d give, either.

The station isn’t what she expected. It’s a skeleton; a work in progress; a mass of cables and metal beams with bots crawling all over it; and the living quarters at the centre, dwarfed by the incomplete structure. Almost deceptively ordinary; and yet it meant so much to Mother. Her vision for the future of the Empire; and neither Quang Tu nor The Tiger in the Banyan having a place within.

And yet.. and yet, the station has heft. It has meaning—that of a painting half-done; of a poem stopped mid-verse—of a spear-thrust stopped a handspan before it penetrates the heart. It begs—demands—to be finished.

The Embroidered Guard speaks, then. “I have business onboard. Wait for me, will you?”

It is a courtesy to ask; since she would wait, in any case. But he surprises her by looking back, as he disembarks. “Ship?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” His voice is toneless.

“Don’t be,” The Tiger in the Banyan says.

He smiles then; a bare upturning of the lips. “I could give you the platitudes about your mother living on in her work, if I thought that would change something for her.”

The Tiger in the Banyan doesn’t say anything, for a while. She watches the station below her; listens to the faint drift of radio communications—scientists calling other scientists; reporting successes and failures and the ten thousand little things that make a project of this magnitude. Mother’s vision; Mother’s work—people call it her life work, but of course she and Quang Tu are also Mother’s life work, in a different way. And she understands, then, why The Dream of Millet sent her there.

“It meant something to her,” she says, finally. “I don’t think she’d have begrudged its completion.”

He hesitates. Then, coming back inside the ship—and looking upwards, straight where the heartroom would be—his gaze level, driven by an emotion she can’t read: “They’ll finish it. The new variety of rice they’ve found—the environment will have to be strictly controlled to prevent it from dying of cold, but…” He takes a deep, trembling breath. “There’ll be stations like this all over the Empire—and it’s all thanks to your mother. “

“Of course,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. And the only words that come to her as the ones Mother spoke, once. “Thank you, child. You did well.”

She watches him leave; and thinks of Mother’s smile. Of Mother’s work; and of the things that happened between the work; the songs and the smiles and the stolen moments, all arrayed within her with the clarity and resilience of diamond. She thinks of the memories she carries within her—that she will carry within her for the centuries to come.

The Embroidered Guard was trying to apologise, for the mem-implants; for the inheritance neither she nor Quang Tu will ever have. Telling her it had all been worth it, in the end; that their sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.

But the truth is, it doesn’t matter. It mattered to Quang Tu; but she’s not her brother. She’s not bound by anger or rancour; and she doesn’t grieve as he does.

What matters is this: she holds all of her memories of Mother; and Mother is here now, with her—forever unchanged, forever graceful and tireless; forever flying among the stars.

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories. Recent works include The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and its upcoming sequel The House of Binding Thorns (April 2017, Roc/Gollancz). She also published The Citadel of Weeping Pearls (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting.

Madeleine
By Amal El-Mohtar

An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

—Marcel Proust

• • • •

Madeleine remembers being a different person.

It strikes her when she’s driving, threading through farmland, homesteads, facing down the mountains around which the road winds. She remembers being thrilled at the thought of travel, of the self she would discover over the hills and far away. She remembers laughing with friends, looking forward to things, to a future.

She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all that’s left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.

• • • •

“Tell me about your mother,” says Clarice, the clinical psychologist assigned to her.

Madeleine is stymied. She stammers. This is only her third meeting with Clarice. She looks at her hands and the tissue she twists between them. “I thought we were going to talk about the episodes.”

“We will,” and Clarice is all gentleness, all calm, “but—”

“I would really rather talk about the episodes.”

Clarice relents, nods in her gracious, patient way, and makes a note. “When was your last one?”

“Last night.” Madeleine swallows, hard, remembering.

“And what was the trigger?”

“The soup,” she says, and she means to laugh but it comes out wet and strangled like a sob. “I was making chicken soup, and I put a stick of cinnamon in. I’d never done that before but I remembered how it looked, sometimes, when my mother would make it—she would boil the thighs whole with bay leaves, black pepper, and sticks of cinnamon—so I thought I would try. It was exactly right—it smelled exactly, exactly like hers—and then I was there, I was small and looking up at her in our old house, and she was stirring the soup and smiling down at me, and the smell was like a cloud all around, and I could smell her, too, the hand cream she used, and see the edge of the stove and the oven door handle with the cat-print dish towel on it—”

“Did your mother like to cook?”

Madeleine stares.

“Madeleine,” says Clarice, with the inevitably Anglo pronunciation Madeleine has resigned herself to, “if we’re going to work together to help you I need to know more about her.”

“The episodes aren’t about her,” says Madeleine, stiffly. “They’re because of the drug.”

“Yes, but—”

“They’re because of the drug, and I don’t need you to tell me I took part in the trial because of her—obviously I did—and I don’t want to tell you about her. This isn’t about my mourning, and I thought we established these aren’t traumatic flashbacks. It’s about the drug.”

“Madeleine,” and Madeleine is fascinated by Clarice’s capacity to both disgust and soothe her with sheer unflappability, “Drugs do not operate—or misfire—in a vacuum. You were one of sixty people participating in that trial. Of those sixty, you’re the only one who has come forward experiencing these episodes.” Clarice leans forward, slightly. “We’ve also spoken about your tendency to see our relationship as adversarial. Please remember that it isn’t. You,” and Clarice doesn’t smile, exactly, so much as that the lines around her mouth become suffused with sympathy, “haven’t even ever volunteered her name.”

Madeleine begins to feel like a recalcitrant child instead of an adult standing her ground. This only adds to her resentment.

“Her name was Sylvie,” she offers, finally. “She loved being in the kitchen. She loved making big fancy meals. But she hated having people over. My dad used to tease her about that.”

Clarice nods, smiles her almost-smile, makes further notes. “And did you use the technique we discussed to dismiss the memory?”

Madeleine looks away. “Yes.”

“What did you choose this time?”

“Althusser.” She feels ridiculous. “‘In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.’”

Clarice frowns as she writes, and Madeleine can’t tell if it’s because talk of war is adversarial or because she dislikes Althusser.

• • • •

After she buried her mother, Madeleine looked for ways to bury herself.

She read non-fiction, as dense and theoretical as she could find, on any subject she felt she had a chance of understanding: economics, postmodernism, settler-colonialism. While reading Patrick Wolfe she found the phrase invasion is a structure not an event, and wondered if one could say the same of grief. Grief is an invasion and a structure and an event, she wrote, then struck it out, because it seemed meaningless.

Grief, thinks Madeleine now, is an invasion that climbs inside you and makes you grow a wool blanket from your skin, itchy and insulating, heavy and grey. It wraps and wraps and wraps around, putting layers of scratchy heat between you and the world, until no one wants to approach for fear of the prickle, and people stop asking how you are doing in the blanket, which is a relief, because all you want is to be hidden, out of sight. You can’t think of a time when you won’t be wrapped in the blanket, when you’ll be ready to face the people outside it—but one day, perhaps, you push through. And even though you’ve struggled against the belief that you’re a worthless colony of contagion that must be shunned at all costs, it still comes as a shock, when you emerge, that no one’s left waiting for you.

Worse still is the shock that you haven’t emerged at all.

• • • •

“The thing is,” says Madeleine, slowly, “I didn’t use the sentence right away.”

“Oh?”

“I—wanted to see how long it could last, on its own.” Heat in her cheeks, knowing how this will sound, wanting both to resist and embrace it. “To ride it out. It kept going just as I remembered it—she brought me a little pink plastic bowl with yellow flowers on it, poured just a tiny bit of soup in, blew on it, gave it to me with a plastic spoon. There were little star-shaped noodles. I—” she feels tears in her eyes, hates this, hates crying in front of Clarice, “—I could have eaten it. It smelled so good, and I was hungry. But I got superstitious. You know.” She shrugs. “Like if I ate it I’d have to stay for good.”

“Did you want to stay for good?”

Madeleine says nothing. This is what she hates about Clarice, this demand that her feelings be spelled out into one thing or another: isn’t it obvious that she both wanted and didn’t want to? From what she said?

“I feel like the episodes are lasting longer,” says Madeleine, finally, trying to keep her voice level. “It used to be just a snap, there and back—I’d blink, I’d be in the memory, I’d realize what happened and it would be like a dream, I’d wake up, come back. I didn’t need sentences to help. But now…” She looks to Clarice to fill the silence, but Clarice waits, as usual, for Madeleine herself to articulate the fear.

“…Now I wonder if this is how it started for her. My mother. What it was like for her.” The tissue in her hands is damp, not from tears, but from the sweat of her palms. “If I just sped up the process.”

“You don’t have Alzheimer’s,” says Clarice, matter-of-fact. “You aren’t forgetting anything. Quite the opposite: you’re remembering so intensely and completely that your memories have the vividness and immediacy of hallucination.” She jots something down. “We’ll keep trying to dismantle the triggers as they arise. If the episodes seem to be lasting longer, it could be because they’re fewer and farther between. This is not necessarily a bad thing.”

Madeleine nods, chewing her lip, not meeting Clarice’s eyes.

• • • •

So far as Madeleine is concerned her mother began dying five years earlier, when the fullness of her life began to fall away from her like chunks of wet cake: names; events; her child. Madeleine watched her mother weep, and this was the worst, because with every storm of grief over her confusion Madeleine couldn’t help but imagine the memories sloughing from her, as if the memories themselves were the source of her pain, and if she could just forget them and live a barer life, a life before the disease, before her husband’s death, before Madeleine, she could be happy again. If she could only shed the burden of the expectation of memory, she could be happy again.

Madeleine reads Walter Benjamin on time as image, time as accumulation, and thinks of layers and pearls. She thinks of her mother as a pearl dissolving in wine until only a grain of sand is left drowning at the bottom of the glass.

As her mother’s life fell away from her, so did Madeleine’s. She took a leave of absence from her job, and kept extending it; she stopped seeing her friends; her friends stopped seeing her. Madeleine is certain her friends expected her to be relieved when her mother died, and were surprised by the depth of her mourning. She didn’t know how to address that. She didn’t know how to say to those friends, you are relieved to no longer feel embarrassed around the subject, and expect me to sympathise with your relief, and to be normal again for your sake. So she said nothing.

Madeleine’s friends were not bad people; they had their own lives, their own concerns, their own comfort to nourish and nurture and keep safe, and dealing with a woman who was dealing with her mother who was dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s proved a little too much, especially when Madeleine’s father had died of bowel cancer only a year earlier, especially when she had no other family. It was indecent, so much pain at once, it was unreasonable, and her friends were reasonable people. They had children, families, jobs, and Madeleine had none; she understood. She did not make demands.

She joined the clinical trial the way some people join fund-raising walks, and thinks now that that was her first mistake. People walk, run, bicycle to raise money for cures—that’s the way she ought to have done it, surely, not actually volunteered to be experimented on. No one sponsors people to stand still.

• • • •

The episodes happen like this.

A song on the radio like an itch in her skull, a pebble rattling around inside until it finds the groove in which it fits, perfectly, and suddenly she’s—

—in California, dislocated, confused, a passenger herself now in her own head’s seat, watching the traffic crawl past in the opposite direction, the sun blazing above. On I-5, en route to Anaheim: she is listening, for the first time, to the album that song is from, and feels the beautiful self-sufficiency of having wanted a thing and purchased it, the bewildering freedom of going somewhere utterly new. And she remembers this moment of mellow thrill shrinking into abject terror at the sight of five lanes between her and the exit, and will she make it, won’t she, she doesn’t want to get lost on such enormous highways—

—and then she’s back, in a wholly different car, her body nine years older, the mountain, the farmland all where they should be, slamming hard on the brakes at an unexpected stop sign, breathing hard and counting all the ways in which she could have been killed.

Or she is walking in a world perched on the lip of spring, the Ottawa snow melting to release the sidewalks in fits and starts, peninsulas of gritty concrete wet and crunching beneath her boots, and that solidity of snowless ground meets the smell of water and the warmth of the sun and the sound of dripping and the world tilts—

—and she’s ten years old on the playground of her second primary school, kicking aside the pebbly grit to make a space for shooting marbles, kneeling to use her hands to smooth the surface, then wiping her palms on her corduroy trousers, then reaching into her bag of marbles for the speckled dinosaur-egg that is her lucky one, her favourite—

—and then she’s back, and someone’s asking if she’s okay, because she looked like she might be about to walk into traffic, was she drunk, was she high?

She has read about flashbacks, about PTSD, about reliving events, and has wondered if this is the same. It is not as she imagined those things. She has tried explaining this to Clarice, who very sensibly pointed out that she couldn’t both claim to have never experienced trauma-induced flashbacks and say with certainty that her episodes are categorically different. Clarice is certain, Madeleine realizes, that trauma is at the root of these episodes, that there’s something Madeleine isn’t telling her, that her mother, perhaps, abused her, that she had a terrible childhood.

None of these things are true.

Now: she is home, leaning her head against her living room window at twilight, and something in the thrill of that blue and the cold glass against her scalp sends her tumbling—

—into her body at fourteen, looking into the blue deepening above the tree line near her home as if into another country, longing for it, aware of the picture she makes as a young girl leaning her wondering head against a window while hungry for the future, for the distance, for the person she will grow to be—and starts to reach for a phrase only her future/present self knows, to untangle herself from her past head. She has just about settled on Kristeva—abjection is above all ambiguity—when she feels, strangely, a tug on her field of vision, something at its periphery demanding attention. She looks away from the sky, looks down, at the street she grew up on, the street she knows like the inside of her mouth.

She sees a girl about her own age, brown-skinned and dark-haired, grinning at her and waving.

She has never seen her before in her life.

• • • •

Clarice, for once, looks excited—which is to say, slightly more intent than usual—which makes Madeleine uncomfortable. “Describe her as accurately as you can,” says Clarice.

“She looked about fourteen, had dark skin—”

Clarice blinks. Madeleine continues.

“—and dark, thick hair, that was pulled up in two ponytails, and she was wearing a red dress and sandals.”

“And you’re certain you’d never seen her before?” Clarice adjusts her glasses.

“Positive.” Madeleine hesitates, doubting. “I mean, she looked sort of familiar, but not in a way I could place? But I grew up in a really white small town in Quebec. There were maybe five non-white kids in my whole school, and she wasn’t any of them. Also—” she hesitates, again, because, still, this feels so private, “—no part of an episode has ever felt unfamiliar.”

“She could be a repressed memory,” Clarice muses, “someone you’ve forgotten—or an avatar you’re making up. Perhaps you should try speaking to her.”

• • • •

Clarice had suggested that Madeline could manage the episodes by corrupting the memory with something incompatible, something of-the-moment. Madeleine had settled on phrases from her recent reading: they were new enough to not be associated with other memories, and incongruous enough to remind her of her bereavement even in her mother’s presence. It seemed to work; she had never yet experienced the same memory twice after deploying her critics and philosophers.

It is very strange, now, to go in search of a memory instead.

She tries, again, with the window: waits until twilight, leans her head against the same place, but the temperature is wrong somehow, it doesn’t come together. She tries making chicken soup; nothing. Finally, feeling her way towards it, she heats a mug of milk in the microwave, stirs it to even out the heat, takes a sip—

—while holding the mug with both hands, sitting at the kitchen table, her legs dangling far above the ground. Her parents are in the kitchen, chatting—she knows she’ll have to go to bed soon, as soon as she finishes her milk—but she can see the darkness outside the living room windows, and she wants to know what’s out there. Carefully, trying not to draw her parents’ attention, she slips down from the chair and pads—her feet are bare, she is in her pajamas already—towards the window.

The girl isn’t there.

“Madeleine,” comes her mother’s voice, cheerful, “as-tu fini ton lait?”

Before she can quite grasp what she is doing, Madeleine turns, smiles, nods vigorously up to her mother, and finishes the warm milk in a gulp. Then she lets herself be led downstairs to bed, tucked in, and kissed goodnight by both her parents, and if a still small part of herself struggles to remember something important to say or do, she is too comfortably nestled to pay any attention as the lights go out and the door to her room shuts. She wonders what happens if you fell asleep in a dream, would you dream and then be able to fall asleep in that dream, and dream again, and—someone knocks, gently, at her bedroom window.

Madeleine’s bedroom is in the basement; the window is level with the ground. The girl from the street kneels there, looking concerned. Madeleine blinks, sits up, rises, opens the window.

“What’s your name?” asks the girl at the window.

“Madeleine.” She tilts her head, surprised to find herself answering in English. “What’s yours?”

“Zeinab.” She grins. Madeleine notices she’s wearing pajamas too, turquoise ones with Princess Jasmine on them. “Can I come in? We could have a sleep-over!”

“Shh,” says Madeleine, pushing her window all the way open to let her in, whispering. “I can’t have sleep-overs without my parents knowing!”

Zeinab covers her mouth, eyes wide, and nods, then mouths sorry before clambering inside. Madeleine motions for her to come sit on the bed, then looks at her curiously.

“How do I know you?” she murmurs, half to herself. “We don’t go to school together, do we?”

Zeinab shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know this place at all. But I keep seeing you! Sometimes you’re older and sometimes you’re younger. Sometimes you’re with your parents and sometimes you’re not. I just thought I should say hello, because I keep seeing you, but you don’t always see me, and it feels a little like spying, and I don’t want to do that. I mean,” she grins again, a wide dimpled thing that makes Madeline feel warm and happy, “I wouldn’t mind being a spy but that’s different, that’s cool, that’s like James Bond or Neil Burnside or Agent Carter—”

—and Madeleine snaps back, fingers gone numb around a mug of cold milk that falls to the ground and shatters as she jumps away, presses her back to a wall and tries to stop shaking.

• • • •

She cancels her appointment with Clarice that week. She looks through old year books, class photos, and finds no one who looks like Zeinab, no Zeinabs anywhere in her past. She googles “Zeinab” in various spellings and discovers it’s the name of a journalist, a Syrian mosque, and the Prophet Muhammad’s grand-daughter. Perhaps she’ll ask Zeinab for her surname, she thinks, a little wildly, dazed and frightened and exhilarated.

Over the course of the last several years Madeleine has grown very, very familiar with the inside of her head. The discovery of someone as new and inexplicable as Zeinab there is thrilling in a way she can hardly begin to explain.

She especially does not want to explain to Clarice.

• • • •

Madeleine takes the bus—she has become wary of driving—to the town she grew up in, an hour’s journey over a provincial border. She walks through her old neighbourhood hunting triggers, but finds more changed than familiar; old houses with new additions, facades, front lawns gone to seed or kept too tidy.

She walks up the steep cul-de-sac of her old street to the rocky hill beyond, where a freight line used to run. There, picking up a lump of pink granite from where the tracks used to be, she flashes—

—back to the first time she saw a hummingbird, standing in her driveway by an ornamental pink granite boulder. She feels, again, her heart in her throat, flooded with the beauty of it, the certainty and immensity of the fact that she is seeing a fairy, that fairies are real, that here is a tiny mermaid moving her shining tail backwards and forwards in the air, before realizing the truth and feeling that it is somehow more precious still to find a bird that sounds like a bee and looks like an impossible jewel.

“Ohh,” she hears behind her, and there is Zeinab, transfixed by the hummingbird, and as it hovers before them for the eternity Madeleine remembers, with its keen jet eye and a needle for a mouth, Madeleine reaches out and takes Zeinab’s hand. Zeinab squeezes hers in reply, and they stand together until the hummingbird zooms away.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” murmurs Zeinab, who is a young teen again, in torn jeans and an oversized sweater with Paula Abdul’s face on it, “but I like it.”

• • • •

Madeleine leads Zeinab through her memories, one sip, smell, sound, taste at a time. Stepping out of the shower one morning tips her back into a school trip to the Montreal Botanical Garden, where she slips away from the group to walk around the grounds with Zeinab and talk. Doing this is, in some ways, like maintaining the image in a Magic Eye puzzle, remaining focused on each other. They can’t mention the world outside the memory or it will end too soon, before they’ve had their fill of talk, of marvelling at the strangeness of their meeting, of enjoying each other’s company.

Their conversations are careful and buoyant, as if they’re sculpting something together, chipping away at a mystery shape trapped in marble. It’s so easy to talk to Zeinab, to listen to her—about the books they read as children, the music they loved, the cartoons they watched. Madeleine wonders why Zeinab’s presence doesn’t break the memories like her philosophers do, why she’s more free inside her memories in Zeinab’s company, but doesn’t dare ask. She suspects she knows why, after all; she doesn’t need Clarice to tell her how lonely, how isolated, how miserable she is, miserable enough to invent a friend who is bubbly where she is quiet, kind and friendly where she is mistrustful and reserved, even dark-skinned where she’s white.

She can hear Clarice explaining, in her reasonable voice, that Madeleine—bereaved twice over, made vulnerable by an experimental drug–has invented a shadow-self to love, and perhaps they should unpack the racism of its manifestation, and didn’t Madeleine have any black friends in real life?

“I wish we could see each other all the time,” says Madeleine, sixteen, on her back in the sunny field, long hair spread like so many corn snakes through the grass. “Whenever we wanted.”

“Yeah,” murmurs Zeinab, watching the sky. “Too bad I made you up inside my head.”

Madeleine steels herself against the careening tug of Sylvia Plath, but then remembers that she started reading her in high school. Instead, she turns to Zeinab, blinks.

“What? No. You’re inside my head.”

Zeinab raises an eyebrow—pierced, now—and when she smiles her teeth look all the brighter against her black lipstick. “I guess that’s one possibility, but if I made you up inside my head and did a really good job of it I’d probably want you to say something like that. To make you be more real.”

“But—so could—”

“Although I guess it is weird that we’re always doing stuff you remember. Maybe you should come over to my place sometime!”

Madeleine feels her stomach seizing up.

“Maybe it’s time travel,” says Zeinab, thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s one of those weird things where I’m actually from your future and am meeting you in your past, and then when you meet me in your future I haven’t met you yet, but you know all about me—

“Zeinab—I don’t think—”

Madeline feels wakefulness press a knife’s edge against the memory’s skin, and she backs away from that, shakes her head, clings to the smell of crushed grass and coming summer, with its long days of reading and swimming and cycling and her father talking to her about math and her mother teaching her to knit and looking forward to seeing the R-rated films in the cinema—

—but she can’t, and she shivers, naked, in her bathroom, and the last of the shower’s steam vanishes from the mirror as she starts to cry.

• • • •

“I must say,” says Clarice, quietly, “this is distressing news.”

It’s been a month since Madeleine last saw Clarice, and where before she felt resistant to her probing, wanting only to solve a very specific problem, she now feels a mess, a bowl’s worth of overcooked spaghetti. If before Clarice made her feel like a stubborn child, now Madeleine is a child who knows she’s about to be punished.

“I had hoped,” says Clarice, adjusting her glasses, “talking to this avatar would help you understand the mechanisms of your grief, but from what you’ve told me it sounds more like you’ve been indulging in a damaging fantasy world.”

“It’s not a fantasy world,” says Madeleine, with less snap than she’d like—she sounds, to her own ears, sullen, defensive. “It’s my memory.”

“The experience of which puts you at risk and makes you lose time. And Zeinab isn’t part of your memories.”

“No, but—” she bites her lip.

“But what?”

“But—couldn’t Zeinab be real? I mean,” hastily, before Clarice’s look sharpens too hard, “couldn’t she be a repressed memory, like you said?”

“A repressed memory with whom you talk about recent television, and who suddenly features in all your memories?” Clarice shakes her head.

“But—talking to her helps, it makes it so much easier to control—

• • • •

“Madeleine, tell me if I’m missing anything here. You’re seeking triggers in order to relive your memories for their own sake—not as exposure therapy, not to dismantle those triggers, not to understand Zeinab’s origins—but to have a… Companion? Dalliance?”

Clarice is so kind and sympathetic that Madeleine wants simultaneously to cry and to punch her in the face.

She wants to say, what you’re missing is that I’ve been happy. What you’re missing is that for the first time in years I don’t feel like a disease waiting to happen or a problem to be solved until I’m back in the now, until she and I are apart.

But there is sand in her throat and it hurts too much to speak.

“I think,” says Clarice, with a gentleness that beggars Madeleine’s belief, “it’s time we discussed admitting you into more comprehensive care.”

• • • •

She sees Zeinab again when, on the cusp of sleep in a hospital bed, she experiences the sensation of falling from a great height, and plunges into—

—the week after her mother’s death, when Madeleine couldn’t sleep without waking in a panic, convinced her mother had walked out of the house and into the street, or fallen down the stairs, or taken the wrong pills at the wrong time, only to recall she’d already died and there was nothing left for her to remember.

She lies in bed, and Zeinab lies next to her, and Zeinab is a woman in her thirties, staring at her strangely, as if only now seeing her for the first time, and Madeleine starts to cry and Zeinab holds her tightly while Madeleine buries her face in Zeinab’s shoulder, and says she loves her and doesn’t want to lose her but she has to go, they won’t let her stay, she’s insane and she can’t keep living in the past but there is no one left here for her, no one.

“I love you too,” says Zeinab, fierce, and wondering, and desperate. “I love you too. I’m here. I promise you, I’m here.”

• • • •

Madeleine is not sure she’s awake when she hears people arguing outside her door.

She hears “serious bodily harm” and “what evidence” and “rights adviser,” then “very irregular” and “I assure you,” traded back and forth in low voices. She drifts in and out of wakefulness, wonders muzzily if she consented to being drugged or if she only dreamt that she did, turns over, falls back asleep.

When she wakes again, Zeinab is sitting at the foot of her bed.

Madeleine stares at her.

“I figured out how we know each other,” says Zeinab, whose hair is waist-length now, straightened, who wears a white silk blouse and a sharp black jacket, high heels, and looks like she belongs in an action film. “How I know you, I guess. I mean,” she smiles, looks down, shy—Zeinab has never been shy, but there is the dimple where Madeleine expects it—“where I know you from. The clinical trial, for the Alzheimer’s drug—we were in the same group. I didn’t recognize you until I saw you as an adult. I remembered because of all the people there, I thought—you looked—” her voice drops a bit, as if remembering, suddenly, that she isn’t talking to herself, “lost. I wanted to talk to you, but it felt weird, like, hi, I guess we have family histories in common, want to get coffee?”

She runs her hand through her hair, exhales, not quite able to look at Madeleine while Madeleine stares at her as if she’s a fairy turning into a hummingbird that could, any second, fly away.

“So not long after the trial I start having these hallucinations, and there’s always this girl in them, and it freaks me out. But I keep it to myself, because—I don’t know, because I want to see what happens. Because it’s not more debilitating than a day dream, really, and I start to get the hang of it—feeling it come on, walking myself to a seat, letting it happen. Sometimes I can stop it, too, though that’s harder. I take time off work, I read about, I don’t know, mystic visions, shit like that, the kind of things I used to wish were real in high school. I figure even if you’re not real—”

Zeinab looks at her now, and there are tears streaking Madeleine’s cheeks, and Zeinab’s smile is small and sad and hopeful, too, “—even if you’re not real, well, I’ll take an imaginary friend who’s pretty great over work friends who are mostly acquaintances, you know? Because you were always real to me.”

Zeinab reaches out to take Madeleine’s hand. Madeleine squeezes it, swallows, shakes her head.

“I—even if I’m not—if this isn’t a dream,” Madeleine half-chuckles through tears, wipes at her cheek, “I think I probably have to stay here for a while.”

Zeinab grins, now, a twist of mischief in it. “Not at all. You’re being discharged today. Your rights adviser was very persuasive.”

Madeleine blinks. Zeinab leans in closer, conspiratorial.

“That’s me. I’m your rights adviser. Just don’t tell anyone I’m doing pro bono stuff, I’ll never hear the end of it at the office.”

Madeleine feels something in her unclench and melt, and she hugs Zeinab to her and holds her and is held by her.

“Whatever’s happening to us,” Zeinab says, quietly, “we’ll figure it out together, okay?”

“Okay,” says Madeleine, and as she does Zeinab pulls back to kiss her forehead, and the scent of her is clear and clean, like grapefruit and salt, and as Zeinab’s lips brush her skin she—

—is in precisely the same place, but someone’s with her in her head, remembering Zeinab’s kiss and her smell and for the first time in a very long time, Madeleine feels—knows, with irrevocable certainty—that she has a future.

Amal El-Mohtar has received the Locus Award, been a Nebula Award finalist for her short fiction, and won the Rhysling Award for poetry three times. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and the LA Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and in anthologies such as The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (Saga Press). She lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

Neat Things
By Seanan McGuire

(Editor’s note: this is a nonfiction entry from the book Letters to Tiptree)

Dear Mr. Tiptree;

I thought a lot about that salutation, because the discovery that you were a woman changed my world when I was fourteen years old. But I first “met” you as a man, and so it seemed appropriate to address you that way. You were one of the kindly uncles and beloved teachers of my childhood, back when I was a gawky, confused girl in glasses too big for my face, reading everything that I could get my hands on, soaking it all in like a sponge.

I might have missed you if we hadn’t been so poor. My reading material was often a decade or more out of date, dictated by what people with disposable income decided to get rid of. My mother, a connoisseur of yard sales and flea markets, came home one day with several boxes of back issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Thousands of short stories, novelettes, and novellas were suddenly dropped into my hands, and I read them all with the unthinking voracity of the starving bookworm. I didn’t really keep track of authors, except to note whether the story was by a man or a woman—and almost always, when it was the sort of thing I wanted to write someday, the sort of thing that spoke to me on a level so deep that it was difficult to put into words, the story was written by a man. I couldn’t decide, at that age, whether women didn’t write science fiction, or whether science fiction by women just didn’t get published. At the same time, writing seemed like such a big, difficult, holy undertaking that I couldn’t imagine that many people did it. So women probably just didn’t write science fiction very often. That was too bad. I would have liked to do that someday.

I kept reading. As so very often happens to children, various of my possessions disappeared every time we moved, until my entire precious run of F&SF vanished into the ether, never to be seen again. I cried. I complained. And one day, I realized that I didn’t have those stories anymore, and that I couldn’t remember the name of the author, only that they—like every other story I had ever loved—had been written by a man.

I began describing them to other people I knew who liked science fiction. “It was about a little girl and an alien who lived in her brain and also there were cows,” I would say. (“The Only Really Neat Thing To Do.”)

“It was about two spiders in love only they weren’t really spiders and maybe they weren’t really in love, I don’t know,” I would say. (“Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death.”)

“It was about a man who loved a mermaid and then he realized that men were bad for mermaids and so he tried to go home,” I would say. (“The Color of Neanderthal Eyes.”)

“It was about me,” I would say. (“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” and “My Sisters, Oh My Sisters, With Your Faces Filled With Light,” and so many others; so many, many others.)

Eventually, someone knew what I was talking about. “That’s by James P. Tiptree,” they said, and “That was the penname of a writer named Alice Sheldon,” they said, and the world turned upside down.

You were my superhero, Mr. Tiptree, because you were also Alice Sheldon, and that meant that a door I had always presumed was closed to me was open: girls could write science fiction, and sometimes when they did, they were so good that everyone believed them when they said that they were really boys. Maybe that’s a common story, and I think that’s a good thing. You weren’t just my superhero. You belonged to every girl I knew who aspired to someday be allowed to write science fiction, who thought that the words in her head were more important than her gender.

Maybe that sounds silly now, but when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and all the names on my book covers were male, and all the boys I knew said “girls can’t write science fiction” and “A.C. Crispin and Janet Kagen don’t count, they’re exceptions, they’re not as good, this isn’t for you,” knowing that you were out there, that you were a girl like me…it meant the world, Mr. Tiptree. It meant that I had a chance. And then I learned that you were also Racoona Sheldon, and that changed everything all over again. I could write my stories without hiding behind a male name. I could be me, and I could still belong.

You had your reasons for the pseudonym you chose. I wish I’d had the chance to know you, to ask what those reasons were, to hear them in your own words, but at the end of the day, your choices were your own. I am so very glad you made them. I am so glad you were a revelation, a surprise that couldn’t be dismissed as “girls writing science fiction for girls.” You paved the way for so many of us, and you did it one beautiful, surreal, world-changing story at a time. Maybe you didn’t mean to. I don’t think that most of the people who change the world for the better ever really mean to—they just do it. It just happened.

So thank you, Mr. Tiptree. Thank you, Mrs. Sheldon. Thank you for showing me that there was a path to the mountain; thank you for pressing the rope into my hand and telling me that I was allowed to make the climb. I never met you, but I have spent my whole writing career trying to make sure that if we had met, you would have been proud of me and the things that I had achieved. You helped me find the strength to pursue science fiction. You were part of the reason that I shrugged and said “sure, that’s not too confusing” when I had the chance to become Mira Grant. You were, and are, and will remain, my hero.

Yours always, thankfully,

Seanan McGuire.

Seanan McGuire lives and works on the West Coast, where she does her best to bother all the frogs while avoiding all the weather. She is currently locked in a battle of wits (and talons) with the owl outside her bedroom window. When not writing, Seanan spends an unreasonable amount of time in haunted houses, haunted corn mazes, and the occasional haunted theme park. Her first book was released in 2009; since then, she has released more than twenty volumes through traditional publishers, thus proving that she doesn’t really sleep. You can keep up with Seanan at www.seananmcguire.com.

Pocosin
By Ursula Vernon

Author’s Note: Pocosins are a type of raised peat wetland found almost exclusively in the Carolinas. The name derives from an Eastern Algonquian word meaning “swamp on a hill.” They are a rare and unique ecosystem, today widely threatened by development.

This is the place of the carnivores, the pool ringed with sundews and the fat funnels of the pitcher plants.

This is the place where the ground never dries out and the loblolly pines grow stunted, where the soil is poor and the plants turn to other means of feeding themselves.

This is the place where the hairstreak butterflies flow sleekly through the air and you can hear insect feet drumming inside the bowl of the pitcher plants.

This is the place where the old god came to die.

He came in the shape of the least of all creatures, a possum. Sometimes he was a man with a long rat’s tail, and sometimes he was a possum with too–human hands. On two legs and four, staggering, with his hands full of mud, he came limping through the marsh and crawled up to the witchwoman’s porch.

“Go back,” she said, not looking up. She had a rocking chair on the porch and the runners creaked as she rocked. There was a second chair, but she did not offer it to him. “Go back where you came from.”

The old god laid his head on the lowest step. When he breathed, it hissed through his long possum teeth and sounded like he was dying.

“I’m done with that sort of thing,” she said, still not looking up. She was tying flies, a pleasantly tricky bit of work, binding thread and chicken feathers to the wickedness of the hook. “You go find some other woman with witchblood in her.”

The old god shuddered and then he was mostly a man. He crawled up two steps and sagged onto the porch.

The woman sighed and set her work aside. “Don’t try to tell me you’re dying,” she said grimly. “I won’t believe it. Not from a possum.”

Her name was Maggie Grey. She was not so very old, perhaps, but she had the kind of spirit that is born old and grows cynical. She looked down on the scruffy rat–tailed god with irritation and a growing sense of duty.

His throat rasped as he swallowed. He reached out a hand with long yellow nails and pawed at the boards on the porch.

“Shit,” Maggie said finally, and went inside to get some water.

• • • •

She poured it down his throat and most of it went down. He came a little bit more alive and looked at her with huge, dark eyes. His face was dirty pale, his hair iron gray.

She knew perfectly well what he was. Witchblood isn’t the same as godblood, but they know each other when they meet in the street. The question was why a god had decided to die on her porch, and that was a lousy sort of question.

“You ain’t been shot,” she said. “There’s not a hunter alive that could shoot the likes of you. What’s got you dragging your sorry ass up on my porch, old god?”

The old god heaved himself farther up on the porch. He smelled rank. His fur was matted with urine when he was a possum and his pants were stained and crusted when he was a man.

His left leg was swollen at the knee, a fat bent sausage, and the foot beneath it was black. There were puncture wounds in his skin. Maggie grunted.

“Cottonmouth, was it?”

The old god nodded.

Maggie sat back down in the rocking chair and looked out over the sundew pool.

There was a dense mat of shrubs all around the house, fetterbush and sheep laurel bound up together with greenbrier. She kept the path open with an axe, when she bothered to keep it open at all. There was no one to see her and the dying man who wasn’t quite a man.

Mosquitos whined in the throats of the pitcher plants and circled the possum god’s head. Maggie could feel her shoulders starting to tense up. It was always her shoulders. On a bad day, they’d get so knotted that pain would shoot down her forearms in bright white lines.

“Would’ve preferred a deer,” she said. “Or a bear, maybe. Got some dignity that way.” Then she laughed. “Should’ve figured I’d get a possum. It’d be a nasty, stinking sort of god that wanted anything to do with me.”

She picked up a pair of scissors from where she’d been tying flies. “Hold still. No, I ain’t gonna cut you. I ain’t so far gone to try and suck the poison out of a god.”

It had likely been another god that poisoned him, she thought—Old Lady Cottonmouth, with her gums as white as wedding veils. She saw them sometimes, big, heavy–bodied snakes, gliding easy through the water. Hadn’t ever seen the Old Lady, but she was out there, and it would be just like a possum to freeze up when those white gums came at him, sprouting up fangs.

Even a witch might hesitate at that.

She waited until he was a man, more or less, and cut his pant leg open with the scissors. The flesh underneath was angry red, scored with purple. He gasped in relief as the tight cloth fell away from the swollen flesh.

“Don’t thank me,” she said grimly. “Probably took a few hours off your life with that. But they wouldn’t be anything worth hanging on for.”

She brought him more water. The first frogs began to screek and squeal in the water.

“You sure you want this?” she asked. “I can put a knife across your throat, make it easy.”

He shook his head.

“You know who’s coming for you?”

He nodded. Then he was a possum again and he gaped his mouth open and hissed in pain.

She hesitated, still holding the scissors. “Ain’t sure I want to deal with ’em myself,” she muttered. “I’m done with all that. I came out here to get away, you hear me?”

The possum closed his eyes, and whispered the only word he’d ever speak.

“…sorry…”

Maggie thrust the scissors into her pocket and scowled.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get you under the porch. You come to me and I’ll stand them off for you, right enough, but you better not be in plain sight.”

She had to carry him down the steps. His bad leg would take no weight and he fell against her, smelling rank. There were long stains on her clothes before they were done.

Under the porch, it was cool. The whole house was raised up, to save it from the spring floods, when the sundew pool reached out hungry arms. There was space enough, in the shadow under the stairs, for a dying god smaller than a man.

She didn’t need to tell him to stay quiet.

She went into the house and poured herself a drink. The alcohol was sharp and raw on her throat. She went down the steps again, to a low green stand of mountain mint, and yanked up a half dozen stems.

They didn’t gentle the alcohol, but at least it gave her something else to taste. The frogs got louder and the shadows under the sheep laurel got thick. Maggie sat back in her rocking chair with her shoulders knotting up under her shirt and went back to tying flies.

Someone cleared his throat.

She glanced up, and there was a man in preacher’s clothes, with the white collar and clean black pants. The crease in them was pressed sharp enough to draw blood.

“Huh,” she said. “Figured the other one’d beat you here.”

He gave her a pained, fatherly smile.

She nodded to the other chair. “Have a seat. I’ve got bad whiskey, but if you cut it with mint and sugar, it ain’t bad.”

“No, thank you,” said the preacher. He sat down on the edge of the chair. His skin was peat colored and there was no mud on his shoes. “You know why I’ve come, Margaret.”

“Maggie,” she said. “My mother’s the only one who calls me Margaret, and she’s dead, as you very well know.”

The preacher tilted his head in acknowledgment.

He was waiting for her to say something, but it’s the nature of witches to outwait God if they can, and the nature of God to forgive poor sinners their pride. Eventually he said, “There’s a poor lost soul under your porch, Maggie Grey.”

“He didn’t seem so lost,” she said. “He walked here under his own power.”

“All souls are lost without me,” said the preacher.

Maggie rolled her eyes.

A whip–poor–will called, placing the notes end to end, whip–er–will! whip–er–will!

It was probably Maggie’s imagination that she could hear the panting of the god under the porch, in time to the nightjar’s calls.

The preacher sat, in perfect patience, with his wrists on his knees. The mosquitos that formed skittering sheets over the pond did not approach him.

“What’s there for a possum in heaven, anyway?” asked Maggie. “You gonna fill up the corners with compost bins and rotten fruit?”

The preacher laughed. He had a gorgeous, church–organ laugh and Maggie’s heart clenched like a fist in her chest at the sound. She told her heart to behave. Witchblood ought to know better than to hold out hope of heaven.

“I could,” said the preacher. “Would you give him to me if I did?”

Maggie shook her head.

His voice dropped, a father explaining the world to a child. “What good does it do him, to be trapped in this world? What good does it do anyone?”

“He seems to like it.”

“He is a prisoner of this place. Give him to me and I will set him free to glory.”

“He’s a possum,” said Maggie tartly. “He ain’t got much use for glory.”

The preacher exhaled. It was most notable because, until then, he hadn’t been breathing. “You cannot doubt my word, my child.”

“I ain’t doubting nothing,” said Maggie. “It’d be just exactly as you said, I bet. But he came to me because that’s not what he wanted, and I ain’t taking that away from him.”

The preacher sighed. It was a more–in–sorrow–than–in–anger sigh, and Maggie narrowed her eyes. Her heart went back to acting the way a witch’s heart ought to act, which was generally to ache at every damn thing and carry on anyway. Her shoulders felt like she’d been hauling stones.

“I could change your mind,” he offered.

“Ain’t your way.”

He sighed again.

“Should’ve sent one of the saints,” said Maggie, taking pity on the Lord, or whatever little piece of Him was sitting on her porch. “Somebody who was alive once, anyway, and remembers what it was like.”

He bowed his head. “I will forgive you,” he said.

“I know you will,” said Maggie kindly. “Now get gone before the other one shows up.”

Her voice sounded as if she shooed the Lord off her porch every day, and when she looked up again, he was gone.

• • • •

It got dark. The stars came out, one by one, and were reflected in the sundew pool. Fireflies jittered, but only a few. Fireflies like grass and open woods, and the dense mat of the swamp did not please them. Maggie lit a lamp to tie flies by.

The Devil came up through a stand of yellowroot, stepping up out of the ground like a man climbing a staircase. Maggie was pleased to see that he had split hooves. She would have been terribly disappointed if he’d been wearing shoes.

He kicked aside the sticks of yellowroot, tearing shreds off them, showing ochre–colored pith underneath. Maggie raised an eyebrow at this small destruction, but yellowroot is hard to kill.

“Maggie Grey,” said the fellow they called the Old Gentleman.

She nodded to him, and he took it as invitation, dancing up the steps on clacking hooves. Maggie smiled a little as he came up the steps, for the Devil always was a good dancer.

He sat down in the same chair that the preacher had used, and scowled abruptly. “See I got here late.”

“Looks that way,” said Maggie Grey.

He dug his shoulderblades into the back of the chair, first one, then the other, rolling a little, like a cat marking territory in something foul. Maggie stifled a sigh. It had been a good rocking chair, but it probably wasn’t wise to keep a chair around that the Devil had claimed.

“You’ve got something I want, Maggie Grey,” he said.

“If it’s my soul, you’ll be waiting awhile,” said Maggie, holding up a bit of feather. She looped three black threads around it, splitting the feather so it looked like wings. The hook gleamed between her fingers.

“Oh no,” said the Devil, “I know better than to mess with a witch’s soul, Maggie Grey. One of my devils showed up to tempt your great–grandmother, and she bit him in half and threw his horns down the well.”

Maggie sniffed. “Well’s gone dry,” she said, trying not to look pleased. She knew better than to respond to demonic flattery. “It’s the ground hereabouts. Sand and moss and swamps on top of hills. Had to dig another one, and lord knows how long it’ll last.”

“Didn’t come here to discuss well–digging, Maggie Grey.”

“I suppose not.” She bit off a thread.

“There’s an old god dying under your porch, Maggie Grey. The fellow upstairs wants him, and I aim to take him instead.”

She sighed. A firefly wandered into a pitcher plant and stayed, pulsing green through the thin flesh. “What do you lot want with a scrawny old possum god, anyway?”

The Devil propped his chin on his hand. He was handsome, of course. It would have offended his notion of his own craftsmanship to be anything less. “Me? Not much. The fellow upstairs wants him because he’s a stray bit from back before he and I were feuding. An old loose end, if you follow me.”

Maggie snorted. “Loose end? The possum gods and the deer and Old Lady Cottonmouth were here before anybody thought to worship you. Either of you.”

The Devil smiled. “Can’t imagine there’s many worshippers left for an old possum god, either. ’Cept the possums, and they don’t go to church much.”

Maggie bent her head over the wisp of thread and metal. “He doesn’t feel like leaving.”

Her guest sat up a little straighter. “I am not sure,” he said, silky–voiced, “that he is strong enough to stop me.”

Maggie picked up the pliers and bent the hook, just a little, working the feathers onto it. “He dies all the time,” she said calmly. “You never picked him up the other times.”

“Can only die so many times, Maggie Grey. Starts to take it out of you. Starts to make you tired, right down to the center of your bones. You know what that’s like, don’t you?”

She did not respond, because the worst thing you can do is let the Devil know when he’s struck home.

“He’s weak now and dying slow. Easy pickings.”

“Seems like I might object,” she said quietly.

The Devil stood up. He was very tall and he threw a shadow clear over the pool when he stood. The sundews folded their sticky leaves in where the shadow touched them. Under the porch steps, the dying god moaned.

He placed a hand on the back of her chair and leaned over her.

“We can make this easy, Maggie Grey,” he said. “Or we can make it very hard.”

She nodded slowly, gazing over the sundew pool.

“Come on—” the Devil began, and Maggie moved like Old Lady Cottonmouth and slammed the fish–hook over her shoulder and into the hand on the back of her chair.

The Devil let out a yelp like a kicked dog and staggered backwards.

“You come to my house,” snapped Maggie, thrusting the pliers at him, “and you have the nerve to threaten me? A witch in her own home? I’ll shoe your hooves in holy iron and throw you down the well, you hear me?”

“Holy iron won’t be kind to witchblood,” he gasped, doubled over.

“It’ll be a lot less kind to you,” she growled.

The Devil looked at his hand, with the fish–hook buried in the meat of his palm, and gave a short, breathless laugh. “Oh, Maggie Grey,” he said, straightening up. “You aren’t the woman your great–grandmother was, but you’re not far off.”

“Get gone,” said Maggie. “Get gone and don’t come back unless I call.”

“You will eventually,” he said.

“Maybe so. But not today.”

He gave her a little salute, with the hook still stuck in his hand, and limped off the porch. The yellowroot rustled as he sank into the dirt again.

His blood left black spots on the earth. She picked up the lantern and went to peer at the possum god.

He was still alive, though almost all possum now. His whiskers lay limp and stained with yellow. There was white all around his eyes and a black crust of blood over his hind leg.

“Not much longer,” she said. “Only one more to go, and then it’s over. And we’ll both be glad.”

He nodded, closing his eyes.

On the way back onto the porch, she kicked at a black bloodstain, which had sprouted a little green rosette of leaves. A white flower coiled out of the leaves and turned its face to the moon.

“Bindweed,” she muttered. “Lovely. One more damn chore tomorrow.”

She stomped back onto the porch and poured another finger of whiskey.

• • • •

It was almost midnight when the wind slowed, and the singing frogs fell silent, one by one.

Maggie looked over, and Death was sitting in the rocking chair.

“Grandmother,” she said. “I figured you’d come.”

“Always,” said Death.

“If you’d come a little sooner, would’ve saved me some trouble.”

Death laughed. She was a short, round woman with hair as gray as Maggie’s own. “Seems to me you were equal to it.”

Maggie grunted. “Whiskey?”

“Thank you.”

They sat together on the porch, drinking. Death’s rocker squeaked in time to the breathing of the dying god.

“I hate this,” said Maggie, to no one in particular. “I’m tired, you hear me? I’m tired of all these fights. I’m tired of taking care of things, over and over, and having to do it again the next day.” She glared over the top of her whiskey. “And don’t tell me that it does make a difference, because I know that, too. Ain’t I a witch?”

Death smiled. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said.

Maggie snorted.

After a minute, she said, “I’m so damn tired of stupid.”

Death laughed out loud, a clear sound that rang over the water. “Aren’t we all?” she said. “Gods and devils, aren’t we all?”

The frogs had stopped. So had the crickets. One whip–poor–will sang uncertainly, off on the other side of the pond. It was quiet and peaceful and it would have been a lovely night, if the smell of the dying possum hadn’t come creeping up from under the porch.

Death gazed into her mug, where the wilting mint was losing the fight against the whiskey. “Can’t fix stupid,” she said. “But other things, maybe. You feeling like dying?”

Maggie sighed. It wasn’t a temptation, even with her shoulders sending bright sparks of pain toward her fingers and making the pliers hard to hold steady. “Feeling like resting,” she said. “For a couple of months, at least. That’s all I want. Just a little bit of time to sit here and tie flies and drink whiskey and let somebody else fight the hard fights.”

Death nodded. “So take it,” she said. “Nobody’s gonna give it to you.”

Maggie scowled. “I was,” she said bitterly. “‘Til a possum god showed up to die.”

Death laughed. “It’s why he came, you know,” she said. Her eyes twinkled, just like Maggie’s grandmother’s had when she wore the body that Death was wearing now. “He wanted to be left alone to die, so he found a witch that’d understand.”

Maggie raked her fingers through her hair. “Son of a bitch,” she said to no one in particular.

Death finished her drink and set it aside. “Shall we do what’s needful?”

Maggie slugged down the rest of the mug and gasped as the whiskey burned down her throat. “Needful,” she said thickly. “That’s being a witch for you.”

“No,” said Death, “that’s being alive. Being a witch just means the things that need doing are bigger.”

They went down the stairs. The boards creaked under Maggie’s feet, but not under Death’s, even though Death had heavy boots on.

Maggie crouched down and said, “She’s here for you, hon.”

She would have sworn that the possum had no strength left in him, but he crawled out from under the porch, hand over hand. His hind legs dragged and his tail looked like a dead worm.

There was nothing noble about him. He stank and black fluid leaked from his ears and the corners of his eyes. Even now, Maggie could hardly believe that God and the Devil would both show up to bargain for such a creature’s soul.

Death knelt down, heedless of the smell and the damp, and held out her arms.

The possum god crawled the last little way and fell into her embrace.

“There you are,” said Death, laying her cheek on the spikey–furred forehead. “There you are. I’ve got you.”

The god closed his eyes. His breath went out on a long, long sigh, and he did not draw another one.

Maggie walked away, to the edge of the sundew pool, and waited.

A frog started up, then another one. The water rippled as their throat sacs swelled. Something splashed out in the dark.

“It’s done,” called Death, and Maggie turned back.

The god looks smaller now. Death had gathered him up and he almost fit in her lap, like a small child or a large dog.

“Don’t suppose he’s faking it?” asked Maggie hopefully. “They’re famous for it, after all.”

Death shook her head. “Even possum gods got to die sometime. Help me get him into the pond.”

Maggie took him under the arms and Death took the feet. His tail dragged on the ground as they hauled him. Death went into the water first, sure–footed, and Maggie followed, feeling water come in over the tops of her shoes.

“If I’d been thinking, I would’ve worn waders,” she said.

Death laughed Maggie’s grandmother’s laugh.

The bottom of the sundew pool was made of mud and sphagnum moss, and it wasn’t always sure if it wanted to be solid or not. Every step she took required a pause while the mud settled and sometimes her heels sank in deep. She started to worry that she was going to lose her shoes in the pool, and god, wouldn’t that be a bitch on top of everything else?

At least the god floated. Her shoulders weren’t up to much more than that.

In the middle of the pool, Death stopped. She let go of the possum’s feet and came around to Maggie’s side. “This ought to do it,” she said.

“If we leave the body in here, it’ll stink up the pool something fierce,” said Maggie. “There’s things that come and drink here.”

“Won’t be a problem,” Death promised. She paused. “Thought you were tired of taking care of things?”

“I am,” snapped Maggie. “Tired isn’t the same as can’t. Though if this keeps up…”

She trailed off because she truly did not know what lay at the end of being tired and it was starting to scare her a little.

Death took the possum’s head between her hands. Maggie put a hand in the center of his chest.

They pushed him under the water and held him for the space of a dozen heartbeats, then brought him to the surface.

“Again,” said Death.

They dunked him again.

“Three times the charm,” said Death, and they pushed him under the final time.

The body seemed to melt away under Maggie’s hands. One moment it was a solid, hairy weight, then it wasn’t. For a moment she thought it was sinking and her heart sank with it, because fishing a dead god out of the pond was going to be a bitch of a way to spend an hour.

But he did not sink. Instead he simply unmade himself, skin from flesh and flesh from bone, unraveling like one of her flies coming untied, and there was nothing left but a shadow on the surface of the water.

Maggie let out a breath and scrubbed her hands together. They felt oily.

She was freezing and her boots were full of water and something slimy wiggled past her shin. She sighed. It seemed, as it had for a long time, that witchcraft—or whatever this was—was all mud and death and need.

She was so damn tired.

She thought perhaps she’d cry, and then she thought that wouldn’t much help, so she didn’t.

Death reached out and took her granddaughter’s hand.

“Look,” said Death quietly.

Around the pond, the fat trumpets of the pitcher plants began to glow from inside, as if they had swallowed a thousand fireflies. The light cast green shadows across the surface of the water and turned the sundews into strings of cut glass beads. It cut itself along the leaves of the staggerbush and threaded between the fly–traps’ teeth.

Whatever was left of the possum god glowed like foxfire.

Hand in hand, they came ashore by pitcher plant light.

Death stood at the foot of the steps. Maggie went up them, holding the railing, moving slow.

There were black stains on the steps where the god had oozed. She was going to have to scrub them down, pour bleach on them, maybe even strip the wood. The bindweed, that nasty little plant they called “Devil’s Guts” was already several feet long and headed toward the mint patch. The stink of dying possum was coming up from under the steps and that was going to need to be scraped down with a shovel and then powdered with lime.

At least she could wait until tomorrow to take an axe to the Devil’s rocking chair, though it might be sensible to drag it off the porch first.

The notion of all the work to be done made her head throb and her shoulders climb toward her ears.

“Go to bed, granddaughter,” said Death kindly. “Take your rest. The world can go on without you for a little while.”

“Work to be done,” Maggie muttered. She held onto the railing to stop from swaying.

“Yes,” said Death, “but not by you. Not tonight. I will make you this little bargain, granddaughter, in recognition of a kindness. I will give you a little time. Go to sleep. Things left undone will be no worse for it.”

Death makes bargains rarely, and unlike the Devil, hers are not negotiable. Maggie nodded and went inside.

She fell straight down on the bed and was asleep without taking off her boots. She did not say goodbye to the being that wore her grandmother’s face, but in the morning, a quilt had been pulled up over her shoulder.

• • • •

The next evening, as the sun set, Maggie sat in her rocking chair and tied flies. Her shoulders were slowly, slowly easing. The pliers only shook a little in her hand.

She had dumped bleach over the steps, and the smell from under the porch had gone of its own accord. The bindweed… well, the black husks had definitely been bindweed, but something had trod upon it and turned it into ash. It was a kindness she hadn’t expected.

Her whiskey bottle was also full, with something rather better than moonshine, although she suspected that a certain cloven–hooved gentleman might have been responsible for that.

The space on the porch where the other rocking chair had been ached like a sore tooth and caught her eye whenever she glanced over. She sighed. Still, the wood would keep the fire going for a couple of days, when winter came.

The throats of the pitcher plants still glowed, just a little. Easy enough to blame on tired eyes. Maggie wrapped thread around the puff of feather and the shining metal hook, and watched the glow from the corner of her eyes.

A young possum trundled out of the thicket, and Maggie looked up.

“Don’t start,” she said warningly. “I’ll get the broom.”

The possum sat down on the edge of the pond. It was an awkward, ungainly little creature, with big dark eyes and wicked kinked whiskers. It was halfway hideous and halfway sweet, which gave it something in common with witches.

Slowly, slowly, the moon rose and the green light died away. The frogs chanted together in the dark.

The possum stood up, stretched, and nodded once to Maggie Grey. Then it shuffled into the undergrowth, its long rat–tail held behind it.

I will give you a little time, Death had said.

She wondered what Death considered ‘a little time.’ An hour? A day? A week?

“A few weeks,” she said to the pond and the absent possum. “A few weeks would be good. A little time for myself. The world can get on just fine without me for a couple of weeks.”

She wasn’t expecting an answer. The whip–poor–wills called to each other over the pond, and maybe that was answer enough.

Maggie poured two fingers of the Devil’s whiskey, with hands that did not shake, and raised the glass in a toast to the absent world.

T. Kingfisher is the pen name for Ursula Vernon, who is a writer, illustrator, gardener, and occasional children’s book creator. As T. Kingfisher, she has written multiple novels based on fairy-tale retellings, including “The Raven & The Reindeer” and “The Seventh Bride.” Her work has won the Hugo, Nebula, WSFA and Mythopoeic Awards. She is fond of plants, bugs, and hound dogs.

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers
By Alyssa Wong

As my date—Harvey? Harvard?—brags about his alma mater and Manhattan penthouse, I take a bite of overpriced kale and watch his ugly thoughts swirl overhead. It’s hard to pay attention to him with my stomach growling and my body ajitter, for all he’s easy on the eyes. Harvey doesn’t look much older than I am, but his thoughts, covered in spines and centipede feet, glisten with ancient grudges and carry an entitled, Ivy League stink.

“My apartment has the most amazing view of the city,” he’s saying, his thoughts sliding long over each other like dark, bristling snakes. Each one is as thick around as his Rolex-draped wrist. “I just installed a Jacuzzi along the west wall so that I can watch the sun set while I relax after getting back from the gym.”

I nod, half-listening to the words coming out of his mouth. I’m much more interested in the ones hissing through the teeth of the thoughts above him.

She’s got perfect tits, lil’ handfuls just waiting to be squeezed. I love me some perky tits.

I’m gonna fuck this bitch so hard she’ll never walk straight again.

Gross.”That sounds wonderful,” I say as I sip champagne and gaze at him through my false eyelashes, hoping the dimmed screen of my iPhone isn’t visible through the tablecloth below. This dude is boring as hell, and I’m already back on Tindr, thumbing through next week’s prospective dinner dates.

She’s so into me, she’ll be begging for it by the end of the night.

I can’t wait to cut her up.

My eyes flick up sharply. “I’m sorry?” I say.

Harvey blinks. “I said, Argentina is a beautiful country.”

Pretty little thing. She’ll look so good spread out all over the floor.

“Right,” I say. “Of course.” Blood’s pulsing through my head so hard it probably looks like I’ve got a wicked blush.

I’m so excited, I’m half hard already.

You and me both, I think, turning my iPhone off and smiling my prettiest smile.

The waiter swings by with another bottle of champagne and a dessert menu burned into a wooden card, but I wave him off. “Dinner’s been lovely,” I whisper to Harvey, leaning in and kissing his cheek, “but I’ve got a different kind of dessert in mind.”

Ahhh, go the ugly thoughts, settling into a gentle, rippling wave across his shoulders. I’m going to take her home and split her all the way from top to bottom. Like a fucking fruit tart.

That is not the way I normally eat fruit tarts, but who am I to judge? I passed on dessert, after all.

When he pays the bill, he can’t stop grinning at me. Neither can the ugly thoughts hissing and cackling behind his ear.

“What’s got you so happy?” I ask coyly.

“I’m just excited to spend the rest of the evening with you,” he replies.

• • • •

The fucker has his own parking spot! No taxis for us; he’s even brought the Tesla. The leather seats smell buttery and sweet, and as I slide in and make myself comfortable, the rankness of his thoughts leaves a stain in the air. It’s enough to leave me light-headed, almost purring. As we cruise uptown toward his fancy-ass penthouse, I ask him to pull over near the Queensboro Bridge for a second.

Annoyance flashes across his face, but he parks the Tesla in a side street. I lurch into an alley, tottering over empty cans and discarded cigarettes in my four-inch heels, and puke a trail of champagne and kale over to the dumpster shoved up against the apartment building.

“Are you all right?” Harvey calls.

“I’m fine,” I slur. Not a single curious window opens overhead.

His steps echo down the alley. He’s gotten out of the car, and he’s walking toward me like I’m an animal that he needs to approach carefully.

Maybe I should do it now.

Yes! Now, now, while the bitch is occupied.

But what about the method? I won’t get to see her insides all pretty everywhere—

I launch myself at him, fingers digging sharp into his body, and bite down hard on his mouth. He tries to shout, but I swallow the sound and shove my tongue inside. There, just behind his teeth, is what I’m looking for: ugly thoughts, viscous as boiled tendon. I suck them howling and fighting into my throat as Harvey’s body shudders, little mewling noises escaping from his nose.

I feel decadent and filthy, swollen with the cruelest dreams I’ve ever tasted. I can barely feel Harvey’s feeble struggles; in this state, with the darkest parts of himself drained from his mouth into mine, he’s no match for me.

They’re never as strong as they think they are.

By the time he finally goes limp, the last of the thoughts disappearing down my throat, my body’s already changing. My limbs elongate, growing thicker, and my dress feels too tight as my ribs expand. I’ll have to work quickly. I strip off my clothes with practiced ease, struggling a little to work the bodice free of the gym-toned musculature swelling under my skin.

It doesn’t take much time to wrestle Harvey out of his clothes, either. My hands are shaking but strong, and as I button up his shirt around me and shrug on his jacket, my jaw has creaked into an approximation of his and the ridges of my fingerprints have reshaped themselves completely. Harvey is so much bigger than me, and the expansion of space eases the pressure on my boiling belly, stuffed with ugly thoughts as it is. I stuff my discarded outfit into my purse, my high heels clicking against the empty glass jar at its bottom, and sling the strap over my now-broad shoulder.

I kneel to check Harvey’s pulse—slow but steady—before rolling his unconscious body up against the dumpster, covering him with trash bags. Maybe he’ll wake up, maybe he won’t. Not my problem, as long as he doesn’t wake in the next ten seconds to see his doppelganger strolling out of the alley, wearing his clothes and fingering his wallet and the keys to his Tesla.

There’s a cluster of drunk college kids gawking at Harvey’s car. I level an arrogant stare at them—oh, but do I wear this body so much better than he did!—and they scatter.

I might not have a license, but Harvey’s body remembers how to drive.

• • • •

The Tesla revs sweetly under me, but I ditch it in a parking garage in Bedford, stripping in the relative privacy of the second-to-highest level, edged behind a pillar. After laying the keys on the driver’s seat over Harvey’s neatly folded clothes and shutting the car door, I pull the glass jar from my purse and vomit into it as quietly as I can. Black liquid, thick and viscous, hits the bottom of the jar, hissing and snarling Harvey’s words. My body shudders, limbs retracting, spine reshaping itself, as I empty myself of him.

It takes a few more minutes to ease back into an approximation of myself, at least enough to slip my dress and heels back on, pocket the jar, and comb my tangled hair out with my fingers. The parking attendant nods at me as I walk out of the garage, his eyes sliding disinterested over me, his thoughts a gray, indistinct murmur.

The L train takes me back home to Bushwick, and when I push open the apartment door, Aiko is in the kitchen, rolling mochi paste out on the counter.

“You’re here,” I say stupidly. I’m still a little foggy from shaking off Harvey’s form, and strains of his thoughts linger in me, setting my blood humming uncomfortably hot.

“I’d hope so. You invited me over.” She hasn’t changed out of her catering company clothes, and her short, sleek hair frames her face, aglow in the kitchen light. Not a single ugly thought casts its shadow across the stove behind her. “Did you forget again?”

“No,” I lie, kicking my shoes off at the door. “I totally would never do something like that. Have you been here long?”

“About an hour, nothing unusual. The doorman let me in, and I kept your spare key.” She smiles briefly, soft compared to the brusque movements of her hands. She’s got flour on her rolled-up sleeves, and my heart flutters the way it never does when I’m out hunting. “I’m guessing your date was pretty shit. You probably wouldn’t have come home at all if it had gone well.”

“You could say that.” I reach into my purse and stash the snarling jar in the fridge, where it clatters against the others, nearly a dozen bottles of malignant leftovers labeled as health drinks.

Aiko nods to her right. “I brought you some pastries from the event tonight. They’re in the paper bag on the counter.”

“You’re an angel.” I edge past her so I don’t make bodily contact. Aiko thinks I have touch issues, but the truth is, she smells like everything good in the world, solid and familiar, both light and heavy at the same time, and it’s enough to drive a person mad.

“He should have bought you a cab back, at least,” says Aiko, reaching for a bowl of red bean paste. I fiddle with the bag of pastries, pretending to select something from its contents. “I swear, it’s like you’re a magnet for terrible dates.”

She’s not wrong; I’m very careful about who I court. After all, that’s how I stay fed. But no one in the past has been as delicious, as hideously depraved as Harvey. No one else has been a killer.

I’m going to take her home and split her all the way from top to bottom.

“Maybe I’m too weird,” I say.

“You’re probably too normal. Only socially maladjusted creeps use Tindr.”

“Gee, thanks,” I complain.

She grins, flicking a bit of red bean paste at me. I lick it off of my arm. “You know what I mean. Come visit my church with me sometime, yeah? There are plenty of nice boys there.”

“The dating scene in this city depresses me,” I mutter, flicking open my Tindr app with my thumb. “I’ll pass.”

“Come on, Jen, put that away.” Aiko hesitates. “Your mom called while you were out. She wants you to move back to Flushing.”

I bark out a short, sharp laugh, my good mood evaporating. “What else is new?”

“She’s getting old,” Aiko says. “And she’s lonely.”

“I bet. All her mahjong partners are dead, pretty much.” I can imagine her in her little apartment in Flushing, huddled over her laptop, floral curtains pulled tight over the windows to shut out the rest of the world. My ma, whose apartment walls are alive with hissing, covered in the ugly, bottled remains of her paramours.

Aiko sighs, joining me at the counter and leaning back against me. For once, I don’t move away. Every muscle in my body is tense, straining. I’m afraid I might catch fire, but I don’t want her to leave. “Would it kill you to be kind to her?”

I think about my baba evaporating into thin air when I was five years old, what was left of him coiled in my ma’s stomach. “Are you telling me to go back?”

She doesn’t say anything for a bit. “No,” she says at last. “That place isn’t good for you. That house isn’t good for anyone.”

Just a few inches away, an army of jars full of black, viscous liquid wait in the fridge, their contents muttering to themselves. Aiko can’t hear them, but each slosh against the glass is a low, nasty hiss:

who does she think she is, the fucking cunt
should’ve got her when I had the chance

I can still feel Harvey, his malice and ugly joy, on my tongue. I’m already full of things my ma gave me. “I’m glad we agree.”

• • • •

Over the next few weeks, I gorge myself on the pickup artists and grad students populating the St. Marks hipster bars, but nothing tastes good after Harvey. Their watery essences, squeezed from their owners with barely a whimper of protest, barely coat my stomach. Sometimes I take too much. I scrape them dry and leave them empty, shaking their forms off like rainwater when I’m done.

I tell Aiko I’ve been partying when she says I look haggard. She tells me to quit drinking so much, her face impassive, her thoughts clouded with concern. She starts coming over more often, even cooking dinner for me, and her presence both grounds me and drives me mad.

“I’m worried about you,” she says as I lie on the floor, flipping listlessly through pages of online dating profiles, looking for the emptiness, the rot, that made Harvey so appealing. She’s cooking my mom’s lo mein recipe, the oily smell making my skin itch. “You’ve lost so much weight and there’s nothing in your fridge, just a bunch of empty jam jars.”

I don’t tell her that Harvey’s lies under my bed, that I lick its remnants every night to send my nerves back into euphoria. I don’t tell her how often I dream about my ma’s place, the shelves of jars she never let me touch. “Is it really okay for you to spend so much time away from your catering business?” I say instead. “Time is money, and Jimmy gets pissy when he has to make all the desserts without you.”

Aiko sets a bowl of lo mein in front of me and joins me on the ground. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here,” she says, and a dangerous, luminous sweetness blooms in my chest.

But the hunger grows worse every day, and soon I can’t trust myself around her. I deadbolt the door, and when she stops by my apartment to check on me, I refuse to let her in. Texts light up my phone like a fleet of fireworks as I huddle under a blanket on the other side, my face pressed against the wood, my fingers twitching.

“Please, Jen, I don’t understand,” she says from behind the door. “Did I do something wrong?”

I can’t wait to cut her up, I think, and hate myself even more.

By the time Aiko leaves, her footsteps echoing down the hallway, I’ve dug deep gouges in the door’s paint with my nails and teeth, my mouth full of her intoxicating scent.

• • • •

My ma’s apartment in Flushing still smells the same. She’s never been a clean person, and the sheer amount of junk stacked up everywhere has increased since I left home for good. Piles of newspapers, old food containers, and stuffed toys make it hard to push the door open, and the stench makes me cough. Her hoard is up to my shoulders, even higher in some places, and as I pick my way through it, the sounds that colored my childhood grow louder: the constant whine of a Taiwanese soap opera bleeding past mountains of trash, and the cruel cacophony of many familiar voices:

Touch me again and I swear I’ll kill you—

How many times have I told you not to wash the clothes like that, open your mouth—

Hope her ugly chink daughter isn’t home tonight—

Under the refuse she’s hoarded the walls are honeycombed with shelves, lined with what’s left of my ma’s lovers. She keeps them like disgusting, mouthwatering trophies, desires pickling in stomach acid and bile. I could probably call them by name if I wanted to; when I was a kid, I used to lie on the couch and watch my baba’s ghost flicker across their surfaces.

My ma’s huddled in the kitchen, the screen of her laptop casting a sickly blue glow on her face. Her thoughts cover her quietly like a blanket. “I made some niu ro mien,” she says. “It’s on the stove. Your baba’s in there.”

My stomach curls, but whether it’s from revulsion or hunger I can’t tell. “Thanks, ma,” I say. I find a bowl that’s almost clean and wash it out, ladling a generous portion of thick noodles for myself. The broth smells faintly of hongtashan tobacco, and as I force it down almost faster than I can swallow, someone else’s memories of my childhood flash before my eyes: pushing a small girl on a swing set at the park; laughing as she chases pigeons down the street; raising a hand for a second blow as her mother launches herself toward us, between us, teeth bared—

“How is it?” she says.

Foul.”Great,” I say. It settles my stomach, at least for a little while. But my baba was no Harvey, and I can already feel the hunger creeping back, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

“You ate something you shouldn’t have, didn’t you, Meimei.” My ma looks up at me for the first time since I walked in, and she looks almost as tired as I feel. “Why didn’t you learn from me? I taught you to stick to petty criminals. I taught you to stay invisible.”

She’d tried to teach me to disappear into myself, the way she’d disappeared into this apartment. “I know I messed up,” I tell her. “Nothing tastes good any more, and I’m always hungry. But I don’t know what to do.”

My ma sighs. “Once you’ve tasted a killer, there’s no turning back. You’ll crave that intensity until you die. And it can take a long time for someone like us to die, Meimei.”

It occurs to me that I don’t actually know how old my ma is. Her thoughts are old and covered in knots, stitched together from the remnants of other people’s experiences. How long has she been fighting this condition, these overwhelming, gnawing desires?

“Move back in,” she’s saying. “There’s so much tong activity here, the streets leak with food. You barely even have to go outside, just crack open a window and you can smell it brewing. The malice, the knives and bullets . . .”

The picture she paints makes me shudder, my mouth itching. “I can’t just leave everything, Ma,” I say. “I have my own life now.” And I can’t live in this apartment, with its lack of sunlight and fresh air, its thick stench of regret and malice.

“So what happens if you go back? You lose control, you take a bite out of Aiko?” She sees me stiffen. “That girl cares about you so much. The best thing you can do for her is keep away. Don’t let what happened to your father happen to Aiko.” She reaches for my hand, and I pull away. “Stay here, Meimei. We only have each other.”

“This isn’t what I want.” I’m backing up, and my shoulder bumps into the trash, threatening to bury us both in rotting stuffed animals. “This isn’t safe, Ma. You shouldn’t even stay here.”

My ma coughs, her eyes glinting in the dark. The cackling from her jar collection swells in a vicious tide, former lovers rocking back and forth on their shelves. “Someday you’ll learn that there’s more to life than being selfish, Meimei.”

That’s when I turn my back on her, pushing past the debris and bullshit her apartment’s stuffed with. I don’t want to die, but as far as I’m concerned, living like my ma, sequestered away from the rest of the world, her doors barricaded with heaps of useless trinkets and soured memories, is worse than being dead.

The jars leer and cackle as I go, and she doesn’t try to follow me.

The scent of Flushing clings to my skin, and I can’t wait to shake it off. I get on the train as soon as I can, and I’m back on Tindr as soon as the M passes above ground. Tears blur my eyes, rattling free with the movement of the train. I scrub them away angrily, and when my vision clears, I glance back at the screen. A woman with sleek, dark hair, slim tortoiseshell glasses, and a smile that seems a little shy, but strangely handsome, glows up at me. In the picture, she’s framed by the downtown cityscape. She has rounded cheeks, but there’s a strange flat quality to her face. And then, of course, there are the dreams shadowing her, so strong they leak from the screen in a thick, heady miasma. Every one of those myriad eyes is staring straight at me, and my skin prickles.

I scan the information on her profile page, my blood beating so hard I can feel my fingertips pulsing: relatively young-looking, but old enough to be my mother’s cousin. Likes: exploring good food, spending rainy days at the Cloisters, browsing used book stores. Location: Manhattan.

She looks a little like Aiko.

She’s quick to message me back. As we flirt, cold sweat and adrenaline send uncomfortable shivers through my body. Everything is sharper, and I can almost hear Harvey’s jar laughing. Finally, the words I’m waiting for pop up:

I’d love to meet you. Are you free tonight?

I make a quick stop-off back home, and my heart hammers as I get on the train bound for the Lower East Side, red lipstick immaculate and arms shaking beneath my crisp designer coat, a pair of Mom’s glass jars tucked in my purse.

• • • •

Her name is Seo-yun, and as she watches me eat, her eyes flickering from my mouth to my throat, her smile is so sharp I could cut myself on it. “I love places like this,” she says. “Little authentic spots with only twelve seats. Have you been to Haru before?”

“I haven’t,” I murmur. My fingers are clumsy with my chopsticks, tremors clicking them together, making it hard to pick up my food. God, she smells delectable. I’ve never met someone whose mind is so twisted, so rich; a malignancy as well developed and finely crafted as the most elegant dessert.

I’m going to take her home and split her open like a—

I can already taste her on my tongue, the best meal I’ve never had.

“You’re in for a treat,” Seo-yun says as the waiter—the only other staff beside the chef behind the counter—brings us another pot of tea. “This restaurant started as a stall in a subway station back in Japan.”

“Oh wow,” I say. “That’s . . . amazing.”

“I think so, too. I’m glad they expanded into Manhattan.”

Behind her kind eyes, a gnarled mess of ancient, ugly thoughts writhes like the tails of a rat king. I’ve never seen so many in one place. They crawl from her mouth and ears, creeping through the air on deep-scaled legs, their voices like the drone of descending locusts.

I’m not her first. I can tell that already. But then, she isn’t mine, either.

I spend the evening sweating through my dress, nearly dropping my chopsticks. I can’t stop staring at the ugly thoughts, dropping from her lips like swollen beetles. They skitter over the tablecloth toward me, whispering obscenities at odds with Seo-yun’s gentle voice, hissing what they’d like to do to me. It takes everything in me not to pluck them from the table and crunch them deep between my teeth right then and there, to pour into her lap and rip her mind clean.

Seo-yun is too much for me, but I’m in too far, too hard; I need to have her.

She smiles at me. “Not hungry?”

I glance down at my plate. I’ve barely managed a couple of nigiri. “I’m on a diet,” I mutter.

“I understand,” she says earnestly. The ugly thoughts crawl over the tops of her hands, iridescent drops spilling into her soy sauce dish.

When the waiter finally disappears into the kitchen, I move in to kiss her across the table. She makes a startled noise, gentle pink spreading across her face, but she doesn’t pull away. My elbow sinks into the exoskeleton of one of the thought-beetles, crushing it into black, moist paste against my skin.

I open my mouth to take the first bite.

“So, I’m curious,” murmurs Seo-yun, her breath brushing my lips. “Who’s Aiko?”

My eyes snap open. Seo-yun smiles, her voice warm and tender, all her edges dark. “She seems sweet, that’s all. I’m surprised you haven’t had a taste of her yet.”

I back up so fast that I knock over my teacup, spilling scalding tea over everything. But Seo-yun doesn’t move, just keeps smiling that kind, gentle smile as her monstrous thoughts lap delicately at the tablecloth.

“She smells so ripe,” she whispers. “But you’re afraid you’ll ruin her, aren’t you? Eat her up, and for what? Just like your mum did your dad.”

No, no, no. I’ve miscalculated so badly. But I’m so hungry, and I’m too young, and she smells like ancient power. There’s no way I’ll be able to outrun her. “Get out of my head,” I manage to say.

“I’m not in your head, love. Your thoughts are spilling out everywhere around you, for everyone to see.” She leans in, propping her chin on her hand. The thoughts twisted around her head like a living crown let out a dry, rattling laugh. “I like you, Jenny. You’re ambitious. A little careless, but we can fix that.” Seo-yun taps on the table, and the waiter reappears, folding up the tablecloth deftly and sliding a single dish onto the now-bare table. An array of thin, translucent slices fan out across the plate, pale and glistening with malice. Bisected eyes glint, mouths caught mid-snarl, from every piece. “All it takes is a little practice and discipline, and no one will know what you’re really thinking.”

“On the house, of course, Ma’am,” the waiter murmurs. Before he disappears again, I catch a glimpse of dark, many-legged thoughts braided like a bracelet around his wrist.

Seo-yun takes the first bite, glancing up at me from behind her glasses. “Your mum was wrong,” she says. “She thought you were alone, just the two of you. So she taught you to only eat when you needed to, so you didn’t get caught, biding your time between meals like a snake.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I say. The heady, rotten perfume from the dish in front of me makes my head spin with hunger.

“My mum was much the same. Eat for survival, not for pleasure.” She gestures at the plate with her chopsticks. “Please, have some.”

As the food disappears, I can only hold out for a few more slices before my chopsticks dart out, catching a piece for myself. It’s so acidic it makes my tongue burn and eyes itch, the aftertaste strangely sweet.

“Do you like it?”

I respond by wolfing down another two slices, and Seo-yun chuckles. Harvey is bland compared to this, this strangely distilled pairing of emotions—

I gasp as my body starts to warp, hands withering, burn scars twisting their way around my arms. Gasoline, malice, childish joy rush through me, a heady mix of memory and sensory overstimulation. And then Seo-yun’s lips are on mine, teeth tugging gently, swallowing, drawing it out of me. The burns fade, but the tingle of cruel euphoria lingers.

She wipes her mouth delicately. “Ate a little too fast, I think, dear,” she says. “My point, Jenny, is that I believe in eating for pleasure, not just survival. And communally, of course. There are a number of us who get together for dinner or drinks at my place, every so often, and I would love it if you would join us tonight. An eating club, of sorts.”

My gaze flickers up at her thoughts, but they’re sitting still as stones, just watching me with unblinking eyes. My mouth stings with the imprint of hers.

“Let me introduce you soon. You don’t have to be alone anymore.” As the waiter clears the plate and nods at her—no check, no receipt, nothing—Seo-yun adds, “And tonight doesn’t have to be over until we want it to be.” She offers me her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I take it. It’s smaller than mine, and warm.

“Yes, please,” I say, watching her thoughts instead of her face.

As we leave the restaurant, she presses her lips to my forehead. Her lips sear into my skin, nerves singing white-hot with ecstasy. “They’re going to love you,” she says.

We’ll have so much fun, say the thoughts curling through her dark hair.

She hails a cab from the fleet circling the street like wolves, and we get inside.

• • • •

I run into Aiko two months later in front of my apartment, as I’m carrying the last box of my stuff out. She’s got a startled look on her face, and she’s carrying a bag stuffed with ramps, kaffir lime, heart of palm—all ingredients I wouldn’t have known two months ago, before meeting Seo-yun. “You’re moving?”

I shrug, staring over her head, avoiding her eyes. “Yeah, uh. I’m seeing someone now, and she’s got a really nice place.”

“Oh.” She swallows, shifts the bag of groceries higher on her hip. “That’s great. I didn’t know you were dating anybody.” I can hear her shaky smile. “She must be feeding you well. You look healthier.”

“Thanks,” I say, though I wonder. It’s true, I’m sleeker, more confident now. I’m barely home any more, spending most of my time in Seo-yun’s Chelsea apartment, learning to cook with the array of salts and spices infused with ugly dreams, drinking wine distilled from deathbed confessions. My time stalking the streets for small-time criminals is done. But why has my confidence evaporated the moment I see Aiko? And if that ravenous hunger from Harvey is gone, why am I holding my breath to keep from breathing in her scent?

“So what’s she like?”

“Older, kind of—” kind of looks like you “—short. Likes to cook, right.” I start to edge past her. “Listen, this box is heavy and the van’s waiting for me downstairs. I should go.”

“Wait,” Aiko says, grabbing my arm. “Your mom keeps calling me. She still has my number from . . . before. She’s worried about you. Plus I haven’t seen you in ages, and you’re just gonna take off?”

Aiko, small and humble. Her hands smell like home, like rice flour and bad memories. How could I ever have found that appealing?

“We don’t need to say goodbye. I’m sure I’ll see you later,” I lie, shrugging her off.

“Let’s get dinner sometime,” says Aiko, but I’m already walking away.

• • • •

Caterers flit like blackbirds through the apartment, dark uniforms neatly pressed, their own ugly thoughts braided and pinned out of the way. It’s a two-story affair, and well-dressed people flock together everywhere there’s space, Seo-yun’s library upstairs to the living room on ground floor. She’s even asked the caterers to prepare some of my recipes, which makes my heart glow. “You’re the best,” I say, kneeling on the bed beside her and pecking her on the cheek.

Seo-yun smiles, fixing my hair. She wears a sleek, deep blue dress, and today, her murderous thoughts are draped over her shoulders like a stole, a living, writhing cape. Their teeth glitter like tiny diamonds. I’ve never seen her so beautiful. “They’re good recipes. My friends will be so excited to taste them.”

I’ve already met many of them, all much older than I am. They make me nervous. “I’ll go check on the food,” I say.

She brushes her thumb over my cheek. “Whatever you’d like, love.”

I escape into the kitchen, murmuring brief greetings to the guests I encounter on the way. Their hideous dreams adorn them like jewels, glimmering and snatching at me as I slip past. As I walk past some of the cooks, I notice a man who looks vaguely familiar. “Hey,” I say.

“Yes, ma’am?” The caterer turns around, and I realize where I’ve seen him; there’s a picture of him and Aiko on her cellphone, the pair of them posing in front of a display at a big event they’d cooked for. My heartbeat slows.

“Aren’t you Aiko’s coworker?”

He grins and nods. “Yes, I’m Jimmy. Aiko’s my business partner. Are you looking for her?”

“Wait, she’s here?”

He frowns. “She should be. She never misses one of Ms. Sun’s parties.” He smiles. “Ms. Sun lets us take home whatever’s left when the party winds down. She’s so generous.”

I turn abruptly and head for the staircase to the bedroom, shouldering my way through the crowd. Thoughts pelt me as I go: Has Aiko known about me, my ma, what we can do? How long has she known? And worse—Seo-yun’s known all along about Aiko, and played me for a fool.

I bang the bedroom door open to find Aiko sprawled out across the carpet, her jacket torn open. Seo-yun crouches on the floor above her in her glorious dress, her mouth dark and glittering. She doesn’t look at all surprised to see me.

“Jenny, love. I hope you don’t mind we started without you.” Seo-yun smiles. Her lipstick is smeared over her chin, over Aiko’s blank face. I can’t tell if Aiko’s still breathing.

“Get away from her,” I say in a low voice.

“As you wish.” She rises gracefully, crossing the room in fluid strides. “I was done with that particular morsel, anyway.” The sounds of the party leak into the room behind me, and I know I can’t run and grab Aiko at the same time.

So I shut the door, locking it, and mellow my voice to a sweet purr. “Why didn’t you tell me about Aiko? We could have shared her together.”

But Seo-yun just laughs at me. “You can’t fool me, Jenny. I can smell your rage from across the room.” She reaches out, catches my face, and I recoil into the door. “It makes you so beautiful. The last seasoning in a dish almost ready.”

“You’re insane, and I’m going to kill you,” I say. She kisses my neck, her teeth scraping my throat, and the scent of her is so heady my knees almost bend.

“I saw you in her head, delicious as anything,” she whispers. Her ugly thoughts hiss up my arms, twining around my waist. There’s a sharp sting at my wrist, and I look down to discover that one of them is already gnawing at my skin. “And I knew I just had to have you.”

There’s a crash, and Seo-yun screams as a porcelain lamp shatters against the back of her head. Aiko’s on her feet, swaying unsteadily, face grim. “Back the fuck away from her,” she growls, her voice barely above a whisper.

“You little bitch—” snarls Seo-yun.

But I seize my chance and pounce, fastening my teeth into the hollow of Seo-yun’s throat, right where her mantle of thoughts gathers and folds inward. I chew and swallow, chew and swallow, gorging myself on this woman. Her thoughts are mine now, thrashing as I seize them from her, and I catch glimpses of myself, of Aiko, and of many others just like us, in various states of disarray, of preparation.

Ma once told me that this was how Baba went; she’d accidentally drained him until he’d faded completely out of existence. For the first time in my life, I understand her completely.

Seo-yun’s bracelets clatter to the floor, her empty gown fluttering soundlessly after. Aiko collapses too, folding like paper.

It hurts to take in that much. My stomach hurts so bad, my entire body swollen with hideous thoughts. At the same time, I’ve never felt so alive, abuzz with possibility and untamable rage.

I lurch over to Aiko on the floor, malice leaking from her mouth, staining the carpet. “Aiko, wake up!” But she feels hollow, lighter, empty. She doesn’t even smell like herself any more.

A knock at the door jolts me. “Ma’am,” says a voice I recognize as the head caterer. “The first of the main courses is ready. Mr. Goldberg wants to know if you’ll come down and give a toast.”

Fuck.”I—” I start to say, but the voice isn’t mine. I glance over at the mirror; sure enough, it’s Seo-yun staring back at me, her dark, terrible dreams tangled around her body in a knotted mess. “I’ll be right there,” I say, and lay Aiko gently on the bed. Then I dress and leave, my heart pounding in my mouth.

I walk Seo-yun’s shape down the stairs to the dining room, where guests are milling about, plates in hand, and smile Seo-yun’s smile. And if I look a little too much like myself, well—according to what I’d seen while swallowing Seo-yun’s thoughts, I wouldn’t be the first would-be inductee to disappear at a party like this. Someone hands me a glass of wine, and when I take it, my hand doesn’t tremble, even though I’m screaming inside.

Fifty pairs of eyes on me, the caterers’ glittering cold in the shadows. Do any of them know? Can any of them tell?

“To your continued health, and to a fabulous dinner,” I say, raising my glass. As one, they drink.

• • • •

Seo-yun’s apartment is dark, cleared of guests and wait staff alike. Every door is locked, every curtain yanked closed.

I’ve pulled every jar, every container, every pot and pan out of the kitchen, and now they cover the floor of the bedroom, trailing into the hallway, down the stairs. Many are full, their malignant contents hissing and whispering hideous promises at me as I stuff my hand in my mouth, retching into the pot in my lap.

Aiko lies on the bed, pale and still. There’s flour and bile on the front of her jacket. “Hang in there,” I whisper, but she doesn’t respond. I swirl the pot, searching its contents for any hint of Aiko, but Seo-yun’s face grins out at me from the patterns of light glimmering across the liquid’s surface. I shove it away from me, spilling some on the carpet.

I grab another one of the myriad crawling thoughts tangled about me, sinking my teeth into its body, tearing it into pieces as it screams and howls terrible promises, promises it won’t be able to keep. I eat it raw, its scales scraping the roof of my mouth, chewing it thoroughly. The more broken down it is, the easier it will be to sort through the pieces that are left when it comes back up.

How long did you know? Did you always know?

I’ll find her, I think as viscous black liquid pours from my mouth, over my hands, burning my throat. The field of containers pools around me like a storm of malicious stars, all whispering my name. She’s in here somewhere, I can see her reflection darting across their surfaces. If I have to rip through every piece of Seo-yun I have, from her dreams to the soft, freckled skin wrapped around my body, I will. I’ll wring every vile drop of Seo-yun out of me until I find Aiko, and then I’ll fill her back up, pour her mouth full of herself.

How could I ever forget her? How could I forget her taste, her scent, something as awful and beautiful as home?

Alyssa Wong studies fiction in Raleigh, NC, and really, really likes crows. She was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. Alyssa can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.

So Much Cooking
By Naomi Kritzer

Carole’s Roast Chicken

This is a food blog, not a disease blog, but of course the rumors all over about bird flu are making me nervous. I don’t know about you, but I deal with anxiety by cooking. So much cooking. But, I’m trying to stick to that New Year’s resolution to share four healthy recipes (entrées, salads, sides…) for every dessert recipe I post, and I just wrote about those lemon meringue bars last week. So even though I dealt with my anxiety yesterday by baking another batch of those bars, and possibly by eating half of them in one sitting, I am not going to bake that new recipe I found for pecan bars today. No! Instead, I’m going to make my friend Carole’s amazing roast chicken. Because how better to deal with fears of bird flu than by eating a bird, am I right?

Here’s how you can make it yourself. You’ll need a chicken, first of all. Carole cuts it up herself but I’m lazy, so I buy a cut-up chicken at the store. You’ll need at least two pounds of potatoes. You’ll need a lemon and a garlic bulb. You’ll need a big wide roasting pan. I use a Cuisinart heavy-duty lasagna pan, but you can get by with a 13x9 cake pan.

Cut up the potatoes into little cubes (use good potatoes! The yellow ones or maybe the red ones. In the summer I buy them at the Farmer’s Market.) Spray your pan with some cooking spray and toss in the potatoes. Peel all the garlic (really, all of it!) and scatter the whole cloves all through with the potatoes. If you’re thinking, “all that garlic?” just trust me on this. Roasted garlic gets all mild and melty and you can eat it like the potato chunks. Really. You’ll thank me later. Finally, lay out the chicken on top, skin-down. You’ll turn it halfway through cooking. Shake some oregano over all the meat and also some sea salt and a few twists of pepper.

Squeeze the lemon, or maybe even two lemons if you really like lemon, and mix it in with 1/4 cup of olive oil. Pour that over everything and use your hands to mix it in, make sure it’s all over the chicken and the potatoes. Then pour just a tiny bit of water down the side of the pan — you don’t want to get it on the chicken — so the potatoes don’t burn and stick. Pop it into a 425-degree oven and roast for an hour. Flip your chicken a half hour in so the skin gets nice and crispy.

Guys, it is SO GOOD. Half the time I swear Dominic doesn’t even notice what he’s eating, but he always likes this dish, and so do I. If you make this much for two people, you’ll have leftovers for lunch. But we’re having guests over tonight, my brother and his wife and kids. So, I’m actually using two chickens and four pounds of potatoes, because teenagers eat a lot.

And chicken has magical healing properties if you make it into soup, so surely some of them stick around when you roast it? And so does garlic, so eat some and stay healthy.

xxoo, Natalie

Substitute Chip Cookies

So, we have some unexpected long-term house guests.

My sister-in-law Kathleen is a nurse at Regions Hospital. She’s not in the ER or the infectious diseases floor but let’s face it, it’s not like you can corral a bunch of airborne viruses and tell them they’re banned from OBGYN. Leo and Kat are worried that if this bird flu thing is the real deal, she could bring it home. Leo’s willing to take his chances but when I said, “would you like to have the kids stay with me for a while,” Kat said, “That would make us both feel so much better,” so voila, here I am, hosting an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old. Monika is 13, Jo is 11.

We have a guest room and a sofa bed. Monika got the guest room, Jo’s on the sofa bed, although we promised to renegotiate this in a few days if they’re still here. (It’s actually a double bed in the guest room but trust me, you don’t want to make my nieces share a bed if you don’t absolutely have to.)

I went to the store today to stock up just in case we want to minimize the “leaving the house” stuff for a while. Apparently I wasn’t the only person who had that thought because (a) the lines were unbelievable and (b) I tried four stores and they were all completely out of milk and eggs. I did manage to get an enormous jumbo package of toilet paper plus a huge sack of rat food (did I mention that Jo has a pet rat named Jerry Springer? I didn’t? Well, my younger niece Jo has a pet rat named Jerry Springer. The rat was not actually invited along for the family dinner, but Dominic ran over today to pick the rat up because he thought Jo would feel better about the whole situation if she had her pet staying here, too.)

The freezer section was also incredibly picked over but at the Asian grocery (store #4) I bought some enormous sacks of rice and also about fifteen pounds of frozen dumplings and you know what, I’m not going to try to list what I came home with as it would be too embarrassing. I’ll just stick to the essentials, which is, no milk and no eggs. I did manage to get some butter, but it was the super-fancy organic kind that’s $10 per pound so I was also a little worried about using up our butter reserve on one batch of cookies. And Jo really wanted chocolate chip cookies.

Okay, actually: I really wanted chocolate chip cookies. But Jo was very willing to agree that she wanted some, too.

You can substitute mayo for eggs, in cookies, and you can substitute oil for the butter. They’ll be better cookies if you happen to have some sesame oil to put in for part of the oil (or any other nut-related oil) and we did, in fact, have sesame oil. And as it happens, those four grocery stores were not out of chocolate chips.

Here’s the recipe in case you are also improvising today:

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup of vegetable oils (preferable 2 T sesame oil + canola oil to equal 1 cup.)

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

6 tablespoons of mayonnaise

12 ounces of whatever sort of chips you have in the house, or chopped up chocolate

Cream the sugar and the oil, then beat in the mayonnaise. I promise the cookies will turn out fine, no matter how gross the mayo smells and looks while you’re beating it in. Mix the baking soda, salt, and flour together, then gradually beat in the mayo mixture, and stir in your chips.

Drop by rounded spoonfuls — oh, you know how to make cookies. You don’t have to grease your cookie sheets. Bake at 375F for about ten minutes and if you want them to stay chewy and soft, put them away in an airtight container before they’re all the way cool. If you like your cookies crunchy, well, what’s wrong with you? But in that case cool them before you put them away, and in fact you’ll probably be happier storing them in something that’s not airtight, like a classic cookie jar.

I gave Dominic the first batch and he said, “you didn’t use up all the butter on this, did you?” I told him we’re not about to run out of butter. We are, however, about to run out of coffee. I may die. Even if I don’t get bird flu. Excuse me, h4N1.

xxoo, Natalie

Homemade Pizza

So, how are things where you live?

Where I live (Minneapolis) there have been 83 confirmed cases of h4N1. The good news (!!!) is that it’s apparently not as lethal in the human-to-human variant as it was back when it was just birds-to-human, but since it was 60% lethal in the old form that’s not really what I think of as good good news. The bad news is that there’s a four-day incubation period so those 83 people all infected others and this is only the tiny, tiny tip of a giant, lethal iceberg.

Probably wherever you live you’re hearing about “social distancing,” which in most places means “we’re going to shut down the schools and movie theaters and other places where folks might gather, stagger work hours to minimize crowding, and instruct everyone to wear face masks and not stand too close to each other when they’re waiting in lines.” In Minneapolis, they’re already worried enough that they’re saying that anyone who can just stay home should go ahead and do that. Since Dominic works in IT and can telecommute, that’s us. I’d planned to go to the store today again to maybe get milk and eggs. If it had been just me and Dominic … I still wouldn’t have risked it. But I definitely wasn’t going to risk it with Jo and Monika in the house.

I made homemade pizza for lunch. The same recipe I made last December right after I got the pizza stone for Christmas — but, no fresh mushrooms. We had a can of pineapple tidbits and some pepperoni so that’s what we topped it with. I thought about trying some of the dried shitake mushrooms on the pizza but on thinking about it I didn’t think the texture would work.

We are now completely out of milk, which makes breakfast kind of a problem, and we’re also out of coffee, which makes everything about my day kind of a problem. Fortunately, we still have some Lipton tea bags (intended for iced tea in the summer) and that’s what I used for my caffeine fix.

(Running out of coffee was pure stupidity on my part. I even remember seeing it on the shelf at the grocery store, but I’m picky about my coffee and I was planning to go to my coffee shop for fresh beans today. Ha ha ha! Folgers and Maxwell House sound pretty good to me now!)

xxoo, Natalie

Eggless Pancakes and Homemade Syrup

In the comments on my last post, someone wanted to know about grocery delivery. We do have grocery delivery in the Twin Cities, but every single store that offers it is currently saying that they are only providing it to current customers. I did register an account with all the places that do it, and I’ve put in an Amazon order for a bunch of items you can have delivered (like more TP) and I’m hoping they don’t e-mail me back to say they ran out and cancelled my order… anyway, I don’t know if I’ll be able to order anything grocery-like anytime soon.

Some of the restaurants in town are still delivering food and I don’t know how I feel about that. Dominic and I are very lucky in that we do have the option of staying home. That makes me feel a little guilty, but in fact, me going out would not make the people who still have to go out, for their jobs, even one tiny bit safer. Quite the opposite. If I got infected, I’d be one more person spreading the virus. (Including to my nieces.) Anyway, Kat has to go out because she’s a labor and delivery nurse, and people are depending on her. But I don’t know if a pizza delivery guy should really be considered essential personnel.

In any case, no one delivers breakfast (which was what I sat down to write about) and no one’s going to bring me milk, so I made milk-less, egg-less, butter-less pancakes, and so can you. Here’s what you need:

2 cups of flour

4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

Blend that together and then add:

1/2 cup of pureed banana OR pureed pumpkin OR applesauce OR any other pureed fruit you’ve got around. I used banana because I have some bananas in my freezer.

1 1/2 cups of water

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 cup sugar

Whisk it all together. You’ll need to grease your skillet a little bit extra because this sticks more than pancakes that were made with butter or oil.

We’re out of maple syrup, but it turned out we still had a bottle of blueberry syrup in the back of a cabinet and that’s what we had with them. There are recipes online for homemade pancake syrup but I haven’t tried them yet. Monika hated the blueberry syrup and just ate them with sugar and cinnamon. Jo thought the blueberry syrup was fine but agreed that maple (or even fake maple) would be better. (I’m with Monika, for the record.)

xxoo, Natalie

Miscellaneous Soup

So, before we get to the recipe today, I was wondering if people could do a favor for one of my friends. Melissa is a waitress, and so far thank God she is still healthy but her restaurant has shut down for the duration. So, it’s good that she’s not going to be fired for not coming in to work, and she’s glad to stay home where she’s safe, but she really needs that job to pay for things like her rent. Anyway, I talked her into setting up a GoFundMe and if you could throw in even a dollar, that would be a big help. Also, to sweeten the pot a little, if you donate anything (even just a dollar!) I’ll throw your name into a hat and draw one reader and that lucky reader will get to have me make, and eat, and blog, anything you want, although if you want me to do that before the pandemic is over you’ll be stuck choosing from the stuff I can make with the ingredients that are in my house. And, I just drove a carload of groceries over to Melissa because she and her daughter were basically out of food, and the food shelves are not running, either. (So, if you were thinking that blueberry-glazed carrots or something would be good, you’re already too late, because she is now the proud owner of that bottle of blueberry syrup. Also, I’m out of carrots.)

Anyway, go donate! If you’ve ever wanted me to try again with the Baked Alaska, or experiment with dishwasher salmon, now’s your chance.

Today, I made Miscellaneous Soup. That is the soup of all the miscellaneous things you have lying around. I actually make this quite often, but I’ve never blogged about it before, because I just don’t think most people would be very impressed. Ordinarily, I make it with stock (boxed stock, if I don’t want to waste my homemade stock on this sort of meal), and some leftover cooked meat if I’ve got it, and whatever vegetables are in the fridge, and either some canned beans or some noodles or both.

What I used today:

2 packets of ramen noodles, including their little flavoring satchet

Wine (we are not even close to being out of wine. Too bad it’s not very good poured over breakfast cereal.)

1/2 pound of frozen roast corn

1/4 pound of frozen mixed vegetables

2 cups dry lentils

1/2 pound of frozen turkey meatballs

I heated up 4 cups of water and added the flavoring packet, 1 cup of wine, and the lentils. From my spice drawer, I also added some cumin and coriander, because I thought they’d go reasonably well with the spice packet. I cooked the lentils in the broth. I thawed out the corn and the mixed veggies and threw that in and then cooked the turkey meatballs in the oven because that’s what the bag wants you to do and then I broke up the ramen brick and threw that in and added the meatballs. And that’s what we all had for dinner.

Jo hates lentils and Monika didn’t like the frozen roast corn but after some complaining they ate it all anyway. And Andrea and Tom liked it fine.

Right, I guess I should fill you in about Andrea and Tom.

Andrea is a friend of Monika’s from school; they’re both in 8th grade. Monika found out (I guess from a text?) that Andrea was home alone with her brother, Tom, because their mother is so worried about bringing the flu home that she’s been sleeping in the car instead of coming home. Tom is only three. Also, they were totally out of food, which is why Monika brought this up (after I did the grocery drop off for Melissa.)

I told her that of course we could bring some food over to her friend, but when I realized Andrea was taking care of a three-year-old full time I suggested they come over here, instead.

So now Monika and Jo are sharing the double bed in the guest room, because sorry, girls, sometimes “shared sacrifice” means a shared bed. Andrea is on the sofabed and Tom is on the loveseat. Well, he was on the loveseat last night. I think tonight he’s going to be on the loveseat cushions and those cushions are going to be on the floor so he’s got less far to fall if he rolls off again.

Can I just say, this is not exactly how I’d imagined my February. But at least we’re all healthy and not out of food yet.

xxoo, Natalie

Ten Things I’m Going to Make When This Is Over

Dinner today was hamburger and rice. I kept looking at recipes and crying, and Dominic wound up cooking.

I kind of want to tell you all the things we’re out of. Like, AA batteries. (I had to track down a corded mouse from the closet where we shove all the electronic stuff we don’t use anymore, because my cordless mouse uses AA batteries.) Dishwasher detergent. (We still have dish soap, but you can’t put that in a dishwasher. So we’re washing everything by hand.) But you remember when we used to say, “first-world problems” about petty complaints? These are healthy-person problems.

We got a call today that Kat is sick. She’s been working 16-hour shifts because some of the other nurses are sick and some of them were refusing to come in and they needed nurses because the babies have still been coming, because they’re going to just keep doing that. Literally everyone is in masks and gloves all the time, but — today she’s running a fever.

Leo says she’s not going to go into the hospital because there isn’t anything they can really do for you anyway, especially as overloaded as they are. She’s just going to stay at home and drink fluids and try to be one of the 68% who’ve been making it through.

So yeah, I wasn’t going to tell you about that when I sat down, I was going to tell you all about the things I’ve been craving that I’m going to make when all this is over but I guess what I really want to say is that the top ten things I want to make when all this is over are ten different flavors of cupcake for Kat, because Kat loves my cupcakes, and if you’re into prayer or good thoughts or anything like that, please send some her way.

There’s still time to donate to Melissa and choose something to have me make. But, seriously, you’ll want to wait until this is over because there’s just not much in the house.

Kale Juice Smoothies (Not Really)

Dear crazy people who read my blog,

I know — well, I’m pretty sure — that you’re trying to be helpful.

But telling me that all my sister-in-law (the mother of my nieces!) needs to do to recover is drink kale juice smoothies with extra wheatgrass and whatever else was supposed to go in your Magic Immune Tonic? Not helpful. First of all, she’s sick with a disease with a 32% fatality rate. Second of all, even if kale or kelp or whatever it was was magic, have you actually been reading my blog? We are eating rice, with flavored olive oil, for fully half our meals now. Today we mixed in some dry Corn Flakes, partly for the textural variety but partly just because we could make less rice because we’re starting to worry that we’re going to run out of that, too.

I can produce a kale smoothie for Kat like I can pull a live, clucking chicken out of my ass and make her some chicken soup with it.

Also, this is a food blog, not a conspiracy theory blog. If you want to try to convince people that the government is infecting everyone on purpose toward some nefarious end, go do it somewhere else.

No love,

Natalie

Rabbit Stew

There are these rabbits that live in our yard. I swear we have like six. They’re the reason I can’t grow lettuce in my garden. (Well, that plus I’d rather use the space for tomatoes.)

I am pretty sure I could rig up a trap for it with items I have around the house and bunnies are delicious.

Pros:

- Fresh meat!

Cons:

- Dominic thinks it’s possible we could get influenza from eating the bunny. (I think he’s being paranoid and as long as we cook it really well we should be fine. I could braise it in wine.)

- I have no actual idea how to skin and gut a rabbit, but I have sharp knives and the Internet and I’m very resourceful.

- Jo is aghast at the idea of eating a bunny.

- We’d probably catch at most one rabbit, and one rabbit split between all these people isn’t very much rabbit.

It’s even more people now, because we’ve added another kid. (You can feel free to make a Pied Piper joke. Or a crazy cat lady joke. We are making all the jokes because it’s the only stress release I’ve got remaining to me.) Arie is twelve, and came really close to being driven back to his cold, empty apartment after he suggested we eat Jo’s rat. (If he were just out of food, we could send him home with food, but the heat’s also gone out, the landlord’s not answering the phone, and it’s February and we live in Minnesota.)

Arie is Andrea’s cousin. Or, hold on, I take it back. Maybe he’s her cousin’s friend? You know what, I just didn’t ask that many questions when I heard “twelve” and “no heat.”

xxoo, Natalie

This is no longer a food blog

This is a boredom and isolation blog.

Also a stress management blog. Normally, I manage stress by cooking. Except we’re out of some key ingredient for like 85% of the recipes can find, and also out of all the obvious substitutes (or nearly) and I’m starting to worry that we will actually run out of food altogether. I’ve pondered trying to reverse-engineer flour by crushing the flakes of the Raisin Bran in my food processor, like some very high-tech version of Laura Ingalls grinding up unprocessed wheat in a coffee mill in The Long Winter.

My cute little bungalow is very spacious for me and Dominic. For me, Dominic, and five kids ranging in age from three to thirteen, it’s starting to feel a little cramped. Monika brought a laptop and she, Arie, and Andrea all want turns using it. (Jo doesn’t ask very often, she just sighs a martyred sigh and says no it’s fine she understands why the big kids are hogging the computer.) We are thoroughly expert on the streaming movies available on every online service but the problem is, if it’s appropriate for Tom to watch, the big kids mostly aren’t interested. We did find a few old-timey musicals that everyone could tolerate but now Tom wants to watch them over and over and Andrea says if she has to listen to “the hiiiiiiiiiills are aliiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuuuuuusic” one more time she might smash the TV with a brick.

We have a back yard and from an influenza infection standpoint it’s reasonably safe to play back there, but it’s February in Minnesota and we’re having a cold snap, like yesterday morning it was -30 with the windchill. (The good news: the cold temperatures might slow the spread of the virus.)

So here’s what we did today: I had some craft paints in the basement, and brushes, so we pulled all the living room furniture away from the wall and I let them paint a mural. The good news: this kept them happily occupied all afternoon. The even better news: they’re not done yet.

xxoo, Natalie

Birthday Pancake Cake

Today is Jo’s birthday, and everyone almost forgot. In part because she clearly expected that everyone had more important things on their mind and wasn’t going to bring it up. Monika, bless her cranky thirteen-year-old heart, remembered.

I thought at first we were not going to be able to bake her a cake. (Unless I really could figure out a way to turn cereal flakes into usable flour, and probably not even then.) But — when I went digging yesterday for the craft paint in the basement, I found this small box of just-add-water pancake mix with our camping equipment. If I’d remembered it before now, I totally would’ve turned it into breakfast at some point, so thank goodness for absent-mindedness. We also still had a package of instant butterscotch pudding mix, un-used since you really can’t make instant pudding without milk.

The other kids took a break from painting the mural and instead made decorations out of printer paper, scissors, and pens. (They made a chain-link streamer.)

I think there’s got to be a way to turn pancake mix into a proper cake, but all the methods I found online needed ingredients I didn’t have. So I wound up making the pancake mix into pancakes, then turning the pancakes into a cake with butterscotch frosting in between layers (to make butterscotch frosting, I used some melted butter — we still had a little left — and some oil, and the butterscotch pudding mix.)

And we stuck two votive candles on it and sang.

Jo did get presents, despite my cluelessness. The mail is still coming — some days — and her father remembered. A big box full of presents ordered from online showed up late in the day, signed “with love from Mom and Dad,” which made her cry.

We’ve been getting updates on Kat, which mostly I haven’t been sharing because they haven’t been very good. We’re just trying to soldier on, I guess. And today that meant celebrating Jo’s birthday.

It Feels Like Christmas

You guys, YOU GUYS. We’re going to get a food delivery! Of something! Maybe I should back up and explain. The local Influenza Task Force arranged for the grocery stores with delivery services to hire on a whole lot more people, mostly people like Melissa whose jobs are shut down, and they’re now staffed well enough to do deliveries nearly everywhere. Everyone was assigned to a grocer and since we have eight people living here (oh, did I mention Arie also had a friend who needed somewhere quarantined to stay? We are full up now, seriously, the bathroom situation is beyond critical already and we’ve been rotating turns to sleep on the floor) we’re allowed to buy up to $560 worth of stuff and it should arrive sometime in the next few days. They’ve instructed us not to go out to meet the delivery person: they’ll leave it on our doorstep and go.

Of course, the problem is that they are out of practically everything. Minneapolis is such a hot spot, a lot of delivery drivers don’t want to come here, plus things are such a mess in California that not much produce is going anywhere at all, so there was no fresh produce of any kind available. I was able to order frozen peaches — though who knows if they’ll actually bring any. Of course there was no milk or eggs but they had almond milk in stock so I ordered almond milk because at least you can use it in baking. They also warned me that in the event that something went out of stock they’d just make a substitution so who even knows, see, it’ll be totally like Christmas, where you give your Mom a wish list and maybe something you put on it shows up under the tree.

I did include a note saying to please, please, please make sure that we got either coffee or something with caffeine. If I have to drink Diet Mountain Dew for breakfast, I will. I mean, we had a two-liter of Coke and I’ve been rationing it out and it’s going flat and I don’t even care. Well, I do care. But I care more about the headaches I get when deprived of my morning caffeine fix.

Some of you were asking about Kat. She’s hanging in there, and Leo has stayed healthy. Thanks for asking.

Someone also asked about the rabbits. So far I have not murdered any of the local wildlife, because maybe I’m slightly squeamish, and Dominic is definitely squeamish.

xxoo, Natalie

Rice Krispie Treats

So, here’s what came in the box from the grocery store. In addition to a bunch of generally useful items like meat, oil, pancake mix, etc., we got:

12 cans of coconut milk

1 enormous can of off-brand vacuum-packed ground coffee THANK YOU GOD

3 bags of miniature marshmallows

2 large cans of butter-flavored shortening

1 enormous pack of TP THANK YOU GOD. I am not going to tell you what we were substituting.

1 small pack of AA batteries

A sack of Hershey’s Miniatures, you know, itty bitty candy bars like you give out on Halloween

14 little boxes of Jell-O gelatin

1 absolutely goliath-sized sack of knock-off Rice Krispie look-alikes

Most of this was not stuff we ordered. In a few cases, I could make a guess what the substitution was. I wanted flour, I got pancake mix. (That one’s not bad.) I wanted chocolate chips, I got Hershey’s Miniatures. (Again, not bad.) I ordered some grape juice concentrate because we’ve been out of anything fruit-like for days and days and although technically you can’t get scurvy this quickly (I checked) I’ve been craving things like carrots and I thought maybe some fruit juice would help. I think the coconut milk was the substitute for the almond milk.

I have no idea why I got the Crispy Rice. I didn’t ask for cereal. We still even have some cereal. But! They also gave us marshmallows and butter-flavored shortening (if not actual butter) so you know what it’s time for, don’t you? That’s right. RICE KRISPY TREATS.

I made these once when I was a kid without a microwave oven, and let me just tell you, they are a lot of work when you don’t have a microwave oven. You have to stand over a stove, stirring marshmallows over low heat, for what felt like about two hours. They’ll still give you stovetop directions but I highly recommend microwave cooking for these.

What you’ll need:

3 tablespoons butter (or margarine or butter-flavored shortening. You can even use extra-virgin olive oil! But, I do not recommend using garlic-infused extra-virgin olive oil.)

1 10-oz bag of marshmallows (or 4 cups of mini marshmallows or 1 jar of marshmallow fluff)

6 cups rice cereal (or corn flakes or Cheerios or whatever cereal you’ve got on hand but if you decide to use bran flakes or Grape Nuts I’m not responsible for the results.)

Put your butter and your marshmallows into a microwave-safe bowl. Heat on high for two minutes. Stir. Heat on high for another minute. Stir until smooth. Add the cereal. Stir until distributed.

Spray or oil a 13x9 inch pan and spread the marshmallow mixture out in the pan. Not surprisingly this is incredibly sticky and you’ll want to use waxed paper folded over your hands, or a greased spatula, or possibly you could just butter your own hands but be careful not to burn yourself. Let it cool and then cut it into squares.

Dominic came in while I was spreading the stuff out in my pan and said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m making Coq au Vin, asshole.”

He said, “This is why I can’t have nice things.”

Maybe you had to be there.

For dinner tonight, we had minute steaks and Rice Krispy treats. And there was great rejoicing.

xxoo, Natalie

Katrina Jane, March 5, 1972 - February 20, 2018

I’ve got nothing today. I’m sorry.

My brother was coughing when he called to tell us the bad news, but said he wasn’t sick, didn’t have a fever, and definitely hadn’t caught the flu from Kat.

Thanks for everyone’s thoughts and prayers. I know I’m not the only person grieving here, so just know that I’m thinking of you, even as you’re thinking of me.

You Still Have to Eat

Leo had Kat cremated but he’s going to wait to have a memorial service until we can all come — including her kids. Monika was furious and insisted that she wants a proper funeral, and wants to go, and thinks it should be this week like funerals normally are, and of course that’s just not possible. They can’t actually stop us from having gatherings but there are no churches, no funeral homes, no nothing that’s going to let you set up folding chairs and have a bunch of people sitting together and delivering eulogies.

We finally talked Monika down by holding our own memorial service, with as many of the trappings as we could possibly put together. We made floral arrangements by taking apart the floral wreath I had in the kitchen with dried lavender in it. We all dressed in black, even though that meant most of the kids had to borrow stuff out of my closet. Then we put out folding chairs in the living room and Dominic led us in a funeral service.

Monika had wanted to do a eulogy but she was crying too hard. She’d written it out, though, so Arie read it for her. I saved it, in case she wants to read it at the real memorial service. Well, maybe for her, this will always be the real memorial service. But there will be another one, a public one, when the epidemic is over.

In Minnesota after a funeral, there’s usually lunch in a church basement and there’s often this dish called ambrosia salad. (Maybe other states have this? I haven’t been to very many funerals outside Minnesota.) I was missing some of the ingredients, but I did have lime Jell-O and mini-marshmallows and even a pack of frozen non-dairy topping and I used canned mandarin oranges instead of the crushed pineapple, and mixed all together that worked pretty well. We had ambrosia salad and breakfast sausages for lunch. (I don’t know why we got so many packs of breakfast sausages, but it’s food, and everyone likes them, so we’ve been eating them almost every day, mostly not for breakfast.)

Monika asked if she could save her share of the ambrosia salad in the fridge until tomorrow, because she really likes it, and she didn’t feel like eating, and didn’t want anyone else to eat her share. (Which was a legitimate worry.) I put it in a container and wrote MONIKA’S, NO ONE ELSE TOUCH ON PAIN OF BEING FED TO THE RAT in sharpie on the lid. Which made her laugh, a little. I guess that’s good.

Jo sat through the service and ate her lunch and didn’t say a word. Mostly she looks like she doesn’t really believe it.

Stone Soup

Arie informed me today that the thing I called “Miscellaneous Soup” is actually called “Stone Soup,” after a folk story where three hungry strangers trick villagers into feeding them. In the story they announce that they’re going to make soup for everyone out of a rock, and when curious villagers come to check out what they’re doing, say that the soup would be better with a carrot or two…and an onion…and maybe some potatoes…and some beans… and one villager brings potatoes, and another one brings an onion, and in the end, there’s a lovely pot of soup for everyone.

I started to point out that I wasn’t tricking anybody, all this stuff was in my cabinet already, but then I realized that I didn’t just have dinner but an activity and all the kids came into the kitchen and acted out the story with little Tom playing the hungry stranger trying to get everyone to chip in for the soup and then throwing each item into the pot.

Then they all made cookies, while I watched, using mayo for the eggs and dicing up mini candy bars for the chips.

It was a sunny day today — cold, but really sunny — and we spread out a picnic cloth and ate in the living room, Stone Soup and chocolate chip cookies and everyone went around in a circle and said the thing they were most looking forward to doing when this was over. Monika said she wanted to be able to take an hour-long shower (everyone’s limited to seven minutes or we run out of hot water). Dominic said he wanted to go to the library. I said I wanted to bake a chocolate soufflé. Everyone complained about that and said it couldn’t be cooking or baking, so I said I wanted to go see a movie, in a theater, something funny, and eat popcorn.

Tomorrow is the first of March.

Hydration

Dominic is sick. It’s not flu. I mean, it can’t be; we haven’t gone out. Literally the whole point of staying in like this has been to avoid exposure. It also can’t be anything else you’d catch. We thought at first possibly it was food poisoning, but no one else is sick and we’ve all been eating the same food. According to Dr. Google, who admittedly is sort of a specialist in worst-case scenarios, it’s either diverticulitis or appendicitis. Or a kidney stone.

Obviously, going in to a doctor’s office is not on the table. We did a phone consultation. The guy we talked to said that yes, it could be any of those things and offered to call in a prescription for Augmentin if we could find a pharmacy that had it. The problem is, even though h4N1 is a virus and antibiotics won’t do anything for it, there are a lot of people who didn’t believe this and some of them had doctors willing to prescribe whatever they were asking for and the upshot is, all our pharmacies are out of almost everything. Oh, plus a bunch of pharmacies got robbed, though mostly that was for pain meds. Pharmacies are as much of a mess as anything else, is what I’m saying.

I’m not giving up, because in addition to the pharmacies that answered the phone and said they didn’t have any, there were a ton where no one even picked up. I’m going to keep trying. In the meantime, we’re keeping Dominic hydrated and hoping for the best. I always keep a couple of bottles of Pedialyte around, because the last thing you want to do when you’re puking is drive to the store, and that stuff’s gross enough that no one’s tried to get me to pop it open for dessert. So I’ve got it chilled and he’s trying to drink sips.

If it’s a kidney stone, Augmentin won’t do anything, but eventually he’ll pass the stone and recover, although it’ll really suck in the meantime. (I wish we had some stronger pain medication than Tylenol. For real, no one has Vicodin right now. Not a single pharmacy.) If it’s appendicitis, there’s a 75% chance that the Augmentin will fix it. (This is new! Well, I mean, it’s new information. There was a study on treating appendicitis with antibiotics and 75% of cases are a type of appendicitis that won’t rupture and can be treated with antibiotics! And if you get a CT scan they can tell whether that’s the kind you’ve got, but, well.) If it’s diverticulitis, and he can keep down fluids, the antibiotics should help. If he’s got the worse kind, and can’t keep down fluids, they would normally hospitalize him for IV antibiotics and maybe do surgery. But again, not an option.

Oh, it could also be cancer. (Thanks, Dr. Google!) In which case there’s no point worrying about it until the epidemic is over.

Cream of Augmentin

I got an e-mail from someone who has Augmentin they’re willing to sell me. Or at least they say it’s Augmentin. I guess I’d have to trust them, which is maybe a questionable decision. They want $1,000 for the bottle, cash only. Dominic was appalled that I’d even consider this. He thought it was a scam, and they were planning to just steal the cash.

Fortunately I also got through to a pharmacy that still had it, a little neighborhood place. Dominic’s doctor called in the prescription, and I gave them my credit card number over the phone, and they actually delivered it. While I was on the phone with them they listed out some other things they have in stock and in addition to the Augmentin we got toothpaste and a big stack of last month’s magazines. Shout out to St. Paul Corner Drug: we are going to get every prescription from you for the rest of our natural lives.

I was hoping that starting the Augmentin would make Dominic at least a little better right away, but instead he’s getting worse.

Possibly this is just a reaction to the Augmentin. It’s not as bad as some antibiotics, but it can definitely upset your stomach, which is pretty counterproductive when puking and stomach pain are your major symptoms.

I had appendicitis when I was a teenager. I spent a day throwing up, and when I got worse instead of better my mother took me to the emergency room. I wound up having surgery. Afterwards I was restricted to clear liquids for a while, just broth and Jell-O and tea, which I got really tired of before they let me back on solid food. My mother smuggled in homemade chicken stock for me in a Thermos — it was still a clear liquid, but at least it was the homemade kind, the healing kind.

If I could pull a live, clucking chicken out of my ass, like I joked about, I would wring its neck and turn it into stock right now for Dominic. Nothing’s staying down, did I mention that? Nothing. But it’s not like we have anything for him other than Pedialyte.

I’m going to try to catch a rabbit.

Rabbit Soup

You guys, you really can find instructions for just about anything online. Okay, I’ve never looked to see if there’s a YouTube video on how to commit the perfect crime, but trapping an animal? Well, among other things, it turns out that the cartoon-style box-leaned-up-against-a-stick-with-bait-underneath is totally a thing you can actually do, but then you’ve got a live animal and if you’re planning to eat it you’ll still need to kill it. I wound up making a wire snare using instructions I found online in the hopes that the snare would do the dirty work for me. And it did. More or less. I’ll spare you the details, other than to say, rabbits can scream.

You can also find instructions for gutting and skinning a rabbit online. I used my kitchen shears for some of this, and I worked outside so that Jo didn’t have to watch. My back yard now looks like a murder scene, by the way, and my fingers were so cold by the end I couldn’t feel them. I feel like I ought to use the fur for something but I don’t think Home Taxidermy is the sort of craft that’s going to keep the pack of pre-teens cheerfully occupied. (Right now they’re reading through all the magazines we got from the pharmacy and I’m pretending not to notice that one of them is Cosmo.)

Back inside I browned the rabbit in the oven, since roasted chicken bones make for much tastier stock than just raw chicken, and then I covered it in just enough water to cover and simmered it for six hours. This would be better stock if I had an onion or some carrots or even some onion or carrot peelings, but we make do. The meat came off the bones, and I took out the meat and chopped it up and put it in the fridge for later, and I boiled the bones for a bit longer and then added a little bit of salt.

The secret to good stock, by the way, is to put in just enough water to cover the bones, and to cook it at a low temperature for a very long time. So there wasn’t a whole lot of stock, in the end: just one big mug full.

The kids have been staying downstairs, trying to keep out of Dominic’s way. Jo and Monika made dinner for the rest of us last night (rice and breakfast sausages) so I could take care of him. I saw Jo watching me while I carried up the mug of soup, though.

The bedroom doesn’t smell very pleasant at the moment — sweat, vomit, and cucumber-scented cleaner from Target. It’s too cold to open the windows, even just for a little while.

Dominic didn’t want it. I’d been making him sip Pedialyte but mostly he was just throwing it up again, and he was dehydrated. I pulled up a stool and sat by the edge of his bed with a spoon and told him he had to have a spoonful. So he swallowed that, and I waited to see if it stayed down, or came back up. It stayed down.

Two minutes later I gave him another spoonful. That stayed down, too.

This is how you rehydrate a little kid, by the way: one teaspoonful every two minutes. It takes a long time to get a mug into someone if you’re going a teaspoon at a time, but eventually the whole mug was gone. The Augmentin stayed down, too.

I went downstairs and set another snare in the back yard.

Something Decadent

So, thank you everyone who donated to Melissa’s fundraiser. I put all the names in the hat and drew out Jessi from Boston, Massachusetts, and she says she doesn’t want me to wait until everything is over, she wants a recipe now. And her request was, “Make something decadent. Whatever you’ve got that can be decadent.” And Dominic is sufficiently recovered today that he can eat something decadent and not regret it horribly within ten minutes, so let’s do this thing.

We still have no milk, no cream, no eggs. I used the frozen whipped topping for the ambrosia salad and the marshmallows for the rice krispy treats (which aren’t exactly decadent, anyway).

But! Let’s talk about coconut milk. If you open a can of coconut milk without shaking it up, you’ll find this gloppy almost-solid stuff clinging to the sides of the can; that’s coconut cream. You can chill it, and whip it, and it turns into something like whipped cream. We set aside the coconut cream from three of the cans and chilled it.

I had no baking cocoa, because we used it all up a while back on a not-terribly-successful attempt at making hot chocolate, but I did have some mini Hershey bars still, so I melted the dark chocolate ones and cooled it, and thinned that out with just a tiny bit of the reserved coconut milk. It wasn’t a ton of chocolate, just so you know — it’s been a bit of a fight to keep people from just scarfing that candy straight down. But we had a little.

Then I whipped the coconut cream until it was very thick and almost stiff, and then mixed in the dark chocolate and a little bit of extra sugar, and it turned into this coconut-chocolate mousse.

When eating decadent food, presentation counts for a lot. We used some beautiful china teacups that I got from my great-grandmother: I scooped coconut-chocolate mousse into eight of them, and then I took the last of the milk chocolate mini bars and grated them with a little hand grater to put chocolate shavings on top. We also had some sparkly purple sprinkles up with the cake decorations so I put just a tiny pinch of that onto each cup. And I opened one of the cans of mandarin oranges and each of the mousse cups got two little orange wedges.

And I tied a ribbon around the handles of each teacup.

And then we set the table with the tablecloth and the nice china and we ate our Stone Soup of the day by candlelight and then I brought out the mousse and everyone ate theirs and then licked out the cups.

Some days it’s hard to imagine that this will ever be over, that we’ll ever be able to get things back to normal at all. When everyone is sniping at each other it feels like you’ve always been trapped in the middle of a half-dozen bickering children and always will be. When you’re in the midst of grief, it’s hard to imagine spring ever coming.

But Dominic pulled through, and Leo didn’t get sick. And tying the ribbons around the handles, I knew: this will all come to an end. We’ll survive this, and everyone will go home. I’m going to miss them, I thought, this pack of other people’s children I’ve crammed into my bungalow.

“Can I keep the ribbon?” Jo asked, when she was done with her mousse.

I told her, of course she could. And then she and Monika started arguing over whether she could have Monika’s ribbon, too, because of course they did, and that was our day, I guess, in a nutshell.

xxoo, Natalie

Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in nearly every major science fiction and fantasy magazine, including Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Clarkesworld. Her short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the 2016 Hugo and Locus Awards and was nominated for the Nebula Award. She also had five fantasy novels published by Bantam in the early 2000s. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her spouse, two kids, and (currently) three cats. You can find her at naomikritzer.com or on Twitter as @naomikritzer.

The Deepwater Bride
By Tamsyn Muir

In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car. Aunt Mar had bought it for a quarter and crammed fun-sized Snickers bars in the trunk. Frankly, I was touched she’d remembered.

That was the summer Jamison Pond became wreathed in caution tape. Deep-sea hagfish were washing ashore. Home with Mar, the pond was my haunt; it was a nice place to read. This habit was banned when the sagging antlers of anglerfish illicia joined the hagfish. The Department of Fisheries blamed global warming.

Come the weekend, gulpers and vampire squid putrefied with the rest, and the Department was nonplussed. Global warming did not a vampire squid produce. I could have told them what it all meant, but then, I was a Blake.

“There’s an omen at Jamison Pond,” I told Mar.

My aunt was chain-smoking over the stovetop when I got home. “Eggs for dinner,” she said, then, reflectively: “What kind of omen, kid?”

“Amassed dead. Salt into fresh water. The eldritch presence of the Department of Fisheries—”

Mar hastily stubbed out her cigarette on the toaster. “Christ! Stop yapping and go get the heatherback candles.”

We ate scrambled eggs in the dim light of heatherback candles, which smelled strongly of salt. I spread out our journals while we ate, and for once Mar didn’t complain; Blakes went by instinct and collective memory to augur, but the records were a familial chef d’oeuvre. They helped where instinct failed, usually.

We’d left tribute on the porch. Pebbles arranged in an Unforgivable Shape around a can of tuna. My aunt had argued against the can of tuna, but I’d felt a sign of mummification and preserved death would be auspicious. I was right.

“Presence of fish en masse indicates the deepest of our quintuple Great Lords,” I said, squinting over notes hundreds of Blakes past had scrawled. “Continuous appearance over days… plague? Presence? What is that word? I hope it’s both. We ought to be the generation who digitizes — I can reference better on my Kindle.”

“A deep omen isn’t fun, Hester,” said Mar, violently rearranging her eggs. “A deep omen seven hundred feet above sea level is some horseshit. What have I always said?”

“Not to say anything to Child Protective Services,” I said, “and that they faked the Moon landing.”

“Hester, you — “

We recited her shibboleth in tandem: “You don’t outrun fate,” and she looked settled, if dissatisfied.

The eggs weren’t great. My aunt was a competent cook, if skewed for nicotine-blasted taste buds, but tonight everything was rubbery and overdone. I’d never known her so rattled, nor to cook eggs so terrible.

I said, “‘Fun’ was an unfair word.”

“Don’t get complacent, then,” she said, “when you’re a teenage seer who thinks she’s slightly hotter shit than she is.” I wasn’t offended. It was just incorrect. “Sea-spawn’s no joke. If we’re getting deep omens here — well, that’s specific, kid! Reappearance of the underdeep at noon, continuously, that’s a herald. I wish you weren’t here.”

My stomach clenched, but I raised one eyebrow like I’d taught myself in the mirror. “Surely you don’t think I should go home.”

“It wouldn’t be unwise—” Mar held up a finger to halt my protest, “— but what’s done is done is done. Something’s coming. You won’t escape it by taking a bus to your mom’s.”

“I would rather face inescapable lappets and watery torment than Mom’s.”

“Your mom didn’t run off and become a dental hygienist to spite you.”

I avoided this line of conversation, because seriously. “What about the omen?”

Mar pushed her plate away and kicked back, precariously balanced on two chair legs. “You saw it, you document it, that’s the Blake way. Just… a deep omen at sixteen! Ah, well, what the Hell. See anything in your eggs?”

I re-peppered them and we peered at the rubbery curds. Mine clumped together in a brackish pool of hot sauce.

“Rain on Thursday,” I said. “You?”

“Yankees lose the Series,” said Aunt Mar, and went to tip her plate in the trash. “What a god-awful meal.”

I found her that evening on the peeling balcony, smoking. A caul of cloud obscured the moon. The treetops were black and spiny. Our house was a fine, hideous artifact of the 1980s, decaying high on the side of the valley. Mar saw no point in fixing it up. She had been — her words — lucky enough to get her death foretokened when she was young, and lived life courting lung cancer like a boyfriend who’d never commit.

A heatherback candle spewed wax on the railing. “Mar,” I said, “why are you so scared of our leviathan dreadlords, who lie lurking in the abyssal deeps? I mean, personally.”

“Because seahorrors will go berserk getting what they want and they don’t quit the field,” she said. “Because I’m not seeing fifty, but your overwrought ass is making it to homecoming. Now get inside before you find another frigging omen in my smoke.”

• • • •

Despite my aunt’s distress, I felt exhilarated. Back at boarding school I’d never witnessed so profound a portent. I’d seen everyday omens, had done since I was born, but the power of prophecy was boring and did not get you on Wikipedia. There was no anticipation. Duty removed ambition. I was apathetically lonely. I prepared only to record The Blake testimony of Hester in the twenty-third generation for future Blakes.

Blake seers did not live long or decorated lives. Either you were mother of a seer, or a seer and never a mother and died young. I hadn’t really cared, but I had expected more payout than social malingering and teenage ennui. It felt unfair. I was top of my class; I was pallidly pretty; thanks to my mother I had amazing teeth. I found myself wishing I’d see my death in my morning cornflakes like Mar; at least then the last, indifferent mystery would be revealed.

When Stylephorus chordatus started beaching themselves in public toilets, I should have taken Mar’s cue. The house became unseasonably cold and at night our breath showed up as wet white puffs. I ignored the brooding swell of danger; instead, I sat at my desk doing my summer chemistry project, awash with weird pleasure. Clutching fistfuls of malformed octopodes at the creek was the first interesting thing that had ever happened to me.

The birch trees bordering our house wept salt water. I found a deer furtively licking the bark, looking like Bambi sneaking a hit. I sat on a stump to consult the Blake journals:

THE BLAKE TESTIMONY OF RUTH OF THE NINETEENTH GENERATION IN HER TWENTY-THIRD YEAR

WEEPING OF PLANTS

Lamented should be greenstuff that seeps brack water or salt water or blood, for Nature is abhorring a lordly Visitor: if be but one plant then burn it or stop up a tree with a poultice of finely crushed talc, &c., to avoid notice. BRACK WATER is the sign of the MANY-THROATED MONSTER GOD & THOSE WHO SPEAK UNSPEAKABLE TONGUES. SALT WATER is the sign of UNFED LEVIATHANS & THE PELAGIC WATCHERS & THE TENTACLE so BLOOD must be the STAR SIGN of the MAKER OF THE HOLES FROM WHICH EVEN LIGHT SHALL NOT ESCAPE. Be comforted that the SHABBY MAN will not touch what is growing.

PLANT WEEPING, SINGLY:

The trail, movement & wondrous pilgrimage.

PLANTS WEEPING, THE MANY:

A Lord’s bower has been made & it is for you to weep & rejoice.

My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate.

Underneath in ballpoint was written: Has nobody noticed that Blake crypto-fascist worship of these deities has never helped?? Family of sheeple. Fuck the SYSTEM! This was dated 1972.

A bird called, then stopped mid-warble. The shadows lengthened into long sharp shapes. A sense of stifling pressure grew. All around me, each tree wept salt without cease.

I said aloud: “Nice.”

I hiked into town before evening. The bustling of people and the hurry of their daily chores made everything look almost normal; their heads were full of small-town everyday, work and food and family and maybe meth consumption, and this banality blurred the nagging fear. I stocked up on OJ and sufficient supply of Cruncheroos.

Outside the sky was full of chubby black rainclouds, and the streetlights cast the road into sulfurous relief. I smelled salt again as it began to rain, and through my hoodie I could feel that the rain was warm as tea; I caught a drop on my tongue and spat it out again, as it tasted deep and foul. As it landed it left whitish build up I foolishly took for snow.

It was not snow. Crystals festooned themselves in long, stiff streamers from the traffic signals. Strands like webbing swung from street to pavement, wall to sidewalk. The streetlights struggled on and turned it green-white in the electric glare, dazzling to the eye. Main Street was spangled over from every parked car to the dollar store. My palms were sweaty.

From down the street a car honked dazedly. My sneakers were gummed up and it covered my hair and my shoulders and my bike tires. I scuffed it off in a hurry. People stood stock-still in doorways and sat in their cars, faces pale and transfixed. Their apprehension was mindless animal apprehension, and my hands were trembling so hard I dropped my Cruncheroos.

“What is it?” someone called out from the Rite Aid. And somebody else said, “It’s salt.”

Sudden screams. We all flinched. But it wasn’t terror. At the center of a traffic island, haloed in the numinous light of the dollar store, a girl was crunching her Converse in the salt and spinning round and round. She had long shiny hair — a sort of chlorine gold — and a spray-on tan the color of Garfield. My school was populated with her clones. A bunch of huddling girls in halter tops watched her twirl with mild and terrified eyes.

“Isn’t this amazing?” she whooped. “Isn’t this frigging awesome?”

The rain stopped all at once, leaving a vast whiteness. All of Main Street looked bleached and shining; even the Pizza Hut sign was scrubbed clean and made fresh. From the Rite Aid I heard someone crying. The girl picked up a handful of powdery crystals and they fell through her fingers like jewels; then her beaming smile found me and I fled.

• • • •

I collected the Blake books and lit a jittering circle of heatherback candles. I turned on every light in the house. I even stuck a Mickey Mouse nightlight into the wall socket, and he glowed there in dismal magnificence as I searched. It took me an hour to alight upon an old glued-in letter:

Reread the testimony of Elizabeth Blake in the fifteenth generation after I had word of this. I thought the account strange, so I went to see for myself. It was as Great-Aunt Annabelle had described, mold everywhere but almost beautiful, for it had bloomed in cunning patterns down the avenue all the way to the door. I couldn’t look for too long as the looking gave me such a headache.

I called in a few days later and the mold was gone. Just one lady of the house and wasn’t she pleased to see me as everyone else in the neighbourhood felt too dreadful to call. She was to be the sacrifice as all signs said. Every spider in that house was spelling the presence and I got the feeling readily that it was one of the lesser diseased Ones, the taste in the milk, the dust. One of the Monster Lord’s fever wizards had made his choice in her, no mistake. The girl was so sweet looking and so cheerful. They say the girls in these instances are always cheerful about it like lambs to the slaughter. The pestilences and their behemoth Duke may do as they will. I gave her til May.

Perhaps staying closer would have given me more detail but I felt that beyond my duty. I placed a wedding gift on the stoop and left that afternoon. I heard later he’d come for his bride Friday month and the whole place lit up dead with Spanish flu.

Aunt Annabelle always said that she’d heard some went a-cour

The page ripped here, leaving what Aunt Annabelle always said forever contentious. Mar found me in my circle of heatherbacks hours later, feverishly marking every reference to bride I could find.

“They closed Main Street to hose it down,” she said. “There were cars backed up all the way to the Chinese take-out. There’s mac ‘n’ cheese in the oven, and for your info I’m burning so much rosemary on the porch everyone will think I smoke pot. “

“One of the pelagic kings has chosen a bride,” I said.

“What?”

“Evidence: rain of salt at the gate, in this case ‘gate’ being Main Street. Evidence of rank: rain of salt in mass quantities from Main Street to, as you said, the Chinese takeout, in the middle of the day during a gibbous moon notable distance from the ocean. The appearance of fish that don’t know light. A dread bower of crystal.”

My aunt didn’t break down, or swear, or anything. She just said, “Sounds like an old-fashioned apocalypse event to me. What’s your plan, champ?”

“Document it and testify,” I said. “The Blake way. I’m going to find the bride.”

“No,” she said. “The Blake way is to watch the world burn from a distance and write down what the flames looked like. You need to see, not to find. This isn’t a goddamned murder mystery.”

I straightened and said very patiently: “Mar, this happens to be my birthright — “

“To Hell with birthright! Jesus, Hester, I told your mom you’d spend this summer getting your driver’s license and kissing boys.”

This was patently obnoxious. We ate our macaroni cheese surrounded by more dribbling heatherbacks, and my chest felt tight and terse the whole time. I kept on thinking of comebacks like, I don’t understand your insistence on meaningless bullshit, Mar, or even a pointed Margaret. Did my heart really have to yearn for licenses and losing my French-kissing virginity at the parking lot? Did anything matter, apart from the salt and the night outside, the bulging eyes down at Jamison Pond?

“Your problem is,” she said, which was always a shitty way to begin a sentence, “that you don’t know what bored is.”

“Wrong. I am often exquisitely bored.”

“Unholy matrimonies are boring,” said my aunt. “Plagues of salt? Boring. The realization that none of us can run — that we’re all here to be used and abused by forces we can’t even fight — that’s so boring, kid!” She’d used sharp cheddar in the mac ‘n’ cheese and it was my favorite, but I didn’t want to do anything other than push it around the plate. “If you get your license you can drive out to Denny’s.”

“I am not interested,” I said, “in fucking Denny’s.”

“I wanted you to make some friends and be a teenager and not to get in over your head,” she said, and speared some macaroni savagely. “And I want you to do the dishes, so I figure I’ll get one out of four. Don’t go sneaking out tonight, you’ll break the rosemary ward.”

I pushed away my half-eaten food, and kept myself very tight and quiet as I scraped pans and stacked the dishwasher.

“And take some Band-Aids up to your room,” said Mar.

“Why?”

“You’re going to split your knee. You don’t outrun fate, champ.”

Standing in the doorway, I tried to think up a stinging riposte. I said, “Wait and see,” and took each step upstairs as cautiously as I could. I felt a spiteful sense of triumph when I made it to the top without incident. Once I was in my room and yanking off my hoodie I tripped and split my knee open on the dresser drawer. I then lay in bed alternately bleeding and seething for hours. I did not touch the Band-Aids, which in any case were decorated with SpongeBob’s image.

Outside, the mountains had forgotten summer. The stars gave a curious, chill light. I knew I shouldn’t have been looking too closely, but despite the shudder in my fingertips and the pain in my knee I did anyway; the tops of the trees made grotesque shapes. I tried to read the stars, but the position of Mars gave the same message each time: doom, and approach, and altar.

One star trembled in the sky and fell. I felt horrified. I felt ecstatic. I eased open my squeaking window and squeezed out onto the windowsill, shimmying down the drainpipe. I spat to ameliorate the breaking of the rosemary ward, flipped Mar the bird, and went to find the bride.

The town was subdued by the night. Puddles of soapy water from the laundromat were filled with sprats. The star had fallen over by the eastern suburbs, and I pulled my hoodie up as I passed the hard glare of the gas station. It was as though even the houses were withering, dying of fright like prey. I bought a Coke from the dollar machine.

I sipped my Coke and let my feet wander up street and down street, along alley and through park. There was no fear. A Blake knows better. I took to the woods behind people’s houses, meandering until I found speared on one of the young birches a dead shark.

It was huge and hideous with a malformed head, pinned with its belly facing whitely upwards and its maw hanging open. The tree groaned beneath its weight. It was dotted all over with an array of fins and didn’t look like any shark I’d ever seen at an aquarium. It was bracketed by a sagging inflatable pool and an abandoned Tonka truck in someone’s backyard. The security lights came on and haloed the shark in all its dead majesty: oozing mouth, long slimy body, bony snout.

One of the windows rattled up from the house. “Hey!” someone called. “It’s you.”

It was the girl with shiny hair, the one who’d danced like an excited puppy in the rain of salt. She was still wearing a surfeit of glittery eye shadow. I gestured to the shark. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “It’s been there all afternoon. Gross, right?”

“Doesn’t this strike you as suspicious?” I said. “Are you not even slightly weirded out?”

“Have you ever seen Punk’d?” She did not give me time to reply. “I got told it could be Punk’d, and then I couldn’t find Punk’d on television so I had to watch it on the YouTubes. I like Punk’d. People are so funny when they get punk’d. Did you know you dropped your cereal? I have it right here, but I ate some.”

“I wasn’t aware of a finder’s tax on breakfast cereal,” I said.

The girl laughed, the way some people did when they had no idea of the joke. “I’ve seen you over at Jamison Pond,” she said, which surprised me. “By yourself. What’s your name?”

“Why name myself for free?”

She laughed again, but this time more appreciatively and less like a studio audience. “What if I gave you my name first?”

“You’d be stupid.”

The girl leaned out the window, hair shimmering over her One Direction T-shirt. The sky cast weird shadows on her house and the shark smelled fetid in the background. “People call me Rainbow. Rainbow Kipley.”

Dear God, I thought.”On purpose?”

“C’mon, we had a deal for your name — “

“We never made a deal,” I said, but relented. “People call me Hester. Hester Blake.”

“Hester,” she said, rolling it around in her mouth like candy. Then she repeated, “Hester,” and laughed raucously. I must have looked pissed-off, because she laughed again and said, “Sorry! It’s just a really dumb name,” which I found rich coming from someone designated Rainbow.

I felt I’d got what I came for. She must have sensed that the conversation had reached a premature end because she announced, “We should hang out.”

“In your backyard? Next to a dead shark? At midnight?”

“There are jellyfish in my bathtub,” said Rainbow, which both surprised me and didn’t, and also struck me as a unique tactic. But then she added, quite normally, “You’re interested in this. Nobody else is. They’re pissing themselves, and I’m not — and here you are — so…”

Limned by the security lamp, Rainbow disappeared and reappeared before waving an open packet of Cruncheroos. “You could have your cereal back.”

Huh. I had never been asked to hang out before. Certainly not by girls who looked as though they used leave-in conditioner. I had been using Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears since childhood as it kept its promises. I was distrustful; I had never been popular. At school my greatest leap had been from weirdo to perceived goth. Girls abhorred oddity, but quantifiable gothness they could accept. Some had even warmly talked to me of Nightwish albums. I dyed my hair black to complete the effect and was nevermore bullied.

I feared no contempt of Rainbow Kipley’s. I feared wasting my time. But the lure was too great. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, “to see if the shark’s gone. You can keep the cereal as collateral.”

“Cool,” she said, like she understood collateral, and smiled with very white teeth. “Cool, cool.”

Driver’s licenses and kissing boys could wait indefinitely, for preference. My heart sang all the way home, for you see: I’d discovered the bride.

• • • •

The next day I found myself back at Rainbow’s shabby suburban house. We both took the time to admire her abandoned shark by the light of day, and I compared it to pictures on my iPhone and confirmed it as Mitsukurina owstoni: goblin shark. I noted dead grass in a broad brown ring around the tree, the star-spoked webs left empty by their spiders, each a proclamation the monster dwells. Somehow we ended up going to the park and Rainbow jiggled her jelly bracelets the whole way.

I bought a newspaper and pored over local news: the headline read GLOBAL WARMING OR GLOBAL WARNING? It queried alkaline content in the rain, or something, then advertised that no fewer than one scientist was fascinated with what had happened on Main Street. “Scientists,” said my companion, like a slur, and she laughed gutturally.

“Science has its place,” I said and rolled up the newspaper. “Just not at present. Science does not cause salt blizzards or impalement of bathydemersal fish.”

“You think this is cool, don’t you?” she said slyly. “You’re on it like a bonnet.”

There was an unseemly curiosity to her, as though the town huddling in on itself waiting to die was like a celebrity scandal. Was this the way I’d been acting? “No,” I lied, “and nobody under sixty says on it like a bonnet.”

“Shut up! You know what I mean — “

“Think of me as a reporter. Someone who’s going to watch what happens. I already know what’s going on, I just want a closer look.”

Her eyes were wide and very dark. When she leaned in she smelled like Speed Stick. “How do you know?”

There was no particular family jurisprudence about telling. Don’t appeared to be the rule of thumb as Blakes knew that, Cassandra-like, they defied belief. For me it was simply that nobody had ever asked. “I can read the future, and what I read always comes true,” I said.

“Oh my God. Show me.”

I decided to exhibit myself in what paltry way a Blake can. I looked at the sun. I looked at the scudding clouds. I looked at an oily stain on our park bench, and the way the thin young stalks of plants were huddled in the ground. I looked at the shadows people made as they hurried, and at how many sparrows rose startled from the water fountain.

“The old man in the hat is going to burn down his house on Saturday,” I said. “That jogger will drop her Gatorade in the next five minutes. The police will catch up with that red-jacket man in the first week of October.” I gathered some saliva and, with no great ceremony, hocked it out on the grass. I examined the result. “They’ll unearth a gigantic ruin in… southwestern Australia. In the sand plains. Seven archaeologists. In the winter sometime. Forgive me inexactitude, my mouth wasn’t very wet.”

Rainbow’s mouth was a round O. In front of us the jogger dropped her Gatorade, and it splattered on the ground in a shower of blue. I said, “You won’t find out if the rest is true for months yet. And you could put it down to coincidences. But you’d be wrong.”

“You’re a gypsy,” she accused.

I had expected “liar,” and “nutjob,” but not “gypsy.” “No, and by the way, that’s racist. If you’d like to know our future, then very soon — I don’t know when — a great evil will make itself known in this town, claim a mortal, and lay waste to us all in celebration. I will record all that happens for my descendants and their descendants, and as is the agreement between my bloodline and the unknown, I’ll be spared.”

I expected her to get up and leave, or laugh again. She said: “Is there anything I can do?”

For the first time I pitied this pretty girl with her bright hair and her Chucks, her long-limbed soda-coloured legs, her ingenuous smile. She would be taken to a place in the deep, dark below where lay unnamed monstrosity, where the devouring hunger lurked far beyond light and there was no Katy Perry. “It’s not for you to do anything but cower in his abyssal wake,” I said, “though you don’t look into cowering.”

“No, I mean — can I help you out?” she repeated, like I was a stupid child. “I’ve run out of Punk’d episodes on my machine, I don’t have anyone here, and I go home July anyway.”

“What about those other girls?”

“What, them?” Rainbow flapped a dismissive hand. “Who cares? You’re the one I want to like me.”

Thankfully, whatever spluttering gaucherie I might have made in reply was interrupted by a scream. Jets of sticky arterial blood were spurting out the water fountain, and tentacles waved delicately from the drain. Tiny octopus creatures emerged in the gouts of blood flooding down the sides and the air stalled around us like it was having a heart attack.

It took me forever to approach the fountain, wreathed with frondy little tentacle things. It buckled as though beneath a tremendous weight. I thrust my hands into the blood and screamed: it was ice-cold, and my teeth chattered. With a splatter of red I tore my hands away and they steamed in the air.

In the blood on my palms I saw the future. I read the position of the dead moon that no longer orbited Earth. I saw the blessing of the tyrant who hid in a far-off swirl of stars. I thought I could forecast to midsummer, and when I closed my eyes I saw people drown. Everyone else in the park had fled.

I whipped out my notebook, though my fingers smeared the pages and were so cold I could hardly hold the pen, but this was Blake duty. It took me three abortive starts to write in English.

“You done?” said Rainbow, squatting next to me. I hadn’t realized I was muttering aloud, and she flicked a clot of blood off my collar. “Let’s go get McNuggets.”

“Miss Kipley,” I said, and my tongue did not speak the music of mortal tongues, “you are a fucking lunatic.”

We left the fountain gurgling like a wound and did not look back. Then we got McNuggets.

• • • •

I had never met anyone like Rainbow before. I didn’t think anybody else had, either. She was interested in all the things I wasn’t — Sephora hauls, New Girl, Nicki Minaj — but had a strangely magnetic way of not giving a damn, and not in the normal fashion of beautiful girls. She just appeared to have no idea that the general populace did anything but clog up her scenery. There was something in her that set her apart — an absence of being like other people — and in a weak moment I compared her to myself.

We spent the rest of the day eating McNuggets and wandering around town and looking at things. I recorded the appearance of naked fish bones dangling from the telephone wires. She wanted to prod everything with the toe of her sneaker. And she talked.

“Favourite color,” she demanded.

I was peering at anemone-pocked boulders behind the gas station. “Black.”

“Favourite subject,” she said later, licking dubious McNugget oils off her fingers as we examined flayed fish in a clearing.

“Physics and literature.”

“Ideal celebrity boyfriend?”

“Did you get this out of Cosmo? Pass.”

She asked incessantly what my teachers were like; were the girls at my school lame; what my thoughts were on Ebola, CSI and Lonely Island. When we had exhausted the town’s supply of dried-up sponges arranged in unknowable names, we ended up hanging out in the movie theatre lobby. We watched previews. Neither of us had seen any of the movies advertised, and neither of us wanted to see them, either.

I found myself telling her about Mar, and even alluded to my mother. When I asked her the same, she just said offhandedly, “Four plus me.” Considering my own filial reticence, I didn’t press.

When evening fell, she said, See you tomorrow, as a foregone conclusion. Like ten-ish, breakfast takes forever.

I went home not knowing what to think. She had a bunny manicure. She laughed at everything. She’d stolen orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine, even if everyone stole orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine. She had an unseemly interest in mummy movies. But what irritated me most was that I found her liking me compelling, that she appeared to have never met anyone like Hester Blake.

Her interest in me was most likely boredom, which was fine, because my interest in her was that she was the bride. That night I thought about what I’d end up writing: the despot of the Breathless Depths took a local girl to wife, one with a bedazzled Samsung. I sniggered alone, and slept uneasy.

• • • •

In the days to come, doom throttled the brittle, increasingly desiccated town, and I catalogued it as my companion caught me up on the plot of every soap opera she’d ever watched. She appeared to have abandoned most of them midway, furnishing unfinished tales of many a shock pregnancy. Mar had been sarcastic ever since I’d broken her rosemary ward so I spent as much time out of the house as possible; that was the main reason I hung around Rainbow.

I didn’t want to like her because her doom was upon us all, and I didn’t want to like her because she was other girls, and I wasn’t. And I didn’t want to like her because she always knew when I’d made a joke. I was so angry, and I didn’t know why.

We went to the woods and consolidated my notes. I laid my research flat on the grass or propped it on a bough, and Rainbow played music noisily on her Samsung. We rolled up our jeans — or I did, as she had no shorts that went past mid-thigh — and half-assedly sunbathed. It felt like the hours were days and the days endless.

She wanted to know what I thought would happen when we all got “laid waste to.” For a moment I was terribly afraid I’d feel guilty.

“I don’t know.” The forest floor smelled cold, somehow. “I’ve never seen waste laid en masse. The Drownlord will make his presence known. People will go mad. People will die.”

Rainbow rolled over toward me, bits of twig caught in her hair. Today she had done her eyeliner in two thick, overdramatic rings, like a sleep-deprived panda. “Do you ever wonder what dying’s like, dude?”

I thought about Mar and never seeing fifty. “No,” I said. “My family dies young. I figure anticipating it is unnecessary.”

“Maybe you’re going to die when the end of this hits,” she said thoughtfully. “We could die tragically together. How’s that shake you?”

I said, “My family has a pact with the All-Devouring so we don’t get killed carelessly in their affairs. You’re dying alone, Kipley.”

She didn’t get upset. She tangled her arms in the undergrowth and stretched her legs out, skinny hips arched, and wriggled pleasurably in the thin and unaffectionate sunlight. “I hope you’ll be super sad,” she said. “I hope you’ll cry for a year.”

“Aren’t you scared to die?”

“Never been scared.”

I said, “Due to your brain damage,” and Rainbow laughed uproariously. Then she found a dried-up jellyfish amid the leaves and dropped it down my shirt.

That night I thought again about what I’d have to write: the many-limbed horror who lies beneath the waves stole a local girl to wife, and she wore the world’s skankiest short-shorts and laughed at my jokes. I slept, but there were nightmares.

• • • •

Sometimes the coming rain was nothing but a fine mist that hurt to breathe, but sometimes it was like shrapnel. The sun shone hot and choked the air with a stench of damp concrete. I carried an umbrella and Rainbow wore black rain boots that squeaked.

Mar ladled out tortilla soup one night as a peace offering. We ate companionably, with the radio on. There were no stories about salt rain or plagues of fish even on the local news. I’d been taught better than to expect it. Fear rendered us rigidly silent, and anyone who went against instinct ended up in a straitjacket.

“Why is our personal philosophy that fate always wins?” I said.

My aunt didn’t miss a beat. “Self-preservation,” she said. “You don’t last long in our line of work fighting facts. Christ, you don’t last long in our line of work, period. Hey — Ted at the gas station said he’d seen you going around with some girl.”

“Ted at the gas station is a grudge informer,” I said. “Back on subject. Has nobody tried to use the Blake sight to effect change?”

“They would’ve been a moron branch of the family, because like I’ve said a million times: it doesn’t work that way.” Mar swirled a spoon around her bowl. “Not trying to make it a federal issue, kid, just saying I’m happy you’re making friends instead of swishing around listening to The Cure.”

“Mar, I have never listened to The Cure.”

“You find that bride?”

Taken aback, I nodded. Mar cocked her dark head in thought. There were sprigs of grey at each temple, and not for the first time I was melancholy, clogged up with an inscrutable grief. But all she said was, “Okay. There were octopuses in the goddamned laundry again. When this is over, you’ll learn what picking up the pieces looks like. Lemon pie in the icebox.”

It was octopodes, but never mind. I cleared the dishes. Afterward we ate two large wedges of lemon pie apiece. The house was comfortably quiet and the sideboard candles bravely chewed on the dark.

“Mar,” I said, “what would happen if someone were to cross the deepwater demons who have slavery of wave and underwave? Hypothetically.”

“No Blake has ever been stupid or saintly enough to try and find out,” said Mar. “Not qualities you’re suited to, Hester.”

I wondered if this was meant to sting, because it didn’t. I felt no pain. “Your next question’s going to be, How do we let other people die?” she said and pulled her evening cigarette from the packet. “Because I’m me, I’ll understand you want a coping mechanism, not a Sunday School lecture. My advice to you is: it becomes easier the less you get involved. And Hester — “

I looked at her with perfect nonchalance.

“I’m not outrunning my fate,” said Aunt Mar. She lit the cigarette at the table. “Don’t try to outrun other people’s. You don’t have the right. You’re a Blake, not God.”

“I didn’t choose to be a Blake,” I snapped and dropped the pie plate on the sideboard before storming from the room. I took each stair as noisily as possible, but not noisily enough to drown out her holler: “If you ever get a choice in this life, kiddo, treasure it!”

• • • •

Rainbow noticed my foul mood. She did not tell me to cheer up or ask me what the matter was, thankfully. She wasn’t that type of girl. Fog boiled low in the valley and the townspeople stumbled through the streets and talked about atmospheric pressure. Stores closed. Buses came late. Someone from the northeast suburbs had given in and shot himself.

I felt numb and untouched, and worse — when chill winds wrapped around my neck and let me breathe clear air, smelling like the beach and things that grow on the beach — I was happy. I nipped this in its emotional bud. Rainbow, of course, was as cheerful and unaffected as a stump.

Midsummer boiled closer and I thought about telling her. I would say outright, Miss Kipley. (“Rainbow” had never left my lips, the correct method with anyone who was je m’appelle Rainbow.) When the ocean lurker comes to take his victim, his victim will be you. Do whatever you wish with this information. Perhaps she’d finally scream. Or plead. Anything.

But when I got my courage up, she leaned in close and combed her fingers through my hair, right down to the undyed roots. Her hands were very delicate, and I clammed up. My sullen silence was no barrier to Rainbow. She just cranked up Taylor Swift.

We were sitting in a greasy bus shelter opposite Walmart when the man committed suicide. There was no showboating hesitation in the way he appeared on the roof, then stepped off at thirty feet. He landed on the spines of a wrought-iron fence. The sound was like a cocktail weenie going through a hole punch.

There was nobody around but us. I froze and did not look away. Next to me, Rainbow was equally transfixed. I felt terrible shame when she was the one to drag us over to him. She already had her phone out. I had seen corpses before, but this was very fresh. There was a terrible amount of blood. He was irreparably dead. I turned my head to inform Rainbow, in case she tried to help him or something equally demented, and then I saw she was taking his picture.

“Got your notebook?” she said.

There was no fear in her. No concern. Rainbow reached out to prod at one mangled, outflung leg. Two spots of colour bloomed high on her cheeks; she was luminously pleased.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” My voice sounded embarrassingly shrill. “This man just killed himself!”

“The fence helped,” said Rainbow helplessly.

“You think this is a joke — what reason could you have for thinking this is okay — “

“Excuse you, we look at dead shit all the time. I thought we’d hit jackpot, we’ve never found a dead guy…”

Her distress was sulky and real. I took her by the shoulders of her stupid cropped jacket and gripped tight, fear a tinder to my misery. The rain whipped around us and stung my face. “Christ, you think this is some kind of game, or… or a YouTube stunt! You really can’t imagine — you have no comprehension — you mindless jackass — “

She was trying to calm me, feebly patting my hands. “Stop being mad at me, it sucks! What gives, Hester — “

“You’re the bride, Kipley. It’s coming for you.”

Rainbow stepped out of my shaking, febrile grip. For a moment her lips pressed very tightly together and I wondered if she would cry. Then her mouth quirked into an uncomprehending, furtive little smile.

“Me,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“You really think it’s me?”

“You know I know. You don’t outrun fate, Rainbow.”

“Why are you telling me now?” Something in her bewilderment cooled, and I was sensible of the fact we were having an argument next to a suicide. “Hey — have you been hanging with me all this time because of that?”

“How does that matter? Look: this the beginning of the end of you. Why don’t you want to be saved, or to run away, or something? It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” said Rainbow, with infinite dignity, “to me. You know what I think?”

She did not wait to hear what I imagined she thought, which was wise. She hopped away from the dead man and held her palms up to the rain. The air was thick with an electrifying chill: a breathless enormity. We were so close now. Color leached from the Walmart, from the concrete, from the green in the trees and the red of the stop sign. Raindrops sat in her pale hair like pearls.

“I think this is the coolest thing that ever happened to this stupid backwater place,” she said. “This is awesome. And I think you agree but won’t admit it.”

“This place is literally Hell.”

“Suits you,” said Rainbow.

I was beside myself with pain. My fingernails tilled up the flesh of my palms. “I understand now why you got picked as the bride,” I said. “You’re a sociopath. I am not like you, Miss Kipley, and if I forgot that over the last few weeks I was wrong. Excuse me, I’m going to get a police officer.”

When I turned on my heel and left her — standing next to a victim of powers we could not understand or fight, and whose coming I was forced to watch like a reality TV program where my vote would never count — the blood was pooling in watery pink puddles around her rain boots. Rainbow didn’t follow.

• • • •

Mar had grilled steaks for dinner that neither of us ate. By the time I’d finished bagging and stuffing them mechanically in the fridge, she’d finished her preparations. The dining-room floor was a sea of reeking heatherbacks. There was even a host of them jarred and flickering out on the porch. The front doors were locked and the windows haloed with duct tape. At the center sat my aunt in an overstuffed armchair, cigarette lit, hair undone, a bucket of dirt by her feet. The storm clamored outside.

I crouched next to the kitchen door and laced up my boots. I had my back to her, but she said, “You’ve been crying.”

My jacket wouldn’t button. I was all thumbs. “More tears will come yet.”

“Jesus, Hester. You sound like a fortune cookie.”

I realized with a start that she’d been drinking. The dirt in the bucket would be Blake family grave dirt; we kept it in a Hefty sack in the attic.

“Did you know,” she said conversationally, “that I was there when you were born?” (Yes, as I’d heard this story approximately nine million times.) “Nana put you in my arms first. You screamed like I was killing you.”

My grief was too acute for me to not be a dick.

“Is this where you tell me about the omen you saw the night of my birth? A grisly fate? The destruction of Troy?”

“First of all, you know damn well you were born in the morning — your mom made me go get her a McGriddle,” said Mar. “Second, I never saw a thing.” The rain came down on the roof like buckshot. “Not one mortal thing,” she repeated. “And that’s killed me my whole life, loving you… not knowing.”

I fled into the downpour. The town was alien. Each doorway was a cold black portal and curtains twitched in abandoned rooms. Sometimes the sidewalk felt squishy underfoot. It was bad when the streets were empty as bones in an ossuary, but worse when I heard a crowd around the corner from the 7-Eleven. I crouched behind a garbage can as misshapen strangers passed and threw up a little, retching water. When there was only awful silence, I bolted for my life through the woods.

The goblin shark in Rainbow’s backyard had peeled open, the muscle and fascia now on display. It looked oddly and shamefully naked; but it did not invoke the puke-inducing fear of the people on the street. There was nothing in that shark but dead shark.

I’d arranged to be picked last for every softball team in my life, but adrenaline let me heave a rock through Rainbow’s window. Glass tinkled musically. Her lights came on and she threw the window open; the rest of the pane fell into glitter on the lawn. “Holy shit, Hester!” she said in alarm.

“Miss Kipley, I’d like to save you,” I said. “This is on the understanding that I still think you’re absolutely fucking crazy, but I should’ve tried to save you from the start. If you get dressed, I know where Ted at the gas station keeps the keys to his truck, and I don’t have my learner’s permit, but we’ll make it to Denny’s by midnight.”

Rainbow put her head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and when she smiled there was a regretful dimple. “Dude,” she said softly, “I thought when you saw the future, you couldn’t outrun it.”

“If we cannot outrun it, then I’ll drive.”

“You badass,” she said, and before I could retort she leaned out past the windowsill. She made a soft white blotch in the darkness.

“I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” said Rainbow. “I think you’re really funny, and you’re interesting, and your fingernails are all different lengths. You’re not like other girls. And you only think things are worthwhile if they’ve been proved ten times by a book, and I like how you hate not coming first.”

“Listen,” I said. My throat felt tight and fussy and rain was leaking into my hood. “The drowned lord who dwells in dark water will claim you. The moon won’t rise tonight, and you’ll never update your Tumblr again.”

“And how you care about everything! You care super hard. And you talk like a dork. I think you’re disgusting. I think you’re super cute. Is that weird? No homo? If I put no homo there, that means I can say things and pretend I don’t mean them?”

“Rainbow,” I said, “don’t make fun of me.”

“Why is it so bad for me to be the bride, anyway?” she said, petulant now. “What’s wrong with it? If it’s meant to happen, it’s meant to happen, right? Cool. Why aren’t you okay with it?”

There was no lightning or thunder in that storm. There were monstrous shadows, shiny on the matt black of night, and I thought I heard things flop around in the woods. “Because I don’t want you to die.”

Her smile was lovely and there was no fear in it. Rainbow didn’t know how to be afraid. In her was a curious exultation and I could see it, it was in her mouth and eyes and hair. The heedless ecstasy of the bride. “Die? Is that what happens?”

My stomach churned. “If you change your mind, come to West North Street,” I said. “The house standing alone at the top of the road. Go to the graveyard at the corner of Main and Spinney and take a handful of dirt off any child’s grave, then come to me. Otherwise, this is goodbye.”

I turned. Something sang through the air and landed next to me, soggy and forlorn. My packet of Cruncheroos. When I turned back, Rainbow was wide-eyed and her face was uncharacteristically puckered, and we must have mirrored each other in our upset. I felt like we were on the brink of something as great as it was awful, something I’d snuck around all summer like a thief.

“You’re a prize dumbass trying to save me from myself, Hester Blake.”

I said, “You’re the only one I wanted to like me.”

My hands shook as I hiked home. There were blasphemous, slippery things in each clearing that endless night. I knew what would happen if they were to approach. The rain grew oily and warm as blood was oily and warm, and I alternately wept and laughed, and none of them even touched me.

My aunt had fallen asleep amid the candles like some untidy Renaissance saint. She lay there with her shoes still on and her cigarette half-smoked, and I left my clothes in a sopping heap on the laundry floor to take her flannel pj’s out the dryer. Their sleeves came over my fingertips. I wouldn’t write down Rainbow in the Blake book, I thought. I would not trap her in the pages. Nobody would ever know her but me. I’d outrun fate, and blaspheme Blake duty.

I fell asleep tucked up next to Mar.

• • • •

In the morning I woke to the smell of toaster waffles. Mar’s coat was draped over my legs. First of July: the Deepwater God was here. I rolled up my pajama pants and tiptoed through molten drips of candlewax to claim my waffle. My aunt wordlessly squirted them with syrup faces and we stood on the porch to eat.

The morning was crisp and gray and pretty. Salt drifted from the clouds and clumped in the grass. The wind discomfited the trees. Not a bird sang. Beneath us, the town was laid out like a spill: flooded right up to the gas station, and the western suburbs drowned entirely. Where the dark, unreflective waters had not risen, you could see movement in the streets, but it was not human movement. And there roared a great revel near the Walmart.

There was thrashing in the water and a roiling mass in the streets. A tentacle rose from the depths by the high school, big enough to see each sucker, and it brushed open a building with no effort. Another tentacle joined it, then another, until the town center was alive with coiling lappets and feelers. I was surprised by their jungle sheen of oranges and purples and tropical blues. I had expected somber greens and funeral grays. Teeth broke from the water. Tall, harlequin-striped fronds lifted, questing and transparent in the sun. My chest felt very full, and I stayed to look when Mar turned and went inside. I watched like I could never watch enough.

The water lapped gently at the bottom of our driveway. I wanted my waffle to be ash on my tongue, but I was frantically hungry and it was delicious. I was chomping avidly, flannels rolled to my knees, when a figure emerged at the end of the drive. It had wet short-shorts and perfectly hairsprayed hair.

“Hi,” said Rainbow bashfully.

My heart sang, unbidden.

“God, Kipley! Come here, get inside — “

“I kind’ve don’t want to, dude,” she said. “No offense.”

I didn’t understand when she made an exaggerated oops! shrug. I followed her gesture to the porch candles with idiot fixation. Behind Rainbow, brightly coloured appendages writhed in the water of her wedding day.

“Hester,” she said, “you don’t have to run. You’ll never die or be alone, neither of us will; not even the light will have permission to touch you. I’ll bring you down into the water and the water under that, where the spires of my palace fill the lost mortal country, and you will be made even more beautiful and funny and splendiferous than you are now.”

The candles cringed from her damp Chucks. When she approached, half of them exploded in a chrysanthemum blast of wax. Leviathans crunched up people busily by the RiteAid. Algal bloom strangled the telephone lines. My aunt returned to the porch and promptly dropped her coffee mug, which shattered into a perfect Unforgivable Shape.

“I’ve come for my bride,” said Rainbow, the abyssal king. “Yo, Hester. Marry me.”

• • • •

This is the Blake testimony of Hester, twenty-third generation in her sixteenth year.

In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, the God of the drowned country came ashore. The many-limbed horror of the depths chose to take a local girl to wife. Main Street was made over into salt bower. Water-creatures adorned it as jewels do. Mortals gave themselves for wedding feast and the Walmart utterly destroyed. The Deepwater Lord returned triumphant to the tentacle throne and will dwell there, in splendour, forever.

My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate, because when the leviathan prince went, I went with her.

Tamsyn Muir is a horror, fantasy and sci-fi author whose works have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales and Clarkesworld. Her short story “The Magician’s Apprentice” was nominated for the 2012 Shirley Jackson Award, and her novelette “The Deepwater Bride” was nominated for the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. She is from Howick, New Zealand.

The Heart’s Filthy Lesson
By Elizabeth Bear

The sun burned through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and—despite the nagging desire to keep traveling—had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. The prehensile fingers and leaping legs of her bioreactor-printed, skin-bonded adaptshell made it simple enough to swarm up one of the tall, gracile pseudo-figs and creep along its gray smooth branches until the ceaseless Venusian rain dripped directly on her adaptshell’s slick-furred head.

It was safer in the treetops, if you were sitting still. Nothing big enough to want to eat her was likely to climb up this far. The grues didn’t come out until nightfall, but there were swamp-tigers, damn things, and velociraptors to worry about. The forest was too thick for predators any bigger than that, but a swarm of scorpion-rats was no joke. And Venus had only been settled for three hundred days, and most of that devoted to Aphrodite Terra; there was still plenty of undiscovered monsters out here in the wilderness.

The water did not bother Dharthi, nor did the dip and sway of the branch in the wind. Her adaptshell was beautifully tailored to this terrain, and that fur shed water like the hydrophobic miracle of engineering that it was. The fur was a glossy, iridescent purple that qualified as black in most lights, to match the foliage that dripped rain like strings of glass beads from the multiple points of palmate leaves. Red-black, to make the most of the rainy grey light. They’d fold their leaves up tight and go dormant when night came.

Dharthi had been born with a chromosomal abnormality that produced red-green colorblindness. She’d been about ten solar days old when they’d done the gene therapy to fix it, and she just about remembered her first glimpses of the true, saturated colors of Venus. She’d seen it first as if it were Earth: washed out and faded.

For now, however, they were alive with the scurryings and chitterings of a few hundred different species of Cytherean canopy-dwellers. And the quiet, nearly-contented sound of Dharthi munching on cake. She would not dwell; she would not stew. She would look at all this natural majesty, and try to spot the places where an unnaturally geometric line or angle showed in the topography of the canopy.

From here, she could stare up the enormous sweep of Maxwell Montes to the north, its heights forested to the top in Venus’ deep, rich atmosphere—but the sight of them lost for most of its reach in clouds. Dharthi could only glimpse the escarpment at all because she was on the “dry” side. Maxwell Montes scraped the heavens, kicking the cloud layer up as if it had struck an aileron, so the “wet” side got the balance of the rain. Balance in this case meaning that the mountains on the windward side were scoured down to granite, and a nonadapted terrestrial organism had better bring breathing gear.

But here in the lee, the forest flourished, and on a clear hour from a height, visibility might reach a couple of klicks or more.

Dharthi took another bite of cake—it might have been “chocolate;” it was definitely caffeinated, because she was picking up the hit on her blood monitors already—and turned herself around on her branch to face downslope. The sky was definitely brighter, the rain falling back to a drizzle and then a mist, and the clouds were peeling back along an arrowhead trail that led directly back to the peak above her. A watery golden smudge brightened one patch of clouds. They tore and she glimpsed the full unguarded brilliance of the daystar, just hanging there in a chip of glossy cerulean sky, the clouds all around it smeared with thick unbelievable rainbows. Waves of mist rolled and slid among the leaves of the canopy, made golden by the shimmering unreal light.

Dharthi was glad she was wearing the shell. It played the sun’s warmth through to her skin without also relaying the risks of ultraviolet exposure. She ought to be careful of her eyes, however: a crystalline shield protected them, but its filters weren’t designed for naked light.

The forest noises rose to a cacophony. It was the third time in Dharthi’s one hundred solar days of life that she had glimpsed the sun. Even here, she imagined that some of these animals would never have seen it before.

She decided to accept it as a good omen for her journey. Sadly, there was no way to spin the next thing that happened that way.

“Hey,” said a voice in her head. “Good cake.”

“That proves your pan is malfunctioning, if anything does,” Dharthi replied sourly. Never accept a remote synaptic link with a romantic and professional partner. No matter how convenient it seems at the time, and in the field.

Because someday they might be a romantic and professional partner you really would rather not talk to right now.

“I heard that.”

“What do you want, Kraken?”

Dharthi imagined Kraken smiling, and wished she hadn’t. She could hear it in her partner’s “voice” when she spoke again, anyway. “Just to wish you a happy dieiversary.”

“Aw,” Dharthi said. “Aren’t you sweet. Noblesse oblige?”

“Maybe,” Kraken said tiredly, “I actually care?”

“Mmm,” Dharthi said. “What’s the ulterior motive this time?”

Kraken sighed. It was more a neural flutter than a heave of breath, but Dharthi got the point all right. “Maybe I actually care.”

“Sure,” Dharthi said. “Every so often you have to glance down from Mount Olympus and check up on the lesser beings.”

“Olympus is on Mars,” Kraken said.

It didn’t make Dharthi laugh, because she clenched her right fist hard enough that, even though the cushioning adaptshell squished against her palm, she still squeezed the blood out of her fingers. You and all your charm. You don’t get to charm me any more.

“Look,” Kraken said. “You have something to prove. I understand that.”

“How can you possibly understand that? When was the last time you were turned down for a resource allocation? Doctor youngest-ever recipient of the Cytherean Award for Excellence in Xenoarcheology? Doctor Founding Field-Martius Chair of Archaeology at the University on Aphrodite?”

“The University on Aphrodite,” Kraken said, “is five Quonset huts and a repurposed colonial landing module.”

“It’s what we’ve got.”

“I peaked early,” Kraken said, after a pause. “I was never your rival, Dharthi. We were colleagues.” Too late, in Dharthi’s silence, she realized her mistake. “Are colleagues.”

“You look up from your work often enough to notice I’m missing?”

There was a pause. “That may be fair,” Kraken said at last. “But if being professionally focused—”

“Obsessed.”

“—is a failing, it was hardly a failing limited to me. Come back. Come back to me. We’ll talk about it. I’ll help you try for a resource voucher again tomorrow.”

“I don’t want your damned help, Kraken!”

The forest around Dharthi fell silent. Shocked, she realized she’d shouted out loud.

“Haring off across Ishtar alone, with no support—you’re not going to prove your theory about aboriginal Cytherean settlement patterns, Dhar. You’re going to get eaten by a grue.”

“I’ll be home by dark,” Dharthi said. “Anyway, if I’m not—all the better for the grue.”

“You know who else was always on about being laughed out of the Academy?” Kraken said. Her voice had that teasing tone that could break Dharthi’s worst, most self-loathing, prickliest mood—if she let it. “Moriarty.”

I will not laugh. Fuck you.

Dharthi couldn’t tell if Kraken had picked it up or not. There was a silence, as if she were controlling her temper or waiting for Dharthi to speak.

“If you get killed,” Kraken said, “make a note in your file that I can use your DNA. You’re not getting out of giving me children that easily.”

Ha ha, Dharthi thought. Only serious. She couldn’t think of what to say, and so she said nothing. The idea of a little Kraken filled her up with mushy softness inside. But somebody’s career would go on hold for the first fifty solar days of that kid’s life, and Dharthi was pretty sure it wouldn’t be Kraken.

She couldn’t think of what to say in response, and the silence got heavy until Kraken said, “Dammit. I’m worried about you.”

“Worry about yourself.” Dharthi couldn’t break the connection, but she could bloody well shut down her end of the dialogue. And she could refuse to hear.

She pitched the remains of the cake as far across the canopy as she could, then regretted it. Hopefully nothing Cytherean would try to eat it; it might give the local biology a belly ache.

• • • •

It was ironically inevitable that Dharthi, named by her parents in a fit of homesickness for Terra, would grow up to be the most Cytherean of Cythereans. She took great pride in her adaptation, in her ability to rough it. Some of the indigenous plants and many of the indigenous animals could be eaten, and Dharthi knew which ones. She also knew, more importantly, which ones were likely to eat her.

She hadn’t mastered humans nearly as well. Dharthi wasn’t good at politics. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t good at making friends. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t charming or beautiful or popular or brilliant. Unlike Kraken, Kraken, Kraken.

Kraken was a better scientist, or at least a better-understood one. Kraken was a better person, probably. More generous, less prickly, certainly. But there was one thing Dharthi was good at. Better at than Kraken. Better at than anyone. Dharthi was good at living on Venus, at being Cytherean. She was more comfortable in and proficient with an adaptshell than anyone she had ever met.

In fact, it was peeling the shell off that came hard. So much easier to glide through the jungle or the swamp like something that belonged there, wearing a quasibiologic suit of super-powered armor bonded to your neural network and your skin. The human inside was a soft, fragile, fleshy thing, subject to complicated feelings and social dynamics, and Dharthi despised her. But that same human, while bonded to the shell, ghosted through the rain forest like a native, and saw things no one else ever had.

A kilometer from where she had stopped for cake, she picked up the trail of a velociraptor. It was going in the right direction, so she tracked it. It wasn’t a real velociraptor; it wasn’t even a dinosaur. Those were Terran creatures, albeit extinct; this was a Cytherean meat-eating monster that bore a superficial resemblance. Like the majority of Cytherean vertebrates, it had six limbs, though it ran balanced on the rear ones and the two forward pairs had evolved into little more than graspers. Four eyes were spaced equidistantly around the dome of its skull, giving it a dome of monocular vision punctuated by narrow slices of depth perception. The business end of the thing was delineated by a sawtoothed maw that split wide enough to bite a human being in half. The whole of it was camouflaged with long draggled fur-feathers that grew thick with near-black algae, or the Cytherean cognate.

Dharthi followed the velociraptor for over two kilometers, and the beast never even noticed she was there. She smiled inside her adaptshell. Kraken was right: going out into the jungle alone and unsupported would be suicide for most people. But wasn’t it like her not to give Dharthi credit for this one single thing that Dharthi could do better than anyone?

She knew that the main Cytherean settlements had been on Ishtar Terra. Knew it in her bones. And she was going to prove it, whether anybody was willing to give her an allocation for the study or not.

They’ll be sorry, she thought, and had to smile at her own adolescent petulance. They’ll rush to support me once this is done.

The not-a-dinosaur finally veered off to the left. Dharthi kept jogging/swinging/swimming/splashing/climbing forward, letting the shell do most of the work. The highlands leveled out into the great plateau the new settlers called the Lakshmi Planum. No one knew what the aboriginals had called it. They’d been gone for—to an approximation—ten thousand years: as long as it had taken humankind to get from the Neolithic (Agriculture, stone tools) to jogging through the jungles of alien world wearing a suit of power armor engineered from printed muscle fiber and cheetah DNA.

Lakshmi Planum, ringed with mountains on four sides, was one of the few places on the surface of Venus where you could not see an ocean. The major Cytherean land masses, Aphrodite and Ishtar, were smaller than South America. The surface of this world was 85% water—water less salty than Earth’s oceans, because there was less surface to leach minerals into it through runoff. And the Lakshmi Planum was tectonically active, with great volcanoes and living faults.

That activity was one of the reasons Dharthi’s research had brought her here.

The jungle of the central Ishtarean plateau was not as creeper-clogged and vine-throttled as Dharthi might have expected. It was a mature climax forest, and the majority of the biomass hung suspended over Dharthi’s head, great limbs stretching up umbrellalike to the limited light. Up there, the branches and trunks were festooned with symbiotes, parasites, and commensal organisms. Down here among the trunks, it was dark and still except for the squish of loam underfoot and the ceaseless patter of what rain came through the leaves.

Dharthi stayed alert, but didn’t spot any more large predators on that leg of the journey. There were flickers and scuttlers and flyers galore, species she was sure nobody had named or described. Perhaps on the way back she’d have time to do more, but for now she contented herself with extensive video archives. It wouldn’t hurt to cultivate some good karma with Bio while she was out here. She might need a job sweeping up offices when she got back.

Stop. Failure is not an option. Not even a possibility.

Like all such glib sentiments, it didn’t make much of a dent in the bleakness of her mood. Even walking, observing, surveying, she had entirely too much time to think.

She waded through two more swamps and scaled a basalt ridge—one of the stretching roots of the vast volcano named Sacajawea. Nearly everything on Venus was named after female persons—historical, literary, or mythological—from Terra, from the quaint old system of binary and exclusive genders. For a moment, Dharthi considered such medieval horrors as dentistry without anesthetic, binary gender, and as being stuck forever in the body you were born in, locked in and struggling against what your genes dictated. The trap of biology appalled her; she found it impossible to comprehend how people in the olden days had gotten anything done, with their painfully short lives and their limited access to resources, education, and technology.

The adaptshell stumbled over a tree root, forcing her attention back to the landscape. Of course, modern technology wasn’t exactly perfect either. The suit needed carbohydrate to keep moving, and protein to repair muscle tissue. Fortunately, it wasn’t picky about its food source—and Dharthi herself needed rest. The day was long, and only half over. She wouldn’t prove herself if she got so tired she got herself eaten by a megaspider.

We haven’t conquered all those human frailties yet.

Sleepily, she climbed a big tree, one that broke the canopy, and slung a hammock high in branches that dripped with fleshy, gorgeous, thickly scented parasitic blossoms, opportunistically decking every limb up here where the light was stronger. They shone bright whites and yellows, mostly, set off against the dark, glossy foliage. Dharthi set proximity sensors, established a tech perimeter above and below, and unsealed the shell before sending it down to forage for the sorts of simple biomass that sustained it. It would be happy with the mulch of the forest floor, and she could call it back when she needed it. Dharthi rolled herself into the hammock as if it were a scentproof, claw-proof cocoon and tried to sleep.

Rest eluded. The leaves and the cocoon filtered the sunlight, so it was pleasantly dim, and the cocoon kept the water off except what she’d brought inside with herself when she wrapped up. She was warm and well-supported. But that all did very little to alleviate her anxiety.

She didn’t know exactly where she was going. She was flying blind—hah, she wished she were flying. If she’d had the allocations for an aerial survey, this would all be a lot easier, assuming they could pick anything out through the jungle—and operating on a hunch. An educated hunch.

But one that Kraken and her other colleagues—and more importantly, the Board of Allocation—thought was at best a wild guess and at worst crackpottery.

What if you’re wrong?

If she was wrong… well. She didn’t have much to go home to. So she’d better be right that the settlements they’d found on Aphrodite were merely outposts, and that the aboriginal Cythereans had stuck much closer to the North pole. She had realized that the remains—such as they were—of Cytherean settlements clustered in geologically active areas. She theorized that they used geothermal energy, or perhaps had some other unknown purpose for staying there. In any case, Ishtar was far younger, far more geologically active than Aphrodite, as attested by its upthrust granite ranges and its scattering of massive volcanoes. Aphrodite—larger, calmer, safer—had drawn the Terran settlers. Dharthi theorized that Ishtar had been the foundation of Cytherean culture for exactly the opposite reasons.

She hoped that if she found a big settlement—the remains of one of their cities—she could prove this. And possibly even produce some clue as to what had happened to them all.

It wouldn’t be easy. A city buried under ten thousand years of sediment and jungle could go unnoticed even by an archaeologist’s trained eye and the most perspicacious modern mapping and visualization technology. And of course she had to be in the right place, and all she had to go on there were guesses—deductions, if she was feeling kind to herself, which she rarely was—about the patterns of relationships between those geologically active areas on Aphrodite and the aboriginal settlements nearby.

This is stupid. You’ll never find anything without support and an allocation. Kraken never would have pushed her luck this way.

Kraken never would have needed to. Dharthi knew better than anyone how much effort and dedication and scholarship went into Kraken’s work—but still, it sometimes seemed as if fantastic opportunities just fell into her lover’s lap without effort. And Kraken’s intellect and charisma were so dazzling… it was hard to see past that to the amount of study it took to support that seemingly effortless, comprehensive knowledge of just about everything.

Nothing made Dharthi feel the limitations of her own ability like spending time with her lover. Hell, Kraken probably would have known which of the animals she was spotting as she ran were new species, and the names and describers of all the known ones.

If she could have this, Dharthi thought, just this—if she could do one thing to equal all of Kraken’s effortless successes—then she could tolerate how perfect Kraken was the rest of the time.

This line of thought wasn’t helping the anxiety. She thrashed in the cocoon for another half-hour before she finally gave in and took a sedative. Not safe, out in the jungle. But if she didn’t rest, she couldn’t run—and even the Cytherean daylight wasn’t actually endless.

• • • •

Dharthi awakened to an animal sniffing her cocoon with great whuffing predatory breaths. An atavistic response, something from the brainstem, froze her in place even as it awakened her. Her arms and legs—naked, so fragile without her skin—felt heavy, numb, limp as if they had fallen asleep. The shadow of the thing’s head darkened the translucent steelsilk as it passed between Dharthi and the sky. The drumming of the rain stopped, momentarily. Hard to tell how big it was, from that—but big, she thought. An estimation confirmed when it nosed or pawed the side of the cocoon and she felt a broad blunt object as big as her two hands together prod her in the ribs.

She held her breath, and it withdrew. There was the rain, tapping on her cocoon where it dripped between the leaves. She was almost ready to breathe out again when it made a sound—a thick chugging noise followed by a sort of roar that had more in common with trains and waterfalls than what most people would identify as an animal sound.

Dharthi swallowed her scream. She didn’t need Kraken to tell her what that was. Every schoolchild could manage a piping reproduction of the call of one of Venus’s nastiest pieces of charismatic megafauna, the Cytherean swamp-tiger.

Swamp-tigers were two lies, six taloned legs, and an indiscriminate number of enormous daggerlike teeth in a four hundred kilogram body. Two lies, because they didn’t live in swamps—though they passed through them on occasion, because what on Venus didn’t?—and they weren’t tigers. But they were striped violet and jade green to disappear into the thick jungle foliage; they had long, slinky bodies that twisted around sharp turns and barreled up tree trunks without any need to decelerate; and their whisker-ringed mouths hinged open wide enough to bite a grown person in half.

All four of the swamp-tiger’s bright blue eyes were directed forward. Because it didn’t hurt their hunting, and what creature in its right mind would want to sneak up on a thing like that?

They weren’t supposed to hunt this high up. The branches were supposed to be too slender to support them.

Dharthi wasn’t looking forward to getting a better look at this one. It nudged the cocoon again. Despite herself, Dharthi went rigid. She pressed both fists against her chest and concentrated on not whimpering, on not making a single sound. She forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly. To consider. Panic gets you eaten.

She wouldn’t give Kraken the damned satisfaction.

She had some resources. The cocoon would attenuate her scent, and might disguise it almost entirely. The adaptshell was somewhere in the vicinity, munching away, and if she could make it into that, she stood a chance of outrunning the thing. She weighed a quarter what the swamp-tiger did; she could get up higher into the treetops than it could. Theoretically; after all, it wasn’t supposed to come up this high.

And she was, at least presumptively, somewhat smarter.

But it could outjump her, outrun her, outsneak her, and—perhaps most importantly—outchomp her.

She wasted a few moments worrying about how it had gotten past her perimeter before the sharp pressure of its claws skidding down the rip-proof surface of the cocoon refocused her attention. That was a temporary protection; it might not be able to pierce the cocoon, but it could certainly squash Dharthi to death inside of it, or rip it out of the tree and toss it to the jungle floor. If the fall didn’t kill her, she’d have the cheerful and humiliating choice of yelling for rescue or wandering around injured until something bigger ate her. She needed a way out; she needed to channel five million years of successful primate adaptation, the legacy of clever monkey ancestors, and figure out how to get away from the not-exactly-cat.

What would a monkey do? The question was the answer, she realized.

She just needed the courage to apply it. And the luck to survive whatever then transpired.

The cocoon was waterproof as well as claw-proof—hydrophobic on the outside, a wicking polymer on the inside. The whole system was impregnated with an engineered bacteria that broke down the waste products in human sweat—or other fluids—and returned them to the environment as safe, nearly odorless, non-polluting water, salts, and a few trace chemicals. Dharthi was going to have to unfasten the damn thing.

She waited while the swamp-tiger prodded her again. It seemed to have a pattern of investigating and withdrawing—Dharthi heard the rustle and felt the thump and sway as it leaped from branch to branch, circling, making a few horrifically unsettling noises and a bloodcurdling snarl or two, and coming back for another go at the cocoon. The discipline required to hold herself still—not even merely still, but limp—as the creature whuffed and poked left her nauseated with adrenaline. She felt it moving away, then. The swing of branches under its weight did nothing to ease the roiling in her gut.

Now or never.

Shell! Come and get me! Then she palmed the cocoon’s seal and whipped it open, left hand and foot shoved through internal grips so she didn’t accidentally evert herself into free fall. As she swung, she shook a heavy patter of water drops loose from the folds of the cocoon’s hydrophobic surface. They pattered down. There were a lot of branches between her and the ground; she didn’t fancy making the intimate acquaintanceship of each and every one of them.

The swamp-tiger hadn’t gone as far as she expected. In fact, it was on the branch just under hers. As it whipped its head around and roared, she had an eloquent view from above—a clear shot down its black-violet gullet. The mouth hinged wide enough to bite her in half across the middle; the tongue was thick and fleshy; the palate ribbed and mottled in paler shades of red. If I live through this, I will be able to draw every one of those seventy-two perfectly white teeth from memory.

She grabbed the safety handle with her right hand as well, heaved with her hips, and flipped the cocoon over so her legs swung free. For a moment, she dangled just above the swamp-tiger. It reared back on its heavy haunches like a startled cat, long tail lashing around to protect its abdomen. Dharthi knew that as soon as it collected its wits it was going to take a swipe at her, possibly with both sets of forelegs.

It was small for a swamp-tiger—perhaps only two hundred kilos—and its stripes were quite a bit brighter than she would have expected. Even wet, its feathery plumage had the unfinished raggedness she associated with young animals still in their baby coats. It might even have been fuzzy, if it were ever properly dry. Which might explain why it was so high up in the treetops. Previously undocumented behavior in a juvenile animal.

Wouldn’t it be an irony if this were the next in a long line of xenobiological discoveries temporarily undiscovered again because a scientist happened to get herself eaten? At least she had a transponder. And maybe the shell was nearby enough to record some of this.

Data might survive.

Great, she thought. I wonder where its mama is.

Then she urinated in its face.

It wasn’t an aimed stream by any means, though she was wearing the external plumbing currently—easier in the field, until you got a bladder stone. But she had a bladder full of pee saved up during sleep, so there was plenty of it. It splashed down her legs and over the swamp-tiger’s face, and Dharthi didn’t care what your biology was, if you were carbon-oxygen based, a snout full of ammonia and urea had to be pretty nasty.

The swamp-tiger backed away, cringing. If it had been a human being, Dharthi would have said it was spluttering. She didn’t take too much time to watch; good a story as it would make someday, it would always be a better one than otherwise if she survived to tell it. She pumped her legs for momentum, glad that the sweat-wicking properties of the cocoon’s lining kept the grip dry, because right now her palms weren’t doing any of that work themselves. Kick high, a twist from the core, and she had one leg over the cocoon. It was dry—she’d shaken off what little water it had collected. Dharthi pulled her feet up—standing on the stuff was like standing on a slack sail, and she was glad that some biotuning trained up by the time she spent running the canopy had given her the balance of a perching bird.

Behind and below, she heard the Cytherean monster make a sound like a kettle boiling over—one part whistle, and one part hiss. She imagined claws in her haunches, a crushing bite to the skull or the nape—

The next branch up was a half-meter beyond her reach. Her balance on her toes, she jumped as hard as she could off the yielding surface under her bare feet. Her left hand missed; the right hooked a limb but did not close. She dangled sideways for a moment, the stretch across her shoulder strong and almost pleasant. Her fingers locked in the claw position, she flexed her bicep—not a pull up, she couldn’t chin herself one-handed—but just enough to let her left hand latch securely. A parasitic orchid squashed beneath the pads of her fingers. A dying bug wriggled. Caustic sap burned her skin. She swung, and managed to hang on.

She wanted to dangle for a moment, panting and shaking and gathering herself for the next ridiculous effort. But beneath her, the rattle of leaves, the creak of a bough. The not-tiger was coming.

Climb. Climb!

She had to get high. She had to get further out from the trunk, onto branches where it would not pursue her. She had to stay alive until the shell got to her. Then she could run or fight as necessary.

Survival was starting to seem like less of a pipe dream now.

She swung herself up again, risking a glance through her armpit as she mantled herself up onto the bough. It dipped and twisted under her weight. Below, the swamp-tiger paced, snarled, reared back and took a great, outraged swing up at her cocoon with its two left-side forepaws.

The fabric held. The branches it was slung between did not. They cracked and swung down, crashing on the boughs below and missing the swamp-tiger only because the Cytherean cat had reflexes preternaturally adapted to life in the trees. It still came very close to being knocked off its balance, and Dharthi took advantage of its distraction to scramble higher, careful to remember not to wipe her itching palms on the more sensitive flesh of her thighs.

Another logic problem presented itself. The closer she got to the trunk, the higher she could scramble, and the faster the adaptshell could get to her—but the swamp-tiger was less likely to follow her out on the thinner ends of the boughs. She was still moving as she decided that she’d go up a bit more first, and move diagonally—up and out, until “up” was no longer an option.

She made two more branches before hearing the rustle of the swamp-tiger leaping upwards behind her. She’d instinctively made a good choice in climbing away from it rather than descending, she realized—laterally or down, there was no telling how far the thing could leap. Going up, on unsteady branches, it was limited to shorter hops. Shorter… but much longer than Dharthi’s. Now the choice was made for her—out, before it caught up, or get eaten. At least the wet of the leaves and the rain were washing the irritant sap from her palms.

She hauled her feet up again and gathered herself to stand and sprint down the center stem of this bough, a perilous highway no wider than her palm. When she raised her eyes, though, she found herself looking straight into the four bright, curious blue eyes of a second swamp-tiger.

“Aw, crud,” Dharthi said. “Didn’t anyone tell you guys you’re supposed to be solitary predators?”

It looked about the same age and size and fluffiness as the other one. Littermates? Littermates of some Terran species hunted together until they reached maturity. That was probably the answer, and there was another groundbreaking bit of Cytherean biology that would go into a swamp-tiger’s belly with Dharthi’s masticated brains. Maybe she’d have enough time to relay the information to Kraken while they were disemboweling her.

The swamp-tiger lifted its anterior right forefoot and dabbed experimentally at Dharthi. Dharthi drew back her lips and hissed at it, and it pulled the leg back and contemplated her, but it didn’t put the paw down. The next swipe would be for keeps.

She could call Kraken now, of course. But that would just be a distraction, not help. Help had the potential to arrive in time.

The idea of telling Kraken—and everybody—how she had gotten out of a confrontation with two of Venus’s most impressive predators put a new rush of strength in her trembling legs. They were juveniles. They were inexperienced. They lacked confidence in their abilities, and they did not know how to estimate hers.

Wild predators had no interest in fighting anything to the death. They were out for a meal.

Dharthi stood up on her refirming knees, screamed in the swamp-tiger’s face, and punched it as hard as she could, right in the nose.

She almost knocked herself out of the damned tree, and only her windmilling left hand snatching at twigs hauled her upright again and saved her. The swamp-tiger had crouched back, face wrinkled up in distaste or discomfort. The other one was coming up behind her.

Dharthi turned on the ball of her foot and sprinted for the end of the bough. Ten meters, fifteen, and it trembled and curved down sharply under her weight. There was still a lot of forest giant left above her, but this bough was arching now until it almost touched the one below. It moved in the wind, and with every breath. It creaked and made fragile little crackling noises.

A few more meters, and it might bend down far enough that she could reach the branch below.

A few more meters, and it might crack and drop.

It probably wouldn’t pull free of the tree entirely—fresh Cytherean “wood” was fibrous and full of sap—but it might dump her off pretty handily.

She took a deep breath—clean air, rain, deep sweetness of flowers, herby scents of crushed leaves—and turned again to face the tigers.

They were still where she had left them, crouched close to the trunk of the tree, tails lashing as they stared balefully after her out of eight gleaming cerulean eyes. Their fanged heads were sunk low between bladelike shoulders. Their lips curled over teeth as big as fingers.

“Nice kitties,” Dharthi said ineffectually. “Why don’t you two just scamper on home? I bet mama has a nice bit of grue for supper.”

The one she had peed on snarled at her. She supposed she couldn’t blame it. She edged a little further away on the branch.

A rustling below. Now that’s just ridiculous.

But it wasn’t a third swamp-tiger. She glanced down and glimpsed an anthropoid shape clambering up through the branches fifty meters below, mostly hidden in foliage but moving with a peculiar empty lightness. The shell. Coming for her.

The urge to speed up the process, to try to climb down to it was almost unbearable, but Dharthi made herself sit tight. One of the tigers—the one she’d punched—rose up on six padded legs and slunk forward. It made a half dozen steps before the branch’s increasing droop and the cracking, creaking sounds made it freeze. It was close enough now that she could make out the pattern of its damp, feathery whiskers. Dharthi braced her bare feet under tributary limbs and tried not to hunker down; swamp-tigers were supposed to go for crouching prey, and standing up and being big was supposed to discourage them. She spread her arms and rode the sway of the wind, the sway of the limb.

Her adaptshell heaved itself up behind her while the tigers watched. Her arms were already spread wide, her legs braced. The shell just cozied up behind her and squelched over her outstretched limbs, snuggling up and tightening down. It affected her balance, though, and the wobbling of the branch—

She crouched fast and grabbed at a convenient limb. And that was more than tiger number two could bear.

From a standing start, still halfway down the branch, the tiger gathered itself, hindquarters twitching. It leaped, and Dharthi had just enough time to try to throw herself flat under its arc. Enough time to try, but not quite enough time to succeed.

One of the swamp-tiger’s second rank of legs caught her right arm like the swing of a baseball bat. Because she had dodged, it was her arm and not her head. The force of the blow still sent Dharthi sliding over the side of the limb, clutching and failing to clutch, falling in her adaptshell. She heard the swamp-tiger land where he had been, heard the bough crack, saw it give and swing down after her. The swamp-tiger squalled, scrabbling, its littermate making abrupt noises of retreat as well—and it was falling beside Dharthi, twisting in midair, clutching a nearby branch and there was a heaving unhappy sound from the tree’s structure and then she fell alone, arm numb, head spinning.

The adaptshell saved her. It, too, twisted in midair, righted itself, reached out and grasped with her good arm. This branch held, but it bent, and she slammed into the next branch down, taking the impact on the same arm the tiger had injured. She didn’t know for a moment if that green sound was a branch breaking or her—and then she did know, because inside the shell she could feel how her right arm hung limp, meaty, flaccid—humerus shattered.

She was dangling right beside her cocoon, as it happened. She used the folds of cloth to pull herself closer to the trunk, then commanded it to detach and retract. She found one of the proximity alarms and discovered that the damp had gotten into it. It didn’t register her presence, either.

Venus.

She was stowing it one-handed in one of the shell’s cargo pockets, warily watching for the return of either tiger, when the voice burst into her head.

“Dhar!”

“Don’t worry,” she told Kraken. “Just hurt my arm getting away from a swamp-tiger. Everything’s fine.”

“Hurt or broke? Wait, swamp-tiger?”

“It’s gone now. I scared it off.” She wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to admit that. “Tell Zamin the juveniles hunt in pairs.”

“A pair of swamp-tigers?!”

“I’m fine,” Dharthi said, and clamped down the link.

She climbed down one-handed, relying on the shell more than she would have liked. She did not see either tiger again.

At the bottom, on the jungle floor, she limped, but she ran.

• • • •

Four runs and four sleeps later—the sleeps broken, confused spirals of exhaustion broken by fractured snatches of rest—the brightest patch of pewter in the sky had shifted visibly to the east. Noon had become afternoon, and the long Cytherean day was becoming Dharthi’s enemy. She climbed trees regularly to look for signs of geometrical shapes informing the growth of the forest, and every time she did, she glanced at that brighter smear of cloud sliding down the sky and frowned.

Dharthi—assisted by her adaptshell—had come some five hundred kilometers westward. Maxwell Montes was lost behind her now, in cloud and mist and haze and behind the shoulder of the world. She was moving fast for someone creeping, climbing, and swinging through the jungle, although she was losing time because she hadn’t turned the adaptshell loose to forage on its own since the swamp-tiger. She needed it to support and knit her arm—the shell fused to itself across the front and made a seamless cast and sling—and for the pain suppressants it fed her along with its pre-chewed pap. The bones were going to knit all wrong, of course, and when she got back, they’d have to grow her a new one, but that was pretty minor stuff.

The shell filtered toxins and allergens out of the biologicals it ingested, reserving some of the carbohydrates, protein, and fat to produce a bland, faintly sweet, nutrient-rich paste that was safe for Dharthi’s consumption. She sucked it from a tube as needed, squashing it between tongue and palate to soften it before swallowing each sticky, dull mouthful.

Water was never a problem—at least, the problem was having too much of it, not any lack. This was Venus. Water squelched in every footstep across the jungle floor. It splashed on the adaptshell’s head and infiltrated every cargo pocket. The only things that stayed dry were the ones that were treated to be hydrophobic, and the coating was starting to wear off some of those. Dharthi’s cocoon was permanently damp inside. Even her shell, which molded her skin perfectly, felt alternately muggy or clammy depending on how it was comping temperature.

The adaptshell also filtered some of the fatigue toxins out of Dharthi’s system. But not enough. Sleep was sleep, and she wasn’t getting enough of it.

The landscape was becoming dreamy and strange. The forest never thinned, never gave way to another landscape—except the occasional swath of swampland—but now, occasionally, twisted fumaroles rose up through it, smoking towers of orange and ochre that sent wisps of steam drifting between scalded yellowed leaves. Dharthi saw one of the geysers erupt; she noticed that over it, and where the spray would tend to blow, there was a hole in the canopy. But vines grew right up the knobby accreted limestone on the windward side.

Five runs and five… five attempts at a sleep later, Dharthi began to accept that she desperately, desperately wanted to go home.

She wouldn’t, of course.

Her arm hurt less. That was a positive thing. Other than that, she was exhausted and damp and cold and some kind of thick liver-colored leech kept trying to attach itself to the adaptshell’s legs. A species new to science, probably, and Dharthi didn’t give a damn.

Kraken tried to contact her every few hours.

She didn’t answer, because she knew if she did, she would ask Kraken to come and get her. And then she’d never be able to look another living Cytherean in the face again.

It wasn’t like Venus had a big population.

Dharthi was going to prove herself or die trying.

The satlink from Zamin, though, she took at once. They chatted about swamp-tigers—Zamin, predictably, was fascinated, and told Dharthi she’d write it up and give full credit to Dharthi as observer. “Tell Hazards, too,” Dharthi said, as an afterthought.

“Oh, yeah,” Zamin replied. “I guess it is at that. Dhar… are you okay out there?”

“Arm hurts,” Dharthi admitted. “The drugs are working, though. I could use some sleep in a bed. A dry bed.”

“Yeah,” Zamin said. “I bet you could. You know Kraken’s beside herself, don’t you?”

“She’ll know if I die,” Dharthi said.

“She’s a good friend,” Zamin said. A good trick, making it about her, rather than Kraken or Dharthi or Kraken and Dharthi. “I worry about her. You know she’s been unbelievably kind to me, generous through some real roughness. She’s—”

“She’s generous,” Dharthi said. “She’s a genius and a charismatic. I know it better than most. Look, I should pay attention to where my feet are, before I break the other arm. Then you will have to extract me. And won’t I feel like an idiot then?”

“Dhar—”

She broke the sat. She felt funny about it for hours afterward, but at least when she crawled into her cocoon that rest period, adaptshell and all, she was so exhausted she slept.

• • • •

She woke up sixteen hours and twelve minutes later, disoriented and sore in every joint. After ninety seconds she recollected herself enough to figure out where she was—in her shell, in her cocoon, fifty meters up in the Ishtarean canopy, struggling out of an exhaustion and painkiller haze—and when she was, with a quick check of the time.

She stowed and packed by rote, slithered down a strangler vine, stood in contemplation on the forest floor. Night was coming—the long night—and while she still had ample time to get back to base camp without calling for a pickup, every day now cut into her margin of safety.

She ran.

Rested, she almost had the resources to deal with it when Kraken spoke in her mind, so she gritted her teeth and said, “Yes, dear?”

“Hi,” Kraken said. There was a pause, in which Dharthi sensed a roil of suppressed emotion. Thump. Thump. As long as her feet kept running, nothing could catch her. That sharpness in her chest was just tight breath from running, she was sure. “Zamin says she’s worried about you.”

Dharthi snorted. She had slept too much, but now that the kinks were starting to shake out of her body, she realized that the rest had done her good. “You know what Zamin wanted to talk to me about? You. How wonderful you are. How caring. How made of charm.” Dharthi sighed. “How often do people take you aside to gush about how wonderful I am?”

“You might,” Kraken said, “be surprised.”

“It’s hard being the partner of somebody so perfect. When did you ever struggle for anything? You have led a charmed life, Kraken, from birth to now.”

“Did I?” Kraken said. “I’ve been lucky, I don’t deny. But I’ve worked hard. And lived through things. You think I’m perfect because that’s how you see me, in between bouts of hating everything I do.”

“It’s how everyone sees you. If status in the afterlife is determined by praises sung, yours is assured.”

“I wish you could hear how they talk about you. People hold you in awe, love.”

Thump. Thump. The rhythm of her feet soothed her, when nothing else could. She was even getting resigned to the ceaseless damp, which collected between her toes, between her buttocks, behind her ears. “They love you. They tolerated me. No one ever saw what you saw in me.”

“I did,” Kraken replied. “And quit acting as if I were somehow perfect. You’ve been quick enough to remind me on occasion of how I’m not. This thing, this need to prove yourself… it’s a sophipathology, Dhar. I love you. But this is not a healthy pattern of thought. Ambition is great, but you go beyond ambition. Nothing you do is ever good enough. You deny your own accomplishments, and inflate those of everyone around you. You grew up in Aphrodite, and there are only thirty thousand people on the whole damned planet. You can’t be surprised that, brilliant as you are, some of us are just as smart and capable as you are.”

Thump. Thump—

She was watching ahead even as she was arguing, though her attention wasn’t on it. That automatic caution was all that kept her from running off the edge of the world.

Before her—below her—a great cliff dropped away. The trees in the valley soared up. But this was not a tangled jungle: it was a climax forest, a species of tree taller and more densely canopied than any Dharthi had seen. The light below those trees was thick and crepuscular, and though she could hear the rain drumming on their leaves, very little of it dripped through.

Between them, until the foliage cut off her line of sight, Dharthi could see the familiar, crescent-shaped roofs of aboriginal Cytherean structures, some of them half-consumed in the accretions from the forest of smoking stone towers that rose among the trees.

She stood on the cliff edge overlooking the thing she had come half a world by airship and a thousand kilometers on foot to find, and pebbles crumbled from beneath the toes of her adaptshell, and she raised a hand to her face as if Kraken were really speaking into a device in her ear canal instead of into the patterns of electricity in her brain. The cavernous ruin stretched farther than her eyes could see—even dark-adapted, once the shell made the transition for her. Even in this strange, open forest filled with colorful, flitting flying things.

“Love?”

“Yes?” Kraken said, then went silent and waited.

“I’ll call you back,” Dharthi said. “I just discovered the Lost City of Ishtar.”

• • • •

Dharthi walked among the ruins. It was not all she’d hoped.

Well, it was more than she had hoped. She rappelled down, and as soon as her shell sank ankle-deep in the leaf litter she was overcome by a hush of awe. She turned from the wet, lichen-heavy cliff, scuffed with the temporary marks of her feet, and craned back to stare up at the forest of geysers and fumaroles and trees that stretched west and south as far as she could see. The cliff behind her was basalt—another root of the volcano whose shield was lost in mists and trees. This… this was the clearest air she had ever seen.

The trees were planted in rows, as perfectly arranged as pillars in some enormous Faerie hall. The King of the Giants lived here, and Dharthi was Jack, except she had climbed down the beanstalk for a change.

The trunks were as big around as ten men with linked hands, tall enough that their foliage vanished in the clouds overhead. Trees on earth, Dharthi knew, were limited in height by capillary action: how high could they lift water to their thirsty leaves?

Perhaps these Cytherean giants drank from the clouds as well as the earth.

“Oh,” Dharthi said, and the spaces between the trees both hushed and elevated her voice, so it sounded clear and thin. “Wait until Zamin sees these.”

Dharthi suddenly realized that if they were a new species, she would get to name them.

They were so immense, and dominated the light so completely, that very little grew under them. Some native fernmorphs, some mosses. Lichens shaggy on their enormous trunks and roots. Where one had fallen, a miniature Cytherean rain forest had sprung up in the admitted light, and here there was drumming, dripping rain, rain falling like strings of glass beads. It was a muddy little puddle of the real world in this otherwise alien quiet.

The trees stood like attentive gods, their faces so high above her she could not even hear the leaves rustle.

Dharthi forced herself to turn away from the trees, at last, and begin examining the structures. There were dozens of them—hundreds—sculpted out of the same translucent, mysterious, impervious material as all of the ruins in Aphrodite. But this was six, ten times the scale of any such ruin. Maybe vaster. She needed a team. She needed a mapping expedition. She needed a base camp much closer to this. She needed to give the site a name—

She needed to get back to work.

She remembered, then, to start documenting. The structures—she could not say, of course, which were habitations, which served other purposes—or even if the aboriginals had used the same sorts of divisions of usage that human beings did—were of a variety of sizes and heights. They were all designed as arcs or crescents, however—singly, in series, or in several cases as a sort of stepped spectacular with each lower, smaller level fitting inside the curve of a higher, larger one. Several had obvious access points, open to the air, and Dharthi reminded herself sternly that going inside unprepared was not just a bad idea because of risk to herself, but because she might disturb the evidence.

She clenched her good hand and stayed outside.

Her shell had been recording, of course—now she began to narrate, and to satlink the files home. No fanfare, just an upload. Data and more data—and the soothing knowledge that while she was hogging her allocated bandwidth to send, nobody could call her to ask questions, or congratulate, or—

Nobody except Kraken, with whom she was entangled for life.

“Hey,” her partner said in her head. “You found it.”

“I found it,” Dharthi said, pausing the narration but not the load. There was plenty of visual, olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic data being sent even without her voice.

“How does it feel to be vindicated?”

She could hear the throb of Kraken’s pride in her mental voice. She tried not to let it make her feel patronized. Kraken did not mean to sound parental, proprietary. That was Dharthi’s own baggage.

“Vindicated?” She looked back over her shoulder. The valley was quiet and dark. A fumarole vented with a rushing hiss and a curve of wind brought the scent of sulfur to sting her eyes.

“Famous?”

“Famous!?”

“Hell, Terran-famous. The homeworld is going to hear about this in oh, about five minutes, given light lag—unless somebody who’s got an entangled partner back there shares sooner. You’ve just made the biggest Cytherean archaeological discovery in the past hundred days, love. And probably the next hundred. You are not going to have much of a challenge getting allocations now.”

“I—”

“You worked hard for it.”

“It feels like…” Dharthi picked at the bridge of her nose with a thumbnail. The skin was peeling off in flakes: too much time in her shell was wreaking havoc with the natural oil balance of her skin. “It feels like I should be figuring out the next thing.”

“The next thing,” Kraken said. “How about coming home to me? Have you proven yourself to yourself yet?”

Dharthi shrugged. She felt like a petulant child. She knew she was acting like one. “How about to you?”

“I never doubted you. You had nothing to prove to me. The self-sufficiency thing is your pathology, love, not mine. I love you as you are, not because I think I can make you perfect. I just wish you could see your strengths as well as you see your flaws—one second, bit of a squall up ahead—I’m back.”

“Are you on an airship?” Was she coming here?

“Just an airjeep.”

Relief and a stab of disappointment. You wouldn’t get from Aphrodite to Ishtar in an AJ.

Well, Dharthi thought. Looks like I might be walking home.

And when she got there? Well, she wasn’t quite ready to ask Kraken for help yet.

She would stay, she decided, two more sleeps. That would still give her time to get back to basecamp before nightfall, and it wasn’t as if her arm could get any more messed up between now and then. She was turning in a slow circle, contemplating where to sling her cocoon—the branches were really too high to be convenient—when the unmistakable low hum of an aircar broke the rustling silence of the enormous trees.

It dropped through the canopy, polished copper belly reflecting a lensed fisheye of forest, and settled down ten meters from Dharthi. Smiling, frowning, biting her lip, she went to meet it. The upper half was black hydrophobic polymer: she’d gotten a lift in one just like it at Ishtar basecamp before she set out.

The hatch opened. In the cramped space within, Kraken sat behind the control board. She half-rose, crouched under the low roof, came to the hatch, held out one her right hand, reaching down to Dharthi. Dharthi looked at Kraken’s hand, and Kraken sheepishly switched it for the other one. The left one, which Dharthi could take without strain.

“So I was going to take you to get your arm looked at,” Kraken said.

“You spent your allocations—”

Kraken shrugged. “Gonna send me away?”

“This time,” she said, “…no.”

Kraken wiggled her fingers.

Dharthi took it, stepped up into the GEV, realized how exhausted she was as she settled back in a chair and suddenly could not lift her head without the assistance of her shell. She wondered if she should have hugged Kraken. She realized that she was sad that Kraken hadn’t tried to hug her. But, well. The shell was sort of in the way.

Resuming her chair, Kraken fixed her eyes on the forward screen. “Hey. You did it.”

“Hey. I did.” She wished she felt it. Maybe she was too tired.

Maybe Kraken was right, and Dharthi should see about working on that.

Her eyes dragged shut. So heavy. The soft motion of the aircar lulled her. Its soundproofing had degraded, but even the noise wouldn’t be enough to keep her awake. Was this what safe felt like? “Something else.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you don’t mind, I was thinking of naming a tree after you.”

“That’s good,” Kraken said. “I was thinking of naming a kid after you.”

Dharthi grinned without opening her eyes. “We should use my Y chromosome. Color blindness on the X.”

“Ehn. Ys are half atrophied already. We’ll just use two Xs,” Kraken said decisively. “Maybe we’ll get a tetrachromat.”

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 27 novels (The most recent is Karen Memory, a Weird West adventure from Tor) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner, writer Scott Lynch.

Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds
By Rose Lemberg

Grandmother kept her cloth of winds in the orange room, a storage chamber painted in fire and lit to a translucent glow by dozens of floating candlebulbs created by the older women’s magic. As a small child, I remember hiding between the legs of a polished pearwood commode, safe and stuffy-warm behind the ancient embroidered material that draped it, hiding—just to be sure—also behind the veil of my hair. Grandmother-nai-Leylit would come in always just before the afternoon meal, and her smell—saffron and skin and millet dough—spread through the room like perfume. Her shuffling steps rang for me a music more exalted and mysterious than the holy sounds of the dawnsong that drifted each morning from behind the white walls of the men’s inner quarter.

I would watch from the darkness of my veils as grandmother unlocked the walnut cupboard, one of many pieces of storage in the room. She would pull from it, her brown age-spotted hands shaking slightly, a basinewood box ribbed in razu ivory and guarded by nails of hammered iron. Gently, as if deep in prayer, she would lift the lid and pull from the box an invisible cloth.

Lacking the magic of deepnames myself, then and now, I could not see what she held, but I could hear a faint crinkling, a movement of small threads of air as they restlessly wound around each other. I watched grandmother bury her face in this cloth, inhale it, pull her kaftan sleeves up and trace the length of it along her bare lower arms, before with a sigh she would put it back.

A few years later my brother was born, and my mothers left again for a trading venture through the southern deserts. I did not see a trace of them nor hear any word before I grew too big to hide under the pearwood commode. Then a letter, torn and filthy, arrived from the south to say that my mothers were now staying in Zhaglit-Beyond-Walls, a place nobody in the quarter had heard of.

My brother Kimriel, now three, did not talk. With my mothers so far and the day of his entrance to the men’s inner quarter only a year away, we were growing more and more anxious. The scholars would not admit a wordless child, but all our teaching and cajoling led to nothing.

One day, grandmother-nai-Leylit brought us children openly into the orange room. Kimriel wailed and struggled in my arms, his face bewildered, eyes darting from one strongbox to another. I hoped, I prayed she’d let him touch the fabric made of wind. I wanted miracles, I wanted him to touch the cloth and break out in a torrent of blessed speech, in great sentences of Old Khana that only the scholars know. I wanted to shake the gatekeepers of the inner quarter, men bearded and veiled and unknown to me, to shout at them to let my Kimi in; I knew, I knew even if they refused to believe, that behind the white walls of the men’s domain there waited for him a greatness. He’d been named after the men’s god, the singer, Kimrí, Bird’s brother, and like the goddess Bird I yearned to shelter him under my wings from all that hurts, and then to send him triumphantly forth. But I did not know how to help him.

When grandmother-nai-Leylit opened the cupboard and the box and pulled out the cloth of winds, Kimi’s eyes focused on it. Even as a young child that had not yet taken magic he could see it, hinting at an aptitude greater than mine by far. Grandmother-nai-Leylit guided his hands to touch the cloth, but no great torrent of speech burst forth from Kimi’s mouth. It took me a moment to realize he’d fallen silent—not wailing, mumbling, or fidgeting even. His small fingers held tightly to what I could not see; a homecoming.

When Kimi turned four, the traditional age for a male child to depart the women’s quarters and pass through to the men’s domain, the scholars would not take him. Another four years they granted him, four years of reprieve during which he could begin to speak and gain acceptance to the men’s side of the quarter, where to learn his Birdseed letters and the deeds of holy artifice. I watched over him, watchful as Bird. Unnoticed by grandmothers and protected from the idle questions of other girls and women by the fierceness of my glare, Kimriel would spin around and around, his face gleeful, his arms spread wide as if he would fly.

My friend Gitit-nai-Lur took to following us to the courtyards nestled under the outer walls of the quarter. Outside these rough-hewn gray boulders lay the city of Niyaz, fabled with its trade and splendor, anointed in persimmon perfume. Everything about it frightened and enticed us—the Niyazi men oiled their beards and donned brightly colored garments; behind these walls they walked unveiled and spoke loudly. The women, radiant in billowing silk dresses and adorned in beads, were stripped of magic according to an age-old tradition. This deed, so repulsive and incomprehensible to us, was to them joyous, marking passage from childhood into adulthood. In time we’d step out of the quarter as grownups, as traders. We would venture into the city, and out of it, through the carved Desert Gate. But it was not yet our time.

In courtyards so close and yet so far from that world, we would watch Kimi’s grounded gyre; Gitit would mutter words in the trade tongues of the desert, which she was trying valiantly to learn. I’d help her sometimes. Languages came easily to me. Under the shadow of the walls we’d say spidersilk, basinewood, glass, honey crystal to each other in Maiva’at and Surun’ and Burrashti. In these words lived for us the dream of all what lay beyond the quarter, beyond even the city—the desert embroidered in heat, the people in their tents of leather strung with bells and globes of fireglass. We spoke of flatweave carpet, madder, garnet, globes of fireglass and of each other in that heat, protected by the benevolence of the ancient trade routes.

Kimi got used to my friend. Gitit learned to draw on her deepnames and send forth bubbles of multicolored air. Kimi would laugh when they landed on his fingers and winked out like tiny candlebulbs or fireflies.

Grandmother-nai-Leylit found it more and more difficult to walk. She made a spare set of keys for my other grandmother, grandmother-nai-Tammah. I would bring Kimriel to the orange room when he was inconsolable, and my other grandmother, tall and willowy under her shawls of spidersilk gauze, would pull the cloth of winds out of the casket for Kimi. The weave of the rustling winds calmed him. It made him happy. It made me happy with the kind of happiness that comes from wanting a person you love to be content in a hundred ways that have nothing to do with aspirations of propriety.

At eight, Kimriel could say a few words—sunset, box, no, fish; not nearly enough to pass into the scholars’ domain, locked now from him forever. We would no longer be allowed to call him after the men’s god, so the grandmothers took the name Kimriel away, together with his young child’s clothing. They named him my sister, Zohra, and dressed now her in garments appropriate for a girl. Though Kimi would not answer to Zohra, no longer did we have to worry about her fate beyond the men’s white walls, no longer would we struggle to teach her the words of scholars.

But the relief from that pressure had thrust me suddenly into the center of my grandmothers’ regard. In all those years of adolescence I had spent watching Birdlike over my sister, I had not taken a deepname, had not even thought about magic. Now, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, they insisted I should take a deepname if I wanted to be marriageable, and desirable as a partner in an oreg, a women’s trading group.

I shrugged it off. I had no aptitude for magic, could not sense it like Kimi or my friends. Marriage would happen as it would, and I could not care less whether some man behind the inner walls would be a master artificer or a floorsweep. I would see him a few times a year at most, in the perpetual semi-darkness of the ritual chambers; most of my time I would spend with my oreg, whether trading or at home.

And as for an oreg, well. Gitit-nai-Lur, that most beautiful girl with her dark lustrous skin and her eyes unpainted by kohl, had deepnames enough for both of us. An oreg was more than the deepnames held by its members.

But even though I had not succumbed to the soul’s darkness that comes to so many who yearn in vain for the mind’s power, I was growing restless. I wanted to venture beyond the quarter’s outer walls, beyond the city, to trade, but grandmother-nai-Tammah begged me to stay and help watch over my sister while grandmother-nai-Leylit grew more and more frail. Gitit-nai-Lur, with her two deepnames, received many offers from trading groups both new and established, but she stayed behind with me out of sheer stubbornness.

Later that year, grandmother-nai-Tammah constructed a rolling chair for grandmother-nai-Leylit. It was made of white metal and deepname-powered, though I could not see exactly how the light of deepnames operated it; it was a work of artifice and thus forbidden to women. Grandmother-nai-Leylit could steer it with her mind. It had annoyed me in the years past when grandmother-nai-Tammah would do those mannish things, but now I was heartened to think that she’d not asked for permission, for surely such would not have been granted.

A few months after that, grandmother-nai-Leylit could no longer steer the chair. I rolled her around in it, and she would lay her hand, wrinkled and calloused and warm, over mine; she smelled of cardamom and bitter medicine, and her once-bright eyes now showed a map of a country unknown that spread under the desert in spidersilk webs of red.

I’d wheel the chair into the orange room and open the box for my grandmother, pull the cloth of winds out for her—still invisible in my hands but heavy with the weight of unshed tears—and lay it against her cheek. She would tilt her head to her shoulder and sing quietly, in the language of the Surun’, a lullaby. She shouldn’t do so, but I had not the heart to remind her of rules.

We all woke up that night, those of us with magic and those of us without. Kimi began to wail—fish, fish, fish, fish—I thought at first of how she couldn’t know that women are forbidden from song; and only then with a jolt, with the sinking in my stomach, I recognized the Surun’ melody. Wrapped in fear’s emptiness I listened hard for what only the strongest in magic are given to see, for the goddess coming.

Bird has many shapes—finch and eagle, sandpiper and turtledove—and yet she comes, they say, in a single visage for the soul’s final exhalation. I heard nothing, saw nothing, I swear. None of us were strong enough to see what shape she took for my grandmother—but an invisible wing, rough like calloused fingers, brushed my cheek as the goddess bore my grandmother’s soul aloft.

• • • •

Grandmother-nai-Tammah and I had not been close before this death. She seemed too aloof, detached. She’d make frequent and not at all hushed supplications to Bird to allow her to be reborn a man, and sometimes I’d see her walk through the quarter in a man’s kaftan and veils, like a scholar who had found himself on the wrong side of the wall.

As a child, I was fascinated and frightened; as an adolescent I was angry that a grandmother of mine would taunt the laws this way. Now I followed grandmother-nai-Tammah around, making cup after cup of red tea for her or accepting the cups she brewed for me. In silence we sat and stared each into her own distance as we blew on the scalding water to cool. My thoughts from years past made me uncomfortable, uneasy for having judged an elder with whom I now shared this grief; and even if she wouldn’t share it, how could I judge what she wanted to be in her next life or how she felt now and yet bristle at the thought of my Kimi being judged?

Day after day we sat with our tea, while my sister played nearby in the orange room. Grandmother-nai-Tammah no longer locked the box. I wondered many times whether she wanted Kimi to damage or misplace the cloth of winds, but it did not happen.

One day grandmother-nai-Tammah spoke to me, as if to continue a conversation we had never begun. “Beyond the city,” she said, “in the heart of the desert, the sandhills crest and fall, shifted about by the hand of the wind. Sometimes the wind blows so mighty it cuts through the layers of sand, through the years, revealing bones of perished animals too winsome to exist. People of the Surun’ treasure these, and so do the Maiva’at. The best of their weavers know how to listen to the bones. In plain threads of spidersilk they then embroider these beasts, fantastical and forgotten, onto carpets dyed with weld and madder.”

I nodded, not feeling the need for speech.

“Each tribe has its own designs, shapes formal and solemn to embody the memories of the bones. Each tribe has its own materials—spidersilk and wool, sisal and reeds and thin leather cords. Yet only among the snake-Surun’ is there a tradition of weaving from air.”

She said nothing more, expecting perhaps a question.

Later, Gitit-nai-Lur would ask me why I had not asked, her eyes bright with secrets and dreams of the desert. “A cloth of winds! A whole tradition of it, not just a single fragment but a whole carpet, carpets! Oh, such a treasure to bring back from a trading venture, to unroll before the ruler of the city!”

I do not know why it made me uneasy to think of the cloth of winds in its box, the invisible heaviness of it alive with threadlike winds. They held within them still the smell of my grandmother’s fingers, the softness of her cheek—and more, images and feelings I could not express: the desert where it had been woven, exhaling the day’s accumulated heat into the night; the patient touch of weavers unknown to me. My heart recoiled at the thought of such a treasure spread before the ruler of Niyaz. I had never seen the Shah, but heard plenty of stories—of our women ridiculed or even assaulted on streets outside of the quarter and then not protected by the law; of our traders imprisoned; of his coffers, in which all matter of treasure lay without ever seeing a person’s loving gaze. I did not want the cloth of winds to feel that loneliness. I scolded myself for letting it become a person to me, because the first thing a trader learns is not to become attached to trade goods.

I brought Gitit-nai-Lur and the stoked flames of her curiosity to my grandmothers’ rooms. But though grandmother-nai-Tammah looked my friend up and down with approval, she was unenthused by Gitit’s questioning. “If you desire to bring such a treasure to the ruler of Niyaz, then you are nothing but a fool.”

“Explain to me, trader Bashri,” said Gitit-nai-Lur, frustrated curiosity lending forcefulness to her voice. “What is so wrong in this? So foolish? Is it not what Khana traders do?”

“You do not understand.” Grandmother-nai-Tammah sighed and passed a hand over her eyes. “There is no need for you to scour the desert for the best woven treasure to bring before the ruler of Niyaz in his rainbow-tiered court. He already has it.”

Grandmother’s words stirred something in me, a yearning I could not explain. “Yes?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

She fell silent. Gitit and I just sat there, determined to wait her out, occasionally refreshing her tea. Kimi ran out and circled us curiously once, twice, thrice, then stole a cardamom cookie from the tray of tea and hopped one-legged into the orange room.

At last, grandmother-nai-Tammah relented.

“It begins with Zurya, a woman of the Maiva’at, who sang a supplication to Bird so beautifully that the goddess gave her the gift to spin with her voice alone, multicolored threads that sang with indigo and weld and the finest red madder.” She paused to take a sip of tea. “And it begins also with a woman of the Khana named Bashri-nai-Leylit, whose lovers took her name and formed an oreg.”

We sighed at the first mention of that name while grandmother’s voice continued to weave for us her heart’s story.

“And it continues with the ruler of Niyaz, who imprisoned the youngest of the oreg, Bashri-nai-Divrah. The crime was that of showing her face unveiled beyond the walls of the Khana quarter, her magic plain for all to see; for outside these walls, they do not allow women to hold deepnames, unless they are Khana and properly veiled. And so it passed that Bashri-nai-Leylit and Bashri-nai-Tammah went to the rainbow-tiered court to plead for their lover’s life; for her veil had been torn away by tormentors, and through no ill intent had she defied the law.”

Between each sliver of the tale, grandmother-nai-Tammah would take a sip of tea; and between each sliver of the tale we breathed, Gitit’s hand tight in mine and shivering like a sparrow.

“The ruler of Niyaz would not relent, unless, he said, the greatest treasure ever woven would be his. And so the two remaining traders Bashri set out to the great desert until they reached the leather tents, bell-strung, that housed a tribe of the Maiva’at.” Grandmother stopped there, allowing our traveling minds to catch up with her story. “It was there that Zurya had sung her supplications to Bird, it was there that she had been rewarded with the gift of spinning from Bird’s own feathers. But now, clouds of dust and dullness of despair veiled the encampment.

“‘Help us, help us, traders of the people of the Khana,’ cried Zurya’s kinsmen. ‘For the threads she sang have cocooned her body,’ and so the Bashri women, having prayed to Bird, pulled on the threads of song that hung from Zurya’s mouth and freed her.”

“Weighted with the wealth of threads that sang of weld and pomegranate, the traders Bashri walked again across the desert. Where the wind reveals and hides the great depths in the sand, they saw bones of such creatures as have never tread on solid ground—a flying razu beast, a lizard longer than my arm and made of entirely of letters, a skeleton of a two-headed bird with a crest of bone feathers, a stag on crane’s feet, a dog with a forehead studded with rubies. And with each revelation, small winds came to us and sang to the song-threads that we carried and wound around them like mating snakes.”

I wasn’t sure if grandmother had noticed abandoning the language of they for the language of we, but I wasn’t about to remind her while in my mind the threads of song and the small threadlike winds conversed in the language of lovers. Gitit-nai-Lur drew on her shorter deepname to heat the tea remaining in the pot, and I poured another round, grateful for the magic. I did not want to get up.

“We came at last, burdened with threads of song and accompanied by small winds, to the tents of the snake-Surun’. There, under awnings once painted in serpents gold and green that were now faded to mere traces of pigment, sat Benesret e Nand e Divyát, a weaver, who took the threads away from us and made them into a carpet. With undyed threads of spidersilk she then embroidered over it the visions of the beasts we saw as we have never seen them: the great razu in flight, its tusks of ivory curled towards the stars; the bird, two-headed and illustrious, drumming with four sticks held tight in beak and claw; the lizard made of letters from a language dead before the trade routes began; and between these images, a hundred roses golden like the sand. Joyfully burdened with Benesret’s carpet, we walked across the desert back home.”

Gitit-nai-Lur and I exchanged a glance. Neither of us interrupted the story, but grandmother’s unspoken secrets yawned from it like lions.

“The ruler of Niyaz delighted in this vision, for truly such a treasure had never before been woven, nor such threads as these ever spun. He offered us our weight in gold, but when we asked instead for Bashri-nai-Divrah, he said she was already dead. And so we were blood-paid and sent off, and the Shah locked the carpet away in his coffers, where it can neither show its colors nor sing.”

Later, Gitit-nai-Lur and I talked about what grandmother said and what she did not say—how she told me that the snake-Surun’ weave from air, but the carpet the Shah hid away had been woven from song; and how she had not spoken of the cloth of winds, even though it had come from this story.

• • • •

Grandmother’s visions kept me awake that night, and when I slept at last, I found myself in the desert, above a gaping hole in the sand. Something stirred at the bottom, a treasure of bones and emerald green. I teetered on the edge, yearning and afraid to step forward, until I was jolted out of the dream and back to my cushions.

In the small hours before dawn I dozed off again, to dream of the Shah’s prisons and faceless women wailing behind bars, beneath the ground. Their magic had been taken away from them, as well as their tongues, so they could neither light a candlebulb nor speak. Unable to break away from this vision I walked down the corridors, peering into the cells. I saw Khana women, their kaftans and sharovar smeared with dirt; Niyazi women in soiled dresses; even foreign women, their torn garments strange to my eyes.

I knew that soon I would see grandmother-nai-Divrah, one I had never known, never touched. The thought of it filled me with dread, and yet I kept walking.

I was saved from that vision by the dawnsong that came wafting from the men’s side of the quarter. The holy melody crested up and up, clearing up the putrefying odor of my dreams, to soar at last with Kimrí, Kimrí, Kimrí, Kimrí as the dawn burst out behind the curtained windows of my room.

“How long does it take to weave and embroider a carpet?” I asked the next day of Gitit-nai-Lur while we watched over spinning Kimi in an overgrown courtyard by the wall. My head buzzed.

“Firefly,” said Kimi, and Gitit weaved her fingers absent-mindedly in the air, producing tiny lights for Kimi to catch and laugh at while we talked.

“How long?” Gitit-nai-Lur pursed her lips. “A month at least, when people are weaving together. I have not heard from my elders of women weaving alone, although I guess it would not be impossible…”

“I want to know more about these women,” I said. Zurya of the Maiva’at, whose song so glorious at the beginning of grandmother’s story had turned into a constricting cocoon by its end; and Benesret e Nand e Divyát, who must have woven for a month, and maybe not alone, while my grandmothers presumably waited—all this spoken over in a breath of my grandmother’s story.

There had been small winds, too, that had accompanied my grandmothers to the snake-Surun’ camp, and I wanted to know how that ended. “I want to know this story, I want to feel it in my bones…”

“I want to travel to these lands,” Gitit-nai-Lur said, wistfullness rising in her voice. Her grandmothers of the Lur oreg had been famous traders, and she had grown up on stories of trade and danger. Her mothers too had been famous for their ventures. Even though Gitit had stayed with me, she would not be content to be idle for much longer. “I want to trade for the carpets of winds and song, if not for the Shah Niyaz, then for the sheer glory of it, a tale for our granddaughters.”

“Then we must find something to do about Kimi. Grandmother—” is too old to watch her alone, I wanted to say, and though the other women would take care of my sister, I worried they would not understand her ways, think her odd or even wrong, constrain her in the ways that we did not.

“We’ll take her with us,” said Gitit-nai-Lur. “I’m sure between us we will manage, especially if we find a third to join our oreg.”

But with one of us lacking magic and another lacking speech, we found ourselves at a disadvantage. We kept sending girls away who bid for Gitit alone, or for Gitit and me without Kimi; later, we argued with friend after friend about the wisdom of our decisions, and Gitit-nai-Lur was growing progressively angrier. “If I hear one more girl tell me with tearful concern how difficult this child will be to manage on the road, I swear I’ll shape my power into a fish and whack her.”

I giggled into my fist, much of my sadness drained away, though not all of it.

“We’ll have to do it. Just us,” said Gitit.

My sister, oblivious, once again chased after Gitit’s magical lights. Kimi had learned two new words this month, firefly and cookie, and used both to gleefully to ask for favors. I watched her with water in my eyes, wishing fervently that the joy I felt at these small words from my sister would be shared by all who saw us. “An oreg of two is unstable,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“It’s either that or the fish.”

And so we opened our dowry caskets and blended them like lovers do, and with that money purchased trade goods from the men: mechanical rods, instruments to measure the heat, pens that secreted ink inside them, and deepname-reinforced parchment. We bought jewelry of the most glorious kind, bracelets and necklaces shaped like butterflies that fluttered and kept the wearer cool in the desert heat; chains of balls that unfolded into fragrant blooms with the advent of cooler hours and closed again at sleeping time; and glorious rings set with beetles and bees. And we found a mechanical cart to carry it all, not large for a person but serviceable enough until we could afford better. Thus equipped, we went to deliver our news to grandmother-nai-Tammah.

“And will you take the name Gitit?” she asked us. It was customary for an oreg to be fully formed and named before the first journey, but we were neither formed, nor named.

“We have agreed to wait with the naming until we find a third,” I said, though I doubted by now that that would ever happen.

Grandmother pursed her lips, unsurprised but not especially happy at this development. “Nothing in this family runs true to course,” she said with some bitterness, “struggle as we might to fit in the great pattern our lives must make.”

“How is your life not true to course?” said my lover, ever brash when frustrated.

“Hah,” said grandmother-nai-Tammah.

“You have lived your life as Khana women must,” Gitit insisted. “You were part of an oreg of three and traded and brought children into the world, and they in turn brought children of their own, some even daughters to carry your name. It’s not your fault that Bashri-nai-Divrah was killed. There is nothing else in your life that deviates from the pattern.”

To this grandmother made no response.

“You should come with us,” I said, thinking of her alone and not a granddaughter nearby to pour her tea or listen to her silences. “If things do not run true to course, then what is one more?”

She waved me away. “I am old, not shaped for young women’s travels.” But she brought the cloth of winds out to us, locked again in its box, and handed me the key.

I averted my eyes, embarrassed. Had she given her heart’s treasure up for Kimi’s sake, or had she simply wanted it gone, to be torn out of her like the grief for grandmother-nai-Leylit? I could not quite tell.

As soon as we left grandmother’s rooms, Gitit-nai-Lur hissed at me, “I cannot believe she just implied that having you and Kimi for granddaughters meant her life deviated from the true course!”

“I am not sure that’s what she meant. There is more.” I spoke of my grandmother’s supplications to Bird, and of her late-night walks in veils and scholars’ garb.

But Gitit remained unconvinced. “No, she worries about what is proper. This is the woman who told you you wouldn’t be able to get married or join an oreg without magic, this is the woman who worried that Kimi…”

“I, too, worry about Kimi.” It was painful to think about, impossible to put in words what I felt—that both grandmothers Bashri wanted what was best for us, had said hurtful words out of love, tried to bend us to that pattern out of love, had let go at last with love and sadness, letting us just be. How I did not feel anything wrong with not having magic, did not feel there was anything wrong with Kimi for being herself, and yet I worried about Kimi and grew—not angry, that was for Gitit—but sad at our attempts to form an oreg.

“If anything deviates from the right pattern,” said Gitit stubbornly, “it is not us, it is the world.”

There’s nothing wrong with you, I yearned to say, and yet you stay with us, but these words, too, were a part of that wrongness Gitit spoke about. So I swallowed them, and cried into her shoulder, and let her comfort me before we were ready to leave.

• • • •

The first days of the journey taught us to miss grandmother-nai-Tammah. The things she’d done for Kimi slipped our notice. It now seemed the cardamom cookies and millet flatbreads had baked themselves, fish and greens had been set on plates pre-washed by air, free hours had appeared as if by magic when we needed them—time in which to learn about trade routes and to sit for tea with our numerous friends; clean clothing quietly replaced the garments my sister soiled. And even my grandmother’s silences were, I now saw, a necessity, a cornerstone of Kimi’s calm that now was gone from us.

Leaving the quarter we’d joined a small group of traders—two oregs of women about our mothers’ age who had planned a joint venture to Burri. Once we passed through the outer gates, past the great stone guardians of the quarter and into the greater city of Niyaz, Kimi became overwhelmed with the sights and sounds of the streets—the endless stream of people and their carts, the noise and smells and garbage. With a sudden cry, she darted away from us and into the crowd.

Gitit and I were quick to chase her, but when we grabbed her by the arms she began to scream, high keening sounds familiar and yet forgotten over the years we’d lived in peace. I tried to embrace her, pull her tight to me and shelter her, but Kimi fought me like she did before the cloth of winds was first placed in her hands. I wanted to pull the cloth out, but feared the other women and what they would say.

I waited for them to scold us for drawing attention, for taking such a child on the road, but the opposite happened. The elders of the Oshrat and Kelli oregs invited Kimi and me to ride in their large mechanical cart. They constructed a shielding of magic over it, so that the city and its people were reduced for us to rain that drummed a whisper upon the opaque gray veil. Inside this canopy Kimi and I sat together, she gradually calming enough to lay her head on my thigh. I opened the box of winds, and my sister pulled the heavy fabric over her head. There we sat, my fingers on the weave that sheltered Kimi’s hair. The thread-winds felt to me as if wet with weeping—rain, regret.

I feared of what Gitit would say, or worse, would think—that these girls were right, who had bid for her and grimaced over Kimi. But in an hour or so she peeked under the veil and offered to replace me, smiling as if nothing was the matter. I felt more eager than I wanted to admit for a gulp of air and a glance of the city. Kimi clung to her as I jumped off the cart.

We’d reached the Desert Gate by then, its arch of rose-carved razu ivory glistening pink in the sun. I shied away from the Kelli elder, Kelli-nai-Marah, who walked beside the cart and probably maintained the veil, but she greeted me with warmth.

“Don’t worry, child,” she said.

“I worry…”

“Yes,” she said, “I know. I know.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Your sister will calm in the desert. It is a good place for those that yearn for the quiet and wide spaces.”

Her kindness overwhelmed me. I wanted to embrace her, to cry, to rage the way Gitit would often rage at the injustice of the world. To beg forgiveness of Gitit, of Kimi, of myself for not knowing better, for having now to pretend that everything was all right. I should have stayed behind with my sister, tricked Gitit into leaving us behind, refused to ever become lovers. “I fear I made a horrible mistake…”

“Daughter,” she said, “your sister is not the first one, not the only one. Trust in the magnanimity of Bird.”

“Then why has Bird made her this way?” It was such a horrible thing to say that I slapped myself on the head, swallowing snot and tears together with my shame. If Bird hadn’t made her this way she would be behind the walls of the inner quarter now, studying the writ and praying to Kimrí, constructing automata, speaking in the scholars’ dialect of Khana peppered with old words the women did not learn. My sister would not be a sister. My sister would be a stranger. My sister would not exist.

“I am sorry. Please don’t listen to me. I am sorry.”

“See?” The trader Kelli pointed out a short, heavily veiled woman that walked with the Oshrat oreg, the only one who had not greeted us when we joined. “Kelli-nai-Berurit will not speak to you, to any strangers. When she is upset, she cannot talk. The veil we constructed for your sister we first constructed for her. She is used to this road now. And if you need to ask, we chose her not out of pity, but because we love her.”

“Nobody wanted to choose us,” I said, the bitterness too much to swallow. When not upset, your lover talks. My sister cannot.

“Your time will come,” the elder Kelli said. She paid for our passage through the Desert gate and would accept no argument over it.

• • • •

We parted with the traders Kelli and Oshrat at the crossroads. A throughway, paved and magically reinforced with bricks of compressed sand, would lead the seven older women through the craggy northern edges of the Burri desert, where water was scarce but reliably available at major oases, all the way eastwards to the Old Royal’s city of eleven wells.

It was at the crossroads that the elders Kelli and Oshrat formally invited us to join them in their venture. Kelli-nai-Marah spoke of the splendors of the terraced red city—the painted tiles of the royal tumbleweed garden, the smell of spices and dust, the markets where multicolored birds spoke poetry in the sixteen languages of the desert.

The elder Kelli spoke, too, of togetherness. “We say that it isn’t good for a Khana to travel alone, and there are reasons aplenty to keep old words close in the turbulent world. There is safety and firmness in the sisterhood we offer to each other.”

The women Kelli and Oshrat all nodded to this. Kelli-nai-Berurit, her gaze firmly on the ground, encouraged us likewise to travel with her oregs.

Gitit and I exchanged glances, each not wanting to accept the offer but feeling too guilty to reject that kindness. But we saw in each other’s eyes an unwillingness to swerve from the path marked by us in my grandmother’s silences, woven into the story of the cloth of winds. And so we took our leave from Oshrat and Kelli formally with traditional words and informally with hugs and tears, and steered the small cart down the lesser trodden paths that led south and into the great desert.

The unending freedom of that land, unknown to us and yet familiar from song and story, spread before us. It smelled like the carpets our mothers and grandmothers had brought back from ventures, before they were rigorously beaten out in the streets: dust and wool and herbs that burned with just a hint of sweetness.

We walked in the early mornings and the evening’s cool hours, childishly unafraid of brigands and thirst. Though I was without magic I read our path easily by the patterns made by the great embroidery of stars that stretched taut upon the needleframe of the sky. I named many kinds of low-hanging grass and shrubbery I recognized from the dried shapes and drawings that grandmother-nai-Tammah had shown me in her journeybooks back home, and I made teas for us and poultices for Gitit’s bleeding feet. Kimi abandoned shoes and took to running joyfully around our cart and forward. Gitit made a string bracelet for her, reinforced with magic, so that she could roam without getting lost.

In the first week we met others, Khana traders and strangers from the desert and from lands far away. With all, we spoke respectfully and all spoke back to us likewise, and as luck shines upon fools and children, we were unhindered. Further south we traveled, following the sky-roads I believed would lead us to the tents of the snake band of the Surun’. The wind was quiet upon the land. We saw no bones, of wondrous beasts or otherwise.

The miracles began with small things—Kimi bringing back an emerald-eyed lizard that escaped before we could determine whether it was mechanical; the wind blowing in a great sudden gust as we hid from the desert heat in a small embroidered tent gifted to us by Gitit’s grandmothers Lur; bones, always bones, that the wind left after it receded, small fragments bleached to a faint pink and yet striated differently from any razu ivory we’d studied. Kimi’s solitary runs stretched longer, and her face browned to an even deeper hue, as did Gitit’s.

We did not worry about Kimi’s excursions until one day she brought in her clenched fist a brown lump that she bit over and over. She swallowed the thing before we could see what it was or twist it from her fingers.

In our hastily pitched tent we fussed over my wailing sister, feeling guilty and foolish for not imagining the kind of poisons Kimi could eat in the desert. Always before she’d been picky, reluctant to try new foods even with family, much less pick them from the ground; yet we should have considered this.

Gitit made fire with her magic, and I brewed poultice after poultice for Kimi. She’d have none of it, kicking and flailing and spitting with grim determination. Once again we felt keenly the absence of grandmother-nai-Tammah, for she had fed much bitterer medicine to Kimi without any apparent effort. We got lucky—either the thing she ate wasn’t poisonous, or stray drips of my boiling brews had done the deed; by nightfall, my sister looked no worse but for the wear we had inflicted upon her by our worry. Gitit and I were done for. Slumped with exhaustion, we slept like the dead through the night and into the morning, when we awoke to the incessant wailing of the wind.

It must have been going for some time, building up before it woke us, gusts that shook the tent and rattled the cart and climbed ever higher in pitch. Kimi, oblivious to the sounds, slept curled on her side with the cloth of winds draped over her face.

In whispers we consulted with each other. The tent pegs, reinforced with Gitit’s magic, should hold even though they would have been stronger, more stable in a magical weave done by two. But perhaps we could further reinforce—

With a great push and a groan the tent was torn from its pegging and was tossed up and sideways, toppling the cart. The backlash flung me back and sideways, painfully into the dust, into—

—I lay on my back, staring up—

—all around me, a great ring of warriors, clothed in armor of polished bronze and headgear of enameled tin feathers that rattled in the wind; warriors with curved breasts and also beards, their faces lighter brown in color than my own, their hands wrapped around pennons and spears. Between them prowled small lions, feather-maned and winged, that bared at me thin fangs of sharpened emerald. I struggled up as one of the warriors raised a hand, the bronze spear in it clutched to strike. I heard more than saw Gitit rush towards me with a great cry, thrown back with the wind’s wailing. Kimi, hands outflung and laughing, spun forward—

“No!”

I do not know if I cried this or another. In-between the wind’s great roar a man appeared, in Khana veils and a billowing kaftan, slicing through the army on flat planes of white metal painted over with the seedlike letters of the writ. In one hand he held a spear of blinding light, a work of magic so powerful it was visible even to me. Moving ever forward, the scholar swung the spear that spread into a fan of two, three, a thousand spears, sweeping into the warriors, sweeping through the warriors who folded like shadows and collapsed into the sand. The emerald-toothed beasts bared their teeth and growled, defiant, before the sleeve of the whirlwind was lowered over them, folded them in—and all went quiet.

Shaken and unsteady I rushed to the fallen Gitit, and our savior sped to my sister in a motion so achingly familiar I knew Grandmother-nai-Tammah before she lowered the veil.

In the moments that followed I had no time for thought. Gitit was injured and unconscious. Blood seeped from a spear-wound in her side where no spear remained. Kimi laughed and laughed in confusion, running around and around until with my help grandmother-nai-Tammah pitched her tent over our toppled but unharmed cart. Of our own tent there was no sign.

Grandmother draped the cloth of winds over Kimi, and I was too confused and shaken to contemplate what had just happened. Behind us, a great hole in the ground gaped, but I wouldn’t have dared look into it even if grandmother hadn’t pulled me inside the tent.

I brewed potion after potion while grandmother cleaned and dressed Gitit’s wound. To distract and occupy my sister, Grandmother-nai-Tammah gave her a great lump of brown dough that looked familiar even to my dulled senses, but I continued to work, single-minded until grandmother proclaimed Gitit to be out of danger.

We moved camp later that night, after Gitit came to and asked for water. The hole in the ground had closed by then. The treacherous desert fell quiet, peaceful and placid as before.

I yearned to ask my grandmother a thousand questions, about the wounding memory of bronze-clad warriors and beasts of spiked emerald, about the wind, about her garb, her magic. She must have been a three-named strong—a miracle, a rarity, a marvel that should have propelled her to great power, made her to sit in council, to lead a famous oreg of her own. And yet, though my grandmother-nai-Leylit had only a single deepname, grandmother-nai-Tammah, the stronger of them, had called her elder and had taken her name, Bashri. But I had a more urgent question to ask.

Settled anew in grandmother’s tent, I waited to spring it until both Gitit and Kimi had fallen asleep. Grandmother-nai-Tammah sat, her back erect and her face half-turned away from me, expecting my speech as one expects a blow.

I spoke. “Back in Niyaz, I offered you to join us. You said no.”

She said, “I meant to let you go. I gave my cloth away to you.”

“I recognize the cake you fed the child, the poison we thought would slay her. You followed us veiled, knowing that we had no magic to see you. You spoke to Kimi, knowing that she could not tell us where she went and what she saw.”

“I changed my mind,” grandmother said. “It is not good for a Khana to travel alone.”

I gulped for breath. Grandmother-nai-Tammah had meant herself. She’d told us she was too old to travel, but what she had planned was to set out alone and leave us.

I turned away from her, and she from me. My face to the painted leather wall of the tent, I let silent tears fall, not quite lulling me to sleep. Later I turned around. Grandmother lay like a lump under a veil of magic that obscured her from the shoulders down. Her back was turned to me. I could not see her face, could not see whether she slept. Kimi snored quietly under the cloth of winds, and Gitit, numbed by my potions, slept also.

I lay on my back, counting invisible stars beyond the tent’s leather canopy, unable to sleep, thinking, thinking. I gave my cloth away to you, she’d said as if it meant the world—but the cloth of winds had belonged to grandmother-nai-Leylit.

• • • •

Gitit slept for eleven hours. When she woke up, grandmother and I took down the tent; Gitit was too weak to do anything but look, hands folded in her lap like nesting birds. Kimi danced around us, asking intermittently for cookies, gleeful at the shadows that fell like sticks around the tent’s collapsing angles.

I did not want to talk to grandmother-nai-Tammah. She’d given Kimi another piece of cake and helped me hoist Gitit upon our trading chest, but she’d deceived us. She’d let us believe she was too fragile and old for our journey, and yet her mechanical shoes, wide and sturdy on their planes of white metal, had carried her effortlessly through the desert. She was a three-named strong and could do whatever she wanted, and what she’d wanted was to travel alone.

On and on we journeyed, delayed in our progress by Gitit’s weight on the mechanical chest too weak to carry her. Grandmother-nai-Tammah made small improvements, but there was only so much she could do in the desert, far from her underground workshop and tools.

For days and days I remained resolutely silent. Grandmother, too, stopped even greeting me. She slid after Kimi into the desert that trembled with the heat’s music, returning only to break camp at high noon. We’d hoist the tent up, and she’d reinforce the pegs with her magic, three deepnames at three points making the structure stable enough that no wind could carry it away.

Even the act of it, simple and easy for a woman with so much power, reprimanded me for my uselessness. If I hadn’t lacked deepnames, I could have reinforced Gitit’s fastening. Even a single deepname, even a weak one, would have secured the magic that held the tent down, would not have failed us in the storm, would not have subjected us all to danger. Grandmother-nai-Tammah did not have to say anything. In the dimness of the tent we lay with our backs to each other, tense and miserable.

But the silence between us did not extend to Gitit. My lover, too weak to talk much, expressed gratitude at my grandmother’s offers of tea, and inquired after her health—small things that left me with a strange bitter slithering in my stomach. One day Gitit asked my grandmother about her mechanical sliding shoes, and was treated to a lengthy story of Khana women who had established, centuries ago, an underground workshop for each other, even though holy artifice was forbidden to us.

I rushed out of the tent. It was either that or screaming.

Gitit came after me. I was too upset to turn around, shaking with anger that threatened to tear me apart from within, rising inside me with devouring intensity I had never before experienced.

“What is it, heart?”

“Why do you talk to her?” I snarled at Gitit, taken aback by my vehemence and yet unable to stop. “She lied to us. She wanted to travel alone. We are a burden to her!”

“How are we a burden? She…”

“Oh, you are not a burden,” I cried. “A two-named strong of good family, of course she’d talk to you. Any strong Khana would talk to you! You’re wanted everywhere! Everywhere! It’s Kimi and I that are redundant, even to our own…”

Gitit recoiled. “She is your grandmother, Aviya-nai-Bashri. She followed us and she saved us. But you can say whatever you need to say.”

My lover turned away, and back into to the tent she slid, leaving me alone to stare at desert shrubs alive with small winds. Somewhere to the east, the snake-band of the Surun’ traveled, weaving carpet after carpet from these threads of breath. To the south-east, singers of the Maiva’at plucked feather after sunset-colored feather from Bird’s triumphant plumage. And further east beyond these lands, beyond the Old Royal’s city of eleven wells, the Loroli people walked behind the blazing star that rolled inside their sacred tumbleweed. And even farther to the east, the crags, the grass-grown mountains, and beyond them, nothing. Oh, the lands of trade and splendor that the Khana women crossed, the lands well-told and yet unknown and new—they’d be as nothing to me now, an emptiness more barren than the desert. Doesn’t she understand? Did I? Did anyone?

A bird, long-legged and bent-beaked, dove down from the sun and slid close to me, spread herself into the sand whirls at my feet; dissolved to nothingness. And I felt nothing.

• • • •

At sleep-time, Kimi brought the cloth of winds and spread it over my face. She’d never paid attention to my crying, to anyone’s, even though laughing and anger fascinated her; I do not know if she noticed my tears that time, or if the gesture was random. But I lay beneath the shivering touch of the winds, strangely comforted by the warmth that wasn’t there, by the bitter and burned smells of liongrass and stillweed that came from another time. Kimi nestled next to me. Her left hand slid under my cheek and touched the cloth of winds. Afraid to move, I lay there. Just outside the tent, the voices of Gitit and grandmother-nai-Tammah began to weave together.

“You wanted to be free,” said Gitit.

“Benesret said I could do it if I wanted. Yes, it would be difficult.”

“But you wouldn’t.”

“The cloth of winds. The birds. They come down from the sun around this time of year, to dance the sandbird dance, the change. At that time, the sandbird festival would happen in the capital. They say the Old Royal went through the change, many times—and other people. It’s harder for those with less magic, but a three-named strong could do it easily, with the help of friends.”

“And yet you wouldn’t.”

“Not me. Bashri, she said…”

And silence.

Winds stirred on my face like snakes, warm with dreams and comforting. I could not scream or think or speak. Under my cheek, Kimi’s hand made a fist.

“Tell me what she said.”

“That we should think of our lover imprisoned—and besides, what use would a man be in an oreg? The scholars would never accept me. And if I wanted to stay with them, how would we live? Wouldn’t we have to hide it anyway, wouldn’t I have to continue my life as a woman, dress as a woman, trade as a woman—and if I didn’t, what would befall us? How would we live among others? How would our children marry? Didn’t Bashri-nai-Divrah deserve a choice in this as well, a decision that would change her life entire? So many reasons to wait.”

“And you agreed.”

“Benesret—see, ah. Benesret. She made this cloth of winds for me, that would begin the spell, this promise-cloth, to come back anytime. I wanted to, after we found out what happened to Bashri-nai-Divrah. What did we have to lose now? But Bashri, Bashri-nai-Leylit, she was stricken. How could I do this to her, tear myself from her at such a time? She said that I could as a woman do all the things I wanted to do, that artifice and scholarship were still within my reach, that if I wanted still to travel and trade like a woman, to bake and to raise children like a woman, to fight and use powerful magic like a woman, then why would I even want to change? What did it even matter?”

“But you wanted to.”

“I wanted to,” grandmother said. “It’s not about what I do, as a man or as a woman. It is about how I feel, how I had always felt.”

“Yes,” said Gitit.

“And so I gave Bashri the cloth of winds. When you’re ready, tell me, give it back to me, I said. Accept me as I am, from north to south and back, a man, a woman, I will always love you, I will never leave you.”

“Did she ever?”

“She gave the keys to me so I could give the cloth to the child,” said my grandmother. “By then we were too set in our unhappiness, too tired to steer away. Like Zurya of the Maiva’at, the blessing of our love had turned into a cocoon that kept us constricted and silent until the end.”

Long silence dripped. The winds lay still upon my cheeks like ropes. I felt the weight of it, that lightlessness that bound my grandmothers in stifling closeness, in tenderness that could not let them grow. I wanted to go out, to hug grandmother-nai-Tammah to me, to ask forgiveness for assuming that she did not want us because of magic or because of Kimi; but before I could stir, Gitit spoke again.

“But you are going now.”

“I did not think I would,” said grandmother-nai-Tammah. “I gave the cloth away. But I cannot. I cannot. I am going now.”

I lay there, thoughts of movement drained from me. You’re going now. You will abandon us, you cannot bear to stay, you’re eager to abandon us. What matter why you shall abandon us?

The winds whisked my tears away, lulled me at last into an uneasy sleep. I said nothing to grandmother-nai-Tammah when we set out again, I said nothing to either of them for days. I said nothing until we saw from afar the conical, bell-topped tents of the Surun’, until the hissing snakes of air and dust arose from the ground to greet us.

• • • •

Kimi ran forward with a laugh, but grandmother grabbed her and pulled her back. “Stand still,” she hissed. My sister began to wail, hands reaching out towards an undulating vision of the serpent golden with the sun, its scales like triangular diamonds. “We have to wait for the guardians.”

On and on my sister cried, her body growing rigid and spasming, but grandmother’s grip did not slack.

A group of warriors approached us, walking slowly through dry stalks of whisperweed. They were men, deep brown in the desert heat and dressed in grassweave shirts and skirts of leather. Their hair was styled as I have never seen—cut down to springly curls and shaved to nothing on the sides, in stripes of skin that patterned after snakes. Each of the men bore a spear of dark bronze—forged beneath the ground, said my books, engraved with symbols of men’s secret stories. So similar the weapons were to those the ghost-warriors had wielded that I barely held myself from gasping.

One of the men waved at the snakes of air and shining dust. I did not see his deepnames crowning him, but something almost shimmered as the snakes collapsed into the ground.

“Greetings, Khana traders,” he said. And then, “Are you traders?”

His companions looked at us with wariness.

“I am Bashri-nai-Tammah,” my grandmother said. “A Khana from Niyaz, but not a trader.” How careful was she to avert her gaze from me, how careful to avoid the word woman. “I come to you after an old friend, Benesret e Nand e Divyát, and by her invitation.”

The men exchanged glances, and their grips on spears tightened. “Is that so?”

“I bear her sign. It is a cloth of winds.” Never relaxing her grip on Kimi, grandmother pulled the cloth out of the pocket of her kaftan. Unprisoned from the darkness of the garment, the winds whined and crackled as if before a storm, and stalks of dry grass buzzed and shook at our feet.

Grandmother, startled, tucked the cloth back in. “Benesret made it for me. She said come back any time.” Calmed by the winds, Kimi fell silent, but when grandmother-nai-Tammah hid the cloth, she sobbed again.

The leader turned to us. “And you? Do you also seek Benesret?”

I looked at Gitit, but her eyes remained fixed on the ground. With no recourse I spoke in Surun’, concentrating so hard on the enunciation that I forgot to be afraid of my words. “I am Aviya-nai-Bashri, trader, granddaughter of Bashri-nai-Tammah. This is my oreg-mate, Gitit-nai-Lur.” It grated even more to me now that we were oreg-mates and lovers, and yet we had not taken each other’s names, and lately had not exchanged even words. I barged on. “My sister…” I gulped, “Zohra-nai-Bashri, who goes by the name of Kimi…” Tight in grandmother’s arms, Kimi keened quietly, rocking back and forth as much as grandmother’s body would allow.

“Ah,” the man said. I could not guess his thoughts. Were we too strange, these generations, these silences, tensions? Why didn’t he ask after my sister? I did not know which felt better—the asking, the pity, the useless advice; or the turning away, the unseeing, the warding signs that mothers made inside their sleeves as if I wouldn’t notice after all those years—fingers moving to shield one against children born strange. The heart in my chest hung heavy and hollow, gnawed out by all the small hurts of what had already passed, of what was yet to pass. Neither Gitit nor grandmother would look at me.

The man motioned us to follow. His warriors flanked us, none of them giving us names or greetings. As we walked, the worry of it felt dull in me and pressing like the onset of nausea. The first thing I had felt in days.

My sister quieted. Hand gripped in grandmother’s, she twisted backwards to look at—there, in the dust of the trail, the golden snake with triangular scales undulated in our wake, the boundary guardian not dismissed after all. The serpent’s glimmer made a no-sound of the rain that falls in dreams. Around it, us, the air began to darken.

Shortly we reached the campsite with its conical leather tents. Small brown goats wandered in-between, not tethered, looking at us intruders with annoyance. The men led us to a large circular construction, a tent painted with serpents and strung with ropes of silver bells that made music like starlight falling. Inside it was hung with carpets, their colorful wool embroidered with plain spidersilk in triangles and squares arranged to symbolize the beasts that rose from buried bone. The tent’s floor was strewn with sturdier weavings I recognized to have been traded from further east, from the peoples of the Maiva’at and the Gehezi—thick-piled and rich with weld and madder.

Upon these carpets five women sat, the oldest in her fifties, the rest my age or younger. They were drinking tea. All turned to us, their fingers still spread with the weight of flat desert-style cups that curved slightly at the lip.

The man who brought us addressed the women in a language I did not know. I heard our names given, and the word Niyaz, and I saw the frown on his face. When he stopped, one of the women, middle-aged and stout, addressed us in Surun’. “Welcome. I am Naïr e Bulvát. My husband, Bulvát. My guests, Uiziya—”

“I know you,” said the older woman so named. “You are the three-named strong for whom the winds came shivering, for whom the bones of the old warriors awoke, the one who carried Zurya’s threads and yet refused to sing.”

The one for whom old warriors awoke…?

“I’d sing,” grandmother-nai-Tammah said, “not for the warriors or threads, but for myself, and yet it is forbidden for the women of the Khana, and so I kept quiet.”

“I remember,” said Uiziya, “how your stifled voice rattled inside you, a rotten walnut shriveled in its shell. Aunt Bene—…”

“Shhh,” said the one called Naïr e Bulvát. “Aunt.”

“No, I want to know,” said my grandmother, “I want to know what happened to Benesret.” She crossed her hands at her chest, and the women stared at her as if she’d just—

“We do not tell this tale. We do not say this name.”

Something shifted in the dimmed light of the tent. I saw—heard—

But suddenly none of this mattered to me, for grandmother’s hands no longer held Kimi.

My sister wasn’t inside.

I dodged past the men, ignoring limbs and grabbing hands, ran out. My sister, knees in dirt, was just outside, thank—

—wrestling with the snake that wound around her arms in suffocating—

I rushed forward.

Stopped.

She wasn’t wrestling. Snake and child, enraptured by each other, wound against each other—Kimi, rocking slightly, giggled as the snake’s thick yellow body slithered past her cheek.

“The guardian will not harm her,” said someone. I turned to see a young woman, one of those who sat with Naïr; older and taller than me but not by much. She wore reddish garments and simple ornaments of bronze. Her brown cheeks were rouged with orange. The other men and women poured out of the tent, surrounding my grandmother and my lover like cupped hands.

“Your grandchild is ready to take power,” said Uiziya.

“I thought she would, in the desert,” said grandmother-nai-Tammah, “when the warriors awoke and pursued us. I waited…”

“Yes?”

“And nothing.”

Naïr said, “Look at the guardian, helped in shape by your grandchild’s curiosity. This power will not be born in defense or aggression.”

“If you say so,” said grandmother dubiously. It was intense emotions—anger, pain, fear—that prompted magically apt children to take deepnames on the threshold of youth.

Uiziya drew my grandmother and others back into the tent. I stayed behind with my sister and the young woman, Leivayi, as the snake and child spun around each other in the dust. Gitit stood with us too. She said nothing. Above us, Bird pecked out small bright holes in the dark cloth of the sky.

“Gitit,” I said in our own language. “Did you hear what she said, what they said? The warriors awoke because of grandmother’s magic, and then she waited to save us because Kimi—because Kimi should have taken a deepname, but Kimi—”

My lover turned away from me.

“Gitit—”

“I do not want to hear.”

She walked off, back into the tent.

Leivayi stretched her arm out, and the snake guardian crawled over to her and wound around her shoulders, shining full, full, full with the day’s accumulated heat, a shoulder-necklace of pure sun. She offered to take both of us to a sleeping place, and I was too exhausted to argue.

My sister was too confused to recognize danger, my grandmother too focused on herself and how that measured against what was proper; my lover too loyal to speak against the one who saved her life, no matter how that life had come to be endangered. Where did this leave me? Where?

Too stubborn to…

Too stubborn to…

I did not argue with Leivayi. She seemed to have no deepnames, and her tent was dark. It smelled of leather, wool, and sweat, and sleep.

• • • •

Too stubborn to forgive.

In my dreams, snakes and children tangled under the star-embroidered sky. Grandmother-nai-Tammah sprouted wings and flew up, gleeful, unseeing. Her wings grew and grew. Joined where my grandmother’s body used to be, the wings alone soared higher, intent on flight.

• • • •

I went to see my grandmother the next day. In the tent with Naïr and Uiziya she talked and talked, not paying attention to anything.

“You should talk to the men,” said Naïr.

“No!” Was it fear that colored grandmother’s voice so? “I do not want to talk to men. I want to talk to you…”

“If you’re to be known as a man…”

Round and round they went. I entered and exited, intent to keep an eye on Kimi, but she seemed engrossed by the snake, and Leivayi watched over them both.

Towards the evening, Leivayi set up a small square loom and threaded it. My sister tangled the threads and laughed, but Leivayi patiently corrected her. She guided Kimi’s hand in hers, repeating the same motion over and over.

And in Naïr’s tent, grandmother was still talking. “Who am I to say what I should or should not be called, whether I am or am not a man already? My grandchild is a girl because she cannot talk, but she is not a girl…”

“I don’t think your grandchild knows—cares—what tai is.” Naïr used a pronoun common to many desert languages—tai, taim, tair in Surun’—that indicated ‘neither he nor she’. The Khana language lacked such a word, both in the speech the scholars used and in women’s talk. In Khana, a person was either she or he. In Khana, all the words were either she or he—carpets, carts, grains of sand, stars in the sky each had their chosen form, female or male. There was no escaping this, but the desert tongues lacked such a distinction. One could be anything. In Surun’.

“Your grandchild may never know, or it may never be important to taim. And because it is not important to taim it is not important to us what style of clothing tai wears, or whether tai chooses to spend tair days among men or among women. If tai were to learn Surun’, tai would ask to be called tai, or something else, when tai knows it. If it is important to taim. Tai might never know, we might never know. But you know. You have always known.”

“Yes, I have always known. And yet…”

“You always hesitated,” said Uiziya. “I thought it was because of your lover, but now that she is gone, I thought…”

“It’s all about Bashri. It’s always been about Bashri. After forty-four years… I do not know how to live otherwise, do not know how to live in this world without Bashri, I do not know if I want to live…”

I left them. I sought out Gitit, sat by her side while she spoke to other women of carpets that might be woven for trade. We talked later that night, awkwardly, rediscovering words, rediscovering how they hurt.

“What is it that angers you,” she asked, “this thing about the elder-nai-Tammah?”

The truth burst out of me, the shape of it before this hidden even from myself. “I would not know how to talk to her if she is a man.”

Gitit frowned. “And what if I were a man?”

“Are you?” I asked. “Are you a man?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

It doesn’t—

No. It mattered. It mattered to me. I had never talked to scholars. Marriage did not scare me, but only because it would be such a formal thing, and such a needed thing, to beget lives—but it would not really matter. Marriage was not for closeness, not for conversations or journeys. For that one had lovers, oreg-mates. If Gitit were a man, how would we trade? How would we expand our oreg, raise our children, what would the other women say? Would she even stay with me? The scholars wouldn’t accept this transformation, and in the quarter she’d have to hide, so why break your heart changing anyway?

Only after Gitit left me I remembered, with a sticky rush of shame I remembered grandmother-nai-Tammah’s words, of what my grandmother-nai-Leylit had told her. Almost the same. The same.

Dark had fallen. The stars keened above. Somewhere beyond the veil of that darkness my grandmother’s soul could not find rest, her arms outstretched towards the cloth of winds.

• • • •

Naïr and Uiziya constructed the large horizontal frame of the loom with the help of others, men and women. None of them would utter the name Benesret, would not speak of her story, but it seemed they’d keep her promise.

The women with deepnames began to sing quietly, drawing winds out of the sky to thread the warp. I could not see them, but I heard the sound they made when pulled taut on the loom—the snapping voice of strong, thin threads. Grandmother, wound tightly in veils and bent like a scholar over a tome of writ, paced around and around the construction.

Kimi learned the Surun’ words for snake, thread, and hand. The large yellow snake still followed her, and Leivayi kept teaching her to weave. Other children would join them now, pulling and pushing and giving instructions to Kimi in voices joking and serious. The youngest of these children, aged three, spoke far more better and fluidly than Kimi ever had.

They talked of my sister as tai now, but I did not. If Kimi had not decided, if Kimi did not know, then how would one pronoun be better than another? Besides, I spoke in Khana in my head, and there was no such thing as tai. She, I continued saying, she, defiant and guilt-gnawed, no longer sure whose truth was real. If only Kimi could tell me… but if Kimi could talk, she would be he. Perhaps not in her deepest heart; perhaps like grandmother-nai-Tammah she’d yearn for change, but she—he—would live in the inner quarter with the men, and would not be now traveling with me.

The day the frame was ready, Uiziya approached me. “It is better if those who love Bashri weave the cloth of transformation,” she said. I answered awkwardly, said I did not know how. And besides, I had no deepnames to weave from wind. But when Naïr and Uiziya sat down to the loom, when Leivayi and the children joined them, I could not leave, or simply watch. I sat down by Naïr and asked to be taught.

She gave me a comb of bone and gold and taught me to beat down the weft-weaves of the winds and push them tight against the ones that had come before. I did it by touch, marveling at the feel of compressed winds under my fingers, rougher than wool, prickly with sand and memory. Leivayi and other weavers without deepnames likewise wielded combs, but Kimi threw hers away and insisted on threading by hand. Her laughter rang out like a pair of bronze sticks striking the sun.

“I’m glad you are working with us,” said Uiziya. “His lover wouldn’t, all those years ago.”

I cringed. The Surun’ people had already switched to the language of he with grandmother-nai-Tammah; even Gitit had begun oh so carefully to say not grandmother but elder, one of the rare words in the Khana language used for both women and men. Grandmother-nai-Tammah had decided on the change.

I alone could not change. I alone could not let go.

• • • •

Gitit spoke to me now, small things. I lost all interest in trade, but with my permission she opened the trading chest and spread our wares, the butterflies whose fluttering brought chill, the splendid jewelry, the rods that extended and collapsed upon themselves.

She sat with those marvels under the awning of the large trade tent erected for the occasion, and women brought her tea in flat cups and goatmilk chilled with magic. At night sometimes we saw sandbirds fall down from the sky, strike sand, and dissolve with the hiss. In the city of eleven wells, the time of the sandbird dance was drawing nearer.

Gitit and I slept side by side now in the trading tent, but it had been too long since we’d made love. My body and heart yearned for hers, but thoughts and words lay cold between us like a spear of bronze forged far beneath the ground, where it is always cold.

• • • •

It happened when the cloth was almost done—a surge of power, clear yet gentle, like a push against my ribcage. Kimi laughed, a small amazed sound. She thrust her hand up in the air. Out of her fingertips came lights, small fireflies more numerous and glowing brighter than Gitit’s. They swarmed and flew and nestled on the threads.

And in that moment the whole cloth came alive before my eyes, all what I could not see before, the rainbow hues of it, the lightning running through some threads that had come from dry storms, swirling sand in others like a road of stars. My sister had taken a deepname.

Not like the usual explosions or waves of slamming anger, this nametaking was a thing of joy and glowing weft-threads, gentle. Kimi leapt up from the loom and began to spin, hands flapping at her sides, fingertips releasing more and more tiny lights that swam through the air and buzzed around her head.

It’s better if those who love Bashri, weave…

Those who love her. Love him. Love her. Love him.

Why did it matter to me so much?

Those who love, weave…

I sought out Gitit that night after we had finished weaving. My lover sat to tea with women who had bought our wares. She did not want to talk to me, but I pleaded, and at last she relented. “I do not know if I am comfortable,” I said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be, but I would give the cloth of winds back to you, I would sit down to weave for you if you wanted to change.” I am confused, I do not know if what I think is right, but it is not right to make of my love a prison for you—for anyone… “I cannot do it alone, Gitit, I have no deepnames, but with others—Kimi, too…”

She began to cry.

I cradled her to me, I whispered, “Love, I am no better than grandmother-nai-Leylit.”

“You are…”

“No, no. I would deny you, would deny myself, because I am not comfortable and I might never be with this, but it is you, it will always be you, I love you, I will never leave you.”

Grandmother-nai-Tammah had said those words to grandmother-nai-Leylit. Without these words we learned, these stories, these mistakes, we could not live. We could not grow. So life by life our lives were woven and compressed to wholeness by the combs of our speech. “I don’t know if I can explain this, but we need words. Words.”

But Gitit drew me to her, and there was no need for words after all.

Later we lay on a tight-woven carpet in the darkness of the trading tent, and Gitit put her hand on my cheek. She laughed—a high-pitched and embarrassed sound. “To answer your question… no, I am not a man.”

“You aren’t?” I felt relief and simultaneously regret, regret at not needing to live through this, and what wisdoms loomed before me on that path like blood and rubies.

“I am sorry. I am… very much like everyone. I am not special. I am a girl, I have mediocre but nice magic, I love trading… I wanted to know… I wanted to know if you’d be as fierce for me as you are for Kimi, for Bashri-nai-Tammah—”

“Bah!” I screamed. “Bah! As if I would not—as if I would not love you because you are not…gah! Not untraditional enough!”

It’s then we heard a sound of winds. Of wings. Like rustling.

• • • •

Outside, grandmother-nai-Tammah stood in veils of winds, arms up as if in prayer. Birds of bright fire fell down from the sky to wrap and wrap my elder in their wings completely, head to toe. Bashri-nai-Tammah became a figure all of sandlight, then a figure no more—a cocoon, a ball of swirling feathers, night-beguiled.

All people in the Surun’ camp woke up, went out to watch as streaks of sandlight fell and fell towards that conflagration; shooting stars from Bird. They stood, not talking, rocking slightly on their feet, and only Kimi ran around. Her waving fingers sent sparkles into the sky, to greet the birds, to dance; the snake-guardian undulated between her feet, nudging her away from the cocoon when the spinning brought her too close.

The night grew thin, and bird by bird, the starfall slowed. With a sigh, the last few sandbirds settled over my grandmother’s glowing light. And then, slowly, they began to fade, to pour in grains of sand down to the ground.

It was then we heard it—singing—from behind the veil of fiery feathers. With the first rays of dawn the singing grew louder, clearer, more intense; grandmother’s body cleared, with arms still raised up, singing for the first time the dawnsong—that sacred melody that scholars sent out every morning in supplication to the men’s god, Bird’s brother, Kimrí, that song the women were forbidden to sing.

With the last grains of sand pouring down to the ground, grandmother—grandfather?—walked over to us. He—he—looked glowing, radiant with light and newly made. His arms spread to us in a blessing, in a wave of great and unfeigned happiness.

It was at this moment that Kimi sang, artlessly but with candor, a song without words that resembled the dawnsong and also a gurgled scream, and also choking. We laughed because we had no idea what to do, and whether Kimi should be permitted to sing, and whether that even mattered.

• • • •

Grandfather was having trouble.

“You should go sit with men,” said Uiziya. They had no problem sheltering a woman, or a person who was neither, but a man basking like a lizard in a woman’s tent was pronounced unseemly.

“I said already, I have no idea how to talk to your men… I am a Khana artificer, not that my people would accept me now, or ever…”

Grandfather had regrets.

“I cannot go back. I may have a man’s body now, but not the scholars’ learning, and our men would never accept me, and I am too old to simply wander into a different city and lie my way into a Khana quarter there… although I could try… I cannot even speak the way the scholars do!”

“Or you could stay here,” said Naïr. “You really should talk to Bulvát.”

“And say what? I don’t know—”

Grandfather had hesitations.

“What should we call you now?” I asked.

“I want to still remain Bashri,” he said, “even if she wouldn’t approve. But it’s not just that she wouldn’t approve. Even to call myself nai-Tammah—for sure my grandmothers would not approve…” He cast his hands around himself. “I wish I could consult the writ! There must have been a precedent, a law… Unless they’d thrown all precedents out of the quarter…”

Grandfather had moments.

“Is there deeper meaning,” he asked Uiziya, “to my grandchild always walking around with the guardian snake? Kimi is quite powerful, I think, so it might be an omen—”

Said Uiziya, “Of course there is a deeper meaning.”

“Yes?”

“It’s a great secret.”

“Yes?”

“I will reveal it to you.”

“Yes?”

Uiziya whispered, “Your grandchild really likes snakes.”

Everybody around us burst into laughter, and grandfather was embarrassed enough to agree to go talk to Bulvát.

• • • •

That night, Gitit and I stayed up to talk. She had traded richly while I wove, and now the chest was full of goods. We wanted to move. But not to go back to Niyaz yet—no, we wanted to go on, to trade among the Maiva’at, to ask from them the story of Zurya, to see with our own eyes how threads could be woven of song. And we wanted to learn the tale of Benesret, dark and beguiling at the edges of our minds. We wanted to travel southeast, to visit the bands of spider-Surun’ and spider-Gehezi, to trade for yarn as delicate and glimmering as rays of shooting stars.

But yet we couldn’t leave. Our Kimi seemed so happy here, fitting, learning under the sky’s unending open wings. Grandfather needed help to settle, to adjust, to grieve for that which could not be redone, for people and loves gone—and we, too, needed time to think, to talk through this, to figure out how to live with a grandfather who was of flesh and bone rather than a disembodied name of a scholar behind the wall. We weren’t sure if he’d want to travel on with us, or stay, or go home—if that was even possible. We were still getting used to “he”.

And we were talking more about “tai” now, how it meant—not a decision, but simply that Kimi had not decided, and therefore we should not decide either. But we could only do this in Surun’. There were so many things that we could say and think in Surun’ but not in our own language. We wanted at least to know what to call grandfather now; and he was not ready to name himself yet.

But it seemed that we were ready to name ourselves.

“I’ll take your name,” I said, “You are the strongest of us.”

“Bah,” she said. “I far prefer Aviya to Gitit.”

“It is traditional for the oreg to be named after the strongest, unless there is something wrong with her…”

Gitit grimaced. “Try again.”

I scratched my head.

“What difference will it make?,” Gitit said. “Our lives already deviate from the great pattern.”

“Hah,” I said. “Are you trying to make me feel better about not having magic?”

“Aaaaa…” she moaned. “Enough, enough. You don’t feel bad about not having magic. I like the name Aviya, I love you, why must you be this stubborn? Why can’t you say yes for a change?”

You cannot still be worried that there’s nothing strange about you… how to say this… “My dear trader-nai-Lur,” I began.

“Please. Aviya-nai-Lur.”

“Oh, very well,” I said, exasperated. “But you’ll explain this to our grandchildren, I will want nothing to do with this.”

She laughed. “I will be glad to tell this tale, grandmother-nai-Bashri.”

“Along with many others, oh grandmother-nai-Lur.”

“Oh yes,” she laughed. “Oh yes.”

There would be many other tales.

Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Rose’s work has appeared in Lightspeed’s Queer Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Unlikely Story, Uncanny, and other venues. Their Birdverse novelette “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and longlisted for the Hugo Award and the Tiptree Award. Rose’s poems have won the Rannu competition, placed in the Rhysling award, and won and placed in the Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll. Rose’s debut poetry collection, MARGINALIA TO STONE BIRD, is available from Aqueduct Press (2016). Rose can be found on Twitter as @roselemberg, on Patreon at http://patreon.com/roselemberg, and on http://roselemberg.net

Another Word For World
By Ann Leckie

Ashiban Xidyla had a headache. A particularly vicious one, centered somewhere on the top of her head. She sat curled over her lap, in her seat on the flier, eyes closed. Oddly, she had no memory of leaning forward, and—now she thought of it—no idea when the headache had begun.

The Gidanta had been very respectful so far, very solicitous of Ashiban’s age, but that was, she was sure, little more than the entirely natural respect for one’s elders. This was not a time when she could afford any kind of weakness. Ashiban was here to prevent a war that would quite possibly end with the Gidanta slaughtering every one of Ashiban’s fellow Raksamat on the planet. The Sovereign of Iss, hereditary high priestess of the Gidanta, sat across the aisle, silent and veiled, her interpreter beside her. What must they be thinking?

Ashiban took three careful breaths. Straightened cautiously, wary of the pain flaring. Opened her eyes.

Ought to have seen blue sky through the flier’s front window past the pilot’s seat, ought to have heard the buzz of the engine. Instead she saw shards of brown and green and blue. Heard nothing. She closed her eyes, opened them again. Tried to make some sense of things. They weren’t falling, she was sure. Had the flier landed, and she hadn’t noticed?

A high, quavering voice said something, syllables that made no sense to Ashiban. “We have to get out of here,” said a calm, muffled voice somewhere at Ashiban’s feet. “Speaker is in some distress.” Damn. She’d forgotten to turn off the translating function on her handheld. Maybe the Sovereign’s interpreter hadn’t heard it. She turned her head to look across the flier’s narrow aisle, wincing at the headache.

The Sovereign’s interpreter lay in the aisle, his head jammed up against the back of the pilot’s seat at an odd, awkward angle. The high voice spoke again, and in the small bag at Ashiban’s feet her handheld said, “Disregard the dead. We have to get out of here or we will also die. The speaker is in some distress.”

In her own seat, the pink- and orange- and blue-veiled Sovereign fumbled at the safety restraints. The straps parted with a click, and the Sovereign stood. Stepped into the aisle, hiking her long blue skirt. Spoke—it must have been the Sovereign speaking all along. “Stupid cow,” said Ashiban’s handheld, in her bag. “Speaker’s distress has increased.”

The flier lurched. The Sovereign cried out. “No translation available,” remarked Ashiban’s handheld, as the Sovereign reached forward to tug at Ashiban’s own safety restraints and, once those had come undone, grab Ashiban’s arm and pull.

The flier had crashed. The flier had crashed, and the Sovereign’s interpreter must have gotten out of his seat for some reason, at just the wrong time. Ashiban herself must have hit her head. That would explain the memory gap, and the headache. She blinked again, and the colored shards where the window should have been resolved into cracked glass, and behind it sky, and flat ground covered in brown and green plants, here and there some white or pink. “We should stay here and wait for help,” Ashiban said. In her bag, her handheld said something incomprehensible.

The Sovereign pulled harder on Ashiban’s arm. “You stupid expletive cow,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign picked Ashiban’s bag up from her feet. “Someone shot us down, and we crashed in the expletive High Mires. The expletive expletive is expletive sinking into the expletive bog. If we stay here we’ll drown. The speaker is highly agitated.” The flier lurched again.

It all seemed so unreal. Concussion, Ashiban thought. I have a concussion, and I’m not thinking straight. She took her bag from the Sovereign, rose, and followed the Sovereign of Iss to the emergency exit.

• • • •

Outside the flier, everything was a brown and green plain, blue sky above. The ground swelled and rolled under Ashiban’s feet, but given the flier behind her, half-sunk into the gray-brown ground, and the pain in her head, she wasn’t sure if it was really doing that or if it was a symptom of concussion.

The Sovereign said something. The handheld in Ashiban’s bag spoke, but it was lost in the open space and the breeze and Ashiban’s inability to concentrate.

The Sovereign yanked Ashiban’s bag from her, pulled it open. Dug out the handheld. “Expletive,” said the handheld. “Expletive expletive. We are standing on water. The speaker is agitated.”

“What?” The flier behind them, sliding slowly into the mire, made a gurgling sound. The ground was still unsteady under Ashiban’s feet, she still wasn’t sure why.

“Water! The speaker is emphatic.” The Sovereign gestured toward the greenish-brown mat of moss beneath them.

“Help will come,” Ashiban said. “We should stay here.”

“They shot us down,” said the handheld. “The speaker is agitated and emphatic.”

“What?”

“They shot us down. I saw the pilot shot through the window, I saw them die. Timran was trying to take control of the flier when we crashed. Whoever comes, they are not coming to help us. We have to get to solid ground. We have to hide. The speaker is emphatic. The speaker is in some distress. The speaker is agitated.” The Sovereign took Ashiban’s arm and pulled her forward.

“Hide?” There was nowhere to hide. And the ground swelled and sank, like waves on the top of water. She fell to her hands and knees, nauseated.

“Translation unavailable,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign dropped down beside her. “Crawl then, but come with me or be dead. The speaker is emphatic. The speaker is in some distress.” The Sovereign crawled away, the ground still heaving.

“That’s my bag,” said Ashiban. “That’s my handheld.” The Sovereign continued to crawl away. “There’s nowhere to hide!” But if she stayed where she was, on her hands and knees on the unsteady ground, she would be all alone here, and all her things gone and her head hurting and her stomach sick and nothing making sense. She crawled after the Sovereign.

By the time the ground stopped roiling, the squishy wet moss had changed to stiff, spiky-leaved meter-high plants that scratched Ashiban’s face and tore at her sodden clothes. “Come here,” said her handheld, somewhere up ahead. “Quickly. Come here. The speaker is agitated.” Ashiban just wanted to lie down where she was, close her eyes, and go to sleep. But the Sovereign had her bag. There was a bottle of water in her bag. She kept going.

Found the Sovereign prone, veilless, pulling off her bright-colored skirts to ball them up beneath herself. Underneath her clothes she wore a plain brown shirt and leggings, like any regular Gidanta. “Ancestors!” panted Ashiban, still on hands and knees, not sure where there was room to lie down. “You’re just a kid! You’re younger than my grandchildren!”

In answer the Sovereign took hold of the collar of Ashiban’s jacket and yanked her down to the ground. Ashiban cried out, and heard her handheld say something incomprehensible, presumably the Gidantan equivalent of No translation available. Pain darkened her vision, and her ears roared. Or was that the flier the Sovereign had said she’d heard?

The Sovereign spoke. “Stupid expletive expletive expletive, lie still,” said Ashiban’s handheld calmly. “Speaker is in some distress.”

Ashiban closed her eyes. Her head hurt, and her twig-scratched face stung, but she was very, very tired.

• • • •

A calm voice was saying, “Wake up, Ashiban Xidyla. The speaker is distressed.” Over and over again. She opened her eyes. The absurdly young Sovereign of Iss lay in front of her, brown cheek pressed against the gray ground, staring at Ashiban, twigs and spiny leaves caught in the few trailing braids that had come loose from the hair coiled at the top of her head. Her eyes were red and puffy, as though she had been crying, though her expression gave no sign of it. She clutched Ashiban’s handheld in one hand. Nineteen at most, Ashiban thought. Probably younger. “Are you awake, Ashiban Xidyla? The speaker is distressed.”

“My head doesn’t hurt,” Ashiban observed. Despite that, everything still seemed slippery and unreal.

“I took the emergency medical kit on our way off the flier,” the handheld said, translating the Sovereign’s reply. “I put a corrective on your forehead. It’s not the right kind, though. The instructions say to take you to a doctor right away. The speaker is…”

“Translation preferences,” interrupted Ashiban. “Turn off emotional evaluation.” The handheld fell silent. “Have you called for help, Sovereign? Is help coming?”

“You are very stupid,” said Ashiban’s handheld. Said the Sovereign of Iss. “Or the concussion is dangerously severe. Our flier was shot down. Twenty minutes after that a flier goes back and forth over us as though it is looking for something, but we are in the High Mires, no one lives here. If we call for help, who is nearest? The people who shot us down.”

“Who would shoot us down?”

“Someone who wants war between Gidanta and Raksamat. Someone with a grudge against your mother, the sainted Ciwril Xidyla. Someone with a grudge against my grandmother, the previous Sovereign.”

“Not likely anyone Raksamat then,” said Ashiban, and immediately regretted it. She was here to foster goodwill between her people and the Sovereign’s, because the Gidanta had trusted her mother, Ciwril Xidyla, and so they might listen to her daughter. “There are far more of you down here than Raksamat settlers. If it came to a war, the Raksamat here would be slaughtered. I don’t think any of us wants that.”

“We will argue in the future,” said the Sovereign. “So long as whoever it is does not manage to kill us. I have been thinking. They did not see us, under the plants, but maybe they will come back and look for us with infrared. They may come back soon. We have to reach the trees north of here.”

“I can use my handheld to just contact my own people,” said Ashiban. “Just them. I trust them.”

“Do you?” asked the Sovereign. “But maybe the deaths of some Raksamat settlers will be the excuse they need to bring a war that kills all the Gidanta so they can have the world for themselves. Maybe your death would be convenient for them.”

“That’s ridiculous!” exclaimed Ashiban. She pushed herself to sitting, not too quickly, wary of the pain in her head returning, of her lingering dizziness. “I’m talking about my friends.”

“Your friends are far away,” said the Sovereign. “They would call on others to come find us. Do you trust those others?” The girl seemed deadly serious. She sat up. “I don’t.” She tucked Ashiban’s handheld into her waistband, picked up her bundle of skirts and veils.

“That’s my handheld! I need it!”

“You’ll only call our deaths down with it,” said the Sovereign. “Die if you want to.” She rose, and trudged away through the stiff, spiky vegetation.

Ashiban considered tackling the girl and taking back her handheld. But the Sovereign was young, and while Ashiban was in fairly good shape considering her age, she had never been an athlete, even in her youth. And that was without considering the head injury.

She stood. Carefully, still dizzy, joints stiff. Where the flier had been was only black water, strips and chunks of moss floating on its surface, all of it surrounded by a flat carpet of yet more moss. She remembered the Sovereign saying We’re standing on water! Remembered the swell and roll of the ground that had made her drop to her hands and knees.

She closed her eyes. She thought she vaguely remembered sitting in her seat on the flier, the Sovereign crying out, her interpreter getting out of his seat to rush forward to where the pilot slumped over the controls.

Shot down. If that was true, the Sovereign was right. Calling for help—if she could find some way to do that without her handheld—might well be fatal. Whoever it was had considered both Ashiban and the Sovereign of Iss acceptable losses. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted both of them dead. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted the war that had threatened for the past two years to become deadly real.

But nobody wanted that. Not even the Gidanta who had never been happy with Ashiban’s people’s presence in the system wanted that, Ashiban was sure.

She opened her eyes. Saw the girl’s back as she picked her way through the mire. Saw far off on the northern horizon the trees the girl had mentioned. “Ancestors!” cried Ashiban. “I’m too old for this.” And she shouldered her bag and followed the Sovereign of Iss.

Eventually Ashiban caught up, though the Sovereign didn’t acknowledge her in any way. They trudged through the hip-high scrub in silence for some time, only making the occasional hiss of annoyance at particularly troublesome branches. The clear blue sky clouded over, and a damp-smelling wind rose. A relief—the bright sun had hurt Ashiban’s eyes. As the trees on the horizon became more definitely a band of trees—still dismayingly far off—Ashiban’s thoughts, which had this whole time been slippery and tenuous, began to settle into something like a comprehensible pattern.

Shot down. Ashiban was sure none of her people wanted war. Though off-planet the Raksamat weren’t quite so vulnerable—were, in fact, much better armed. The ultimate outcome of an actual war would probably not favor the Gidanta. Or Ashiban didn’t think so. It was possible some Raksamat faction actually wanted such a war. And Ashiban wasn’t really anyone of any significance to her own people.

Her mother had been. Her mother, Ciwril Xidyla, had negotiated the Treaty of Eatu with the then-Sovereign of Iss, ensuring the right of the Raksamat to live peacefully in the system, and on the planet. Ciwril had been widely admired among both Raksamat and Gidanta. As her daughter, Ashiban was only a sign, an admonition to remember her mother. If her side could think it acceptable to sacrifice the lives of their own people on the planet, they would certainly not blink at sacrificing Ashiban herself. She didn’t want to believe that, though, that her own people would do such a thing.

Would the Gidanta be willing to kill their own Sovereign for the sake of a war? An hour ago—or however long they had been trudging across the mire, Ashiban wasn’t sure—she’d have said certainly not. The Sovereign of Iss was a sacred figure. She was the conduit between the Gidanta and the spirit of the world of Iss, which spoke to them with the Sovereign’s voice. Surely they wouldn’t kill her just to forward a war that would be disastrous for both sides?

“Sovereign.”

A meter ahead of Ashiban, the girl kept trudging. Looked briefly over her shoulder. “What?”

“Where are you going?”

The Sovereign didn’t even turn her head this time. “There’s a monitoring station on the North Udran Plain.”

That had to be hundreds of kilometers away, and that wasn’t counting the fact that if this was indeed the High Mires, they were on the high side of the Scarp and would certainly have to detour to get down to the plains.

“On foot? That could take weeks, if we even ever get there. We have no food, no water.” Well, Ashiban had about a third of a liter in a bottle in her bag, but that hardly counted. “No camping equipment.”

The Sovereign just scoffed and kept walking.

“Young lady,” began Ashiban, but then remembered herself at that age. Her own children and grandchildren. Adolescence was trying enough without the fate of your people resting on your shoulders, and being shot down and stranded in a bog. “I thought the current Sovereign was fifty or sixty. The daughter of the woman who was Sovereign when my mother was here last.”

“You’re not supposed to talk like we’re all different people,” said the girl. “We’re all the voice of the world spirit. And you mean my aunt. She abdicated last week.”

“Abdicated!” Mortified by her mistake—Ashiban had been warned over and over about the nature of the Sovereign of Iss, that she was not an individual, that referring to her as such would be an offense. “I didn’t know that was possible.” And surely at a time like this, the Sovereign wouldn’t want to drop so much responsibility on a teenager.

“Of course it’s possible. It’s just a regular priesthood. It never was particularly special. It was you Raksamat who insisted on translating Sovereign as Sovereign. And it’s you Raksamat whose priests are always trancing out and speaking for your ancestors. Voice of Iss doesn’t mean that at all.”

“Translating Sovereign as Sovereign?” asked Ashiban. “What is that supposed to mean?” The girl snorted. “And how can the Voice of Iss not mean exactly that?” The Sovereign didn’t answer, just kept walking.

After a long silence, Ashiban said, “Then why do any of the Gidanta listen to you? And who is it my mother was negotiating with?”

The Sovereign looked back at Ashiban and rolled her eyes. “With the interpreter, of course. And if your mother didn’t know that, she was completely stupid. And nobody listens to me.” The voice of the translating handheld was utterly calm and neutral, but the girl’s tone was contemptuous. “That’s why I’m stuck here. And it wasn’t about us listening to the voice of the planet. It was about you listening to us. You wouldn’t talk to the Terraforming Council because you wouldn’t accept they were an authority, and besides, you didn’t like what they were saying.”

“An industrial association is not a government!” Seeing the girl roll her eyes again, Ashiban wondered fleetingly what her words sounded like in Gidantan—if the handheld was making industrial association and government into the same words, the way it obviously had when it had said for the girl, moments ago, translating Sovereign as Sovereign. But that was ridiculous. The two weren’t the same thing at all.

The Sovereign stopped. Turned to face Ashiban. “We have been here for two thousand years. For all that time, we have been working on this planet, to make it a place we could live without interference. We came here, to this place without an intersystem gate, so that no one would bother us and we could live in peace. You turned up less than two centuries ago, now most of the hard work is done, and you want to tell us what to do with our planet, and who is or isn’t an authority!”

“We were refugees. We came here by accident, and we can’t very well leave. And we brought benefits. You’ve been cut off from the outside for so long, you didn’t have medical correctives. Those have saved lives, Sovereign. And we’ve brought other things.” Including weapons the Gidanta didn’t have. “Including our own knowledge of terraforming, and how to best manage a planet.”

“And you agreed, your own mother, the great Ciwril Xidyla agreed, that no one would settle on the planet without authorization from the Terraforming Council! And yet there are dozens of Raksamat farmsteads just in the Saunn foothills, and more elsewhere.”

“That wasn’t the agreement. The treaty explicitly states that we have a right to be here, and a right to share in the benefits of living on this planet. Your own grandmother agreed to that! And small farmsteads are much better for the planet than the cities the Terraforming Council is intending.” Wind gusted, and a few fat drops of rain fell.

“My grandmother agreed to nothing! It was the gods-cursed interpreter who made the agreement. And he was appointed by the Terraforming Council, just like all of them! And how dare you turn up here after we’ve done all the hard work and think because you brought us some technology you can tell us what to do with our planet!”

“How can you own a planet? You can’t, it’s ridiculous! There’s more than enough room for all of us.”

“I’ve memorized it, you know,” said the Sovereign. “The entire agreement. It’s not that long. Settlement will only proceed according to the current consensus regarding the good of the planet. That’s what it says, right there in the second paragraph.”

Ashiban knew that sentence by heart. Everyone knew that sentence by now. Arguments over what current consensus regarding the good of the planet might mean were inescapable—and generally, in Ashiban’s opinion, made in bad faith. The words were clear enough. “There’s nothing about the Terraforming Council in that sentence.” Like most off-planet Raksamat, Ashiban didn’t speak the language of the Gidanta. But—also like most off-planet Raksamat—she had a few words and phrases, and she knew the Gidantan for Terraforming Council. Had heard the girl speak the sentence, knew there was no mention of the council.

The Sovereign cried out in apparent anger and frustration. “How can you? How can you stand there and say that, as though you have not just heard me say it?”

Overhead, barely audible over the sound of the swelling rain, the hum of a flier engine. The Sovereign looked up.

“It’s help,” said Ashiban. Angry, yes, but she could set that aside at the prospect of rescue. Of soon being somewhere warm, and dry, and comfortable. Her clothes—plain, green trousers and shirt, simple, soft flat shoes—had not been chosen with any anticipation of a trek through mud and weeds, or standing in a rain shower. “They must be looking for us.”

The Sovereign’s eyes widened. She spun and took off running through the thick, thigh-high plants, toward the trees.

“Wait!” cried Ashiban, but the girl kept moving.

Ashiban turned to scan the sky, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand. Was there anything she could do to attract the attention of the flier? Her own green clothes weren’t far off the green of the plants she stood among, but she didn’t trust the flat, brownish-green mossy stretches that she and the Sovereign had been avoiding. She had nothing that would light up, and the girl had fled with Ashiban’s handheld, which she could have used to try to contact the searchers.

A crack echoed across the mire, and a few meters to Ashiban’s left, leaves and twigs exploded. The wind gusted again, harder than before, and she shivered.

And realized that someone had just fired at her. That had been a gunshot, and there was no one here to shoot at her except that approaching flier, which was, Ashiban saw, coming straight toward her, even though with the clouds and the rain, and the green of her clothes and the green of the plants she stood in, she could not have been easy to see.

Except maybe in the infrared. Even without the cold rain coming down, she must glow bright and unmistakable in infrared.

Ashiban turned and ran. Or tried to, wading through the plants toward the trees, twigs catching her trousers. Another crack, and she couldn’t go any faster than she was, though she tried, and the wind blew harder, and she hoped she was moving toward the trees.

Three more shots in quick succession, the wind blowing harder, nearly pushing her over, and Ashiban stumbled out of the plants onto a stretch of open moss that trembled under her as she ran, gasping, cold, and exhausted, toward another patch of those thigh-high weeds, and the shadow of trees beyond. Below her feet the moss began to come apart, fraying, loosening, one more wobbling step and she would sink into the black water of the mire below, but another shot cracked behind her and she couldn’t stop, and there was no safe direction, she could only go forward. She ran on. And then, with hopefully solid ground a single step ahead, the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, and the moss gave way underneath her.

She plunged downward, into cold water. Made a frantic, scrabbling grab, got hold of one tough plant stem. Tried to pull herself up, but could not. The rain poured down, and her grip on the plant stem began to slip.

A hand grabbed her arm. Someone shouted something incomprehensible—it was the Sovereign of Iss, rain streaming down her face, braids plastered against her neck and shoulders. The girl grabbed the back of Ashiban’s shirt with her other hand, leaned back, pulling Ashiban up a few centimeters, and Ashiban reached forward and grabbed another handful of plant, and somehow scrambled free of the water, onto the land, and she and the Sovereign half-ran, half-stumbled forward into the trees.

Where the rain was less but still came down. And they needed better cover, they needed to go deeper into the trees. Ancestors grant the woods ahead were thick enough to hide them from the flier, and Ashiban wanted to tell the Sovereign that they needed to keep running, but the girl didn’t stop until Ashiban, unable to move a single step more, collapsed at the bottom of a tree.

The Sovereign dropped down beside her. There was no sound but their gasping, and the rain hissing through the branches above.

One of Ashiban’s shoes had come off, somewhere. Her arm, which the Sovereign had pulled on to get her up out of the water, ached. Her back hurt, and her legs. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and she shivered, with cold or with fear she wasn’t sure.

• • • •

The rain lessened not long after, and stopped at some point during the night. Ashiban woke shivering, the Sovereign huddled beside her. Pale sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, and the leaf-covered ground was sodden. So was Ashiban.

She was hungry, too. Wasn’t food the whole point of planets? Surely there would be something to eat, it would just be a question of knowing what there was, and how to eat it safely. Water might well be a bigger problem than food. Ashiban opened her bag—which by some miracle had stayed on her shoulder through everything—and found her half-liter bottle of water, still about three-quarters full. If she’d had her wits about her last night, she’d have opened it in the rain, to collect as much as she could.

“Well,” Ashiban said, “here we are.”

Silence. Not a word from the handheld. The Sovereign uncurled herself from where she huddled against Ashiban. Put a hand on her waist, where the handheld had been tucked into her waistband. Looked at Ashiban.

The handheld was gone. “Oh, Ancestors,” said Ashiban. And after another half-panicked second, carefully got to her feet from off the ground—something that hadn’t been particularly easy for a decade or two, even without yesterday’s hectic flight and a night spent cold and soaking wet, sleeping sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree—and retraced their steps. The Sovereign joined her.

As far back as they went (apparently neither of them was willing to go all the way back to the mire), they found only bracken, and masses of wet, dead leaves.

Ashiban looked at the damp and shivering Sovereign. Who looked five or six years younger than she’d looked yesterday. The Sovereign said nothing, but what was there to say? Without the handheld, or some other translation device, they could barely talk to each other at all. Ashiban herself knew only a few phrases in Gidantan. Hello and good-bye and I don’t understand Gidantan. She could count from one to twelve. A few words and phrases more, none of them applicable to being stranded in the woods on the edge of the High Mires. Ironic, since her mother Ciwril had been an expert in the language. It was her mother’s work that had made the translation devices as useful as they were, that had allowed the Raksamat and Gidanta to speak to each other. And who is it my mother was negotiating with? With the interpreter, of course.

No point thinking about that just now. The immediate problem was more than enough.

Someone had shot down their flier yesterday, and then apparently flown away. Hours later they had returned, so that they could shoot at Ashiban and the Sovereign as they fled. It didn’t make sense.

The Gidanta had guns, of course, knew how to make them. But they didn’t have many. Since they had arrived here, most of their energies had been devoted to the terraforming of Iss, and during much of that time they’d lived in space, on stations, an environment in which projectile weapons potentially caused far more problems than they might solve, even when it came to deadly disputes.

That attitude had continued when they had moved down to the planet. There were police, and some of the Terraforming Council had bodyguards, and Ashiban didn’t doubt there were people who specialized in fighting, including firing guns, but there was no Gidanta military, no army, standing or otherwise. Fliers for cargo or for personal transport, but not for warfare. Guns for hunting, not designed to kill people efficiently.

The Raksamat, Ashiban’s own people, had come into the system armed. But none of those weapons were on the planet. Or Ashiban didn’t think they were. So, a hunting gun and a personal flier. She wanted to ask the Sovereign, standing staring at Ashiban, still shivering, if the girl had seen the other flier. But she couldn’t, not without that handheld.

But it didn’t matter, this moment, why it had happened the way it had. There was no way to tell who had tried to kill them. No way to know what or who they would find if they returned to the mire, to where their own flier had sunk under the black water and the moss.

Her thoughts were going in circles. Whether it was the night spent in the cold, and the hunger and the fear, or whether it was the remnants of her concussion—and what had the Sovereign of Iss said, that the corrective hadn’t been the right sort and she should get to a doctor as soon as possible?—or maybe all of those, Ashiban didn’t know.

Yesterday the Sovereign had said there was a monitoring station on the Udran Plains, which lay to the north of the Scarp. There would be people at a monitoring station—likely all of them Gidanta. Very possibly not favorably disposed toward Ashiban, no matter whose daughter she was.

But there would be dozens, maybe even hundreds of people at a monitoring station, any of whom might witness an attempt to murder Ashiban, and all of whom would be outraged at an attempt to harm the Sovereign of Iss. There was no one at the crash site on the mire to see what happened to them.

“Which way?” Ashiban asked the girl.

Who looked up at the leaf-dappled sky above them, and then pointed back into the woods, the way they had come. Said something Ashiban didn’t understand. Watched Ashiban expectantly. Something about the set of her jaw suggested to Ashiban that the girl was trying very hard not to cry.

“All right,” said Ashiban, and turned and began walking back the way they had come, the Sovereign of Iss alongside her.

• • • •

They shared out the water between them as they went. There was less food in the woods than Ashiban would have expected, or at least neither of them knew where or how to find it. No doubt the Sovereign of Iss, at her age, was hungrier even than Ashiban, but she didn’t complain, just walked forward. Once they heard the distant sound of a flier, presumably looking for them, but the Sovereign of Iss showed no sign of being tempted to go back. Ashiban thought of those shots, of plunging into cold, black water, and shivered.

Despite herself, Ashiban began imagining what she would eat if she were at home. The nutrient cakes that everyone had eaten every day until they had established contact with the Gidanta. They were traditional for holidays, authentic Raksamat cuisine, and Ashiban’s grandmother had despised them, observed wryly on every holiday that her grandchildren would not eat them with such relish if that had been their only food for years. Ashiban would like a nutrient cake now.

Or some fish. Or snails. Surely there might be snails in the woods? But Ashiban wasn’t sure how to find them.

Or grubs. A handful of toasted grubs, with a little salt, maybe some cumin. At home they were an expensive treat, either harvested from a station’s agronomy unit, or shipped up from Iss itself. Ashiban remembered a school trip, once, when she’d been much, much younger, a tour of the station’s food-growing facilities, remembered an agronomist turning over the dirt beside a row of green, sharp-smelling plants to reveal a grub, curled and white in the dark soil. Remembered one of her schoolmates saying the sight made them hungry.

She stopped. Pushed aside the leaf mold under her feet. Looked around for a stick.

The Sovereign of Iss stopped, turned to look at Ashiban. Said something in Gidantan that Ashiban assumed was some version of What are you doing?

“Grubs,” said Ashiban. That word she knew—the Gidanta sold prepackaged toasted grubs harvested from their own orbital agronomy projects, and the name was printed on the package.

The Sovereign blinked at her. Frowned. Seemed to think for a bit, and then said, “Fire?” in Gidantan. That was another word Ashiban knew—nearly everyone in the system recognized words in either language that might turn up in a safety alert.

There was no way to make a fire that Ashiban could think of. Her bag held only their now nearly empty bottle of water. People who lived in space generally didn’t walk around with the means for producing an open flame. Here on Iss things might be different, but if the Sovereign had been carrying fire-making tools, she’d lost them in the mire. “No fire,” Ashiban said. “We’ll have to eat anything we find raw.” The Sovereign of Iss frowned, and then went kicking through the leaf mold for a couple of sturdy sticks.

The few grubs they dug up promised more nearby. There was no water to wash the dirt off them, and they were unpleasant to eat while raw and wiggling, but they were food.

Their progress slowed as they stopped every few steps to dig for more grubs, or to replace a broken stick. But after a few hours, or at least what Ashiban took to be a few hours—she had no way of telling time beyond the sunlight, and had no experience with that—their situation seemed immeasurably better than it had before they’d eaten.

They filled Ashiban’s bag with grubs, and walked on until night fell, and slept, shivering, huddled together. Ashiban was certain she would never be warm again, would always be chilled to her bones. But she could think straighter, or at least it seemed like she could. The girl’s plan to walk down to the plains was still outrageous, still seemed all but impossible, but it also seemed like the only way forward.

• • • •

By the end of the next day, Ashiban was more sick of raw and gritty grubs than she could possibly say. And by the afternoon of the day after that, the trees thinned and they were faced with a wall of brambles. They turned to parallel the barrier, walked east for a while, until they came to a relatively clear space—a tunnel of thorny branches arching over a several-meters-wide shelf of reddish-brown rock jutting out of the soil. Ashiban peered through and saw horizon, gestured to the Sovereign of Iss to look.

The Sovereign pulled her head back out of the tunnel, looked at Ashiban, and said something long and incomprehensible.

“Right,” said Ashiban. In her own language. There was no point trying to ask her question in Gidantan. “Do we want to go through here and keep going north until we find the edge of the Scarp, and turn east until we find a way down to the plain? Or do we want to keep going east like we have been and hope we find something?”

With her free hand—her other one held the water bottle that no longer fit in Ashiban’s grub-filled bag—the Sovereign waved away the possibility of her having understood Ashiban.

Ashiban pointed north, toward the brambles. “Scarp,” she said, in Gidantan. It was famous enough that she knew that one.

“Yes,” agreed the Sovereign, in that same language. And then, to Ashiban’s surprise, added, in Raksamat, “See.” She held her hands up to her eyes, miming a scope. Then waved an arm expansively. “Scarp see big.”

“Good point,” agreed Ashiban. On the edge of the Scarp, they could see where they were, and take their direction from that, instead of wandering and hoping they arrived somewhere. “Yes,” she said in Gidantan. “Good.” She gestured at the thorny tunnel of brambles.

The Sovereign of Iss just stared at her. Ashiban sighed. Made sure her bag was securely closed. Gingerly got down on her hands and knees and crawled under the brambles.

The tunnel wasn’t long, just three or four meters, but Ashiban took it slowly, the bag dragging beside her, thorns tearing at her clothes and her face. Knees and wrists and shoulders aching. When she got home, she was going to talk to the doctor about joint repairs, even if having all of them done at once would lay her up for a week or more.

Her neck and shoulders as stiff as they were, Ashiban was looking down at the red-brown rock when she came out of the bramble tunnel. She inched herself carefully free of the thorns and then began to contemplate getting herself to her feet. She would wait for the Sovereign, perhaps, and let the girl help her to standing.

Ashiban pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and then reached forward. Her hand met nothingness. Unbalanced, tipping in the direction of her outstretched hand, she saw the edge of the rock she crawled on, and nothing else.

Nothing but air. And far, far below—nearly a kilometer, she remembered hearing in some documentary about the Scarp—the green haze of the plains. Behind her the Sovereign of Iss made a strangled cry, and grabbed Ashiban’s legs before she could tip all the way forward.

They stayed that way, frozen for a few moments, the Sovereign gripping Ashiban’s legs, Ashiban’s hand outstretched over the edge of the Scarp. Then the Sovereign whimpered. Ashiban wanted to join her. Wanted, actually, to scream. Carefully placed her outstretched hand on the edge of the cliff, and pushed herself back, and looked up.

The line of brambles stopped a bit more than a meter from the cliff edge. Room enough for her to scoot carefully over and sit. But the Sovereign would not let go of her legs. And Ashiban had no way to ask her to. Silently, and not for the first time, she cursed the loss of the handheld.

The Sovereign whimpered again. “Ashiban Xidyla!” she cried, in a quavering voice.

“I’m all right,” Ashiban said, and her own voice was none too steady. “I’m all right, you got me just in time. You can let go now.” But of course the girl couldn’t understand her. She tried putting one leg back, and slowly, carefully, the Sovereign let go and edged back into the tunnel of brambles. Slowly, carefully, Ashiban got herself from hands and knees to sitting by the mouth of that tunnel, and looked out over the edge of the Scarp.

A sheer cliff some six hundred kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high, the Scarp loomed over the Udran Plains to the north, grassland as far as Ashiban could see, here and there a patch of trees, or the blue and silver of water. Far off to the northwest shone the bright ribbon of a river.

In the middle of the green, on the side of a lake, lay a small collection of roads and buildings, how distant Ashiban couldn’t guess. “Sovereign, is that the monitoring station?” Ashiban didn’t see anything else, and it seemed to her that she could see quite a lot of the plains from where she sat. It struck her then that this could only be a small part of the plains, as long as the Scarp was, and she felt suddenly lost and despairing. “Sovereign, look!” She glanced over at the mouth of the bramble tunnel.

The Sovereign of Iss lay facedown, arms flat in front of her. She said something into the red-brown rock below her.

“Too high?” asked Ashiban.

“High,” agreed the Sovereign, into the rock, in her small bit of Raksamat. “Yes.”

And she had lunged forward to grab Ashiban and keep her from tumbling over the edge. “Look, Sovereign, is that the…” Ashiban wished she knew how to say monitoring station in Gidantan. Tried to remember what the girl had said, days ago, when she’d mentioned it, but Ashiban had only been listening to the handheld translation. “Look. See. Please, Sovereign.” Slowly, hesitantly, the Sovereign of Iss raised her head. Kept the rest of herself flat against the rock. Ashiban pointed. “How do we get there? How did you mean us to get there?” Likely there were ways to descend the cliff face. But Ashiban had no way of knowing where or how to do that. And given the state the Sovereign was in right now, Ashiban would guess she didn’t either. Hadn’t had any idea what she was getting into when she’d decided to come this way.

She’d have expected better knowledge of the planet from the Sovereign of Iss, the voice of the planet itself. But then, days back, the girl had said that it was Ashiban’s people, the Raksamat, who thought of that office in terms of communicating with the Ancestors, that it didn’t mean that at all to the Gidanta. Maybe that was true, and even if it wasn’t, this girl—Ashiban still didn’t know her name, likely never would, addressing her by it would be the height of disrespect even from her own mother now that she was the Sovereign—had been Sovereign of Iss for a few weeks at the most. The girl had almost certainly been well out of her depth from the moment her aunt had abdicated.

And likely she had grown up in one of the towns dotted around the surface of Iss. She might know quite a lot more about outdoor life than Ashiban did—but that didn’t mean she knew much about survival in the wilderness with no food or equipment.

Well. Obviously they couldn’t walk along the edge of the Scarp, not given the Sovereign’s inability to deal with heights. They would have to continue walking east along the bramble wall, to somewhere the Scarp was lower, or hope there was some town or monitoring station in their path.

“Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, and reached out to give the Sovereign’s shoulder a gentle push back toward the other side of the brambles. Saw the girl’s back and shoulders shaking, realized she was sobbing silently. “Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, again. Searched her tiny Gidantan vocabulary for something useful. “Go,” she said, finally, in Gidantan, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. After a moment, the Sovereign began to scoot backward, never raising her head more than a few centimeters. Ashiban followed.

Crawling out of the brambles back into the woods, Ashiban found the Sovereign sitting on the ground, still weeping. As Ashiban came entirely clear of the thorns, the girl stood and helped Ashiban to her feet and then, still crying, not saying a single word or looking at Ashiban at all, turned and began walking east.

• • • •

The next day they found a small stream. The Sovereign lay down and put her face in the water, drank for a good few minutes, and then filled the bottle and brought it to Ashiban. They followed the stream’s wandering east-now-south-now-east-again course for another three days as it broadened into something almost approaching a river.

At the end of the third day, they came to a small, gently arched bridge, mottled gray and brown and beige, thick plastic spun from whatever scraps had been thrown into the hopper of the fabricator, with a jagged five- or six-centimeter jog around the middle, where the fabricator must have gotten hung up and then been kicked back into action.

On the far side of the bridge, on the other bank of the stream, a house and outbuildings, the same mottled gray and brown as the bridge. An old, dusty groundcar. A garden, a young boy pulling weeds, three or four chickens hunting for bugs among the vegetables.

As Ashiban and the Sovereign came over the bridge, the boy looked up from his work in the garden, made a silent O with his mouth, turned and ran into the house. “Raksamat,” said Ashiban, but of course the Sovereign must have realized as soon as they set eyes on those fabricated buildings.

A woman came out of the house, in shirt and trousers and stocking feet, gray-shot hair in braids tied behind her back. A hunting gun in her hand. Not aimed at Ashiban or the Sovereign. Just very conspicuously there.

The sight of that gun made Ashiban’s heart pound. But she would almost be glad to let this woman shoot her so long as she let Ashiban eat something besides grubs first. And let her sit in a chair. Still, she wasn’t desperate enough to speak first. She was old enough to be this woman’s mother.

“Elder,” said the woman with the gun. “To what do we owe the honor?”

It struck Ashiban that these people—probably on the planet illegally, one of those Raksamat settler families that had so angered the Gidanta recently—were unlikely to have any desire to encourage a war that would leave them alone and vulnerable here on the planet surface. “Our flier crashed, child, and we’ve been walking for days. We are in sore need of some hospitality.” Some asperity crept into her voice, and she couldn’t muster up the energy to feel apologetic about it.

The woman with the gun stared at Ashiban, and her gaze shifted over Ashiban’s shoulder, presumably to the Sovereign of Iss, who had dropped back when they’d crossed the bridge. “You’re Ashiban Xidyla,” said the woman with the gun. “And this is the Sovereign of Iss.”

Ashiban turned to look at the Sovereign. Who had turned her face away, held her hands up as though to shield herself.

“Someone tried to kill us,” Ashiban said, turning back to the woman with the gun. “Someone shot down our flier.”

“Did they now,” said the woman with the gun. “They just found the flier last night. It’s been all over the news, that the pilot and the Sovereign’s interpreter were inside, but not yourself, Elder, or her. Didn’t say anything about it being shot down, but I can’t say I’m surprised.” She considered Ashiban and the Sovereign for a moment. “Well, come in.”

Inside they found a large kitchen, fabricator-made benches at a long table where a man sat plucking a chicken. He looked up at their entrance, then down again. Ashiban and the Sovereign sat at the other end of the table, and the boy from the garden brought them bowls of pottage. The Sovereign ate with one hand still spread in front of her face.

“Child,” said Ashiban, forcing herself to stop shoveling food into her mouth, “is there a cloth or a towel the Sovereign could use? She lost her veils.”

The woman stared at Ashiban, incredulous. Looked for a moment as though she was going to scoff, or say something dismissive, but instead left the room and came back with a large, worn dish towel, which she held out for the Sovereign.

Who stared at the cloth a moment, through her fingers, and then took it and laid it over her head, and then pulled one corner across her face, so that she could still see.

Their host leaned against a cabinet. “So,” she said, “the Gidanta wanted an excuse to kill all us Raksamat on the planet, and shot your flier out of the sky.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Ashiban. The comfort from having eaten actual cooked food draining away at the woman’s words. “I don’t know who shot our flier down.”

“Who else would it be?” asked the woman, bitterly. The Sovereign sat silent beside Ashiban. Surely she could not understand what was being said, but she was perceptive enough to guess what the topic was, to understand the tone of voice. “Not that I had much hope for this settlement you’re supposedly here to make. All respect, Elder, but things are as they are, and I won’t lie.”

“No, of course, child,” replied Ashiban. “You shouldn’t lie.”

“It’s always us who get sold out, in the agreements and the settlements,” said the woman. “We have every right to be here. As much right as the Gidanta. That’s what the agreement your mother made said, isn’t it? But then when we’re actually here, oh, no, that won’t do, we’re breaking the law. And does your mother back us up? Does the Assembly? No, of course not. We aren’t Xidylas or Ontrils or Lajuds or anybody important. Maybe if my family had an elder with a seat in the Assembly it would be different, but if we did, we wouldn’t be here. Would we.”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, child,” replied Ashiban. “When the Raksamat farmsteads were first discovered, the Gidanta wanted to find you all and expel you. They wanted the Assembly to send help to enforce that. In the end my mother convinced everyone to leave the farmsteads alone while the issues were worked out.”

“Your mother!” cried the woman, their host. “All respect, Elder, but your mother might have told them to hold to the agreement she worked out and the Gidanta consented to, in front of their ancestors. It’s short and plain enough.” She gestured at the Sovereign. “Can you tell her that?”

The front door opened on three young women talking, pulling off their boots. One of them glanced inside, saw Ashiban and the Sovereign, the other woman, presumably a relative of theirs, standing straight and angry by the cabinet. Elbowed the others, who fell silent.

Ashiban said, “I don’t speak much Gidantan, child. You probably speak more than I do. And the Sovereign doesn’t have much Raksamat. I lost my handheld in the crash, so there’s no way to translate.” And the Sovereign was just a girl, with no more power in this situation than Ashiban herself.

The man at the end of the table spoke up. “Any news?” Directed at the three young women, who had come in and begun to dish themselves out some pottage.

“We didn’t see anything amiss,” said one of the young women. “But Lyek stopped on their way home from town, they said they went in to take their little one to the doctor. It was unfriendly. More unfriendly than usual, I mean.” She sat down across the table with her bowl, cast a troubled glance at the Sovereign, though her tone of voice stayed matter-of-fact. “They said a few people in the street shouted at them to get off the planet, and someone spit on them and called them stinking weevils. When they protested to the constable, she said it was no good complaining about trouble they’d brought on themselves, and wouldn’t do anything. They said the constable had been standing right there.”

“It sounds like the Sovereign and I need to get into town as soon as possible,” suggested Ashiban. Though she wondered what sort of reception she herself might meet, in a Gidanta town where people were behaving that way toward Raksamat settlers.

“I think,” said the woman, folding her arms and leaning once more against the cabinet, “that we’ll make our own decisions about what to do next, and not take orders from the sainted Ciwril Xidyla’s daughter, who doesn’t even speak Gidantan. Your pardon, Elder, but I honestly don’t know what they sent you here for. You’re welcome to food and drink, and there’s a spare bed upstairs you and her ladyship there can rest in. None of us here means you any ill. But I think we’re done taking orders from the Assembly, who can’t even bother to speak for us when we need it.”

If this woman had been one of her own daughters, Ashiban would have had sharp words for her. But this was not her daughter, and the situation was a dangerous one—and moreover, it was far more potentially dangerous for the Sovereign, sitting silent beside her, face still covered.

And Ashiban hadn’t reached her age without learning a thing or two. “Of course, child,” she said. “We’re so grateful for your help. The food was delicious, but we’ve walked for days and we’re so very tired. If we could wash, and maybe take you up on the offer of that bed.”

• • • •

Ashiban and the Sovereign each had another bowl of pottage, and Ashiban turned her bagful of grubs over to the man with the chicken. The three young women finished eating in silence, and two went up, at an order from the older woman, to make the bed. The third showed Ashiban and the Sovereign where they could wash.

The bed turned out to be in its own tiny chamber, off an upstairs corridor, and not in one corner of a communal sleeping room. The better to keep watch on them, Ashiban thought, but also at least on the surface a gesture of respect. This small bedroom probably belonged to the most senior member of the household.

Ashiban thanked the young woman who had shown them upstairs. Closed the door—no lock, likely the only door in this house that locked was that front door they had come through. Looked at the Sovereign, standing beside the bed, the cloth still held across her mouth. Tried to remember how to say sleep in Gidantan.

Settled for Raksamat. “Sleep now,” Ashiban said, and mimed laying her head on her hand, closed her eyes. Opened them, sat down on one side of the bed, patted the other. Lay down and closed her eyes.

Next she knew, the room was dark and silent, and she ached, even more than she had during days of sleeping on the ground. The Sovereign lay beside her, breathing slow and even.

Ashiban rose, gingerly, felt her way carefully to the door. Opened it, slowly. Curled in the doorway lay the young woman who had shown them to the room, her head pillowed on one arm, a lamp on the floor by her hand, turned low. Next to her, a gun. The young woman snored softly. The house was otherwise silent.

Ashiban had entertained vague thoughts of what she would do at this moment, waking in the night when the rest of the house was likely asleep. Had intended to think more on the feasibility of those vague thoughts, and the advisability of following up on them.

She went back into the room. Shook the Sovereign awake. Finger on her lips, Ashiban showed her the sleeping young woman outside the door. The gun. The Sovereign of Iss, still shaking off the daze of sleep, blinked, frowned, went back to the bed to pick up the cloth she’d used to cover her face, and then stepped over the sleeping young woman and out into the silent corridor. Ashiban followed.

She was prepared to tell anyone who met them that they needed to use the sanitary facility. But they met no one, walked through the dark and silent house, out the door and into the starlit night. The dark, the damp, the cool air, the sound of the stream. Ashiban felt a sudden familiar ache of wishing-to-be-home. Wishing to be warmer. Wishing to have eaten more than what little she and the Sovereign could forage. And, she realized now they were outside, she had no idea what to do next.

Apparently not burdened with the same doubts, the Sovereign walked straight and without hesitation to the groundcar. Ashiban hastened to catch up with her. “I can’t drive one of these,” she whispered to the Sovereign, pointlessly. The girl could almost certainly not understand her. Did not even turn her head to look at Ashiban or acknowledge that she’d said anything, but opened the groundcar door and climbed into the driver’s seat. Frowned over the controls for a few minutes, stretched out to a near-eternity by Ashiban’s fear that someone in the house would wake and see that they were gone.

The Sovereign did something to the controls, and the groundcar started up with a low hum. Ashiban went around to the passenger side, climbed in, and before she could even settle in the seat the groundcar was moving and they were off.

At first Ashiban sat tense in the passenger seat, turned as best she could to look behind. But after a half hour or so of cautious, bumpy going, it seemed to her that they were probably safely away. She took a deep breath. Faced forward again, with some relief—looking back hadn’t been terribly comfortable for her neck or her back. Looked at the Sovereign, driving with utter concentration. Well, it was hardly a surprise, now Ashiban thought of it. The Sovereign had grown up down here, doubtless groundcars were an everyday thing to her.

What next? They needed to find out where that town was. They might need to defend themselves some time in the near future. Ashiban looked around to see what there might be in the car that they could use. Back behind the seats was an assortment of tools and machines that Ashiban assumed were necessary for farming on a planet. A shovel. Some rope. A number of other things she couldn’t identify.

A well between her seat and the Sovereign’s held a tangled assortment of junk. A small knife. A doll made partly from pieces of fabricator plastic and partly from what appeared to be bits of an old, worn-out shirt. Bits of twine. An empty cup. Some sort of clip with a round gray blob adhesived to it. “What’s this?” asked Ashiban aloud.

The Sovereign glanced over at Ashiban. With one hand she took the clip from Ashiban’s hand, flicked the side of it with her thumb, and held it out to Ashiban, her attention back on the way ahead of them. Said something.

“It’s a translator,” said the little blob on the clip in a quiet, tinny voice. “A lot of weevils won’t take their handheld into town because they’re afraid the constable will take it from them and use the information on it against their families. Or if you’re out working and have your hands full but think you might need to talk to a weevil.” A pause, in which the Sovereign seemed to realize what she’d said. “You’re not a weevil,” said the little blob.

“It’s not a very nice thing to say.” Though of course Ashiban had heard Raksamat use slurs against the Gidanta, at home, and not thought twice about it. Until now.

“Oh, Ancestors!” cried the Sovereign, and smacked the groundcar steering in frustration. “I always say the wrong thing. I wish Timran hadn’t died, I wish I still had an interpreter.” Tears filled her eyes, shone in the dim light from the groundcar controls.

“Why are you swearing by the Ancestors?” asked Ashiban. “You don’t believe in them. Or I thought you didn’t.” One tear escaped, rolled down the Sovereign’s cheek. Ashiban picked up the end of the old dishcloth that was currently draped over the girl’s shoulder and wiped it away.

“I didn’t swear by the Ancestors!” the Sovereign protested. “I didn’t swear by anything. I just said oh, Ancestors.” They drove in silence for a few minutes. “Wait,” said the Sovereign then. “Let me try something. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“This: Ancestors. What did I say?”

“You said Ancestors.”

“Now. Pingberries. What did I say?”

“You said pingberries.”

The Sovereign brought the groundcar to a stop, and turned to look at Ashiban. “Now. Oh, Ancestors!” as though she were angry or frustrated. “There. Do you hear? Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.” Ashiban had heard it, plain and clear. “You said oh, pingberries, but the translator said it was oh, Ancestors. How did that happen?”

“Pingberries sounds a lot like…something that isn’t polite,” the Sovereign said. “So it’s the kind of swear your old uncle would use in front of the in-laws.”

“What?” asked Ashiban, and then, realizing, “Whoever entered the data for the translator thought it was equivalent to swearing by the Ancestors.”

“It might be,” said the Sovereign, “and actually that’s really useful, that it knows when I’m talking about wanting to eat some pingberries, or when I’m frustrated and swearing. That’s good, it means the translators are working well. But Ancestors and pingberries, those aren’t exactly the same. Do you see?”

“The treaty,” Ashiban realized. “That everyone thinks the other side is translating however they want.” And probably not just the treaty.

It had been Ciwril Xidyla who had put together the first, most significant collection of linguistic data on Gidantan. It was her work that had led to the ease and usefulness of automatic translation between the two languages. Even aside from automatic translation, Ashiban suspected that her mother’s work was the basis for nearly every translation between Raksamat and Gidantan for very nearly a century. That was one reason why Ciwril Xidyla was as revered as she was, by everyone in the system. Translation devices like this little blob on a clip had made communication possible between Raksamat and Gidanta. Had made peaceful agreement possible, let people talk to each other whenever they needed it. Had probably saved lives. But. “We can’t be the first to notice this.”

The Sovereign set the groundcar moving again. “Noticing something and realizing it’s important aren’t the same thing. And maybe lots of people have noticed, but they don’t say anything because it suits them to have things as they are. We need to tell the Terraforming Council. We need to tell the Assembly. We need to tell everybody, and we need to retranslate the treaty. We need more people to actually learn both languages instead of only using that thing.” She gestured toward the translator clipped to Ashiban’s collar.

“We need the translator to be better, Sovereign. Not everyone can easily learn another language.” More people learning the two languages ought to help with that. More people with firsthand experience to correct the data. “But we need the translator to know more than what my mother learned.” Had the translations been unchanged since her mother’s time? Ashiban didn’t think that was likely. But the girl’s guess that it suited at least some of the powers that be to leave problems—perhaps certain problems—uncorrected struck Ashiban as sadly possible. “Sovereign, who’s going to listen to us?”

“I am the Sovereign of Iss!” the girl declared. “And you are the daughter of Ciwril Xidyla! They had better listen to us.”

• • • •

Shortly after the sky began to lighten, they came to a real, honest-to-goodness road. The Sovereign pulled the groundcar up to its edge and then stopped. The road curved away on either side, so that they could see only the brief stretch in front of them, and trees all around. “Right or left?” asked the Sovereign. There was no signpost, no indication which way town was, or even any evidence beyond the existence of the road itself that there was a town anywhere nearby.

When Ashiban didn’t answer, the Sovereign slid out of the driver’s seat and walked out to the center of the road. Stood looking one way, and then the other.

“I think the town is to the right,” she said, when she’d gotten back in. “And I don’t think we have time to get away.”

“I don’t understand,” Ashiban protested. But then she saw lights through the trees, to the right. “Maybe they’ll drive on by.” But she remembered the young woman’s story of how a Raksamat settler had been received in the town yesterday. And she was here to begin with because of rising tensions between Gidanta and Raksamat, and whoever had shot their flier down, days ago, had fairly obviously wanted to increase those tensions, not defuse them.

And they were sitting right in the middle of the path to the nearest Raksamat farmstead. Which had no defenses beyond a few hunting guns and maybe a lock on the front door.

A half dozen groundcars came around the bend in the road. Three of them the sort made to carry loads, but the wide, flat cargo areas held people instead of cargo. Several of those people were carrying guns.

The first car in the procession slowed as it approached the path where Ashiban and the Sovereign sat. Began to turn, and stopped when its lights brushed their stolen groundcar. Nothing more happened for the next few minutes, except that the people in the backs of the cargo cars leaned and craned to see what was going on.

“Expletive,” said the Sovereign. “I’m getting out to talk to them. You should stay here.”

“What could you possibly say to them, child?” But there wasn’t much good doing anything else, either.

“I don’t know,” replied the girl. “But you should stay here.”

Slowly the Sovereign opened the groundcar door, slid out again. Closed the door, pulled her cloth up over her face, and walked out into the pool of light at the edge of the road.

Getting out of the passenger seat would be slow and painful, and Ashiban really didn’t want to. But the Sovereign looked so small standing by the side of the road, facing the other groundcar. She opened her own door and clambered awkwardly down. Just as she came up behind the Sovereign, the passenger door of the groundcar facing them opened, and a woman stepped out onto the road.

“I am the Sovereign of Iss,” announced the Sovereign. Murmured the translator clipped to Ashiban’s shirt. “Just what do you think you’re doing here?” Attempting more or less credibly to sound imperious even despite the one hand holding the cloth over her face, but the girl’s voice shook a little.

“Glad to see you safe, Sovereign,” said the woman, “but I am constable of this precinct and you are blocking my path. Town’s that way.” She pointed back along the way the procession of groundcars had come.

“And where are you going, Constable,” asked the Sovereign, “with six groundcars and dozens of people behind you, some of them with guns? There’s nothing behind us but trees.”

“There are three weevil farmsteads in those woods,” cried someone from the back of a groundcar. “And we’ve had it with the weevils thinking they own our planet. Get out of the way, girl!”

“We know the Raksamat tried to kill you,” put in the constable. “We know they shot down your flier. It wasn’t on the news, but people talk. Do they want a war? An excuse to try to kill us all? We won’t be pushed any farther. The weevils are here illegally, and they will get off this planet and back to their ships. Today if I have anything to say about it.”

“This is Ciwril Xidyla’s daughter next to me,” said the Sovereign. “She came here to work things out, not to try to kill anyone.”

“That would be the Ciwril Xidyla who translated the treaty so the weevils could read it to suit them, would it?” asked the constable. There was a murmur of agreement from behind her. “And wave it in our faces like we agreed to something we didn’t?”

Somewhere overhead, the sound of a flier engine. Ashiban’s first impulse was to run into the trees. Instead, she said, “Constable, the Sovereign is right. I came here to try to help work out these difficulties. Whoever tried to kill us, they failed, and the sooner we get back to work, the better.”

“We don’t mean you any harm, old woman,” said the constable. “But you’d best get out of our way, because we are coming through here, whether you move or not.”

“To do what?” asked Ashiban. “To kill the people on those farmsteads behind us?”

“We’re not going to kill anybody,” said the constable, plainly angry at the suggestion. “We just want them to know we mean business. If you won’t move, we’ll move you.” And when neither Ashiban nor the Sovereign replied, the constable turned to the people on the back of the vehicle behind her and gestured them forward.

A moment of hesitation, and then one of them jumped off the groundcar, and another few followed.

Beside Ashiban the Sovereign took a shaking breath and cried, “I am the Sovereign of Iss! You will go back to the town.” The advancing people froze, staring at her.

“You’re a little girl in a minor priesthood, who ought to be home minding her studies,” said the constable. “It’s not your fault your grandmother made the mistake of negotiating with the weevils, and it’s not your fault your aunt quit and left you in the middle of this, but don’t be thinking you’ve got any authority here.” The people who had leaped off the groundcar still hesitated.

The Sovereign, visibly shaking now, pointed at the constable with her free hand. “I am the voice of the planet! You can’t tell the planet to get out of your way.”

“Constable!” said one of the people who had come off the groundcar. “A moment.” And went over to say something quiet in the constable’s ear.

The Sovereign said, low enough so only Ashiban could hear it, “Tell the planet to get out of the way? How could I say something so stupid?”

And then lights came sweeping around the lefthand bend of the road, and seven or eight groundcars came into view, and stopped short of where the constable stood in the road.

A voice called out, “This is Delegate Garas of the Terraforming Council Enforcement Commission.” Ashiban knew that name. Everyone in the system knew that name. Delegate Garas was the highest-ranking agent of the Gidantan Enforcement Commission, and answered directly to the Terraforming Council. “Constable, you have overstepped your authority.” A man stepped out from behind the glare of the lights. “This area is being monitored.” The sound of a flier above, louder. “Anyone who doesn’t turn around and go home this moment will be officially censured.”

The person who had been talking to the constable said, “We were just about to leave, Delegate.”

“Good,” said the delegate. “Don’t delay on my account, please. And, Constable, I’ll meet with you when I get into town this afternoon.”

• • • •

The Commission agents settled Ashiban and the Sovereign into the back of a groundcar, and poured them hot barley tea from a flask. The tea hardly had time to cool before Delegate Garas slid into the passenger seat in front and turned to speak to them. “Sovereign. Elder.” With little bows of his head. “I apologize for not arriving sooner.”

“We had everything under control,” said the Sovereign, loftily, cloth still held over her face. Though, sitting close next to her as Ashiban was, she could feel the Sovereign was still shaking.

“Did you now. Well. We only were able to start tracking you when we found the crash site. Which took much longer than it should have. The surveillance in the High Mires and the surrounding areas wasn’t functioning properly.”

“That’s a coincidence,” Ashiban remarked, drily.

“Not a coincidence at all,” the delegate replied. “It was sabotage. An inside job.”

The Sovereign made a small, surprised noise. “It wasn’t the weev…the Raksamat?”

“Oh, they were involved, too.” Delegate Garas found a cup somewhere in the seat beside him, poured himself some barley tea. “There’s a faction of Raksamat—I’m sure this won’t surprise you, Elder—who resent the illegal settlers for grabbing land unauthorized, but who also feel that the Assembly will prefer certain families once Raksamat can legally come down to the planet, and between the two all the best land and opportunities will be gone. There is also—Sovereign, I don’t know if you follow this sort of thing—a faction of Gidanta who believe that the Terraforming Council is, in their turn, arranging things to profit themselves and their friends, and leaving everyone else out. Their accusations may in fact be entirely accurate and just, but that is of course no reason to conspire with aggrieved Raksamat to somehow be rid of both Council and Assembly and divide the spoils between themselves.”

“That’s a big somehow,” Ashiban observed.

“It is,” Delegate Garas acknowledged. “And they appear not to have had much talent for that sort of undertaking. We have most of them under arrest.” The quiet, calm voice of a handheld murmured, too low for Ashiban’s translator clip to pick up. “Ah,” said Delegate Garas. “That’s all of them now. The trials should be interesting. Fortunately, they’re not my department. It’s Judicial’s problem now. So, as I said, we were only able to even begin tracking you sometime yesterday. And we were already in the area looking for you when we got a call from a concerned citizen who had overheard plans for the constable’s little outing, so it was simple enough to show up. We were pleasantly surprised to find you both here, and relatively well.” He took a drink of his tea. “We’ve let the team tracking you know they can go home now. As the both of you can, once we’ve interviewed you so we know what happened to you.”

“Home!” The Sovereign was indignant. “But what about the talks?”

“The talks are suspended, Sovereign. And your interpreter is dead. The Council will have to appoint a new one. And let’s be honest—both of you were involved mainly for appearance’s sake. In fact, I’ve wondered over the last day or two if you weren’t brought into this just so you could die and provide a cause for trouble.”

This did not mollify the Sovereign. “Appearance’s sake! I am the Sovereign of Iss!”

“Yes, yes,” Delegate Garas agreed, “so you told everyone just a short while ago.”

“And it worked, too,” observed Ashiban. Out the window, over the delegate’s shoulder, the sun shone on the once again deserted road. She shivered, remembering the cracked flier windshield, the pilot slumped over the controls.

“You can’t have these talks without me,” the Sovereign insisted. “I’m the voice of the planet.” She looked at Ashiban. “I am going to learn Raksamat. And Ashiban Xidyla can learn Gidantan. We won’t need any expletive interpreter. And we can fix the handheld translators.”

“That might take a while, Sovereign,” Ashiban observed.

The Sovereign lifted the cloth covering her mouth just enough to show her frown to Ashiban. “We already talked about this, Ashiban Xidyla. And I am the Voice of Iss. I will learn quickly.”

“Sovereign,” said Delegate Garas, “those handheld translators are a good thing. Can you imagine what the past hundred years would have been like without them? People can learn Raksamat, or Gidantan, but as Ashiban Xidyla points out, that takes time, and in the meanwhile people still have to talk to each other. Those handheld translators have prevented all sorts of problems.”

“We know, Delegate,” Ashiban said. “We were just talking about it, before the townspeople got here. But they could be better.”

“Well,” said Delegate Garas. “You may be right, at that. And if any of this were my concern in the least, I’d be getting a headache about now. Fortunately, it’s not my problem. I’ll see you ladies on your way home and…”

“Translation unavailable,” exclaimed the Sovereign, before he could finish. Got out of the groundcar, set her empty cup on the roof with a smack, opened the driver’s door, and slid in. Closed the door behind her.

“Young lady,” Delegate Garas began.

“I am the Voice of Iss!” the Sovereign declared. She did something with the controls and the groundcar started up with a low hum. Delegate Garas frowned, looked back at Ashiban.

Ashiban wanted to go home. She wanted to rest, and go back to her regular, everyday life, doing nothing much.

There had never been much point to doing anything much, not with a mother like Ciwril Xidyla. Anyone’s wildest ambitions would pale into nothing beside Ashiban’s mother’s accomplishments. And Ashiban had never been a terribly ambitious person. Had always wished for an ordinary life. Had mostly had it, at least the past few decades. Until now.

Those Raksamat farmers wanted an ordinary life, too, and the Gidanta townspeople. The Sovereign herself had been taken from an ordinary girlhood—or as ordinary as your life could be when your grandmother and your aunt were the voice of the planet—and thrown into the middle of this.

Delegate Garas was still watching her, still frowning. Ashiban sighed. “I don’t recommend arguing, Delegate. Assassins and a flier crash in the High Mires couldn’t stop us. I doubt you can do more than slow us down, and it’s really better if you don’t. Sovereign, I think first we should have a bath and clean clothes and something to eat. And get checked out by a doctor. And maybe get some sleep.”

The Sovereign was silent for a few seconds, and then said, “All right. I agree to that. But we should start on the language lessons as soon as possible.”

“Yes, child,” said Ashiban, closing her eyes. “But not this very moment.”

Delegate Garas laughed at that, short and sharp. But he made no protest at all as the Sovereign started the groundcar moving toward town.

Ann Leckie is the author of the novels Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy. She lives in St Louis, Missouri.

The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild
By Catherynne M. Valente

1: Violet

I don’t know what stories are anymore so I don’t know how to tell you about the adventures of Woe-Be-Gone Nowgirl Violet Wild. In the Red Country, a story is a lot of words, one after the other, with conflict and resolution and a beginning, middle, and, most of the time, an end. But in the Blue Country, a story is a kind of dinosaur. You see how it gets confusing. I don’t know whether to begin by saying: Once upon a time a girl named Violet Wild rode a purple mammoth bareback through all the seven countries of world just to find a red dress that fit or by shooting you right in that sweet spot between your reptilian skull-plates. It’s a big decision. One false move and I’m breakfast.

I expect Red Rules are safer. They usually are. Here we go then! Rifle to the shoulder, adjust the crosshairs, stare down the barrel, don’t dare breathe, don’t move a muscle and—

Violet Wild is me. Just a kid with hair the color of raisins and eyes the color of grape jelly, living the life glasstastic in a four-bedroom wine bottle on the east end of Plum Pudding, the only electrified city in the Country of Purple. Bottle architecture was hotter than fried gold back then—and when the sunset slung itself against all those bright glass doors the bluffs just turned into a glitterbomb firework and everyone went staggering home with lavender light stuck to their coats. I got myself born like everybody else in P-Town: Mummery wrote a perfect sentence, so perfect and beautiful and fabulously punctuated that when she finished it, there was a baby floating in the ink pot and that was that. You have to be careful what you write in Plum Pudding. An accidentally glorious grocery list could net you twins. For this reason, the most famous novel in the Country of Purple begins: It is a truth universally acknowledged, umbrella grouchy eggs. I guess the author had too much to worry about already.

That was about the last perfect thing anybody did concerning myself. Oh, it was a fabulously punctuated life I had—Mums was a Clarinaut, Papo was a Nowboy, and you never saw a house more like a toybox than the bottle at 15 Portwine Place, chock full of gadgets and nonsense from parts unknown, art that came down off the walls for breakfast, visits from the Ordinary Emperor, and on some precious nights, gorgeous people in lavender suits and sweet potato ice cream gowns giggling through mouthfuls of mulberry schnapps over how much tastier were Orange Country cocktails and how much more belligerent were Green Country cockatiels. We had piles of carousel horse steaks and mugs of foamy creme de violette on our wide glass table every night. Trouble was, Mums was a Clarinaut and Papa was a Nowboy, so I mostly ate and drank it on my lonesome, or with the Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen and the watercolor unicorns from Still Life with Banana Tree, Unicorns, and Murdered Tuba, who came down off the living room wall some mornings in hopes of coffee and cereal with marshmallows. Mummery brought them back from her expeditions, landing her crystal clarinet, the good ship Eggplant, in the garden in a shower of prismy bubbles, her long arms full of poison darts, portraiture, explosives that look exactly like tea kettles and lollipops that look exactly like explosives. And then she’d take off again, with a sort of confused-confounded glance down at me, as though every time she came home, it was a shock to remember that I’d ever been born.

“You could ask to go with her, you know,” said the Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen once, tipping the spiral-swirl of her carved mouth toward a bowl of bruise-black coffee, careful to keep its scruff of bloodgull feathers combed back and out of the way.

“We agree,” piped up the watercolor unicorns, nosing at a pillowcase I’d filled with marshmallow cereal for them. “You could be her First Mate, see the crass and colorful world by clarinet. It’s romantic.”

“You think everything’s romantic,” I sighed. Watercolor unicorns have hearts like soap operas that never end, and when they gallop it looks like crying. “But it wouldn’t be. It would be like traveling with a snowman who keeps looking at you like you’re a lit torch.”

So I guess it’s no surprise I went out to the herds with Papo as soon as I could. I could ride a pony by the time I got a handle on finger painting—great jeweled beasts escaped from some primeval carousel beyond the walls of time. There’s a horn stuck all the way through them, bone or antler or both, and they leap across the Past Perfect Plains on it like a sharp white foot, leaving holes in the earth like ellipses. They’re vicious and wily and they bite like it’s their one passion in life, but they’re the only horses strong and fast enough to ride down the present just as it’s becoming the future and lasso it down. And in the Country of Purple, the minutes and hours of present-future-happening look an awful lot like overgrown pregnant six-legged mauve squirrels. They’re pregnant all the time, but they never give birth, on account of how they’re pregnant with tomorrow and a year from now and alternate universes where everyone is half-bat. When a squirrel comes to term, she just winks out like a squashed cigarette. That’s the Nowboy life. Saddle up with the sun and bring in tomorrow’s herd—or next week’s or next decade’s. If we didn’t, those nasty little rodents would run wild all over the place. Plays would close three years before they open, Wednesdays would go on strike, and a century of Halloweens would happen all at once during one poor bedraggled lunch break. It’s hard, dusty work, but Papo always says if you don’t ride the present like the devil it’ll get right away from you because it’s a feral little creature with a terrible personality and no natural predators.

So that’s who I was before the six-legged squirrels of the present turned around and spat in my face. I was called Violet and I lived in a purple world and I had ardors for my Papo, my magenta pony Stopwatch even though he bit me several times and once semi-fatally, a bone mask, and a watercolor painting. But I only loved a boy named Orchid Harm, who I haven’t mentioned yet because when everything ever is about one thing, sometimes it’s hard to name it. But let’s be plain: I don’t know what love is anymore, either. In the Red Country, when you say you love someone, it means you need them. You desire them. You look after them and yearn achingly for them when they’re away down at the shops. But in the Country of Purple, when you say you love someone, it means you killed them. For a long time, that’s what I thought it meant everywhere.

I only ever had one friend who was a person. His name was Orchid Harm. He could read faster than anyone I ever met and he kissed as fast as reading. He had hair the color of beetroot and eyes the color of mangosteen and he was a Sunslinger like his Papo before him. They caught sunshine in buckets all over Plum Pudding, mixed it with sugar and lorikeet eggs and fermented it into something not even a little bit legal. Orchid had nothing to do all day while the sun dripped down into his stills. He used to strap on a wash-basket full of books and shimmy up onto the roof of the opera house, which is actually a giantess’s skull with moss and tourmalines living all over it, scoot down into the curve of the left eye socket, and read seven books before twilight. No more, no less. He liked anything that came in sevens. I only came in ones, but he liked me anyway.

We met when his parents came to our bottle all covered in glitter and the smell of excitingly dodgy money to drink Mummery’s schnapps and listen to Papo’s Nowboy songs played on a real zanfona box with a squirrel-leg handle. It was a marquee night in Mummery’s career—the Ordinary Emperor had promised to come, he who tells all our lives which way to run. Everyone kept peering at brandy snifters, tea kettles, fire pokers, bracelets, books on our high glass shelves. When—and where—would the Little Man make his entrance? Oh, Mauve, do you remember, when he came to our to-do, he was my wife’s left-hand glove, the one she’d lost in the chaise cushions months ago!

And then a jar of dried pasta grew a face and said: “What a pleasure it is to see so many of my most illustrious subject gathered all together in this fine home,” but I didn’t care because I was seven.

You see, the Ordinary Emperor can be anything he likes, as long as it’s nothing you’d expect an Emperor to ever want to be. At any moment, anything you own could turn into the Emperor and he’d know everything you’d ever done with it—every mirror you’d ever hung and then cried in because you hated your own face, or candle you ever lit because you were up late doing something dastard, or worse, or better. It’s unsettling and that’s a fact.

Orchid was only little and so was I. While Mums cooed over the Emperor of Dried Pasta, I sat with my knees up by the hearth, feeding escargot to one of the watercolor unicorns. They can’t get enough of escargot, even though it gives them horrible runny creamsicle-shits. This is the first thing Orchid ever said to me:

“I like your unicorn. Pink and green feel good on my eyes. I think I know who painted it but I don’t want you to think I’m a know-it-all so I won’t say even though I really want to say because I read a whole book about her and knowing things is nicer when somebody else knows you know them.”

“I call her Jellyfish even though that’s not her name. You can pet her but you have to let her smell your hand first. You can say who painted it if you want. Mums told me when she brought it home from Yellow Country, but I forgot.” I didn’t forget. I never got the hang of forgetting things the way other people do.

Orchid let Jellyfish snuffle his palm with her runny rosy nose.

“Do you have snails?” the watercolor unicorn asked. “They’re very romantic.”

Orchid didn’t, but he had a glass of blackberry champagne because his parents let him drink what they drank and eat what they ate and read what they read and do what they did, which I thought was the best thing I had ever heard. Jellyfish slurped it up.

“A lady named Ochreous Wince painted me and the tuba and the banana tree and all my brothers and sisters about a hundred years ago, if you want to know. She was a drunk and she had a lot of dogs,” Jellyfish sniffed when she was done, and jumped back up into her frame in a puff of rosewater smoke.

“Show me someplace that your parents don’t know about,” said Orchid. I took him to my room and made him crawl under my bed. It was stuffy and close down there, and I’m not very tidy. Orchid waited. He was good at waiting. I rolled over and pointed to the underside of my bed. On one of the slats I’d painted a single stripe of gold paint.

“Where?” he breathed. He put his hand on it. I put my hand on his.

“I stole it from Mummery’s ship when she was busy being given the key to the city.”

“She already lives here.”

“I know.”

After that, Orchid started going out with Papo and me sometimes, out beyond the city walls and onto the dry, flat Past Perfect Plains where the thousand squirrels that are every future and present and past scrabbled and screamed and thrashed their fluffy tails in the air. I shouldn’t have let him, but knowing things is nicer when somebody else knows you know them. By the time the worst thing in the world happened, Orchid Harm could play Bury Me on the Prairie with a Squirrel in my Fist on the zanfona box as well as Papo or me. He helped a blackberry-colored mare named Early-to-Tea get born and she followed him around like a lovesick tiger, biting his shoulders and hopping in circles until he gave up and learned to ride her.

I don’t want to say this part. I wish this were the kind of story that’s a blue dinosaur munching up blueberries with a brain in its head and a brain in its tail so it never forgets how big it is. But I have to or the rest of it won’t make sense. Okay, calm down, I’m doing it. Rifle up.

The day of the worst thing in the world was long and hot and bright, packed so full of summer autumn seeped out through the stitches. We’d ridden out further than usual—the ponies ran like they had thorns in their bellies and the stupid squirrels kept going at each other like mad, whacking their purple heads together and tail-wrestling and spitting paradoxes through clenched teeth. I wanted to give them some real space, something fresh to graze on. Maybe if they ate enough they’d just lay down in the heat and hold their little bellies in their paws and concentrate on breathing like any sane animal. Papo stayed behind to see to a doe mewling and foaming at the mouth, trying to pass a chronology stone. She kept coughing up chunks of the Ordinary Emperor’s profligate youth, his wartime speeches and night terrors echoing out of her rodent-mouth across the prairie.

We rode so far, Orchid and me, bouncing across the cracked purple desert on Stopwatch and Early-to-Tea, that we couldn’t even see the lights of Plum Pudding anymore, couldn’t see anything but the plains spreading out like an inkstain. That far into the wilds, the world wasn’t really purple anymore. It turned to indigo, the dark, windy borderlands where the desert looks like an ocean and the twisted-up trees are the color of lightning. And then, just when I was about to tell Orchid how much I liked the shadow of his cheekbones by indigo light, the Blue Country happened, right in front of us. That’s the only way I can say it where it seems right to me. I’d never seen a border before. Somehow I always thought there would be a wall, or guards with spears and pom-poms on their shoes, or at least a sign. But it was just a line in the land, and on this side everything was purple and on that side everything was blue. The earth was still thirsty and spidered up with fine cracks like a soft boiled egg just before you stick your spoon in, but instead of the deep indigo night-steppe or the bright purple pampas, long aquamarine salt flats stretched out before us, speckled with blueberry brambles and sapphire tumbleweeds and skittering blue crabs. The Blue Country smelled like hot corn and cold snow. All the mauve time-squirrels skidded up short, sniffing the blue-indigo line suspiciously.

We let Stopwatch and Early-to-Tea bounce off after the crabs. The carousel ponies roared joyfully and hopped to it, skewering the cerulean crustacean shells with their bone poles, each gnawing the meat and claws off the other’s spike. The sun caromed off the gems on their rump. Orchid and I just watched the blue.

“Didn’t you ever want to see this, Violet? Go to all other places that exist in the universe, like your Mummery?” he said at last. “Didn’t you ever watch her clarinet take off and feel like you’d die if you didn’t see what she saw? I feel like I’ll die if I don’t see something new. Something better than sunshine in a bucket.”

Off in the distance, I could see a pack of stories slurping at a watering hole, their long spine-plates standing against the setting sun like broken fences.

“Do you want to know a secret?” I said. I didn’t wait for him to answer. Orchid always wanted to know secrets. “I dream in gold. When I’m asleep I don’t even know what purple is. And one time I actually packed a suitcase and went to the train station and bought a ticket to the Yellow Country with money I got from selling all my chess sets. But when I got there and the conductor was showing me to my seat I just knew how proud Mums would be. I could see her stupid face telling her friends about her daughter running off on an adventure. Darling, the plum doesn’t fall far from the tree, don’t you know? Violet’s just like a little photograph of me, don’t you think? Well, the point is: fuck her, I guess.”

“You were going to go without me?”

And my guts were full of shame, because I hadn’t even thought of him that day, not when I put on my stockings or my hat, not when I marched into a taxi and told him to take me to Heliotrope Station, not when I bought my ticket for one. I just wanted to go. Which meant I was a little photograph of her, after all. I kissed him, to make it better. We liked kissing. We’d discovered it together. We’d discussed it and we were fairly certain no one in the world did it as well as we did. When Orchid and me kissed, we always knew what the other was thinking, and just then we knew that the other was thinking that we had two horses and could go now, right now, across the border and through the crabs and blueberries and stories and hot corn air. We’d read in our books, curled up together, holding hands and feet, in the eye socket of the opera house, that all the fish in the Blue Country could talk, and all the people had eyes the color of peacock feathers, and you could make babies by singing an aria so perfectly that when you were done, there would be a kid in the sheet music, and that would be that, so The Cyan Sigh can never be performed on-key unless the soprano is ready for the responsibility. And in the Blue Country, all the cities were electrified, just like us.

We were happy and we were going to run away together. So the squirrels ate him.

Orchid and I jumped over the border like a broomstick and when our feet came down the squirrels screeched and rushed forward, biting our heels, slashing our legs with their six clawed feet, spitting bile in our faces. Well, I thought it was our faces, our heels, our legs. I thought they were gunning for both of us. But it was Orchid they wanted. The squirrels slashed open his ankles so he’d fall down to their level, and then they bit off his fingers. I tried to pull and kick them off but there were so many, and you can’t kill a plains-squirrel. You just can’t. You might stab the rest of your life. You might break a half-bat universe’s neck. You might end the whole world. I lay over Orchid so they couldn’t get to him but all that meant was they dug out one of my kidneys and I was holding him when they chewed out his throat and I kissed him because when we kissed we always knew what the other was thinking and I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

2: Blue

Papo never said anything. Neither did I. Jellyfish and the other watercolor unicorns each cut off a bit of their tails and stuck them together to make a watercolor orchid in the bottom left corner of the painting. It looked like a five-year-old with a head injury drew it with her feet and it ruined the whole composition. Orcheous Wince would have sicced her dogs on it. But no matter how Mummery fumed, they wouldn’t put their tails back where they belonged. The Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen just said: “I like being a mask better than I’d like being a face, I think. But if you want, you can put me on and I’ll be your face if you don’t want anyone to see what you look like on the inside right now. Because everyone can see.”

Orchid’s father gave me a creme-pot full of sunslung booze. I went up to the eye socket of the opera house and drank and drank but the pot never seemed to dry up. Good. Everything had a shine on it when I drank the sun. Everything had a heart that only I could see. Everything tasted like Orchid Harm, because he always tasted like the whole of the sun.

Once, I rode out on Stopwatch across the indigo borderlands again, up to the line in the earth where it all goes blue. I could see, I thought I could see, the haze of cornflower light over Lizard Tongue, the city that started as a wedding two hundred years ago and the party just never stopped. Stopwatch turned his big magenta head around and bit my hand—but softly. Hardly a bite at all.

I looked down. All the squirrels, pregnant with futures and purple with the present, thousands of them, stood on their hind legs around my pony’s spike, staring up at me in silence like the death of time.

The day the rest of it happened, the squirrels were particularly depraved. I caught three shredding each other’s bellies to ribbons behind a sun-broiled rock, blood and fur and yesterdays everywhere. I tried to pull them apart but I didn’t try very hard because I never did anymore. They all died anyway, and I got long scratches all up and down my arms for my trouble. I’d have to go and get an inoculation. Half of them are rabid and the other half are lousy with regret. I looked at my arms, already starting to scab up. I am a champion coagulator. All the way home I picked them open again and again. So I didn’t notice anyone following me back into P-Town, up through the heights and the sunset on the wine bottle houses, through the narrow lilac streets while the plummy streetlamps came on one at a time. I was almost home before I heard the other footsteps. The bells of St. Murex bonged out their lonely moans and I could almost hear Mummery’s voice, rich as soup, laughing at her own jokes by the glass hearth. But I did hear, finally, a sound, a such-soft sound, like a girl’s hair falling, as it’s cut, onto a floor of ice. I turned around and saw a funny little beastie behind me, staring at me with clear lantern-fish eyes.

The thing looked some fair bit like a woolly mammoth, if a mammoth could shrink down to the size of a curly wolfhound, with long indigo fur that faded into pale, pale lavender, almost white, over its four feet and the tip of its trunk, which curled up into the shape of a question mark. But on either side, where a mammoth would have flanks and ribs and the bulge of its elephant belly, my creeper had cabinet doors, locked tight, the color of dark cabbages with neat white trim and silver hinges. I looked at my sorrow and it looked at me. Our dark eyes were the same eyes, and that’s how I knew it was mine.

“I love you,” it said.

But Mummery said: “Don’t you dare let that thing in the house.” She was home for once, so she thought she could make rules. “It’s filthy; I won’t have it. Look how it’s upsetting the unicorns!” The poor things were snorting and stampeding terribly in their frame, squashing watercolor bananas as they tumbled off the watercolor tree.

“Let it sleep in the garden, Mauve. Come back to me,” said a box of matchsticks, for that night Mums was busy that night, being very important and desirable company. She was entertaining the Ordinary Emperor alone. I peered over into the box—every matchstick was carved in the shape of a tiny man with a shock of blue sulfuric hair that would strike on any surface. When he was here last month, the Ordinary Emperor was our downstairs hammer. I think the Ordinary Emperor wanted to seduce my mother. He showed up a lot during the mating season when Papo slept out on the range.

“What on earth is it?” sniffed Mummery, lifting a flute of mulberry schnapps to her lips as though nobody had ever died in the history of the world.

“Light me, my darling,” cried the Ordinary Emperor, and she did, striking his head on the mantle and bringing him in close to the tiny mammoth’s face. It didn’t blink or cringe away, even though it had a burning monarch and a great dumb Mummery-face right up against its trunk.

“Why, it’s a sorrow,” the Ordinary Emperor whistled. “I thought they were extinct. I told them to be extinct ages ago. Naughty Nellies. Do you know, in the Red Country, sorrow means grief and pain and horror and loss? It’s a decadent place. Everything tastes like cranberries, even the roast beef.”

That was the first thing the Ordinary Emperor ever said to me alone. Mums knew very well what sorrow meant where the sun sets red. Then he said a second thing:

“You are more beautiful than your mother.”

That’s the kind of Emperor the Matchstick Man is, in seven words. But Mummery fell for it and glowered at me with her great famous moonshadow eyes.

But my sorrow was not extinct. My sorrow was hungry. I put it out in the garden and locked the fence. I filled an agate bowl with the mushrooms we grow on the carcass of a jacaranda tree that used to grow by the kitchen window and water from our private well. I meant to leave it to its dinner, but for whatever reason my body ever decides to do things, I sat down with it instead, in the shadow of Mummery’s crystal clarinet, parked between the roses and the lobelias. The breeze made soft, half-melodic notes as it blew over the Eggplant’s portholes. A few iridescent fuel-bubbles popped free of the bell.

My sorrow ate so daintily, picking up each lacecap mushroom with its trunk, turning it around twice, and placing it on its outstretched ultraviolet tongue. It couldn’t get its mouth in the right place to drink. I cupped my hands and dipped them into the clear water and held them up to my sorrow. Its tongue slipped against my palms three times as it lapped. I stroked my sorrow’s fur and we watched the garden wall come alive with moonflowers opening like pale happy mouths in the night wind off of the Cutglass River. My sorrow was soft as fish frills. I didn’t want to hurt its pride by looking, so I decided she was a girl, like me.

“I love you,” my sorrow said, and she put her soft mouth over my ravaged arms. She opened the wounds again with her tongue and licked up the purple blood that seeped out of the depths of me. I kept stroking her spine and the warm wood of the cabinet doors in her belly. I pulled gently at their handles, but they would not open.

“It’s ok if you love me,” I whispered. “I forgive you.”

But she didn’t love me, not then, or not enough. I woke up in the morning in my own bed. My sorrow slept curled into the curve of my sleep. When she snored it sounded like the river-wind blowing over my mother’s ship. I tried to get up. But the floor of my bedroom was covered in sleeping squirrels, a mauve blanket of a hundred unhappened futures. When I put my bare feet on the floor, they scattered like buckshot.

I came downstairs reeking of sorrowmusk and futureshit. Mummery was already gone; Papo had never come home. Instead of anyone who lived with me, a stranger stood in our kitchen, fixing himself coffee. He was short but very slim and handsome, shaven, with brilliant hair of every color, even green, even burgundy, even gold, tied back with one of my velvet ribbons. He wore a doublet and hose like an actor or a lawyer, and when he turned to search for the cream, I could see a beautiful chest peeking out from beneath an apricot silk shirt. The unfamiliar colors of him made my eyes throb, painfully, then hungrily, starving for his emerald, his orange, his cobalt, even his brown and black. His gold. The stranger noticed me suddenly, fixing his eyes, the same shocking spatter of all possible colors as his hair, on my face.

“You’re naked,” I said before I could remember to be polite. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. I had caught the Ordinary Emperor naked, unhidden in any oddjob object, the morning after he’d probably ridden Mummery like Stopwatch.

One imperial eyebrow lifted in amusement.

“So are you,” he said.

I don’t sleep with clothes on. I don’t see why I should strangle myself in a nightdress just so my dreams won’t see my tits. I think his majesty expected me to blush and cover myself with my hands, but I didn’t care. If Orchid could never see my skin again, what did it matter who else did? So we stood there, looking at each other like stories at a watering hole. The Ordinary Emperor had an expression on that only people like Mummery understand, the kind of unplain stare that carries a hundred footnotes to its desire.

The king blinked first. He vanished from the kitchen and became our chandelier. Every teardrop-shaped jewel was an eye, every lightbulb was a mouth. I looked up at the blaze of him and drank his coffee. He took it sweet, mostly cream and honey, with only a lash of coffee hiding somewhere in the thick of it.

“Defiant girl, who raised you?” hissed the Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen.

“You know who,” I snorted, and even the chandelier laughed.

“Good morning, Violet,” the lightbulbs said, flashing blue, garnet, lime green with each word. “If you give me your sorrow, I shall see it safely executed. They are pests, like milkweed or uncles. You are far too young and lovely to have a boil like that leaking all over your face.”

I looked down. My sorrow had followed me without the smallest sound, and sat on her haunches beside my feet, staring up at me with those deepwater eyes. I held out the Emperor’s coffee cup so she could sip.

“Do you really know everything that happens in all your countries?” I asked him. There really is nothing like a man hopping on top of your mother to make him seem altogether less frightening and a little pitiful.

“I don’t know it all at once. But if I want to know it, I can lean toward it and it will lean toward me and then I know it better than you know your favorite lullaby.” The Ordinary Emperor burned so brightly in our chandelier. Light bloomed out of the crystals, hot, dappled, harlequin light, pouring down onto my skin, turning me all those colors, all his spun-sugar patchwork. I didn’t like it. His light on me felt like hands. It burned me; it clutched me, it petted me like a cat. I loved it. I was drowning in my dream of gold. My bones creaked for more. I wanted to wash it off forever.

I closed my eyes. I could still see the prisms of the Emperor. “What does death mean in the Red Country?” I whispered.

“It is a kind of dress with a long train that trails behind it and a neckline that plunges to the navel. Death is the color of garnets and is very hard to dance in.” The eyes in my chandelier looked kind. We have a dress like that, too. It is the color of hyacinths and it is called need. “I know what you’re asking, darling. And if you go to the Red Country you may find Orchid laughing there and wearing a red dress. It is possible. The dead here often go there, to Incarnadine, where the fisherwomen punt along the Rubicund, fishing for hope. The Red Country is not for you, Violet. The dead are very exclusive.”

And then I said it, to the king of everything, the hope buried under the concrete at the bottom of me: “Doesn’t it seem to you that a body eaten by the present becoming the future shouldn’t really be dead? Shouldn’t he just be waiting for me in tomorrow?”

“That I cannot tell you. It doesn’t make much sense to me, though. Eaten is eaten. Your pampas squirrels are not my subjects. They are not my countries. They are time, and time eats everything but listens to no one. The digestive systems of squirrels are unreliable at best. I know it is painful to hear, but time devours all love affairs. It is unavoidable. The Red Country is so much larger than the others. And you, Violet Wild, you specifically, do not have rights of passage through any of my nations. Stay put and do as your Mummery tells you. You are such a trial to her, you know.”

The Ordinary Emperor snuffed abruptly out and the wine bottle went dark. The watercolor unicorns whinnied fearfully. The Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen turned its face to the wall. In the shallow cup of her other side, a last mauve squirrel hid away the great exodus from my bedroom. She held her tail up over her little face and whispered:

“I won’t say even though I really want to say.”

My sorrow tugged my fingers with her trunk. “I love you,” she said again, and this time I shivered. I believed her, and I did not live in the Red Country where love means longing. “If you let me, I can be so big.”

My sorrow twisted her trunk around her own neck and squeezed. She grew like a wetness spreading through cloth. Taller than me, and then taller than the cabinets, and then taller than the chandelier. She lowered her purple trunk to me like a ladder.

I don’t know what stories are anymore. I don’t know how fast sorrow can move and I don’t know how squirrels work. But I am wearing my best need and a bone face over mine so no one can see what my insides look like. I can see already the blue crabs waving their claws to the blue sky, I can see the lights of Lizard Tongue and hear the wedding bells playing their millionth song. I am going on the back of my sorrow, further than Mummery ever did, to a place where love is love, stories have ends, and death is a red dress.

A stream of rabid, pregnant, time-squirrels races after me. I hope the crabs get them all.

3. Green

The place between the Blue Country and the Green Country is full of dinosaurs called stories, bubble-storms that make you think you’re somebody else, and a sky and a ground that look almost exactly the same. And, for a little while, it was full of me. My sorrow and me and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen crossed the Blue Country where it gets all narrow and thirsty. I was also all narrow and thirsty, but between the two of us, I complained less than the Blue Country. I shut my eyes when we stepped over the border. I shut my eyes and tried to remember kissing Orchid Harm and knowing that we were both thinking about ice cream.

When I was little and my hair hadn’t grown out yet but my piss-and-vinegar had, I asked my Papo:

“Papo, will I ever meet a story?”

My Papo took a long tug on his squirrel-bone pipe and blew smoky lilac rings onto my fingers.

“Maybe-so, funny bunny, maybe-not-so. But don’t be sad if you don’t. Stories are pretty dumb animals. And so aggressive!”

I clapped my hands. “Say three ways they’re dumb!”

“Let’s see.” Papo counted them off on his fingers. “They’re cold-blooded, they use big words when they ought to use small ones, and they have no natural defense against comets.”

So that’s what I was thinking about while my sorrow and me hammered a few tent stakes into the huge blue night. We made camp at the edge of a sparkling oasis where the water looked like liquid labradorite. The reason I thought about my Papo was because the oasis was already occupado. A herd of stories slurped up the water and munched up the blueberry brambles and cobalt cattails growing up all over the place out of the aquamarine desert. The other thing that slurped and munched and stomped about the oasis was the great electro-city of Lizard Tongue. The city limits stood a ways off, but clearly Lizard Tongue crept closer all the time. Little houses shaped like sailboats and parrot eggs spilled out of the metropolis, inching toward the water, inching, inching—nobody look at them or they’ll stampede! I could hear the laughing and dancing of the city and I didn’t want to laugh and I didn’t want to dance and sleeping on the earth never troubled me so I stuck to my sorrow and the water like a flat blue stone.

It’s pretty easy to make a camp with a sorrow as tall as a streetlamp, especially when you didn’t pack anything from home. I did that on purpose. I hadn’t decided yet if it was clever or stupid as sin. I didn’t have matches or food or a toothbrush or a pocketknife. But the Ordinary Emperor couldn’t come sneaking around impersonating my matches or my beef jerky or my toothbrush or my pocketknife, either. I was safe. I was Emperor-proof. I was not squirrel-proof. The mauve squirrels of time and/or space milled and tumbled behind us like a stupid furry wave of yesterpuke and all any of us could do was ignore them while they did weird rat-cartwheels and chittered at each other, which sounds like the ticks of an obnoxiously loud clock, and fucked with their tails held over their eyes like blindfolds in the blue-silver sunset.

My sorrow picked turquoise coconuts from the paisley palm trees with her furry lavender trunk and lined up the nuts neatly all in a row. Sorrows are very fastidious, as it turns out.

“A storm is coming at seven minutes past seven,” the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen said. “I do not like to get wet.”

I collected brambles and crunched them up for kindling. In order to crunch up brambles, I had to creep and sneak among the stories, and that made me nervous, because of what Papo said when my hair was short.

A story’s scales are every which shade of blue you can think of and four new ones, too. I tiptoed between them, which was like tiptoeing between trolley-cars. I tried to avoid the poison spikes on their periwinkle tails and the furious horns on their navy blue heads and the crystal sapphire plates on their backs. The setting sun shone through their sapphire plates and burned up my eyeballs with blue.

“Heyo, guignol-girl!” One story swung round his dinosaur-head at me and smacked his chompers. “Why so skulk and slither? Have you scrofulous aims on our supper?”

“Nope, I only want to make a fire,” I said. “We’ll be gone in the morning.”

“Ah, conflagration,” the herd nodded sagely all together. “The best of all the -ations.”

“And whither do you peregrinate, young sapiens sapiens?” said one of the girl-dinosaurs. You can tell girl-stories apart from boy-stories because girl-stories have webbed feet and two tongues.

I was so excited I could have chewed rocks for bubblegum. Me, Violet Wild, talking to several real live stories all at once. “I’m going to the Red Country,” I said. “I’m going to the place where death is a red dress and love is a kind of longing and maybe a boy named Orchid didn’t get his throat ripped out by squirrels.”

“We never voyage to the Red Country. We find no affinity there. We are allowed no autarchy of spirit.”

“We cannot live freely,” explained the webfooted girl-story, even though I knew what autarchy meant. What was I, a baby eating paint? “They pen us up in scarlet corrals and force us to say exactly what we mean. It’s deplorable.”

“Abhorrent.”

“Iniquitous!”

The stories were working themselves up into a big blue fury. I took a chance. I grew up a Nowgirl on the purple pampas, I’m careful as a crook on a balcony when it comes to animals. I wouldn’t like to spook a story. When your business is wildness and the creatures who own it, you gotta be cool, you gotta be able to act like a creature, talk like a creature, make a creature feel like you’re their home and the door’s wide open.

“Heyo, Brobdingnagian bunnies,” I said with all the sweetness I knew how to make with my mouth. “No quisquoses or querulous tristiloquies.” I started to sweat and the stars started to come out. I was already almost out of good words. “Nobody’s going to . . . uh . . . ravish you off to Red and rapine. Pull on your tranquilities one leg at a time. Listen to the . . . um . . . psithurisma? The psithurisma of the . . . vespertine . . . trees rustling, eat your comestibles, get down with dormition.”

The stories milled around me, purring, rubbing their flanks on me, getting their musk all over my clothes. And then I had to go lie down because those words tired me right out. I don’t even know if all of them were really words but I remembered Mummery saying all of them at one point or another to this and that pretty person with a pretty name.

My sorrow lay down in the moonlight. I leaned against her furry indigo chest. She spat on the brambles and cattails I crunched up and they blazed up purple and white. I didn’t know a sorrow could set things on fire.

“I love you,” my sorrow said.

In the Blue Country, when you say you love someone it means you want to eat them. I knew that because when I thought about Orchid Harm on the edge of the oasis with water like labradorite all I could think of was how good his skin tasted when I kissed it; how sweet and savory his mouth had always been, how even his bones would probably taste like sugar, how even his blood would taste like hot cocoa. I didn’t like those thoughts but they were in my head and I couldn’t not have them. That was what happened to my desire in the Blue Country. The blue leaked out all over it and I wanted to swallow Orchid. He would be okay inside me. He could live in my liver. I would take care of him. I would always be full.

But Orchid wasn’t with me which is probably good for him as I have never been good at controlling myself when I have an ardor. My belly growled but I didn’t bring anything to eat on account of not wanting an Emperor-steak, medium-rare, so it was coconut delight on a starlit night with the bubbles coming in. In the Blue Country, the bubbles gleam almost black. They roll in like dark dust, an iridescent wall of go-fuck-yourself, a soft, ticklish tsunami of heart-killing gases. I didn’t know that then but I know it now. The bubble-storm covered the blue plains and wherever a bubble popped something invisible leaked out, something to do with memory and the organs that make you feel things even when you would rather play croquet with a plutonium mallet than feel one more drop of anything at all. The blue-bruise-black-bloody bubbles tumbled and popped and burst and glittered under the ultramarine stars and I felt my sorrow’s trunk around my ankle which was good because otherwise I think I would probably have floated off or disappeared.

People came out of the houses shaped like sailboats and the houses shaped like parrot eggs. They held up their hands like little kids in the bubble-monsoon. Bubbles got stuck in their hair like flowers, on their fingers like rings. I’d never seen a person who looked like those people. They had hair the color of tropical fish and skin the color of a spring sky and the ladies wore cerulean dresses with blue butterflies all over them and the boys wore midnight waistcoats and my heart turned blue just looking at them.

“Heyo, girlie!” The blue people called, waggling their blue fingers in the bubbly night. “Heyo, elephant and mask! Come dance with us! Cornflower Leap and Pavonine Up are getting married! You don’t even have any blueberry schnapps!”

Because of the bubbles popping all over me I stopped being sure who I was. The bubbles smelled like a skull covered in moss and tourmalines. Their gasses tasted like coffee with too much milk and sugar left by an Emperor on a kitchen counter inside a wine bottle.

“Cornflower Leap and Pavonine Up are dead, dummies,” I said, but I said it wrong somehow because I wasn’t Violet Wild anymore but rather a bubble and inside the bubble of me I was turning into a box of matchsticks. Or Orchid Harm. Or Mummery. I heard clarinets playing the blues. I heard my bones getting older. “They got dead two hundred years ago, you’re just too drunk to remember when their wedding grew traffic laws and sporting teams and turned into a city.”

One of the blue ladies opened her mouth right up and ate a bubble out of the air on purpose and I decided she was the worst because who would do that? “So what?” she giggled. “They’re still getting married! Don’t be such a drip. How did a girlie as young as you get to be a drip as droopy as you?”

People who are not purple are baffling.

You better not laugh but I danced with the blue people. Their butterflies landed on me. When they landed on me they turned violet like my body and my name but they didn’t seem upset about it. The whole world looked like a black rainbow bubble. It was the opposite of drinking the sun that Orchid’s family brewed down in their slipstills. When I drink the sun, I feel soft and edgeless. When the bubbles rained down on me I felt like I was made of edges all slicing themselves up and the lights of Lizard Tongue burned up my whole brain and while I was burning I was dancing and while I was dancing I was the Queen of the Six-Legged squirrels. They climbed up over me in between the black bubbles. Some of them touched the turquoise butterflies and when they did that they turned blue and after I could always tell which of the squirrels had been with me that night because their fur never got purple again, not even a little.

I fell down dancing and burning. I fell down on the cracked cobalt desert. A blue lady in a periwinkle flapper dress whose hair was the color of the whole damn ocean tried to get me to sit up like I was some sad sack of nothing at Mummery’s parties who couldn’t hold her schnapps.

“Have you ever met anyone who stopped being dead?” I asked her.

“Nobody blue,” she said.

I felt something underneath me. A mushy, creamy, silky something. A something like custard with a crystal heart. I rolled over and my face made a purple print in the blue earth and when I rolled over I saw Jellyfish looking shamefaced, which she should have done because stowaways should not look proudfaced, ever.

“I ate a bunch of bleu cheese at the wedding buffet in the town square and now my tummy hates me,” the watercolor unicorn mourned.

One time Orchid Harm told me a story about getting married and having kids and getting a job somewhere with no squirrels or prohibited substances. It seemed pretty unrealistic to me. Jellyfish and I breathed in so much blackish-brackish bubble-smoke that we threw up together, behind a little royal blue dune full of night-blooming lobelia flowers. When we threw up, that story came out and soaked into the ground. My sorrow picked us both up in her trunk and carried us back to the fire.

The last thing I said before I fell asleep was: “What’s inside your cabinet?”

The only answer I got was the sound of a lock latching itself and a squirrel screeching because sorrow stepped on it.

When I woke up the Blue Country had run off. The beautiful baffling blue buffoons and the black bubbles and the pompous stories had legged it, too.

Green snow fell on my hair. It sparkled in my lap and there was a poisonous barb from the tail of a story stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I pulled it off very carefully and hung it from my belt. My hand turned blue where I’d held it and it was always blue forever and so I never again really thought of it as my hand.

4. Yellow

Sometimes I get so mad at Mummery. She never told me anything important. Oh, sure, she taught me how to fly a clarinet and how much a lie weighs and how to shoot her stained-glass Nonegun like a champ. Of course, you can plot any course you like on a clarinet, darlingest, but the swiftest and most fuel efficient is Premiére Rhapsodie by Debussy in A Major. Ugh! Who needs to know the fuel efficiency of Debussy? Mummery toot-tooted her long glass horn all over the world and she never fed me one little spoonful of it when I was starving to death for anything other than our old awful wine bottle in Plum Pudding. What did Mummery have to share about the Green Country? I enjoyed the saunas in Verdigris, but Absinthe is simply lousy with loyalty. It’s a serious problem. That’s nothing! That’s rubbish, is what. Especially if you know that in the Green Country, loyalty is a type of street mime.

The Green Country is frozen solid. Mummery, if only you’d said one useful thing, I’d have brought a thicker coat. Hill after hill of green snow under a chartreuse sky. But trees still grew and they still gave fruit—apples and almonds and mangoes and limes and avocados shut up in crystal ice pods, hanging from branches like party lanterns. People with eyes the color of mint jelly and hair the color of unripe bananas, wearing knit olive caps with sage poms on the ends zoomed on jade toboggans, up and down and everywhere, or else they skate on green glass rivers, ever so many more than in the Blue Country. Green people never stop moving or shivering. My sorrow slipped and slid and stumbled on the lime-green ice. Jellyfish and I held on for dear life. The Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen clung to my face, which I was happy about because otherwise I’d have had green frost growing on my teeth.

One time Orchid Harm and I went up to the skull socket of the opera house and read out loud to each other from a book about how to play the guitar. It never mattered what we read about really, when we read out loud to each other. We just liked to hear our voices go back and forth like a seesaw. Most popular songs are made up of three or four or even two simple chords, whispered Orchid seductively. Let us begin with the D chord, which is produced by holding the fingers thusly. And he put his fingers on my throat like mine was the neck of a guitar. And suddenly a terror happened inside me, a terror that Orchid must be so cold, so cold in my memory of the skull socket and the D chord and cold wherever he might be and nothing mattered at all but that I had to warm him up, wrap him in fur or wool or lay next to him skin to skin, build a fire, the biggest fire that ever wrecked a hearth, anything if it would get him warm again. Hot. Panic went zigzagging through all my veins. We had to go faster.

“We’ll go to Absinthe,” I said shakily, even though I didn’t know where Absinthe was because I had a useless Mummery. I told the panic to sit down and shut up. “We need food and camping will be a stupid experience here.”

“I love you,” said my sorrow, and her legs grew like the legs of a telescope, longer even than they had already. The bottoms of her fuzzy hippo-feet flattened out like pancakes frying in butter until they got as wide as snowshoes. A sorrow is a resourceful beast. Nothing stops sorrow, not really. She took the snowy glittering emerald hills two at a stride. Behind us the army of squirrels flowed like the train of a long violet gown. Before us, toboggan-commuters ran and hid.

“In the Green Country, when you say you love somebody, it means you will keep them warm even if you have to bathe them in your own blood,” Jellyfish purred. Watercolor unicorns can purr, even though real unicorns can’t. Jellyfish rubbed her velvety peach and puce horn against my sorrow’s spine.

“How do you know that?”

“Ocherous Wince, the drunken dog-lover who painted me, also painted a picture more famous than me. Even your Mummery couldn’t afford it. It’s called When I Am In Love My Heart Turns Green. A watercolor lady with watercolor wings washes a watercolor salamander with the blood pouring out of her wrists and her elbows. The salamander lies in a bathtub that is a sawn-open lightbulb with icicles instead of clawfeet. It’s the most romantic thing I ever saw. I know a lot of things because of Ocherous Wince, but I never like to say because I don’t want you to think I’m a know-it-all even though I really want to say because knowing things is nicer when somebody else knows you know them.”

Absinthe sits so close to the border of the Yellow Country that half the day is gold and half the day is green. Three brothers sculpted the whole city—houses, pubs, war monuments—out of jellybean-colored ice with only a little bit of wormwood for stability and character. I didn’t learn that from Jellyfish or Mummery, but from a malachite sign on the highway leading into the city. The brothers were named Peapod. They were each missing their pinky fingers but not for the same reason.

It turns out everybody notices you when you ride into town on a purple woolly mammoth with snowshoes for feet with a unicorn in your lap and a bone mask on your face. I couldn’t decide if I liked being invisible better or being watched by everybody all at once. They both hurt. Loyalties scattered before us like pigeons, their pale green greasepainted faces miming despair or delight or umbrage, depending on their schtick. They mimed tripping over each other, and then some actually did trip, and soon we’d cause a mime-jam and I had to leave my sorrow parked in the street. I was so hungry I could barely shiver in the cold. Jellyfish knew a cafe called O Tannenbaum but I didn’t have any money.

“That’s all right,” said the watercolor unicorn. “In the Green Country, money means grief.”

So I paid for a pine-green leather booth at O Tannenbaum, a stein of creme de menthe, a mugwort cake and parakeet pie with tears. The waiter wore a waistcoat of clover with moldavite buttons. He held out his hands politely. I didn’t think I could do it. You can’t just grieve because the bill wants 15% agony on top of the prix fixe. But my grief happened to me like a back alley mugging and I put my face into his hands so no one would see my sobbing; I put my face into his hands like a bone mask so no one could see what I looked like on the inside.

“I’m so lonely,” I wept. “I’m nobody but a wound walking around.” I lifted my head—my head felt heavier than a planet. “Did you ever meet anyone who fucked up and put it all right again, put it all back the way it was?”

“Nobody green,” said the waiter, but he walked away looking very pleased with his tip.

It’s a hard damn thing when you’re feeling lowly to sit in a leather booth with nobody but a unicorn across from you. Lucky for me, a squirrel hopped up on the bamboo table. She sat back on her hind two legs and rubbed her humongous paradox-pregnant belly with the other four paws. Her bushy mauve tail stood at attention behind her, bristling so hard you could hear it crackling.

“Pink and green feel good on my eyes,” the time-squirrel said in Orchid Harm’s voice.

“Oh, go drown yourself in a hole,” I spat at it, and drank my creme de menthe, which gave me a creme de menthe mustache that completely undermined much of what I said later.

The squirrel tried again. She opened her mouth and my voice came out.

“No quisquoses or querulous tristiloquies,” she said soothingly. But I had no use for a squirrel’s soothe.

“Eat shit,” I hissed.

But that little squirrel was the squirrel who would not quit. She rubbed her cheeks and stretched her jaw and out came a voice I did not know, a man’s voice, with a very expensive accent.

“The Red Country is the only country with walls. It stands to reason something precious lives there. But short of all-out war, which I think we can all agree is at least inconvenient, if not irresponsible, we cannot know what those walls conceal. I would suggest espionage, if we can find a suitable candidate.”

Now, I don’t listen to chronosquirrels. They’re worse than toddlers. They babble out things that got themselves said a thousand months ago or will be said seventy years from now or were only said by a preying mantis wearing suspenders in a universe that’s already burned itself out. When I was little I used to listen, but my Papo spanked me and told me the worst thing in the world was for a Nowboy to listen to his herd. It’ll drive you madder than a plate of snakes, he said. He never spanked me for anything else and that’s how I know he meant serious business. But this dopey doe also meant serious business. I could tell by her tail. And I probably would have gotten into it with her, which may or may not have done me a lick of good, except that I’d made a mistake without even thinking about it, without even brushing off a worry or a grain of dread, and just at that moment when I was about to tilt face first into Papo’s plate of snakes, the jade pepper grinder turned into a jade Emperor with black peppercorn lips and a squat silver crown.

“Salutations, young Violet,” said the Ordinary Emperor in a voice like a hot cocktail. “What’s a nice purple girl like you doing in a bad old green place like this?”

Jellyfish shrieked. When a unicorn shrieks, it sounds like sighing. I just stared. I’d been so careful. The Emperor of Peppercorns hopped across the table on his grinder. The mauve squirrel patted his crown with one of her hands. They were about the same height. I shook my head and declined to say several swear words.

“Don’t feel bad, Miss V,” he said. “It’s not possible to live without objects. Why do you think I do things this way? Because I enjoy being hand brooms and cheese-knives?”

“Leave me alone,” I moaned.

“Now, I just heard you say you were lonely! You don’t have to be lonely. None of my subjects have to be lonely! It was one of my campaign promises, you know.”

“Go back to Mummery. Mind your own business.”

The Ordinary Emperor stroked his jade beard. “I think you liked me better when I was naked in your kitchen. I can do it again, if you like. I want you to like me. That is the cornerstone of my administration.”

“No. Be a pepper grinder. Be a broom.”

“Your Papo cannot handle the herd by himself, señorita,” clucked the Ordinary Emperor. “You’ve abandoned him. Midnight comes at 3 p.m. in Plum Pudding. Every day is Thursday. Your Mummery has had her clarinet out day and night looking for you.”

“Papo managed before I was born, he can manage now. And you could have told Mums I was fine.”

“I could have. I know what you’re doing. It’s a silly, old-fashioned thing, but it’s just so you. I’ve written a song about it, you know. I called it My Baby Done Gone to Red. It’s proved very popular on the radio, but then, most of my songs do.”

“I’ve been gone for three days!”

“Culture moves very quickly when it needs to, funny bunny. Don’t you like having a song with you in it?”

I thought about Mummery and all the people who thought she was fine as a sack of bees and drank her up like champagne. She lived for that drinking-up kind of love. Maybe I would, too, if I ever got it. The yellow half of Absinthe’s day came barreling through the cafe window like a bandit in a barfight. Gold, gorgeous, impossible gold, on my hands and my shoulders and my unicorn and my mouth, the color of the slat under my bed, the color of the secret I showed Orchid before I loved him. Sitting in that puddle of suddenly gold light felt like wearing a tiger’s fur.

“Well, I haven’t heard the song,” I allowed. Maybe I wanted a little of that champagne-love, too.

Then the Ordinary Emperor wasn’t a pepper grinder anymore because he was that beautiful man in doublet and hose and a thousand hundred colors who stood in my kitchen smelling like sex and power and eleven kinds of orange and white. He put his hands over mine.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why the clarinauts are the only ones who travel between countries? Why they’re so famous and why everyone wants to hear what they say?”

“I never thought about it even one time.” That was a lie; I thought about it all the time the whole year I was eleven but that was long enough ago that it didn’t feel like much of a lie.

He wiped away my creme de menthe mustache. I didn’t know it yet, but my lips stayed green and they always would. “A clarinaut is born with a reed in her heart through which the world can pass and make a song. For everyone else, leaving home is poison. They just get so lost. Sometimes they spiral down the drain and end up Red. Most of the time they just wash away. It’s because of the war. Bombs are so unpredictable. I’m sure everyone feels very embarrassed now.”

I didn’t want to talk about the specialness of Mummery. I didn’t want to cry, either, but I was, and my tears splashed down onto the table in big, showy drops of gold. The Ordinary Emperor knuckled under my chin.

“Mon petite biche, it is natural to want to kill yourself when you have bitten off a hurt so big you can’t swallow it. I once threw myself off Split Salmon Bridge in the Orange Country. But the Marmalade Sea spit me back. The Marmalade Sea thinks suicide is for cowards and she won’t be a part of it. But you and I know better.”

“I don’t want to kill myself!”

“It doesn’t matter what death means in the Red Country, Violet. Orchid didn’t die in the Red Country. And you won’t make it halfway across the Tangerine Tundra. You’re already bleeding.” He turned over my blue palm, tracing tracks in my golden tears. “You’ll ride your sorrow into a red brick wall.”

“It does matter. It does. You don’t matter. My sorrow loves me.”

“And what kind of love would that be? The love that means killing? Or eating? Or keeping warm? Do you know what ‘I love you’ means in the Yellow Country?”

“It means ‘I cannot stand the sight of you,’” whinnied Jellyfish, flicking her apricot and daffodil tail. “Ocherous Wince said it to all her paintings every day.”

The waiter appeared to take the Ordinary Emperor’s order. He trembled slightly, his clovers quivering. “The pea soup and a glass of green apple gin with a dash of melon syrup, my good man,” his Majesty said without glancing at the help. “I shall tell you a secret if you like, Violet. It’s better than a swipe of gold paint, I promise.”

“I don’t care.” My face got all hot and plum-dark even through the freezing lemony air. I didn’t want him to talk about my slat. “Why do you bother with me? Go be a government by yourself.”

“I like you. Isn’t that enough? I like how much you look like your Mummery. I like how hard you rode Stopwatch across the Past Perfect Plains. I like how you looked at me when you caught me making coffee. I like that you painted the underside of your bed and I especially like how you showed it to Orchid. I’m going to tell you anyway. Before I came to the throne, during the reign of the Extraordinary Emperor, I hunted sorrows. Professionally. In fact, it was I who hunted them to extinction.”

“What the hell did you do that for?” The waiter set down his royal meal and fled which I would also have liked to do but could not because I did not work in food service.

“Because I am from the Orange Country, and in the Orange Country, a sorrow is not a mammoth with a cabinet in its stomach, it is a kind of melancholic dread, a bitter, heartsick gloom. It feels as though you can never get free of a sorrow once you have one, as though you become allergic to happiness. It was because of a certain sorrow that I leapt from the Split Salmon Bridge. My parents died of a housefire and then my wife died of being my wife.” The Ordinary Emperor’s voice stopped working quite right and he sipped his gin. “All this having happened before the war, we could all hop freely from Orange to Yellow to Purple to Blue to Green—through Red was always a suspicious nation, their immigration policies never sensible, even then, even then when no one else knew what a lock was or a key. When I was a young man I did as young men do—I traveled, I tried to find women to travel with me, I ate foreign food and pretended to like it. And I saw that everywhere else, sorrows roamed like buffalo, and they were not distresses nor dolors nor disconsolations, but animals who could bleed. Parasites drinking from us like fountains. I did not set out for politics, but to rid the world of sorrows. I thought if I could kill them in the other countries, the Orange Country sort of sorrow would perish, too. I rode the ranges on a quagga with indigestion. I invented the Nonegun myself—I’ll tell you that secret, too, if you like, and then you will know something your Mums doesn’t, which I think is just about the best gift I could give you. To make the little engine inside a Nonegun you have to feel nothing for anyone. Your heart has to look like the vacuum of space. Not coincidentally, that is also how you make the engine inside an Emperor. I shot all the sorrows between the eyes. I murdered them. I rode them down. I was merciless.”

“Did it work?” I asked softly.

“No. When I go home I still want to die. But it made a good campaign slogan. I have told you this for two reasons. The first is that when you pass into the Orange Country you will want to cut yourself open from throat to navel. Your sorrow has gotten big and fat. It will sit on you and you will not get up again. Believe me, I know. When I saw you come home with a sorrow following you like a homeless kitten I almost shot it right there and I should have. They have no good parts. Perhaps that is why I like you, really. Because I bleached sorrow from the universe and you found one anyway.”

The Ordinary Emperor took my face in his hands. He kissed me. I started to not like it but it turned into a different kind of kiss, not like the kisses I made with Orchid, but a kiss that made me wonder what it meant to kiss someone in the Orange Country, a kiss half full of apology and half full of nostalgia and a third half full of do what I say or else. So in the end I came round again to not liking it. I didn’t know what he was thinking when he kissed me. I guess that’s not a thing that always happens.

“The second reason I told you about the sorrows, Violet Wild, is so that you will know that I can do anything. I am the man who murdered sorrow. It said that on my election posters. You were too young to vote, but your Mummery wasn’t, and you won’t be too young when I come up for re-election.”

“So?”

“So if you run as my Vice-Emperor, which is another way of saying Empress, which is another way of saying wife, I will kill time for you, just like I killed sorrow. Squirrels will be no trouble after all those woolly monsters. Then everything can happen at once and you will both have Orchid and not have him at the same time because the part where you showed him the slat under your bed and the part where his body disappeared on the edge of the Blue Country will not have to happen in that order, or any order. It will be the same for my wife and my parents and only in the Red Country will time still mean passing.”

The squirrel still squatted on the table with her belly full of baby futures in her greedy hands. She glared at the Ordinary Emperor with unpasteurized hate in her milky eyes. I looked out the great ice picture window of the restaurant that wasn’t called O Tannenbaum anymore, but The Jonquil Julep, the hoppingest nightspot in the Yellow Country. Only the farthest fuzz on the horizon still looked green. Chic blonde howdy-dos started to crowd in wearing daffodil dresses and butterscotch tuxedos. Some of them looked sallow and waxy; some of them coughed.

“There is always a spot of cholera in the Yellow Country,” admitted the Ordinary Emperor with some chagrin. Through the glass I saw my sorrow hunched over, peering in at the Emperor, weeping soundlessly, wiping her eyes with her trunk. “But the light here is so good for painting.”

Everything looked like the underside of my bed. The six-legged squirrel said:

“Show me something your parents don’t know about.”

And love went pinballing through me but it was a Yellow kind of love and suddenly my creme de menthe was banana schnapps and suddenly my mugwort cake was lemon meringue and suddenly I hated Orchid Harm. I hated him for making me have an ardor for something that wasn’t a pony or a Papo or a color of paint, I hated him for being a Sunslinger all over town even though everybody knew that shit would hollow you out and fill you back up with nothing if you stuck with it. I hated him for making friends with my unicorn and I hated him for hanging around Papo and me till he got dead from it and I hated him for bleeding out under me and making everything that happened happen. I didn’t want to see his horrible handsome face ever again. I didn’t want alive-Orchid and dead-Orchid at the same time, which is a pretty colossally unpleasant idea when you think about it. My love was the sourest thing I’d ever had. If Orchid had sidled up and ordered a cantaloupe whiskey, I would have turned my face away. I had to swallow all that back to talk again.

“But killing sorrow didn’t work,” I said, but I kept looking at my sorrow on the other side of the window.

“I obviously missed one,” he said grimly. “I will be more thorough.”

And the Ordinary Emperor, quick as a rainbow coming on, snatched up the squirrel of time and whipped her little body against the lemonwood table so that it broke her neck right in half. She didn’t even get a chance to squeak.

Sometimes it takes me a long time to think through things, to set them up just right in my head so I can see how they’d break if I had a hammer. But sometimes I have a hammer. So I said:

“No, that sounds terrible. You are terrible. I am a Nowgirl and a Nowgirl doesn’t lead her herd to slaughter. Bring them home, bring them in, my Papo always said that and that’s what I will always say, too. Go away. Go be dried pasta. Go be sad and orange. Go jump off your bridge again. I’m going to the Red Country on my sorrow’s back.”

The Ordinary Emperor held up his hand. He stood to leave as though he were a regular person who was going to walk out the door and not just turn into a bar of Blue Country soap. He looked almost completely white in the loud yellow sunshine. The light burned my eyes.

“It’s dangerous in the Red Country, Violet. You’ll have to say what you mean. Even your Mummery never flew so far. “

He dropped the corpse of the mauve space-time squirrel next to his butter knife by way of paying his tab because in the Yellow Country, money means time.

“You are not a romantic man,” said Jellyfish through clenched pistachio-colored teeth. That’s the worst insult a watercolor unicorn knows.

“There’s a shortcut to the Orange Country in the ladies’ room. Turn the right tap three times, the left tap once, and pull the stopper out of the basin.” That was how the Ordinary Emperor said goodbye. I’m pretty sure he told Mummery I was a no-good whore who would never make good even if I lived to a hundred. That’s probably even true. But that wasn’t why I ran after him and stabbed him in the neck with the poisonous prong of the story hanging from my belt. I did that because, no matter what, a Nowgirl looks after her herd.

5. Orange

This is what happened to me in the Orange Country: I didn’t see any cities even though there are really nice cities there, or drink any alcohol even though I’ve always heard clementine schnapps is really great, or talk to any animals even though in the Orange Country a poem means a kind of tiger that can’t talk but can sing, or people, even though there were probably some decent ones making a big bright orange life somewhere.

I came out of the door in the basin of The Jonquil Julep and I lay down on floor of a carrot-colored autumn jungle and cried until I didn’t have anything wet left to lose. Then I crawled under a papaya tree and clawed the orange clay until I made a hole big enough to climb inside if I curled up my whole body like a circle you draw with one smooth motion. The clay smelled like fire.

“I love you,” said my sorrow. She didn’t look well. Her fur was threadbare, translucent, her trunk dried out.

“I don’t know what ‘I love you’ means in the Orange Country,” sighed Jellyfish.

“I do,” said the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen, who hadn’t had a damn thing to say in ages. “Here, if you love someone, you mean to keep them prisoner and never let them see the sun.”

“But then they’d be safe,” I whispered.

“I love you,” said my sorrow. She got down on her giant woolly knees beside my hole. “I love you. Your eyes are yellow.”

I began to claw into the orange clay my hole. I peeled it away and crammed it into my mouth. My teeth went through it easy as anything. It didn’t taste like dirt. It tasted like a lot of words, one after the other, with conflict and resolution and a beginning, middle, but no end. It tasted like Mummery showing me how to play the clarinet. It tasted like an Emperor who wasn’t an Emperor anymore. The earth stained my tongue orange forever.

“I love you,” said my sorrow.

“I heard you, dammit,” I said between bright mouthfuls.

Like she was putting an exclamation point on her favorite phrase, my sorrow opened up her cabinet doors in the sienna shadows of the orange jungle. Toucans and orioles and birds of paradise crowed and called and their crowing and calling caromed off the titian trunks until my ears hated birdsong more than any other thing. My sorrow opened up her cabinet doors and the wind whistled through the space inside her and it sounded like Premiére Rhapsodie in A Major through the holes of a fuel-efficient crystal clarinet.

Inside my sorrow hung a dress the color of garnets, with a long train trailing behind it and a neckline that plunged to the navel. It looked like it would be very hard to dance in.

6. Red

In the Red Country, love is love, loyalty is loyalty, a story is a story, and death is a long red dress. The Red Country is the only country with walls.

I slept my way into the Red Country.

I lay down inside the red dress called death; I lay down inside my sorrow and a bone mask crawled onto my face; I lay down and didn’t dream and my sorrow smuggled me out of the orange jungles where sorrow is sadness. I don’t remember that part so I can’t say anything about it. The inside of my sorrow was cool and dim; there wasn’t any furniture in there, or any candles. She seemed all right again, once we’d lumbered on out of the jungle. Strong and solid like she’d been in the beginning. I didn’t throw up even though I ate all that dirt. Jellyfish told me later that the place where the Orange Country turns into the Red Country is a marshland full of flamingos and ruby otters fighting for supremacy. I would have liked to have seen that.

I pulled it together by the time we reached the riverbanks. The Incarnadine River flows like blood out of the marshes, through six locks and four sluice gates in the body of a red brick wall as tall as clouds. Then it joins the greater rushing rapids and pools of the Claret, the only river in seven kingdoms with dolphins living in it, and all together, the rivers and the magenta dolphins, roar and tumble down the valleys and into the heart of the city of Cranberry-on-Claret.

Crimson boats choked up the Incarnadine. A thousand fishing lines stuck up into the pink dawn like pony-poles on the pampas. The fisherwomen all wore masks like mine, masks like mine and burgundy swimming costumes that covered them from neck to toe and all I could think was how I’d hate to swim in one of those things, but they probably never had to because if you fell out of your boat you’d just land in another boat. The fisherwomen cried out when they saw me. I suppose I looked frightening, wearing that revealing, low-cut death and the bone mask and riding a mammoth with a unicorn in my arms. They called me some name that wasn’t Violet Wild and the ones nearest to shore climbed out of their boats, shaking and laughing and holding out their arms. I don’t think anyone should get stuck holding their arms out to nothing and no one, so I shimmied down my sorrow’s fur and they clung on for dear live, touching the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen, stroking its cheeks, its red spiral mouth, telling it how it had scared them, vanishing like that.

“I love you,” the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen kept saying over and over. It felt strange when the mask on my face spoke but I didn’t speak. “I love you. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. I love you. I can’t stay.”

My mask and I said both together: “We are afraid of the wall.”

“Don’t be doltish,” an Incarnadine Fisherwoman said. She must have been a good fisherwoman as she had eight vermillion catfish hanging off her belt and some of them were still opening and closing their mouths, trying to breathe water that had vanished like a mask. “You’re one of us.”

So my sorrow swam through the wall. She got into the scarlet water which rose all the way up to her eyeballs but she didn’t mind. I rode her like sailing a boat and the red water soaked the train of my red death dress and magenta dolphins followed along with us, jumping out of the water and echolocating like a bunch of maniacs and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen said:

“I am beginning to remember who I am now that everything is red again. Why is anything unred in the world? It’s madness.”

Jellyfish hid her lavender face in her watermelon-colored hooves and whispered:

“Please don’t forget about me, I am water soluble!”

I wondered, when the river crashed into the longest wall in the world, a red brick wall that went on forever side to side and also up and down, if the wall had a name. Everything has a name, even if that name is in Latin and nobody knows it but one person who doesn’t live nearby. Somebody had tried to blow up the wall several times. Jagged chunks were missing; bullets had gouged out rock and mortar long ago, but no one had ever made a hole. The Incarnadine River slushed in through a cherry-colored sluice gate. Rosy sunlight lit up its prongs. I glided on in with all the other fisherwomen like there never was a wall in the first place. I looked behind us—the river swarmed with squirrels, gasping, half drowning, paddling their little feet for dear life. They squirmed through the sluice gate like plague rats.

“If you didn’t have that mask on, you would have had to pay the toll,” whispered Jellyfish.

“What’s the toll?”

“A hundred years as a fisherwoman.”

Cranberry-on-Claret is a city of carnelian and lacquerwork and carbuncle streetlamps glowing with red gas flames because the cities of the Red Country are not electrified like Plum Pudding and Lizard Tongue and Absinthe. People with hair the color of raspberries and eyes the color of wood embers play ruby bassoons and chalcedony hurdy-gurdies and cinnamon-stick violins on the long, wide streets and they never stop even when they sleep; they just switch to nocturnes and keep playing through their dreaming. When they saw me coming, they started up My Baby Done Gone to Red, which, it turns out, is only middling as far as radio hits go.

Some folks wore deaths like mine. Some didn’t. The Ordinary Emperor said that sometimes the dead go to the Red Country but nobody looked dead. They looked busy like city people always look. It was warm in Cranberry-on-Claret, an autumnal kind of warm, the kind that’s having a serious think about turning to cold. The clouds glowed primrose and carmine.

“Where are we going?” asked my watercolor unicorn.

“The opera house,” I answered.

I guess maybe all opera houses are skulls because the one in the Red Country looked just like the one back home except, of course, as scarlet as the spiral mouth of a mask. It just wasn’t a human skull. Out of a cinnabar piazza hunched up a squirrel skull bigger than a cathedral and twice as fancy. Its great long teeth opened and closed like proper doors and prickled with scrimshaw carving like my Papo used to do on pony-bones. All over the wine-colored skull grew bright hibiscus flowers and devil’s hat mushrooms and red velvet lichen and fire opals.

Below the opera house and behind they kept the corrals. Blue stories milled miserably in pens, their sapphire plates drooping, their eyes all gooey with cataracts. I took off the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen and climbed down my sorrow.

“Heyo, beastie-blues,” I said, holding my hands out for them to sniff through the copper wire and redwood of their paddock. “No lachrymose quadrupeds on my watch. Be not down in the mouth. Woe-be-gone, not woe-be-come.”

“That’s blue talk,” a boy-story whispered. “You gotta talk red or you get no cud.”

“Say what you mean,” grumbled a girl-story with three missing scales over her left eye. “It’s the law.”

“I always said what I meant. I just meant something very fancy,” sniffed a grandfather-story lying in the mud to stay cool.

“Okay. I came from the Purple Country to find a boy named Orchid Harm.”

“Nope, that’s not what you mean,” the blue grandpa dinosaur growled, but he didn’t seem upset about it. Stories mostly growl unless they’re sick.

“Sure it is!”

“I’m just a simple story, what do I know?” He turned his cerulean rump to me.

“You’re just old and rude. I’m pretty sure Orchid is up there in the eye of that skull, it’s only that I was going to let you out of your pen before I went climbing but maybe I won’t now.”

“How’s about we tell you what you mean and then you let us out and nobody owes nobody nothing?” said the girl-story with the missing scales. It made me sad to hear a story talking like that, with no grammar at all.

“I came from the Purple Country to find Orchid,” I repeated because I was afraid.

“Are you sure you’re not an allegory for depression or the agrarian revolution or the afterlife?”

“I’m not an allegory for anything! You’re an allegory! And you stink!”

“If you say so.”

“What do you mean then?”

“I mean a blue dinosaur. I mean a story about a girl who lost somebody and couldn’t get over it. I can mean both at the same time. That’s allowed.”

“This isn’t any better than when you were saying autarchy and peregrinate.”

“So peregrinate with autarchy, girlie. That’s how you’re supposed to act around stories, anyway. Who raised you?”

I kicked out the lock on their paddock and let the reptilian stories loose. They bolted like blue lightning into the cinnabar piazza. Jellyfish ran joyfully among them, jumping and wriggling and whinnying, giddy to be in a herd again, making a mess of a color scheme.

“I love you,” said my sorrow. She had shrunk up small again, no taller than a good dog, and she was wearing the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen. By the time I’d gotten half way up the opera-skull, she was gone.

“Let us begin by practicing the chromatic scale, beginning with E major.”

That is what the voice coming out of the eye socket of a giant operatic squirrel said and it was Orchid’s voice and it had a laugh hidden inside it like it always did. I pulled myself up and over the lip of the socket and curled up next to Orchid Harm and his seven books, of which he’d already read four. I curled up next to him like nothing bad had ever happened. I fit into the line of his body and he fit into mine. I didn’t say anything for a long, long time. He stroked my hair and read to me about basic strumming technique but after awhile he stopped talking, too and we just sat there quietly and he smelled like sunlight and booze and everything purple in the world.

“I killed the Ordinary Emperor with a story’s tail,” I confessed at last.

“I missed you, too.”

“Are you dead?”

“The squirrels won’t tell me. Something about collapsing a waveform. But I’m not the one wearing a red dress.”

I looked down. Deep red silky satin death flowed out over the bone floor. A lot of my skin showed in the slits of that dress. It felt nice.

“The squirrels ate you, though.”

“You never know with squirrels. I think I ate some of them, too. It’s kind of the same thing, with time travel, whether you eat the squirrel or the squirrel eats you. I remember it hurt. I remember you kissed me till it was over. I remember Early-to-Tea and Stopwatch screaming. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. Anyway, the squirrels felt bad about it. Because we’d taken care of them so well and they had to do it anyway. They apologized for ages. I fell asleep once in the middle of them going on and on about how timelines taste.”

“Am I dead?”

“I don’t know, did you die?”

“Maybe the bubbles got me. The Emperor said I’d get sick if I traveled without a clarinet. And parts of me aren’t my own parts anymore.” I stretched out my legs. They were the color of rooster feathers. “But I don’t think so. What do you mean the squirrels had to do it?”

“Self-defense, is what they said about a million times.”

“What? We never so much as kicked one!”

“You have to think like a six-legged mauve squirrel of infinite time. The Ordinary Emperor was going to hunt them all down one by one and set the chronology of everything possible and impossible on fire. They set a contraption in motion so that he couldn’t touch them, a contraption involving you and me and a blue story and a Red Country where nobody dies, they just change clothes. They’re very tidy creatures. Don’t worry, we’re safe in the Red Country. There’ll probably be another war. The squirrels can’t fix that. They’re only little. But everyone always wants to conquer the Red Country and nobody ever has. We have a wall and it’s a really good one.”

I twisted my head up to look at him, his plum-colored hair, his amethyst eyes, his stubborn chin. “You have to say what you mean here.”

“I mean I love you. And I mean the infinite squirrels of space and time devoured me to save themselves from annihilation at the hands of a pepper grinder. I can mean both. It’s allowed.”

I kissed Orchid Harm inside the skull of a giant rodent and we knew that we were both thinking about ice cream. The ruby bassoons hooted up from the piazza and scarlet tanagers scattered from the rooftops and a watercolor unicorn told a joke about the way tubas are way down the road but the echoes carried her voice up and up and everywhere. Orchid stopped the kiss first. He pointed to the smooth crimson roof of the eye socket.

A long stripe of gold paint gleamed there.

Catherynne M. Valente is The New York Times–bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

Our Lady of the Open Road
By Sarah Pinsker

The needle on the veggie oil tank read flat empty by the time we came to China Grove. A giant pink and purple fiberglass dragon loomed over the entrance, refugee from some shuttered local amusement park, no doubt; it looked more medieval than Chinese. The parking lot held a mix of Chauffeurs and manual farm trucks, but I didn’t spot any other greasers, so I pulled in.

“Cutting it close, Luce?” Silva put down his book and leaned over to peer at the gauge.

“There hasn’t been anything but farms for the last fifty miles. Serves me right for trying a road we haven’t been down before.”

“Where are we?” asked Jacky from the bed in the back of the van. I glanced in the rearview. He caught my eye and gave an enthusiastic wave. His microbraids spilled forward from whatever he’d been using to tether them, and he gathered them back into a thick ponytail.

Silva answered before I could. “Nowhere, Indiana. Go back to sleep.”

“Will do.” Without music or engine to drown him out, Jacky’s snores filled the van again a second later. He’d been touring with us for a year now, so we’d gotten used to the snores. To be honest, I envied him his ability to fall asleep that fast.

I glanced at Silva. “You want to do the asking for once?”

He grinned and held up both forearms, tattooed every inch. “You know it’s not me.”

“There’s such thing as sleeves, you know.” I pulled my windbreaker off the back of my seat and flapped it at him, even though I knew he was right. In the Midwest, approaching a new restaurant for the first time, it was never him, between the tattoos and the spiky blue hair. Never Jacky for the pox scars on his cheeks, even though they were clearly long healed. That left me.

My bad knee buckled as I swung from the driver’s seat. I bent to clutch it and my lower back spasmed just to the right of my spine, that momentary pain that told me to rethink all my life’s choices.

“What are you doing?” Silva asked through the open door.

“Tying my shoe.” There was no need to lie, but I did it anyway. Pride or vanity or something akin. He was only two years younger than me, and neither of us jumped off our amps much anymore. If I ached from the drive, he probably ached, too.

The backs of my thighs were all pins and needles, and my shirt was damp with sweat. I took a moment to lean against Daisy the Diesel and stretch in the hot air. I smelled myself: not great after four days with no shower, but not unbearable.

The doors opened into a foyer, red and gold and black. I didn’t even notice the blond hostess in her red qipao until she stepped away from the wallpaper.

“Dining alone?” she asked. Beyond her, a roomful of faces turned in my direction. This wasn’t really the kind of place that attracted tourists, especially not these days, this far off the interstate.

“No, um, actually, I was wondering if I could speak to the chef or the owner? It’ll only take a minute.” I was pretty sure I had timed our stop for after their dinner rush. Most of the diners looked to be eating or pushing their plates aside.

The owner and chef were the same person. I’d been expecting another blonde Midwesterner, but he was legit Chinese. He had never heard of a van that ran on grease. I did the not-quite-pleading thing. On stage I aimed for fierce, but in jeans and runners and a ponytail, I could fake a down-on-her-luck Midwest momma. The trick was not to push it.

He looked a little confused by my request, but at least he was willing to consider it. “Come to the kitchen door after we close and show me. Ten, ten thirty.”

It was nine; not too bad. I walked back to the van. Silva was still in the passenger seat, but reading a trifold menu. He must have ducked in behind me to grab it. “They serve a bread basket with lo mein. And spaghetti and meatballs. Where are we?”

“Nowhere, Indiana.” I echoed back at him.

We sat in the dark van and watched the customers trickle out. I could mostly guess from their looks which ones would be getting into the trucks and which into the Chauffeurs. Every once in a while, a big guy in work boots and a trucker cap surprised me by squeezing himself into some little self-driving thing. The game passed the time, in any case.

A middle-aged cowboy wandered over to stare at our van. I pegged him for a legit rancher from a distance, but as he came closer I noticed a clerical collar beneath the embroidered shirt. His boots shone and he had a paunch falling over an old rodeo belt; the incongruous image of a bull-riding minister made me laugh. He startled when he realized I was watching him.

He made a motion for me to lower my window.

“Maryland plates!” he said. “I used to live in Hagerstown.”

I smiled, though I’d only ever passed through Hagerstown.

“Used to drive a church van that looked kinda like yours, too, just out of high school. Less duct tape, though. Whatcha doing out here?”

“Touring. Band.”

“No kidding! You look familiar. Have I heard of you?”

“Cassis Fire,” I said, taking the question as a prompt for a name. “We had it painted on the side for a while, but then we figured out we got pulled over less when we were incognito.”

“Don’t think I know the name. I used to have a band, back before…” His voice trailed off, and neither of us needed him to finish his sentence. There were several “back befores” he could be referring to, but they all amounted to the same thing. Back before StageHolo and SportsHolo made it easier to stay home. Back before most people got scared out of congregating anywhere they didn’t know everybody.

“You’re not playing around here, are you?”

I shook my head. “Columbus, Ohio. Tomorrow night.”

“I figured. Couldn’t think of a place you’d play nearby.”

“Not our kind of music, anyway,” I agreed. I didn’t know what music he liked, but this was a safe bet.

“Not any kind. Oh well. Nice chatting with you. I’ll look you up on StageHolo.”

He turned away.

“We’re not on StageHolo,” I called to his back, though maybe not loud enough for him to hear. He waved as his Chauffeur drove him off the lot.

“Luce, you’re a terrible sales person,” Silva said to me.

“What?” I hadn’t realized he’d been paying attention.

“You know he recognized you. All you had to do was say your name instead of the band’s. Or ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ He’d have paid for dinner for all of us, then bought every t-shirt and download code we have.”

“And then he’d listen to them and realize the music we make now is nothing like the music we made then. And even if he liked it, he’d never go to a show. At best he’d send a message saying how much he wished we were on StageHolo.”

“Which we could be…”

“Which we won’t be.” He knew better than to argue with me on that one. It was our only real source of disagreement.

The neon “open” sign in the restaurant’s window blinked out, and I took the cue to put the key back in the ignition. The glowplug light came on, and I started the van back up.

My movement roused Jacky again. “Where are we now?”

I didn’t bother answering.

As I had guessed, the owner hadn’t quite understood what I was asking for. I gave him the engine tour, showing him the custom oil filter and the dual tanks. “We still need regular diesel to start, then switch to the veggie oil tank. Not too much more to it than that.”

“It’s legal?”

Legal enough. There was a gray area wherein perhaps technically we were skirting the fuel tax. By our reasoning, though, we were also skirting the reasons for the fuel tax. We’d be the ones who got in trouble, anyway. Not him.

“Of course,” I said, then changed the subject. “And the best part is that it makes the van smell like egg rolls.”

He smiled. We got a whole tankful out of him, and a bag full of food he’d have otherwise chucked out, as well.

The guys were over the moon about the food. Dumpster diving behind a restaurant or Superwally would have been our next order of business, so anything that hadn’t made a stop in a garbage can on its way to us was haute cuisine as far as we were concerned. Silva took the lo mein - no complimentary bread-, screwed together his travel chopsticks, and handed mine to me from the glove compartment. I grabbed some kind of moo shu without the pancakes, and Jacky woke again to snag the third container.

“Can we go someplace?” Silva asked, waving chopsticks at the window.

“Got anything in mind on a Tuesday night in the boonies?”

Jacky was up for something, too. “Laser tag? Laser bowling?”

Sometimes the age gap was a chasm. I turned in my seat to side-eye the kid. “One vote for lasers.”

“I dunno,” said Silva. “Just a bar? If I have to spend another hour in this van I’m going to scream.”

I took a few bites while I considered. We wouldn’t be too welcome anywhere around here, between our odor and our look, not to mention the simple fact that we were strangers. On the other hand, the more outlets I gave these guys for legit fun, the less likely they were to come up with something that would get us in trouble. “If we see a bar or a bowling joint before someplace to sleep, sure.”

“I can look it up,” said Jacky.

“Nope,” I said. “Leave it to fate.”

After two thirds of the moo shu, I gave up and closed the container. I hated wasting food, but it was too big for me to finish. I wiped my chopsticks on my jeans and put them back in their case.

Two miles down the road from the restaurant, we came to Starker’s, which I hoped from the apostrophe was only a bar, not a strip club. Their expansive parking lot was empty except for eight Chauffeurs, all lined up like pigs at a trough. At least that meant we didn’t have to worry about some drunk crashing into our van on his way out.

I backed into the closest spot to the door. It was the best lit, so I could worry less about our gear getting lifted. Close was also good if the locals decided they didn’t like our looks.

We got the long stare as we walked in, the one from old Westerns, where all the heads swivel our way and the piano player stops playing. Except of course, these days the piano player didn’t stop, because the piano player had no idea we’d arrived. The part of the pianist in this scenario was played by Roy Bittan, alongside the whole E Street Band, loud as a stadium and projected in StageHolo 3D.

“Do you want to leave?” Jacky whispered to me.

“No, it’s okay. We’re here now. Might as well have a drink.”

“At least it’s Bruce. I can get behind Bruce.” Silva edged past me toward the bar.

A few at leasts: at least it was Bruce, not some cut-rate imitation. Bruce breathed punk as far as I was concerned, insisting on recording new music and legit live shows all the way into his eighties. At least it was StageHolo and not StageHoloLive, in which case there’d be a cover charge. I was willing to stand in the same room as the technology that was trying to make me obsolete, but I’d be damned if I paid them for the privilege. Of course, it wouldn’t be Bruce on StageHoloLive either; he’d been gone a couple years now, and this Bruce looked to be only in his sixties, anyway. A little flat, too, which suggested this was a retrofitted older show, not one recorded using StageHolo’s tech.

Silva pressed a cold can into my hand, and I took a sip, not even bothering to look at what I was drinking. Knowing him, knowing us, he’d snagged whatever had been cheapest. Pisswater, but cold pisswater. Perfect for washing down the greasy takeout food aftertaste.

I slipped into a booth, hoping the guys had followed me. Jacky did, carrying an identical can to mine in one hand, and something the color of windshield wiper fluid in a plastic shot glass in the other.

“You want one?” he asked me, nudging the windshield wiper fluid. “Bartender said it was the house special.”

I pushed it back in his direction. “I don’t drink anything blue. It never ends well.”

“Suit yourself.” He tossed it back, then grinned.

“Your teeth are blue now. You look like you ate a Smurf.”

“What’s a Smurf?”

Sometimes I forgot how young he was. Half my age. A lifetime in this business. “Little blue characters? A village with one chick, one old man, and a bunch of young guys?”

“Like our band?” He shook his head. “Sorry. Bad joke. Anyway, I have no idea what was in that food, but it might have been Smurf, if they’re blue and taste like pork butt. How’s your dinner sitting?”

I swatted him lightly, backhand. “Fine, as long as I don’t drink anything blue.”

He downed his beer in one long chug, then got up to get another. He looked at mine and raised his eyebrows.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick with one. I get the feeling this is a zero tolerance town.”

If twenty-odd years of this had taught me one thing, it was to stay clear of local police. Every car in the parking lot was self-driving, which suggested there was somebody out on the roads ready to come down hard on us. Having spent a lot of time in my youth leaving clubs at closing time and dodging drunk drivers, I approved this effort. One of the few aspects of our brave new world I could fully endorse.

I looked around. Silva sat on a stool at the bar. Jacky stood behind him, a hand on Silva’s shoulder, tapping his foot to the Bo Diddley beat of “She’s the One.” The rest of the bar stools were filled with people who looked too comfortable to be anything but regulars. A couple of them had the cocked-head posture of cheap neural overlays. The others played games on the slick touchscreen bar, or tapped on the Bracertabs strapped to their arms, the latest tech fad. Nobody talking to anybody.

Down at the other end, two blond women stood facing the Bruce holo, singing along and swaying. He pointed in their general direction, and one giggled and clutched her friend’s arm as if he had singled her out personally. Two guys sat on stools near the stage, one playing air drums, the other watching the women. The women only had eyes for Bruce.

I got where they were coming from. I knew people who didn’t like his voice or his songs, but I didn’t know anybody, especially any musician, who couldn’t appreciate his stage presence. Even here, even now, knowing decades separated me from the night this had been recorded, and decades separated the young man who had first written the song from the older man who sang it, even from across a scuzzy too-bright barroom, drinking pisswater beer with strangers and my own smelly band, I believed him when he sang that she was the one. I hated the StageHolo company even more for the fact I was enjoying it.

Somebody slid into the booth next to me. I turned, expecting one of my bandmates, but a stranger had sat down, closer than I cared for.

“Passing through?” he asked, looking at me with intense, bloodshot eyes. He brushed a thick sweep of hair from his forehead, a style I could only assume he had stuck with through the decades since it had been popular. He had dimples and a smile that had clearly been his greatest asset in his youth. He probably hadn’t quite realized drinking had caught up with him, that he was puffy and red-nosed. Or that he slurred a bit, even on those two words.

“Passing through.” I gave him a brief “not interested” smile and turned my whole body back toward the stage.

“Kind of unusual for somebody to pass through here, let alone bother to stop. What attracted you?” His use of the word “attracted” was pointed.

If he put an arm around me, I’d have to slug him. I shifted a few inches, trying to put distance between us, and emphasized my next word. “We wanted a drink. We’ve been driving a while.”

His disappointment was evident. “Boyfriend? Husband?”

I nodded at the bar, letting him pick whichever he thought looked more like he might be with me, and whichever label he wanted to apply. It amused me either way, since I couldn’t imagine being with either of them. Not at the beginning, and especially not after having spent all this time in the van with them.

Then I wondered why I was playing games at all. I turned to look at him. “We’re a band.”

“No kidding! I used to have a band.” A reassessment of the situation flashed across his face. A new smile, more collegial. The change in his whole demeanor prompted me to give him a little more attention.

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. Mostly we played here. Before the insurance rates rose and StageHolo convinced Maggie she’d save money with holos of famous bands.”

“Did she? Save money?”

He sighed. “Probably. Holos don’t drink, and holos don’t dent the mics or spill beers into the PA. And people will stay and drink for hours if the right bands are playing. “

“Do you still play for fun? Your band?”

He shrugged. “We did for a while. We even got a spot at the very last State Fair. And after that, every once in a while we’d play a barbecue in somebody’s backyard. But it’s hard to keep it up when you’ve got nothing to aim for. Playing here once a week was a decent enough goal, but who would want to hear me sing covers when you can have the real thing?”

He pointed his beer at one of the women by the stage. “That’s my ex-wife, by the way.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s okay.” He took a swig of beer. “That’s when Polly left me. Said it wasn’t cause the band was done, but I think it was related. She said I didn’t seem interested in anything at all after that.”

He had turned his attention down to his drink, but now he looked at me again. “How about you? I guess there are still places out there to play?”

“A few,” I said. “Mostly in the cities. There’s a lot of turnover, too. So we can have a great relationship with a place and then we’ll call back and they’ll be gone without a trace.”

“And there’s enough money in it to live on?”

There are people who ask that question in an obnoxious, disbelieving way, and I tend to tell them, “We’re here, aren’t we?” but this guy was nostalgic enough that I answered him honestly. Maybe I could help him see there was no glamor left for people like us.

“I used to get some royalty checks from an old song, which covered insurance and repairs for the van, but they’ve gotten smaller and smaller since BMI v. StageHolo. We make enough to stay on the road, eat really terribly, have a beer now and again. Not enough to save. Not enough to stop, ever. Not that we want to stop, so it’s okay.”

“You never come off the road? Do you live somewhere?”

“The van’s registered at my parents’ place in Maryland, and I crash there when I need a break. But that isn’t often.”

“And your band?”

“My bassist and I have been playing together for a long time, and he’s got places he stays. We replace a drummer occasionally. This one’s been with us for a year, and the two of them are into each other, so if they don’t fall out it might last a while.”

He nodded. The wolfishness was gone, replaced by something more wistful. He held out his beer. “To music.”

“To live music.” My can clinked his.

Somebody shouted over by the bar, and we both twisted round to see what had happened. The air-drum player had wandered over – Max Weinberg was on break too – and he and Jacky were squaring off over something. Jacky’s blue lips glowed from twenty feet away.

“Nothing good ever comes of blue drinks,” I said to my new friend.

He nodded. “You’re gonna want to get your friend out of here. That’s the owner behind the bar. If your guy breaks anything, she’ll have the cops here in two seconds flat.”

“Crap. Thanks.”

Blue liquid pooled around and on Jacky, a tray of overturned plastic shot glasses behind him. At least they weren’t glass, and at least he hadn’t damaged the fancy bar top. I dug a twenty from the thin wad in my pocket, hoping it was enough.

“You’re fake-drumming to a fake band,” Jacky was saying. “And you’re not even good at it. If you went to your crash cymbal that much with the real Bruce, he’d fire you in two seconds.”

“Who the hell cares? Did I ask you to critique my drumming?”

“No, but if you did, I’d tell you you’re behind on the kick, too. My two year old niece keeps a better beat than you do.”

The other guy’s face reddened, and I saw him clench a fist. Silva had an arm across Jacky’s chest by then, propelling him toward the door. We made eye contact, and he nodded.

I tossed my twenty on a dry spot on the bar, still hoping for a quick getaway.

“We don’t take cash,” said the owner, holding my bill by the corner like it was a dead rat.

Dammit. I squared my shoulders. “You’re legally required to accept US currency.”

“Maybe true in the US of A, but this is the US of Starker’s, and I only accept Superwally credit. And your blue buddy there owes a lot more than this anyway for those spilled drinks.” She had her hand below the bar. I had no clue whether she was going for a phone or a baseball bat or a gun; nothing good could come of any of those options.

I snatched the bill back, mind racing. Silva kept a credit transfer account; that wouldn’t be any help, since he was already out the door. I avoided credit and devices in general, which usually held me in good stead, but I didn’t think the label “Non-comm” would win me any friends here. Jacky rarely paid for anything, so I had no clue whether he had been paying cash or credit up until then.

“I’ve got them, Maggie.” My new friend from the booth stepped up beside me, waving his phone.

He turned to me. “Go on. I’ve got this.”

Maggie’s hand came out from under the bar. She pulled a phone from behind the cash register to do the credit transfer, which meant whatever she had reached for down below probably wouldn’t have been good for my health.

“Keep playing,” he called after me.

• • • •

Jacky was unremorseful. “He started it. Called us disease vectors. I told him to stay right where he was and the whole world would go on turning ’cause it doesn’t even know he exists. Besides, if he can’t air drum, he should just air guitar like everybody else.”

Silva laughed. “You should have pretended to cough. He probably would have pissed himself.”

He and Silva sprawled in the back together as I peeled out of the parking lot.

“Not funny. I don’t care who started it. No fights. I mean it. Do you think I can afford to bail you out? How are we supposed to play tomorrow if our drummer’s in jail? And what if they skip the jail part and shoot you? It’s happened before.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Jacky said.

“Not funny,” I repeated. “If you ever call me ‘Mom’ again I’m leaving you on the side of the road. And I’m not a Chauffeur. Somebody come up here to keep me company.”

Silva climbed across the bed and bags and up to the passenger seat. He flipped on the police scanner, then turned it off after a few minutes of silence; nobody had put out any APBs on a van full of bill-ducking freaks. I drove speed limit plus five, same as the occasional Chauffeurs we passed ferrying their passengers home. Shortcutting onto the highway to leave the area entirely would’ve been my preference, but Daisy would have triggered the ramp sensors in two seconds flat; we hadn’t been allowed on an interstate in five years.

After about twenty miles, my fear that we were going to get chased down finally dissipated and my heartbeat returned to acceptable rhythms. We pulled into an office park that didn’t look patrolled.

“Your turn for the bed, Luce?” Jacky asked. Trying to make amends, maybe.

“You guys can have it if I can find my sleeping bag. It’s actually pretty nice out, and then I don’t have to smell whatever that blue crap is on your clothes.”

“You have a sleeping bag?”

“Of course I do. I just used it in…” Actually, I couldn’t think of when I had used it last. It took a few minutes of rummaging to find it in the storage space under the bed, behind Silva’s garage sale box of pulp novels. I spread it on the ground just in front of the van. The temperature was perfect and the sky was full of stars. Hopefully there weren’t any coyotes around.

I slept three or four hours before my body started to remind me why I didn’t sleep outside more often. I got up to pee and stretch. When I opened the door, I was hit by an even deeper grease smell than usual. It almost drowned out the funk of two guys farting, four days unwashed. Also the chemical-alcohol-blue scent Jacky wore all over his clothes.

Leaning over the driver’s seat, I dug in the center console for my silver pen and the bound atlas I used as a road bible. The stars were bright enough to let me see the pages without a flashlight. The atlas was about fifteen years out of date, but my notes kept it useable. The town we had called Nowhere was actually named Rackwood, which sounded more like a tree disease than a town to me. A glittery asterisk went next to Rackwood, and in the margin “China Grove – Mike Sun – grease AND food.” I drew an X over the location of Starker’s, which wouldn’t get our repeat business.

I crawled inside around dawn, feeling every bone in my body, and reclined the passenger seat. Nobody knocked on the van to tell us to move on, so we slept until the sun started baking us. Jacky reached forward to offer up his last leftovers from the night before. I sniffed the container and handed it back to him. He shrugged and dove in with his fingers, chopsticks having disappeared into the detritus surrounding him. After a little fishing around, I found my dinner and sent that his way as well.

Silva climbed into the driver’s seat. I didn’t usually relinquish the wheel; I genuinely loved doing all the driving myself. I liked the control, liked to listen to Daisy’s steady engine and the thrum of the road. He knew that, and didn’t ask except when he really felt the urge, which meant that when he did ask, I moved over. Jacky had never offered once, content to read and listen to music in his back seat cocoon. Another reason he fit in well.

Silva driving meant I got a chance to look around; it wasn’t often that we took a road I hadn’t been down before. I couldn’t even remember how we had wound up choosing this route the previous day. We passed shuttered diners and liquor stores, the ghost town that might have been a main street at one time.

“Where is everybody?” Jacky asked.

I twisted around to see if he was joking. “Have you looked out the window once this whole year? Is this the first time you’re noticing?”

“I usually sleep through this part of the country. It’s boring.”

“There is no everybody,” Silva said. “A few farmers, a Superwally that employs everyone else within an hour’s drive.”

I peered at my atlas. “I’ve got a distribution center drawn in about forty miles back and ten miles north, on the road we usually take. That probably employs anybody not working for the company store.” There wasn’t really any reason for me to draw that kind of place onto my maps, but I liked making them more complete. They had layers in some places, stores and factories that had come and gone and come and gone again.

Most backroad towns looked like this, these days. At best a fast food place, a feed store, maybe a run down looking grocery or a health clinic, and not much else. There’d be a Superwally somewhere between towns, as Silva had said, luring everyone even farther from center or anything resembling community. Town after town, we saw the same thing. And of course most people didn’t see anything at all, puttering along on the self-driving highways, watching movies instead of looking out the windows, getting from point A to point B without stopping in between.

We weren’t exactly doing our part either. It’s not like we had contributed to the local economy. We took free dinner, free fuel. We contributed in other ways, but not in this town or the others we’d passed through the night before. Maybe someday someone here would book us and we’d come back, but until then we were passing through. Goodbye, Rackwood, Indiana.

“Next town has the World’s Largest Salt Shaker.” I could hear the capital letters in Jacky’s voice. He liked to download tourist brochures. I approved of that hobby, the way I approved of supporting anything to make a place less generic. Sometimes we even got to stop at some of the sights, when we could afford it and we weren’t in a hurry. Neither of which was the case today.

“Another time,” Silva said. “We slept later than we should have.”

“I think we’re missing out.”

I twisted around to look at Jacky. He flopped across the bed, waving his phone like a look at the world’s largest salt shaker might make us change our minds. “It’s a choice between showers and salt shaker. You decide.”

He stuffed his phone into his pocket with a sigh. Showers trumped.

About an hour outside Columbus, we stopped at a by-the-hour motel already starred in my atlas, and rented an hour for the glory of running water. The clerk took my cash without comment.

I let the guys go first, so I wouldn’t have to smell them again after I was clean. The shower itself was nothing to write home about. The metal booth kind, no tub, nonexistent water pressure, seven minute shutoff; better than nothing. Afterward, I pulled a white towel from the previous hotel from my backpack to leave in the room, and stuffed one of the near-identical clean ones in my bag. The one I took might have been one I had left the last time through. Nobody ever got shorted a towel, and it saved me a lot of time in Laundromats. I couldn’t even remember who had taught me that trick, but I’d been doing it for decades.

We still had to get back in our giant grease trap, of course, now in our cleanish gig clothes. I opened all the windows and turned on the fan full blast, hoping to keep the shower scent for as long as possible. I could vaguely hear Jacky calling out visitor highlights for Columbus from the back, but the noise stole the meat of whatever he was saying. I stuck my arm outside and planed my hand against the wind.

I didn’t intend to fall asleep, but I woke to Silva shouting “Whoa! Happy birthday, Daisy!” and hooting the horn. I leaned over to see the numbers clicking over from 99 999.

Jacky threw himself forward to snap a picture of the odometer as it hit all zeroes. “Whoa! What birthday is this?”

I considered. Daisy only had a five-digit odometer, so she got a fresh start every hundred thousand miles. “Eight, I think?”

Silva grinned. “Try again. My count says nine.”

“Nine? I thought we passed seven on the way out of Seattle two years ago.”

“That was five years ago. Eight in Asheville. I don’t remember when.”

“Huh. You’re probably right. We should throw her a party at a million.” I gave her dashboard a hard pat, like the flank of a horse. “Good job, old girl. That’s amazing.”

“Totally,” said Jacky. “And can we play ‘Our Lady of the Open Road’ tonight? In Daisy’s honor? I love that song. I don’t know why we don’t play it more often.” He started playing the opening with his hands on the back of my seat.

“I’m on board,” Silva agreed. “Maybe instead of ‘Manifest Independence?’ That one could use a rest.”

“‘Manifest Independence’ stays,” I said. “Try again.”

“‘Outbreak?’”

“Deal.”

Jacky retreated to make the changes to the set list.

Our destination was deep in the heart of the city. Highways would have gotten us there in no time, not that we had that option. We drove along the river, then east past the decaying convention center.

We hadn’t played this particular space before, but we’d played others, mostly in this same neighborhood of abandoned warehouses. Most closed up pretty quickly, or moved when they got shut down, so even if we played for the same crowd, we rarely played the same building twice.

This one, The Chain, sounded like it had a chance at longevity. It was a bike co-op by day, venue by night. Cities liked bike co-ops. With the right people running the place, maybe somebody who knew how to write grants and dress in business drag and shake a hand or two, a bike co-op could be part of the city plan. Not that I had any business telling anyone to sell themselves out for a few months of forced legitimacy.

Our timing was perfect. The afternoon bike repair class had just finished, so the little stage area was more or less clear. Better yet, they’d ordered pizza. Jacky had braved the Chinese leftovers, but Silva and I hadn’t eaten yet. It took every ounce of my self-restraint to help haul in the instruments before partaking. I sent a silent prayer up to the pizza gods there’d still be some left for us once all our gear was inside.

I made three trips – guitars and gear, amp, swag to sell– then loaded up a paper plate with three pizza slices. I was entirely capable of eating all three, but I’d share with the guys if they didn’t get their gear in before the food was gone. Not ideal dinner before singing, anyway; maybe the grease would trump the dairy as a throat coating. I sat on my amp and ate the first piece, watching Jacky and Silva bring in the drums, feeling only a little guilty. I had done my share, even if I hadn’t helped anyone else.

The bike class stuck around. We chatted with a few. Emma, Rudy, Dijuan, Carter, Marin – there were more but I lost track of names after that. I gave those five the most attention in any case, since Rudy had been the one to book us, and Emma ran the programming for the bike co-op. We were there because of them. We talked politics and music and bikes. I was grateful not to have to explain myself again. These were our people. They treated us like we were coming home, not passing through.

More audience gradually trickled in, a good crowd for a Wednesday night. A mix of young and old, in varying degrees of punk trappings, according to their generation and inclination. Here and there, some more straight-laced, though they were as punk as anyone, in the truest spirit of the word, for having shown up at this space at all. Punk as a genre didn’t look or sound like it used to, in any case; it had scattered to the wind, leaving a loose grouping of bands whose main commonality was a desire to create live music for live audiences.

The first band began to play, an all woman four piece called Moby K. Dick. They were young enough to be my kids, which meant young enough they had never known any scene but this one. The bassist played from a sporty little wheelchair, her back to the audience, like she was having a one-on-one conversation with the drummer’s high hat. At first, I thought she was shy, but I gradually realized she was just really into the music. The drummer doubled as singer, hiding behind a curtain of dreadlocks that lifted and dropped back onto her face with every beat. They played something that sounded like sea chanties done double time and double volume, but the lyrics were all about whales and dolphins taking revenge on people. It was pretty fantastic.

I gave all the bands we played with a chance to win me over. They were the only live music we ever got to hear, being on the road full time. The few friends we still had doing the same circuit were playing the same nights as us in other towns, rotating through; the others were doing StageHolo and we didn’t talk much anymore. It used to be we’d sometimes even wind up in the same cities on the same night, so we’d miss each other and split the audience. That didn’t happen much anymore with so few places to play.

Moby K. Dick earned my full attention, but the second band lost me pretty quickly. They all played adapted console-game instruments except the drummer. No strings, all buttons, all programmed to trigger samples. I’d seen bands like that before that were decent; this one was not my thing.

The women from the first band were hanging out by the drink cooler, so I made my way back there. I thrust my hand into the ice and came out with a water bottle. Most venues like this one were alcohol-free and all ages. There was probably a secret beer cooler hidden somewhere, but I wasn’t in the mood to find it.

“I liked your stuff,” I said to the bassist. Up close, she looked slightly older than she had on stage. Mid-twenties, probably. “My name’s Luce.”

She grinned. “I know! I mean, I’m Truly. And yes, that’s really my name. Nice to meet you. And really? You liked it? That’s so cool! We begged to be on this bill with you. I’ve been listening to Cassis Fire my whole life. I’ve got ‘Manifest Independence’ written on my wall at home. It’s my mantra.”

I winced but held steady under the barrage and the age implication. She continued. “My parents have all your music. They like the stuff with Marcia Januarie on drums best, when you had the second guitarist, but I think your current lineup is more streamlined.”

“Thanks.” I waited for her to point her parents out in the room, and for them to be younger than me. When she thankfully didn’t volunteer that information, I asked, “Do you guys have anything recorded?”

“We’ve been recording our shows, but mostly we just want to play. You could take us on the road with you, if you wanted. Opening act.”

She said the last bit jokingly, but I was pretty sure the request was real, so I treated it that way.” We used to be able to, but not these days. It’s hard enough to keep ourselves fed and moving to the next gig. I’m happy to give you advice, though. Have you seen our van?”

Her eyes widened. She was kind of adorable in her enthusiasm. Part of me considered making a pass at her, but we only had a few minutes before I had to be onstage, and I didn’t want to confuse things. Sometimes I hated being the responsible one.

“It’s right outside. They’ll find me when it’s our turn to play. Come on.”

The crowd parted for her wheelchair as we made our way through. I held the door for her and she navigated the tiny rise in the doorframe with practiced ease.

“We call her Daisy,” I said, introducing Truly to the van. I searched my pockets for the keys and realized Silva had them. So much for that idea. “She’s a fifteen seater, but we took out the middle seats for a bed and the back to make a cage for the drums and stuff so they don’t kill us if we stop short.”

“What’s the mpg?” she asked. I saw her gears spinning as she tried to figure out logistics. I liked her focus. She was starting to remind me of me, though, which was the turnoff I needed.

I beckoned her to the hood, which popped by latch, no keys necessary. “That’s the best part of all.”

She locked her chair and pushed herself up to lean against Daisy’s frame. At my look, she explained, “I don’t need it all the time, but playing usually makes me pretty tired. And I don’t like getting pushed around in crowds.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” I said. “And if you buy a van of your own, that’s one less conversion you’ll have to make, if you can climb in without a lift. I had been trying to figure out if you’d have room for four people and gear and a chair lift.”

“Nah, you can go back to the part where we wonder how I’m going to afford a van, straight up. Right now we just borrow my sister’s family Chauffeur. It’s just barely big enough for all our gear, but the mileage is crap and there’s no room for clothes or swag or anything.”

“Well, if you can find a way to pay for an old van like Daisy, the beauty of running on fry oil is the money you’ll save on fuel. As long as you like takeout food, you get used to the smell…”

Silva stuck his head out the door, then came over to us. I made introductions. He unlocked the van; I saw Truly wince when the smell hit her. He reached under the bed, back toward the wheel well, and emerged with a bottle of whiskey in hand. Took a long swig, and passed it to me. I had a smaller sip, just enough to feel the burn in my throat, the lazy singer’s warm-up.

Truly followed my lead. “Promise you’ll give me pointers if I manage to get a van?”

I promised. The kid wasn’t just like me; she practically was me, with the misfortune to have been born twenty years too late to possibly make it work.

I made Silva tap phones with her. “I would do it myself, but…”

“I know,” she said. “I’d be Non-comm if I could, but my parents won’t let me. Emergencies and all that.”

Did we play extra well, or did it just feel like it? Moby K. Dick had helped; it was always nice to be reminded that what you did mattered. I had a mental buzz even with only a sip of whiskey, the combination of music and possibilities and an enthusiastic crowd eager to take whatever we gave them.

On a good night like this, when we locked in with each other, it was like I was a time traveler for an hour. Every night we’d ever played a song overlapped with every night we’d ever play it again, even though I was fully in the moment. My fingers made shapes, ran steel strings over magnets, ran signals through wires to the amplifier behind me, which blasted those shapes back over me in waves. Glorious, cathartic, bone-deep noise.

On stage, I forgot how long I’d been doing this. I could still be the kid playing in her parents’ basement, or the young woman with the hit single and the major label, the one called the next Joan Jett, the second coming of riot grrl, not that I wanted to be the young version of me anymore. I had to work to remember that if I slid on my knees I might not get up again. I was a better guitar player now, a better singer, a better songwriter. I had years of righteous rage to channel. When I talked, I sometimes felt like a pissed off grump, stuck in the past. Given time to express it all in music, I came across better.

Moby K. Dick pushed through to the front when we played “Manifest Independence,” singing along at the top of their lungs. They must have been babies when I released that song, but it might as well have been written for them. It was as true for them as it had been for me.

That was what the young punks and the old punks all responded to; they knew I believed what I was singing. We all shared the same indignation that we were losing everything that made us distinct, that nothing special happened anymore, that the new world replacing the old one wasn’t nearly as good, that everyone was hungry and everything was broken and that we’d fix it if we could find the right tools. My job was to give it all a voice. Add to that the sweet old-school crunch of my Les Paul played through Marshall tubes, Silva’s sinuous bass lines, Jacky’s tricky beats, and we could be the best live band you ever heard. Made sweeter by the fact that you had to be there to get the full effect.

We didn’t have rehearsed moves or light shows or spotlights to hit like the StageHolos, but we knew how to play it up for the crowd. To make it seem like we were playing for one person, and playing for all of them, and playing just for them, because this night was different and would only ever happen once. People danced and pogoed and leaned into the music. A few of the dancers had ultraviolet tattoos, which always looked pretty awesome from my vantage point, a secret performance for the performers. I nudged Silva to look at one of them, a glowing phoenix spread wingtip to wingtip across a dancer’s bare shoulders and arms.

A couple of tiny screens also lit the audience: people recording us with Bracertabs, arms held aloft. I was fine with that. Everyone at the show knew how it felt to be there; they’d come back, as long as there were places for us to play. The only market for a non-Holo recording was other people like this audience, and it would only inspire them to come out again the next time.

Toward the end of the set, I dedicated “Our Lady of the Open Road” to Daisy. At the tail of the last chorus, Jacky rolled through his toms in a way he never had before, cracking the song open wide, making it clear he wasn’t coming in for a landing where he was supposed to. Silva and I exchanged glances, a wordless “this is going to be interesting,” then followed Jacky’s lead. The only way to do that was to make it bigger than usual, keep it going, make it a monster. I punched my gain pedal and turned to my amp to ride the feedback. Our lady of the open road, get me through another night.

Through some miracle of communication we managed to end the song together, clean enough that it sounded planned. I’d kill Jacky later, but at that moment I loved him. The crowd screamed.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my shoulder. “We’ve got one more for you. Thanks so much for being here tonight.” I hoped “Better to Laugh” wouldn’t sound like an afterthought.

That was when the power went out.

“Police!” somebody shouted. The crowd began to push toward the door.

“Not the police!” someone else yelled. “Just a blackout.”

“Just a blackout!” I repeated into the mic as if it were still on, then louder into the front row, hoping they were still listening to me. “Pass it on.”

The message rippled through the audience. A tense moment passed with everyone listening for sirens, ready to scatter. Then they began to debate whether the blackout was the city or the building, whether the power bill had been paid, whether it was a plot to shut the place down.

Emma pushed her way through the crowd to talk to us. “They shut this neighborhood’s power down whenever the circuits overload uptown. We’re trying to get somebody to bring it up in city council. I’m so sorry.”

I leaned in to give her a sweaty hug. “Don’t worry about it. It happens.”

We waited, hoping for the rock gods to smile upon us. The room started to heat up, and somebody propped the outside doors, which cooled things down slightly. After twenty minutes, we put our instruments down. At least we had made it through most of our set. I had no doubt the collective would pay us, and no concern people would say they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth. I dug the hotel towel out of my backpack to wipe my dripping face.

A few people made their way over to talk to us and buy t-shirts and patches and even LPs and download codes, even though you could find most of our songs free online. That was part of the beauty of these kids. They were all broke as hell, but they still wanted to support us, even if it was just a patch or a pin or a password most of them were capable of hacking in two seconds flat. And they all believed in cash, bless them. We used the light of their phone screens to make change.

The girls from Moby K. Dick all bought t-shirts. Truly bought an LP as well – it figured she was into vinyl – and I signed it “To my favorite new band, good luck.” She wheeled out with her band, no parents in sight. I wondered if they’d decided they were too old for live music, then chided myself. I couldn’t have it both ways, mad that they were probably my age and mad that they weren’t there. Besides, they might have just left separately from their kid. I knew I must be tired if I was getting hung up on something like that.

“You look like you need some water,” somebody said to me in the darkness. A bottle pressed into my hand, damp with condensation.

“Thanks,” I said. “Though I don’t know how you can say I look like anything with the lights out.”

At that moment, the overheads hummed on again. I had left my guitar leaning face down on my amp, and it started to build up a squeal of feedback. I tossed the water back, wiped my hands on my pants, and slammed the standby switch. The squeal trailed away.

“Sorry, you were saying?” I asked, returning to the stranger, who still stood with bottle in hand. I took it from her again. I thought maybe I’d know her in the light, but she didn’t look familiar. Mid-thirties, maybe, tall and tan, with a blandly friendly face, toned arms, Bracertab strapped to one forearm. She wore a Magnificent Beefeaters T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. We used to play shows with them, before they got big.

“I was saying you looked like you were thirsty, by which I mean you looked like that before the lights went out, so I guessed you probably still looked like that after.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I wanted to say good show. One of your best I’ve seen.”

“Have you seen a lot?” It was a bit of a rude question, with an implication I didn’t recognize her. Bad for business. Everybody should believe they were an integral part of the experience. But really, I didn’t think I’d seen her before, and it wasn’t the worst question, unless the answer was she’d been following us for the last six months.

“I’ve been following you for the last six months,” she said. “But mostly live audience uploads. I was at your last Columbus show, though, and up in Rochester.”

Rochester had been a huge warehouse. I didn’t feel as bad.

“Thanks for coming. And, uh, for the water.” I tried to redeem myself.

“My pleasure,” she said. “I really like your sound. Nikki Kellerman.”

She held her arm out in the universal ‘tap to exchange virtual business cards’ gesture.

“Sorry, I’m Non-comm,” I said.

She looked surprised, but I couldn’t tell if it was surprise that I was Non-comm, or that she didn’t know the term. The latter didn’t seem likely. I’d have said a third of the audience at our shows these days were people who had given up their devices and all the corporate tracking that went along with them.

She unstrapped the tablet, peeled a thin wallet off her damp arm, and drew a paper business card from inside it.

I read it out loud. “Nikki Kellerman, A & R, StageHolo Productions.” I handed it back to her.

“Hear me out,” she said.

“Okay, Artists & Repertoire. You can talk at me while I pack up.”

I opened the swag tub and started piling the t-shirts back into it. Usually we took the time to separate them by size so they’d be right the next time, but now I tossed them in, hoping to get away as soon as possible.

“As you probably know, we’ve been doing very well with getting StageHolo into venues across the country. Bringing live music into places that previously didn’t have it.”

“There are about seven things wrong with that statement,” I said without looking up.

She continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Our biggest selling acts are arena rock, pop, rap, and Spanish pop. We now reach nine in ten bars and clubs. One in four with StageHolo AtHome.”

“You can stop the presentation there. Don’t you dare talk to me about StageHolo AtHome.” My voice rose. Silva stood in the corner chatting with some bike kids, but I saw him throw a worried look my way. “‘All the excitement of live entertainment without leaving your living room.’ ‘Stay AtHome with John Legend tonight.’”

I clapped the lid onto the swag box and carried it to the door. When I went to pack up my stage gear, she followed.

“I think you’re not understanding the potential, Luce. We’re looking to diversify, to reach new audiences: punk, folk, metal, musical theater.” She listed a few more genres they hadn’t completely destroyed yet.

I would punch her soon. I was not a violent person, but I knew for a fact I would punch her soon. “You’re standing in front of me, asking me to help ruin my livelihood.”

“No! Not ruin it. I’m inviting you to a better life. You’d still play shows. You’d still have audiences.”

“Audiences of extras paid to be there? Audiences in your studios?” I asked through clenched teeth.

“Yes and no. We can set up at your shows, but that’s harder. Not a problem in an arena setting, but I think you’d find the 3D array distracting in a place like this. We’d book you some theaters, arenas. Fill in the crowds if we needed to. You could still do this in between if you wanted, but…” she shrugged to indicate she couldn’t see why I would want.

“Hey, Luce. A little help over here?” I looked down to see my hands throttling my mic instead of putting it back in its box. Looked up at Silva struggling to get his bass amp on the dolly, like he didn’t do it on his own every night of the week. Clearly an offer of rescue.

“Gotta go,” I said to the devil’s A & R person. “Have your people call my people.”

Turning the bass rig into a two-person job took all of our acting skills. We walked to the door in exaggerated slow motion. Lifting it into the van genuinely did take two, but usually my back and knee ruled me out. I gritted my teeth and hoisted.

“What was that about?” Silva asked, shutting Daisy’s back hatch and leaning against it. “You looked like you were going to tear that woman’s throat out with your teeth.”

“StageHolo! Can you believe the nerve? Coming here, trying to lure us to the dark side?”

“The nerve,” he echoed, shaking his head, but giving me a funny look. He swiped an arm across his sweaty forehead, then pushed off from the van.

I followed him back inside. Nikki Kellerman was still there.

“Luce, I think you’re not seeing everything I have to offer.”

“Haven’t you left yet? That was a pretty broad hint.”

“Look around.” She gestured at the near-empty room.

I stared straight at her. I wasn’t dignifying her with any response.

“Luce, I know you had a good crowd tonight, but are there people who aren’t showing up anymore? Look where you are. Public transit doesn’t run into this neighborhood anymore. You’re playing for people who squat in warehouses within a few blocks, and then people who can afford bikes or Chauffeurs.”

“Most people can scrounge a bicycle,” I said. “I’ve never heard a complaint about that.”

“You’re playing for the people who can bike, then. That bassist from the first band, could she have gotten here without a car?”

For the first time, I felt like she was saying something worth hearing. I sat down on my amp.

“You’re playing for this little subset of city punks for whom this is a calling. And after that you’re playing for the handful of people who can afford a night out and still think of themselves as revolutionary. And that’s fine. That’s a noble thing. But what about everybody else? Parents who can’t afford a sitter? Teens who are too young to make it here on their own, or who don’t have a way into the city? There are plenty of people who love music and deserve to hear your message. They just aren’t fortunate enough to live where you’re playing. Wouldn’t you like to reach them too?”

Dammit, dammit, dammit, she had a decent point. I thought about the guy who had paid for our drinks the night before, and the church van guy from outside the Chinese restaurant, and Truly if she didn’t have a sister with a car.

She touched her own back. “I’ve seen you after a few shows now, too. You’re amazing when you play, but when you step off, I can see what it takes. You’re tired. What happens if you get sick, or if your back goes out completely?”

“I’ve always gotten by,” I said, but not with the same vehemence as a minute before.

“I’m just saying you don’t have to get by. You can still do these shows, but you won’t have to do as many. Let us help you out. I can get you a massage therapist or a chiropractor or a self-driving van.”

I started to protest, but she held up her hands in a placating gesture. “Sorry – I know you’ve said you love your van. No offense meant. I’m not chasing you because my boss wants me to. I’m chasing you because I’ve seen you play. You make great music. You reach people. That’s what we want.”

She put her card on the amp next to me, and walked out the front of the club. I watched her go.

“Hey Luce,” Jacky called to me. I headed his way, slowly. My back had renewed its protest.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He gestured at the bike kids surrounding him, Emma and Rudy and some more whose names I had forgotten. Marina? Marin. I smiled. I should have spent more time with them, since they were the ones who had brought us in.

“Our generous hosts have offered us a place to stay nearby. I said I thought it was a good idea, but you’re the boss.”

They all looked at me, waiting. I hadn’t seen the money from the night yet. It would probably be pretty good, since this kind of place didn’t take a cut for themselves. They were in it for the music. And for the chance to spend some time with us, which I was in a position to provide.

“That sounds great,” I said. “Anything is better than another night in the van.” We might be able to afford a hotel, or save the hotel splurge for the next night, in – I mentally checked the roadmap – Pittsburgh.

With the bike kids’ help, we made quick work of the remaining gear. Waited a little longer while Rudy counted money and handed it over to me with no small amount of pride.

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. It had been a really good show, and the money was actually better than expected. “We’ll come back here anytime.”

Just to prove it, I pulled my date book from my backpack. He called Emma over, and together we penned in a return engagement in three months. I was glad to work with people so competent; there was a good chance they’d still be there in three months.

We ended up at a diner, van parked in front, bikes chained to the fence behind it, an unruly herd.

I was so tired the menu didn’t look like English; then I realized I was looking at the Spanish side.

“Is there a fridge at the place we’re staying?” Silva asked.

Smart guy. Emma nodded. Silva and Jacky and I immediately ordered variations on an omelet theme, without looking further at either side of the menu. The beauty of omelets: you ate all the toast and potatoes, wrapped the rest, and the eggs would still taste fine the next day. Two meals in one, maybe three, and we hadn’t had to hit a dumpster in two full days.

Our hosts were a riot. I barely kept my eyes open – at least twice I realized they weren’t – but Emma talked about Columbus politics and bikes and greenspaces with a combination of humor and enthusiasm that made me glad for the millionth time for the kind of places we played, even if I didn’t quite keep up my end of the conversation. Nikki Kellerman could flush herself down the toilet. I wouldn’t trade these kids for anything.

Until we saw the place on offer. After the lovely meal, after following their bikes at bike speed through unknown and unknowable dark neighborhoods, Silva pulled the van up. The last portion had involved turning off the road along two long ruts in grass grown over a paved drive. I had tried to follow in my atlas on the city inset, but gave up when the streets didn’t match.

“Dude,” I said, opening my eyes. “What is that?”

We all stared upward. At first glance it looked like an enormous brick plantation house, with peeling white pillars supporting the upper floors. At second, maybe some kind of factory.

“Old barracks,” said Jacky, king of local tourist sites. “Those kids got themselves an abandoned fort.”

“I wonder if it came with contents included.” Silva mimed loading a rifle. “Bike or die.”

I laughed.

Jacky leaned into the front seat. “If you tell me I have to haul in my entire kit, I swear to god I’m quitting this band. I’ll join the bike militia. Swear to god.”

I peered out the windows, but had no sense of location. “Silva?”

“I can sleep in the van if you think I should.”

It was a generous offer, given that actual beds were in the cards.

“You don’t have to do that,” I decided. “We’ll take our chances.”

I stopped at the back gate for my guitar, in the hopes of having a few minutes to play in the morning. Silva did the same. We shouldered instruments and backpacks, and Jacky took the three Styrofoam boxes with our omelets. The bike kids waited in a cluster by an enormous door. We staggered their way.

“So who has the keys?” Silva asked.

Emma grinned. “Walk this way.”

The big door was only for dramatic effect. We went in through a small, unlocked door on the side. It looked haphazardly placed, a late addition to the architecture. A generator hummed just outside the door, powering a refrigerator, where we left our leftovers. I hoped it also powered overhead lights, but the bike kids all drew out halogen flashlights as soon as we had stored the food.

The shadows made everything look ominous and decrepit; I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t look the same in daylight. Up a crumbling staircase, then a second, to a smaller third floor. Walls on one side, railing on the other, looking down over a central core, all black. Our footsteps echoed through the emptiness. In my tired state, I imagined being told to bed down in the hallway, sleeping with my head pressed to the floor. If they didn’t stop soon, I might.

We didn’t have to go further. Emma swung open an unmarked door and handed me her flashlight. I panned it over the room. A breeze wafted through broken glass. An open futon took up most of the space, a threadbare couch sagging beneath the window. How those things had made it up to this room without the stairs falling away entirely was a mystery, but I had never been so happy to see furniture in my entire life.

I dropped my shoulder and lowered my guitar to the floor. The bike kids stared at us and we stared back. Oh god, I thought. If they want to hang out more, I’m going to cry.

“This is fantastic,” said Silva, the diplomat. “Thank you so much. This is so much better than sleeping in the van.”

“Sweet. Hasta mañana!” said Rudy, his spiky head bobbing. They backed out the door, closing it behind them, and creaked off down the hallway.

I sank into the couch. “I’m not moving again,” I said.

“Did they say whether they’re renting or squatting? Is anybody else getting a jail vibe?” Jacky asked, flopping back onto the futon.

Silva opened the door. “We’re not locked in.” He looked out into the hallway and then turned back to us. “But, uh, they’re gone without a trace. Did either of you catch where the bathroom was?”

I shook my head, or I think I did. They were on their own.

The night wasn’t a pleasant one. I woke once to the sound of Silva pissing in a bottle, once to a sound like animals scratching at the door, once to realize there was a spring sticking through the couch and into my thigh. The fourth time, near eight in the morning, I found myself staring at the ceiling at a crack that looked like a rabbit. I turned my head and noticed a cat pan under the futon. Maybe it explained the scratching I had heard earlier.

I rolled over and stood up one vertebra at a time. Other than the spring, it hadn’t been a bad couch. My back felt better than the night before. I grabbed my guitar and slipped out the door.

I tried to keep my steps from echoing. With the first daylight streaming in through the jagged windows, I saw exactly how dilapidated the place was, like it had been left to go feral. I crept down to the first floor, past a mural that looked like a battle plan for world domination, all circles and arrows, and another of two bikes in carnal embrace. Three locked doors, then I spotted the fridge and the door out. Beyond this huge building there were several others of similar size, spread across a green campus. Were they all filled with bike kids? It was a pleasant thought. I’d never seen any place like this. I sat down on the ground, my back against the building, in the morning sunshine.

It was nice to be alone with my guitar. The problem with touring constantly was we were always driving, always with people, always playing the same songs we already knew. And when we did have down time, we’d spend it tracking down new gigs, or following up to make sure the next places still existed. The important things like writing new songs fell to last on the list.

This guitar and I, we were old friends. The varnish above her pick guard had worn away where I hit it on the downstroke. Tiny grooves marked where my fingers had indented the frets. She fit my hands perfectly. We never talked anymore.

She was an old Les Paul knockoff, silver cloudburst except where the bare wood showed through. Heavy as anything, the reason why my back hurt so constantly. The hunch of my shoulder as I bent over her was permanent. And of course with no amp she didn’t make any sound beyond string jangle. Still, she felt good.

I didn’t need to play the songs we played every night, but my fingers have always insisted on playing through the familiar before they can find new patterns. I played some old stuff, songs I loved when I was first teaching myself to play, Frightwig and the Kathleen Battle School and disappear fear, just to play something I could really feel. Then a couple of bars of “She’s the One,” then what I remembered of a Moby K. Dick whale song. I liked those kids.

When I finally hit my brain’s unlock code, it latched onto a twisty little minor descent. The same rhythm as the whale song, but a different progression, a different riff. A tiny theft, the kind all musicians make. There was only so much original to do within twelve notes. Hell, most classic punk was built on a couple of chords. What did Lou Reed say? One chord is fine, two chords is pushing it, three chords you’re into jazz?

I knew what I was singing about before I even sang it. That StageHolo offer, and the idea of playing for a paid audience night after night, the good and the bad parts. The funny thing about bargains with the devil was you so rarely heard about people turning him down; maybe sometimes it was worth your soul. I scrambled in my gig bag pocket for a pen and paper. When I came up with only a sharpie, I wrote the lyrics on my arm. The chords would keep. I’d remember them. Would probably remember the lyrics too, but I wasn’t chancing it.

Silva stepped out a little while later, wearing only a ratty towel around his waist. “There’s a bucket shower out the back!”

“Show me in a sec, but first, check it out.” I played him what I had.

His eyes widened. “Be right back.”

He returned a moment later wearing jeans, bass in hand. We both had to play hard, and I had to whisper-sing to hear the unplugged electric instruments, but we had something we both liked before long.

“Tonight?” he asked me.

“Maybe… depends on how early we get there, I guess. And whether there’s an actual soundcheck. Do you remember?”

He shook his head. “Four band lineup, at a warehouse. That’s all I remember. But maybe if we leave pretty soon, we can set up early? It’s only about three hours, I think.”

He showed me where the shower was, and I took advantage of the opportunity. The bike kids appeared with a bag of lumpy apples, and we ate the apples with our omelets, sitting on the floor. Best breakfast in ages. They explained the barracks – the story involved an arts grant and an old school and abandoned buildings and a cat sanctuary and I got lost somewhere along the way, working on my new song in my head.

After breakfast, we made our excuse that we had to get on the road. They walked us back the way we came, around the front.

My smile lasted as long as it took us to round the corner. As long as it took to see Daisy was gone.

“Did you move her, Jacky?” Silva asked.

“You’ve got the keys, man.”

Silva patted his pockets, and came up with the key. We walked closer. Glass.

I stared at the spot, trying to will Daisy back into place. Blink and she’d be back. How had we let this happen? I went through the night in my head. Had I heard glass breaking, or the engine turning over? I didn’t think so. How many times had we left her outside while we played or ate or showered or slept? I lay down on the path, away from the glass, and looked up at the morning sky.

The bike kids looked distraught, all talking at once. “This kind of thing never happens.” “We were only trying to help.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, after a minute. Then louder, when they didn’t stop. “It wasn’t your fault.” They closed their mouths and looked at me.

I sat up and continued, leaning back on my hands, trying to be the calm one, the adult. “The bad news is we’re going to need to call the police. The good news is, you’re not squatting, so we don’t have to work too hard to explain what we were doing here. The bad news is whoever stole the van can go really far on that tank. The good news is they’re probably local and aren’t trying to drive to Florida. Probably just kids who’ve never gotten to drive something that didn’t drive itself. They’ll abandon her nearby when she runs out of gas.” I was trying to make myself feel better as much as them.

“And maybe they hate Chinese food,” Jacky said. “Maybe the smell’ll make them so hungry they have to stop for Chinese food. We should try all the local Chinese food places first.”

Silva had stepped away from the group, already on the phone with the police. I heard snippets, even though his back was turned. License plate. Yes, a van. Yes, out of state plates. No, he didn’t own it, but the owner was with him. Yes, we’d wait. Where else did we have to go? Well, Pittsburgh, but it didn’t look like we’d be getting there any time soon.

He hung up and dug his hands into his pockets. He didn’t turn around or come back to the group. I should probably have gone over to him, but he didn’t look like he wanted to talk.

The kids scattered before the police arrived, all but Emma disappearing into the building. Jacky walked off somewhere as well. It occurred to me I didn’t really know much of his history for all the time we’d been riding together.

The young policewoman who arrived to take our report was standoffish at first, like we were the criminals. Emma explained the situation. No officer, not squatting, here are the permits. I kept the van registration and insurance in a folder in my backpack, which helped on that end too, so that she came over to our side a little. Just a little.

“Insurance?”

“Of course.” I rustled in the same folder, presented the card to her. She looked surprised, and I realized she had expected something electronic. “But only liability and human driver.”

Surprised her again. “So the van isn’t self-driving?”

“No, ma’am. I’ve had her – it – for twenty-three years.”

“But you didn’t convert when the government rebates were offered?”

“No, ma’am. I love driving.”

She gave me a funny look. “

“Was anything in the van?” she asked.

I sighed and started the list, moving from back to front.

“One drum kit, kind of a hodgepodge of different makes, Ampeg bass rig, Marshall guitar amp, suitcase full of gig clothes. A sleeping bag. A box of novels, maybe fifty of them. Um, all the merchandise: records and t-shirts and stuff to sell…” I kept going through all the detritus in my head, discarding the small things: collapsible chopsticks, restaurant menus, pillows, jackets. Those were all replaceable. My thoughts snagged on one thing.

“A road atlas. Rand McNally.”

The officer raised her eyebrows. “A what?”

“A road atlas. A book of maps.”

“You want me to list that?”

“Well, it’s in there. And it’s important, to me anyway. It’s annotated. All the places we’ve played, all the places we like to stop and we don’t.” I tried to hide the hitch in my voice. Don’t cry, I told myself. Cry over the van, if you need to. Not over the atlas. You’ll make another. It might take years, but it could be done.

It wasn’t just the atlas, obviously. Everything we had hadn’t been much, and it was suddenly much less. I was down to the cash in my pocket, the date book, the single change of clothes in my backpack, my guitar. How could we possibly rebuild from there? How do you finish a tour without a van? Or amps, or drums?

The officer held out her phone to tap a copy of her report over to me.

“Non-comm,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

Silva stepped in for the first time. He hadn’t even opened his mouth to help me list stuff, but now he held up his phone. “Send it to me, officer.”

She did, with a promise to follow up as soon as she had any leads. Got in her squad car. She had to actually use the wheel and drive herself back down the rutted path; I guessed places like this were why police cars had a manual option. She had probably written us off already, either way.

I turned to Silva, but he had walked off. I followed him down the path toward an old warehouse.

“Stop!” I said, when it was clear he wasn’t going to. He turned toward me. I expected him to be as sad as me, but he looked angrier than I had ever seen him, fists clenched and jaw tight.

“Whoa,” I said. “Calm down. It’ll be okay. We’ll figure something out.”

“How? How, Luce?”

“They’ll find Daisy. Or we’ll figure something out.”

“Daisy’s just the start of it. It’s amps and records and t-shirts and everything we own. I don’t even have another pair of underwear. Do you?”

I shook my head. “We can buy…”

“We can buy underwear at the Superwally. But not all that other stuff. We can’t afford it. This is it. We’re done. Unless.”

“Unless?”

He unclenched his left fist and held out a scrap of paper. I took it from him and flattened it. Nikki Kellerman’s business card, which had been on my amp when I last saw it.

“No,” I said.

“Hear me out. We have nothing left. Nothing. You know she’d hook us up if we called now and said we’d sign. We’d get it all back. New amps, new merch, new stage clothes. And we wouldn’t need a new van if we were doing holo shows. We could take a break for a while.”

“Are you serious? You’d stay in one place and do holo shows?” I waited for an answer. He stomped at a piece of glass in the dirt, grinding it with his boot heel. “We’ve been playing together for twenty years and I wouldn’t have guessed you’d ever say yes to that.”

“Come off it, Luce. You know I don’t object the way you do. You know that, or you’d have run it past me before turning her down. I know we’re not a democracy, but you used to give me at least the illusion I had a choice.”

I bit my lip. “You’re right. I didn’t run it past you. And actually, I didn’t turn her down in the end. I didn’t say yes, but she said some stuff that confused me.”

That stopped him short. Neither of us said anything for a minute. I looked around. What a weird place to be having this fight; I always figured it would come, but in the van. I waited for a response, and when none came, I prodded. “So you’re saying that’s what you want?”

“No! Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t always seem like the worst idea. But now I don’t think we have another option. I think I could have kept going the way we were for a while longer, but rebuilding from scratch?” He shook his head, then turned and walked away again. I didn’t follow this time.

Back at the building where we had stayed, the bike kids had reappeared, murmuring amongst themselves. Jacky leaned against the front stoop, a few feet from them. I sat down in the grass opposite my drummer.

“What do you think of StageHolo? I mean really?”

He spit on the ground.

“Me too,” I agreed. “But given the choice between starting over with nothing, and letting them rebuild us, what would you do? If there weren’t any other options.”

He ran a hand over his braids. “If there weren’t any other options?”

I nodded.

“There are always other options, Luce. I didn’t sign up with you to do fake shows in some fake warehouse for fake audiences. I wouldn’t stay. And you wouldn’t last.”

I pulled a handful of grass and tossed it at him.

He repeated himself. “Really. I don’t know what you’d do. You wouldn’t be you anymore. You’d probably still come across to some people, but you’d have the wrong kind of anger. Anger for yourself, instead of for everybody. You’d be some hologram version of yourself. No substance.”

I stared at him.

“People always underestimate the drummer, but I get to sit behind you and watch you every night. Trust me.” He laughed, then looked over my shoulder. “I watch you, too, Silva. It goes for you, too.”

I didn’t know how long Silva had been behind me, but he sat down between us now, grunting as he lowered himself to the ground. He leaned against Jacky and put his grimy glass-dust boots in my lap.

I shoved them off. “That was an old man grunt.”

“I’m getting there, old lady, but you’ll get there first. Do you have a plan?”

I looked over where the bike kids had congregated. “Hey, guys! Do any of you have a car? Or, you know, know anybody who has a car?”

The bike kids looked horrified, then one – Dijuan? - nodded. “My sister has a Chauffeur.”

“Family sized?”

Dijuan’s face fell.

Back to the drawing board. Leaning back on my elbows, I thought about all the other bands we could maybe call on, if I knew anybody who had come off the road, who might have a van to sell if Daisy didn’t reappear. Maybe, but nobody close enough to loan one tonight. Except…

“You’re not saying you’re out, right?” I asked Silva. “You’re not saying StageHolo or nothing? Cause I really can’t do it. Maybe someday, on our terms, but I can’t do it yet.”

He closed his eyes. “I know you can’t. But I don’t know what else to do.”

“I do. At least for tonight.”

I told him who to call.

Truly arrived with her sister’s family-sized Chauffeur an hour later. We had to meet her up on the road.

“It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we’ll get there,” she said. The third row and all the foot space was packed tight with the Moby K. Dick amps and drums and cables.

“Thank you so much,” I said, climbing into what would be the driver’s seat if it had a wheel or pedals. It felt strange, but oddly freeing as the car navigated its way from wherever we were toward where we were going.

I was supposed to be upset. But we had a ride to the gig, and gear to play. We’d survive without merch for the time being. Somebody in Pittsburgh would help us find a way to Baltimore if Daisy hadn’t been found by then, or back to Columbus to reclaim her.

With enough time to arrange it, the other bands would let us use their drums and amps at most of the shows we had coming up, and in the meantime we still had our guitars and a little bit of cash. We’d roll on, in Daisy or a Chauffeur, or on bikes with guitars strapped to our backs. No StageHolo gig could end this badly; this was the epic, terrible, relentlessness of life on the road. We made music. We were music. We’d roll on. We’d roll on. We’d roll on.

Sarah Pinsker is the author of the 2015 Nebula Award winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the 2014 Sturgeon Award winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and dog. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn
By Usman T. Malik

“When the Spirit World appears in a sensory Form, the Human Eye confines it. The Spiritual Entity cannot abandon that Form as long as Man continues to look at it in this special way. To escape, the Spiritual Entity manifests an Image it adopts for him, like a veil. It pretends the Image is moving in a certain direction so the Eye will follow it. At which point the Spiritual Entity escapes its confinement and disappears.

Whoever knows this and wishes to maintain perception of the Spiritual, must not let his Eye follow this illusion.

This is one of the Divine Secrets.”

The Meccan Revelations by Muhiyuddin Ibn Arabi

• • • •

For fifteen years my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum. The princess ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus. Dozens of children from Bhati Model School rushed screaming down muddy lanes to gather at her shop, which was really just a roadside counter with a tin roof and a smattering of chairs and a table. On winter afternoons it was her steaming cardamom-and-honey tea the kids wanted; in summer it was the chilled Rooh Afza.

As Gramps talked, he smacked his lips and licked his fingers, remembering the sweet rosewater sharbat. He told me that the princess was so poor she had to recycle tea leaves and sharbat residue. Not from customers, of course, but from her own boiling pans—although who really knew, he said, and winked.

I didn’t believe a word of it.

“Where was her kingdom?” I said.

“Gone. Lost. Fallen to the British a hundred years ago,” Gramps said. “She never begged, though. Never asked anyone’s help, see?”

I was ten. We were sitting on the steps of our mobile home in Florida. It was a wet summer afternoon and rain hissed like diamondbacks in the grass and crackled in the gutters of the trailer park.

“And her family?”

“Dead. Her great-great-great grandfather, the exiled King Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon and is buried there. Burmese Muslims make pilgrimages to his shrine and honor him as a saint.”

“Why was he buried there? Why couldn’t he go home?”

“He had no home anymore.”

For a while I stared, then surprised both him and myself by bursting into tears. Bewildered, Gramps took me in his arms and whispered comforting things, and gradually I quieted, letting his voice and the rain sounds lull me to sleep, the loamy smell of him and grass and damp earth becoming one in my sniffling nostrils.

I remember the night Gramps told me the rest of the story. I was twelve or thirteen. We were at this desi party in Windermere thrown by Baba’s friend Hanif Uncle, a posh affair with Italian leather sofas, crystal cutlery, and marble-topped tables. Someone broached a discussion about the pauper princess. Another person guffawed. The Mughal princess was an urban legend, this aunty said. Yes, yes, she too had heard stories about this so-called princess, but they were a hoax. The descendants of the Mughals left India and Pakistan decades ago. They are settled in London and Paris and Manhattan now, living postcolonial, extravagant lives after selling their estates in their native land.

Gramps disagreed vehemently. Not only was the princess real, she had given him free tea. She had told him stories of her forebears.

The desi aunty laughed. “Senility is known to create stories,” she said, tapping her manicured fingers on her wineglass.

Gramps bristled. A long heated argument followed and we ended up leaving the party early.

“Rafiq, tell your father to calm down,” Hanif Uncle said to my baba at the door. “He takes things too seriously.”

“He might be old and set in his ways, Doctor sahib,” Baba said, “but he’s sharp as a tack. Pardon my boldness but some of your friends in there . . .” Without looking at Hanif Uncle, Baba waved a palm at the open door from which blue light and Bollywood music spilled onto the driveway.

Hanif Uncle smiled. He was a gentle and quiet man who sometimes invited us over to his fancy parties where rich expatriates from the Indian subcontinent opined about politics, stocks, cricket, religious fundamentalism, and their successful Ivy League–attending progeny. The shyer the man the louder his feasts, Gramps was fond of saying.

“They’re a piece of work all right,” Hanif Uncle said. “Listen, bring your family over some weekend. I’d love to listen to that Mughal girl’s story.”

“Sure, Doctor sahib. Thank you.”

The three of us squatted into our listing truck and Baba yanked the gearshift forward, beginning the drive home.

“Abba-ji,” he said to Gramps. “You need to rein in your temper. You can’t pick a fight with these people. The doctor’s been very kind to me, but word of mouth’s how I get work and it’s exactly how I can lose it.”

“But that woman is wrong, Rafiq,” Gramps protested. “What she’s heard are rumors. I told them the truth. I lived in the time of the pauper princess. I lived through the horrors of the eucalyptus jinn.”

“Abba-ji, listen to what you’re saying! Please, I beg you, keep these stories to yourself. Last thing I want is people whispering the handyman has a crazy, quarrelsome father.” Baba wiped his forehead and rubbed his perpetually blistered thumb and index finger together.

Gramps stared at him, then whipped his face to the window and began to chew a candy wrapper (he was diabetic and wasn’t allowed sweets). We sat in hot, thorny silence the rest of the ride and when we got home Gramps marched straight to his room like a prisoner returning to his cell.

I followed him and plopped on his bed.

“Tell me about the princess and the jinn,” I said in Urdu.

Gramps grunted out of his compression stockings and kneaded his legs. They occasionally swelled with fluid. He needed water pills but they made him incontinent and smell like piss and he hated them. “The last time I told you her story you started crying. I don’t want your parents yelling at me. Especially tonight.”

“Oh, come on, they don’t yell at you. Plus I won’t tell them. Look, Gramps, think about it this way: I could write a story in my school paper about the princess. This could be my junior project.” I snuggled into his bedsheets. They smelled of sweat and medicine, but I didn’t mind.

“All right, but if your mother comes in here, complaining—”

“She won’t.”

He arched his back and shuffled to the armchair by the window. It was ten at night. Cicadas chirped their intermittent static outside, but I doubt Gramps heard them. He wore hearing aids and the ones we could afford crackled in his ears, so he refused to wear them at home.

Gramps opened his mouth, pinched the lower denture, and rocked it. Back and forth, back and forth. Loosening it from the socket. Pop! He removed the upper one similarly and dropped both in a bowl of warm water on the table by the armchair.

I slid off the bed. I went to him and sat on the floor by his spidery, white-haired feet. “Can you tell me the story, Gramps?”

Night stole in through the window blinds and settled around us, soft and warm. Gramps curled his toes and pressed them against the wooden leg of his armchair. His eyes drifted to the painting hanging above the door, a picture of a young woman turned ageless by the artist’s hand. Soft muddy eyes, a knowing smile, an orange dopatta framing her black hair. She sat on a brilliantly colored rug and held a silver goblet in an outstretched hand, as if offering it to the viewer.

The painting had hung in Gramps’s room for so long I’d stopped seeing it. When I was younger I’d once asked him if the woman was Grandma, and he’d looked at me. Grandma died when Baba was young, he said.

The cicadas burst into an electric row and I rapped the floorboards with my knuckles, fascinated by how I could keep time with their piping.

“I bet the pauper princess,” said Gramps quietly, “would be happy to have her story told.”

“Yes.”

“She would’ve wanted everyone to know how the greatest dynasty in history came to a ruinous end.”

“Yes.”

Gramps scooped up a two-sided brush and a bottle of cleaning solution from the table. Carefully, he began to brush his dentures. As he scrubbed, he talked, his deep-set watery eyes slowly brightening until it seemed he glowed with memory. I listened, and at one point Mama came to the door, peered in, and whispered something we both ignored. It was Saturday night so she left us alone, and Gramps and I sat there for the longest time I would ever spend with him.

This is how, that night, my gramps ended up telling me the story of the Pauper Princess and the Eucalyptus Jinn.

• • • •

The princess, Gramps said, was a woman in her twenties with a touch of silver in her hair. She was lean as a sorghum broomstick, face dark and plain, but her eyes glittered as she hummed the Qaseeda Burdah Shareef and swept the wooden counter in her tea shop with a dustcloth. She had a gold nose stud that, she told her customers, was a family heirloom. Each evening after she was done serving she folded her aluminum chairs, upended the stools on the plywood table, and took a break. She’d sit down by the trunk of the towering eucalyptus outside Bhati Gate, pluck out the stud, and shine it with a mint-water-soaked rag until it gleamed like an eye.

It was tradition, she said.

“If it’s an heirloom, why do you wear it every day? What if you break it? What if someone sees it and decides to rob you?” Gramps asked her. He was about fourteen then and just that morning had gotten Juma pocket money and was feeling rich. He whistled as he sat sipping tea in the tree’s shade and watched steel workers, potters, calligraphers, and laborers carry their work outside their foundries and shops, grateful for the winter-softened sky.

Princess Zeenat smiled and her teeth shone at him. “Nah ji. No one can steal from us. My family is protected by a jinn, you know.”

This was something Gramps had heard before. A jinn protected the princess and her two sisters, a duty imposed by Akbar the Great five hundred years back. Guard and defend Mughal honor. Not a clichéd horned jinn, you understand, but a daunting, invisible entity that defied the laws of physics: it could slip in and out of time, could swap its senses, hear out of its nostrils, smell with its eyes. It could even fly like the tales of yore said.

Mostly amused but occasionally uneasy, Gramps laughed when the princess told these stories. He had never really questioned the reality of her existence; lots of nawabs and princes of pre-Partition India had offspring languishing in poverty these days. An impoverished Mughal princess was conceivable.

A custodian jinn, not so much.

Unconvinced thus, Gramps said:

“Where does he live?”

“What does he eat?”

And, “If he’s invisible, how does one know he’s real?”

The princess’s answers came back practiced and surreal:

The jinn lived in the eucalyptus tree above the tea stall.

He ate angel-bread.

He was as real as jasmine-touched breeze, as shifting temperatures, as the many spells of weather that alternately lull and shake humans in their variegated fists.

“Have you seen him?” Gramps fired.

“Such questions.” The Princess shook her head and laughed, her thick, long hair squirming out from under her chador. “Hai Allah, these kids.” Still tittering, she sauntered off to her counter, leaving a disgruntled Gramps scratching his head.

The existential ramifications of such a creature’s presence unsettled Gramps, but what could he do? Arguing about it was as useful as arguing about the wind jouncing the eucalyptus boughs. Especially when the neighborhood kids began to tell disturbing tales as well.

Of a gnarled bat-like creature that hung upside down from the warped branches, its shadow twined around the wicker chairs and table fronting the counter. If you looked up, you saw a bird nest—just another huddle of zoysia grass and bird feathers—but then you dropped your gaze and the creature’s malignant reflection juddered and swam in the tea inside the chipped china.

“Foul face,” said one boy. “Dark and ugly and wrinkled like a fruit.”

“Sharp, crooked fangs,” said another.

“No, no, he has razor blades planted in his jaws,” said the first one quickly. “My cousin told me. That’s how he flays the skin off little kids.”

The description of the eucalyptus jinn varied seasonally. In summertime, his cheeks were scorched, his eyes red rimmed like the midday sun. Come winter, his lips were blue and his eyes misty, his touch cold like damp roots. On one thing everyone agreed: if he laid eyes on you, you were a goner.

The lean, mean older kids nodded and shook their heads wisely.

A goner.

The mystery continued this way, deliciously gossiped and fervently argued, until one summer day a child of ten with wild eyes and a snot-covered chin rushed into the tea stall, gabbling and crying, blood trickling from the gash in his temple. Despite several attempts by the princess and her customers, he wouldn’t be induced to tell who or what had hurt him, but his older brother, who had followed the boy inside, face scrunched with delight, declared he had last been seen pissing at the bottom of the eucalyptus.

“The jinn. The jinn,” all the kids cried in unison. “A victim of the jinn’s malice.”

“No. He fell out of the tree,” a grownup said firmly. “The gash is from the fall.”

“The boy’s incurred the jinn’s wrath,” said the kids happily. “The jinn will flense the meat off his bones and crunch his marrow.”

“Oh shut up,” said Princess Zeenat, feeling the boy’s cheeks, “the eucalyptus jinn doesn’t harm innocents. He’s a defender of honor and dignity,” while all the time she fretted over the boy, dabbed at his forehead with a wet cloth, and poured him a hot cup of tea.

The princess’s sisters emerged from the doorway of their two-room shack twenty paces from the tea stall. They peered in, two teenage girls in flour-caked dopattas and rose-printed shalwar kameez, and the younger one stifled a cry when the boy turned to her, eyes shiny and vacuous with delirium, and whispered, “He says the lightning trees are dying.”

The princess gasped. The customers pressed in, awed and murmuring. An elderly man with betel-juice-stained teeth gripped the front of his own shirt with palsied hands and fanned his chest with it. “The jinn has overcome the child,” he said, looking profoundly at the sky beyond the stall, and chomped his tobacco paan faster.

The boy shuddered. He closed his eyes, breathed erratically, and behind him the shadow of the tree fell long and clawing at the ground.

• • • •

The lightning trees are dying. The lightning trees are dying.

So spread the nonsensical words through the neighborhood. Zipping from bamboo door-to-door; blazing through dark lovers’ alleys; hopping from one beggar’s gleeful tongue to another’s, the prophecy became a proverb and the proverb a song.

A starving calligrapher-poet licked his reed quill and wrote an elegy for the lightning trees.

A courtesan from the Diamond Market sang it from her rooftop on a moonlit night.

Thus the walled city heard the story of the possessed boy and his curious proclamation and shivered with this message from realms unknown. Arthritic grandmothers and lithe young men rocked in their courtyards and lawns, nodding dreamily at the stars above, allowing themselves to remember secrets from childhood they hadn’t dared remember before.

Meanwhile word reached local families that a child had gotten hurt climbing the eucalyptus. Angry fathers, most of them laborers and shopkeepers with kids who rarely went home before nightfall, came barging into the Municipality’s lean-to, fists hammering on the sad-looking officer’s table, demanding that the tree be chopped down.

“It’s a menace,” they said.

“It’s hollow. Worm eaten.”

“It’s haunted!”

“Look, its gum’s flammable and therefore a fire hazard,” offered one versed in horticulture, “and the tree’s a pest. What’s a eucalyptus doing in the middle of a street anyway?”

So they argued and thundered until the officer came knocking at the princess’s door. “The tree,” said the sad-looking officer, twisting his squirrel-tail mustache, “needs to go.”

“Over my dead body,” said the princess. She threw down her polish rag and glared at the officer. “It was planted by my forefathers. It’s a relic, it’s history.”

“It’s a public menace. Look, bibi, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, but I’m telling you—”

“Try it. You just try it,” cried the princess. “I will take this matter to the highest authorities. I’ll go to the Supreme Court. That tree”—she jabbed a quivering finger at the monstrous thing—“gives us shade. A fakir told my grandfather never to move his business elsewhere. It’s blessed, he said.”

The sad-faced officer rolled up his sleeves. The princess eyed him with apprehension as he yanked one of her chairs back and lowered himself into it.

“Bibi,” he said not unkindly, “let me tell you something. The eucalyptus was brought here by the British to cure India’s salinity and flooding problems. Gora sahib hardly cared about our ecology.” His mustache drooped from his thin lips. The strawberry mole on his chin quivered. “It’s not indigenous, it’s a pest. It’s not a blessing, it repels other flora and fauna and guzzles groundwater by the tons. It’s not ours,” the officer said, not looking at the princess. “It’s alien.”

It was early afternoon and school hadn’t broken yet. The truant Gramps sat in a corner sucking on a cigarette he’d found in the trash can outside his school and watched the princess. Why wasn’t she telling the officer about the jinn? That the tree was its home? Her cheeks were puffed from clenching her jaws, the hollows under her eyes deeper and darker as she clapped a hand to her forehead.

“Look,” she said, her voice rising and falling like the wind stirring the tear-shaped eucalyptus leaves, “you take the tree, you take our good luck. My shop is all I have. The tree protects it. It protects us. It’s family.”

“Nothing I can do.” The officer scratched his birthmark. “Had there been no complaint . . . but now I have no choice. The Lahore Development Authority has been planning to remove the poplars and the eucalyptus for a while anyway. They want to bring back trees of Old Lahore. Neem, pipal, sukhchain, mulberry, mango. This foreigner”—he looked with distaste at the eucalyptus—“steals water from our land. It needs to go.”

Shaking his head, the officer left. The princess lurched to her stall and began to prepare Rooh Afza. She poured a glittering parabola of sharbat into a mug with trembling hands, staggered to the tree, and flung the liquid at its hoary, clawing roots.

“There,” she cried, her eyes reddened. “I can’t save you. You must go.”

Was she talking to the jinn? To the tree? Gramps felt his spine run cold as the blood-red libation sank into the ground, muddying the earth around the eucalyptus roots. Somewhere in the branches, a bird whistled.

The princess toed the roots for a moment longer, then trudged back to her counter.

Gramps left his teacup half-empty and went to the tree. He tilted his head to look at its top. It was so high. The branches squirmed and fled from the main trunk, reaching restlessly for the hot white clouds. A plump chukar with a crimson beak sat on a branch swaying gently. It stared back at Gramps, but no creature with razor-blade jaws and hollow dust-filled cheeks dangled from the tree.

As Gramps left, the shadows of the canopies and awnings of shops in the alley stretched toward the tree accusatorially.

That night Gramps dreamed of the eucalyptus jinn.

It was a red-snouted shape hurtling toward the heavens, its slipstream body glittering and dancing in the dark. Space and freedom rotated above it, but as it accelerated showers of golden meteors came bursting from the stars and slammed into it. The creature thinned and elongated until it looked like a reed pen trying to scribble a cryptic message between the stars, but the meteors wouldn’t stop.

Drop back, you blasphemer, whispered the heavens. You absconder, you vermin. The old world is gone. No place for your kind here now. Fall back and do your duty.

And eventually the jinn gave up and let go.

It plummeted: a fluttering, helpless, enflamed ball shooting to the earth. It shrieked as it dove, flickering rapidly in and out of space and time but bound by their quantum fetters. It wanted to rage but couldn’t. It wanted to save the lightning trees, to upchuck their tremulous shimmering roots and plant them somewhere the son of man wouldn’t find them. Instead it was imprisoned, captured by prehuman magic and trapped to do time for a sin so old it had forgotten what it was.

So now it tumbled and plunged, hated and hating. It changed colors like a fiendish rainbow: mid-flame blue, muscle red, terror green, until the force of its fall bleached all its hues away and it became a pale scorching bolt of fire.

Thus the eucalyptus jinn fell to its inevitable dissolution, even as Gramps woke up, his heart pounding, eyes fogged and aching from the dream. He groped in the dark, found the lantern, and lit it. He was still shaking. He got up, went to his narrow window that looked out at the moon-drenched Bhati Gate a hundred yards away. The eight arches of the Mughal structure were black and lonely above the central arch. Gramps listened. Someone was moving in the shack next door. In the princess’s home. He gazed at the mosque of Ghulam Rasool—a legendary mystic known as the Master of Cats—on its left.

And he looked at the eucalyptus tree.

It soared higher than the gate, its wild armature pawing at the night, the oily scent of its leaves potent even at this distance. Gramps shivered, although heat was swelling from the ground from the first patter of raindrops. More smells crept into the room: dust, trash, verdure.

He backed away from the window, slipped his sandals on, dashed out of the house. He ran toward the tea stall but, before he could as much as cross the chicken yard up front, lightning unzipped the dark and the sky roared.

• • • •

The blast of its fall could be heard for miles.

The eucalyptus exploded into a thousand pieces, the burning limbs crackling and sputtering in the thunderstorm that followed. More lightning splintered the night sky. Children shrieked, dreaming of twisted corridors with shadows wending past one another. Adults moaned as timeless gulfs shrank and pulsed behind their eyelids. The walled city thrashed in sweat-soaked sheets until the mullah climbed the minaret and screamed his predawn call.

In the morning the smell of ash and eucalyptol hung around the crisped boughs. The princess sobbed as she gazed at her buckled tin roof and smashed stall. Shards of china, plywood, clay, and charred wicker twigs lay everywhere.

The laborers and steel workers rubbed their chins.

“Well, good riddance,” said Alamdin electrician, father of the injured boy whose possession had ultimately proved fleeting. Alamdin fingered a hole in his string vest. “Although I’m sorry for your loss, bibi. Perhaps the government will give you a monthly pension, being that you’re royal descent and all.”

Princess Zeenat’s nose stud looked dull in the gray after-storm light. Her shirt was torn at the back, where a fragment of wood had bitten her as she scoured the wreckage.

“He was supposed to protect us,” she murmured to the tree’s remains: a black stump that poked from the earth like a singed umbilicus, and the roots lapping madly at her feet. “To give us shade and blessed sanctuary.” Her grimed finger went for the nose stud and wrenched it out. “Instead—” She backpedaled and slumped at the foot of her shack’s door. “Oh, my sisters. My sisters.”

Tutting uncomfortably, the men drifted away, abandoning the pauper princess and her Mughal siblings. The women huddled together, a bevy of chukars stunned by a blood moon. Their shop was gone, the tree was gone. Princess Zeenat hugged her sisters and with a fierce light in her eyes whispered to them.

Over the next few days Gramps stood at Bhati Gate, watching the girls salvage timber, china, and clay. They washed and scrubbed their copper pots. Heaved out the tin sheet from the debris and dragged it to the foundries. Looped the remaining wicker into small bundles and sold it to basket weavers inside the walled city.

Gramps and a few past patrons offered to help. The Mughal women declined politely.

“But I can help, I really can,” Gramps said, but the princess merely knitted her eyebrows, cocked her head, and stared at Gramps until he turned and fled.

The Municipality officer tapped at their door one Friday after Juma prayers.

“Condolences, bibi,” he said. “My countless apologies. We should’ve cut it down before this happened.”

“It’s all right.” The princess rolled the gold stud tied in a hemp necklace around her neck between two fingers. Her face was tired but tranquil. “It was going to happen one way or the other.”

The officer picked at his red birthmark. “I meant your shop.”

“We had good times here”—she nodded—“but my family’s long overdue for a migration. We’re going to go live with my cousin. He has an orange-and-fig farm in Mansehra. We’ll find plenty to do.”

The man ran his fingernail down the edge of her door. For the first time Gramps saw how his eyes never stayed on the princess. They drifted toward her face, then darted away as if the flush of her skin would sear them if they lingered. Warmth slipped around Gramps’s neck, up his scalp, and across his face until his own flesh burned.

“Of course,” the officer said. “Of course,” and he turned and trudged to the skeletal stump. Already crows had marked the area with their pecking, busily creating a roost of the fallen tree. Soon they would be protected from horned owls and other birds of prey, they thought. But Gramps and Princess Zeenat knew better.

There was no protection here.

The officer cast one long look at the Mughal family, stepped around the stump, and walked away.

Later, the princess called to Gramps. He was sitting on the mosque’s steps, shaking a brass bowl, pretending to be a beggar. He ran over, the coins jingling in his pocket.

“I know you saw something,” she said once they were seated on the hemp charpoy in her shack. “I could see it in your face when you offered your help.”

Gramps stared at her.

“That night,” she persisted, “when the lightning hit the tree.” She leaned forward, her fragrance of tea leaves and ash and cardamom filling his nostrils. “What did you see?”

“Nothing,” he said and began to get up.

She grabbed his wrist. “Sit,” she said. Her left hand shot out and pressed something into his palm. Gramps leapt off the charpoy. There was an electric sensation in his flesh; his hair crackled. He opened his fist and looked at the object.

It was her nose stud. The freshly polished gold shimmered in the dingy shack.

Gramps touched the stud with his other hand and withdrew it. “It’s so cold.”

The princess smiled, a bright thing that lit up the shack. Full of love, sorrow, and relief. But relief at what? Gramps sat back down, gripped the charpoy’s posts, and tugged its torn hemp strands nervously.

“My family will be gone by tonight,” the princess said.

And even though he’d been expecting this for days, it still came as a shock to Gramps. The imminence of her departure took his breath away. All he could do was wobble his head.

“Once we’ve left, the city might come to uproot that stump.” The princess glanced over her shoulder toward the back of the room where shadows lingered. “If they try, do you promise you’ll dig under it?” She rose and peered into the dimness, her eyes gleaming like jewels.

“Dig under the tree? Why?”

“Something lies there which, if you dig it up, you’ll keep to yourself.” Princess Zeenat swiveled on her heels. “Which you will hide in a safe place and never tell a soul about.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what the fakir told my grandfather. Something old and secret rests under that tree and it’s not for human eyes.” She turned and walked to the door.

Gramps said, “Did you ever dig under it?”

She shook her head without looking back. “I didn’t need to. As long as the tree stood, there was no need for me to excavate secrets not meant for me.”

“And the gold stud? Why’re you giving it away?”

“It comes with the burden.”

“What burden? What is under that tree?”

The princess half turned. She stood in a nimbus of midday light, her long muscled arms hanging loosely, fingers playing with the place in the hemp necklace where once her family heirloom had been; and despite the worry lines and the callused hands and her uneven, grimy fingernails, she was beautiful.

Somewhere close, a brick truck unloaded its cargo and in its sudden thunder what the princess said was muffled and nearly inaudible. Gramps thought later it might have been, “The map to the memory of heaven.”

But that of course couldn’t be right.

• • • •

“The princess and her family left Lahore that night,” said Gramps. “This was in the fifties and the country was too busy recovering from Partition and picking up its own pieces to worry about a Mughal princess disappearing from the pages of history. So no one cared. Except me.”

He sank back into the armchair and began to rock.

“She or her sisters ever come back?” I said, pushing myself off the floor with my knuckles. “What happened to them?”

Gramps shrugged. “What happens to all girls. Married their cousins in the north, I suppose. Had large families. They never returned to Lahore, see?”

“And the jinn?”

Gramps bent and poked his ankle with a finger. It left a shallow dimple. “I guess he died or flew away once the lightning felled the tree.”

“What was under the stump?”

“How should I know?”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t dig it up. No one came to remove the stump, so I never got a chance to take out whatever was there. Anyway, bache, you really should be going. It’s late.”

I glanced at my Star Wars watch. Luke’s saber shone fluorescent across the Roman numeral two. I was impressed Mama hadn’t returned to scold me to bed. I arched my back to ease the stiffness and looked at him with one eye closed. “You’re seriously telling me you didn’t dig up the secret?”

“I was scared,” said Gramps, and gummed a fiber bar. “Look, I was told not to remove it if I didn’t have to, so I didn’t. Those days we listened to our elders, see?” He grinned, delighted with this unexpected opportunity to rebuke.

“But that’s cheating,” I cried. “The gold stud. The jinn’s disappearance. You’ve explained nothing. That . . . that’s not a good story at all. It just leaves more questions.”

“All good stories leave questions. Now go on, get out of here. Before your mother yells at us both.”

He rose and waved me toward the door, grimacing and rubbing his belly—heartburn from Hanif Uncle’s party food? I slipped out and shut the door behind me. Already ghazal music was drifting out: Ranjish hi sahih dil hi dukhanay ke liye aa. Let it be heartbreak; come if just to hurt me again. I knew the song well. Gramps had worn out so many cassettes that Apna Bazaar ordered them in bulk just for him, Mama joked.

I went to my room, undressed, and for a long time tossed in the sheets, watching the moon outside my window. It was a supermoon kids at school had talked about, a magical golden egg floating near the horizon, and I wondered how many Mughal princes and princesses had gazed at it through the ages, holding hands with their lovers.

This is how the story of the Pauper Princess and the Eucalyptus Jinn comes to an end, I thought. In utter, infuriating oblivion.

I was wrong, of course.

• • • •

In September 2013, Gramps had a sudden onset of chest pain and became short of breath. 911 was called, but by the time the medics came his heart had stopped and his extremities were mottled. Still they shocked him and injected him with epi-and-atropine and sped him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Gramps had really needed those water pills he’d refused until the end.

I was at Tufts teaching a course in comparative mythology when Baba called. It was a difficult year. I’d been refused tenure and a close friend had been fired over department politics. But when Baba asked me if I could come, I said of course. Gramps and I hadn’t talked in years after I graduated from Florida State and moved to Massachusetts, but it didn’t matter. There would be a funeral and a burial and a reception for the smattering of relatives who lived within drivable distance. I, the only grandchild, must be there.

Sara wanted to go with me. It would be a good gesture, she said.

“No,” I said. “It would be a terrible gesture. Baba might not say anything, but the last person he’d want at Gramps’s funeral is my white girlfriend. Trust me.”

Sara didn’t let go of my hand. Her fingers weren’t dainty like some women’s— you’re afraid to squeeze them lest they shatter like glass—but they were soft and curled easily around mine. “You’ll come back soon, won’t you?”

“Of course. Why’d you ask?” I looked at her.

“Because,” she said kindly, “you’re going home.” Her other hand plucked at a hair on my knuckle. She smiled, but there was a ghost of worry pinching the corner of her lips. “Because sometimes I can’t read you.”

We stood in the kitchenette facing each other. I touched Sara’s chin. In the last few months there had been moments when things had been a bit hesitant, but nothing that jeopardized what we had.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

We hugged and kissed and whispered things I don’t remember now. Eventually we parted and I flew to Florida, watching the morning landscape tilt through the plane windows. Below, the Charles gleamed like steel, then fell away until it was a silver twig in a hard land; and I thought, The lightning trees are dying.

Then we were past the waters and up and away, and the thought receded like the river.

We buried Gramps in Orlando Memorial Gardens under a row of pines. He was pale and stiff limbed, nostrils stuffed with cotton, the white shroud rippling in the breeze. I wished, like all fools rattled by late epiphanies, that I’d had more time with him. I said as much to Baba, who nodded.

“He would have liked that,” Baba said. He stared at the gravestone with the epitaph I have glimpsed the truth of the Great Unseen that Gramps had insisted be written below his name. A verse from Rumi. “He would have liked that very much.”

We stood in silence and I thought of Gramps and the stories he took with him that would stay untold forever. There’s a funny thing about teaching myth and history: you realize in the deep of your bones that you’d be lucky to become a mote of dust, a speck on the bookshelf of human existence. The more tales you preserve, the more claims to immortality you can make.

After the burial we went home and Mama made us chicken karahi and basmati rice. It had been ages since I’d had home-cooked Pakistani food and the spice and garlicky taste knocked me back a bit. I downed half a bowl of fiery gravy and fled to Gramps’s room where I’d been put up. Where smells of his cologne and musty clothes and his comings and goings still hung like a memory of old days.

In the following week Baba and I talked. More than we had in ages. He asked me about Sara with a glint in his eyes. I said we were still together. He grunted.

“Thousands of suitable Pakistani girls,” he began to murmur, and Mama shushed him.

In Urdu half-butchered from years of disuse I told them about Tufts and New England. Boston Commons, the Freedom Trail with its dozen cemeteries and royal burial grounds, the extremities of weather; how fall spun gold and rubies and amethyst from its foliage. Baba listened, occasionally wincing, as he worked on a broken power drill from his toolbox. It had been six years since I’d seen him and Mama, and the reality of their aging was like a gut punch. Mama’s hair was silver, but at least her skin retained a youthful glow. Baba’s fistful of beard was completely white, the hollows of his eyes deeper and darker. His fingers were swollen from rheumatoid arthritis he’d let fester for years because he couldn’t afford insurance.

“You really need to see a doctor,” I said.

“I have one. I go to the community health center in Leesburg, you know.”

“Not a free clinic. You need to see a specialist.”

“I’m fifty-nine. Six more years and then.” He pressed the power button on the drill and it roared to life. “Things will change,” he said cheerfully.

I didn’t know what to say. I had offered to pay his bills before. The handyman’s son wasn’t exactly rich, but he was grown up now and could help his family out.

Baba would have none of it. I didn’t like it, but what could I do? He had pushed me away for years. Get out of here while you can, he’d say. He marched me to college the same way he would march me to Sunday classes at Clermont Islamic Center. Go on, he said outside the mosque, as I clutched the siparas to my chest. Memorize the Quran. If you don’t, who will?

Was that why I hadn’t returned home until Gramps’s death? Even then I knew there was more. Home was a morass where I would sink. I had tried one or two family holidays midway through college. They depressed me, my parents’ stagnation, their world where nothing changed. The trailer park, its tired residents, the dead-leaf-strewn grounds that always seemed to get muddy and wet and never clean. A strange lethargy would settle on me here, a leaden feeling that left me cold and shaken. Visiting home became an ordeal filled with guilt at my indifference. I was new to the cutthroat world of academia then and bouncing from one adjunct position to another was taking up all my time anyway.

I stopped going back. It was easier to call, make promises, talk about how bright my prospects were in the big cities. And with Gramps even phone talk was useless. He couldn’t hear me, and he wouldn’t put on those damn hearing aids.

So now I was living thousands of miles away with a girl Baba had never met.

I suppose I must’ve been hurt at his refusal of my help. The next few days were a blur between helping Mama with cleaning out Gramps’s room and keeping up with the assignments my undergrads were emailing me even though I was on leave. A trickle of relatives and friends came, but to my relief Baba took over the hosting duties and let me sort through the piles of journals and tomes Gramps had amassed.

It was an impressive collection. Dozens of Sufi texts and religious treatises in different languages: Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi, Turkish. Margins covered with Gramps’s neat handwriting. I didn’t remember seeing so many books in his room when I used to live here.

I asked Baba. He nodded.

“Gramps collected most of these after you left.” He smiled. “I suppose he missed you.”

I showed him the books. “Didn’t you say he was having memory trouble? I remember Mama being worried about him getting dementia last time I talked. How could he learn new languages?”

“I didn’t know he knew half these languages. Urdu and Punjabi he spoke and read fluently, but the others—” He shrugged.

Curious, I went through a few line notes. Thoughtful speculation on ontological and existential questions posed by the mystic texts. These were not the ramblings of a senile mind. Was Gramps’s forgetfulness mere aging? Or had he written most of these before he began losing his marbles?

“Well, he did have a few mini strokes,” Mama said when I asked. “Sometimes he’d forget where he was. Talk about Lahore, and oddly, Mansehra. It’s a small city in Northern Pakistan,” she added when I raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps he had friends there when he was young.”

I looked at the books, ran my finger along their spines. It would be fun, nostalgic, to go through them at leisure, read Rumi’s couplets and Hafiz’s Diwan. I resolved to take the books with me. Just rent a car and drive up north with my trunk rattling with a cardboard box full of Gramps’s manuscripts.

Then one drizzling morning I found a yellowed, dog-eared notebook under an old rug in his closet. Gramps’s journal.

• • • •

Before I left Florida I went to Baba. He was crouched below the kitchen sink, twisting a long wrench back and forth between the pipes, grunting. I waited until he was done, looked him in the eye, and said, “Did Gramps ever mention a woman named Zeenat Begum?”

Baba tossed the wrench into the toolbox. “Isn’t that the woman in the fairy tale he used to tell? The pauper Mughal princess?”

“Yes.”

“Sure he mentioned her. About a million times.”

“But not as someone you might have known in real life?”

“No.”

Across the kitchen I watched the door of Gramps’s room. It was firmly closed. Within hung the portrait of the brown-eyed woman in the orange dopatta with her knowing half smile. She had gazed down at my family for decades, offering us that mysterious silver cup. There was a lump in my throat but I couldn’t tell if it was anger or sorrow.

Baba was watching me, his swollen fingers tapping at the corner of his mouth. “Are you all right?”

I smiled, feeling the artifice of it stretch my skin like a mask. “Have you ever been to Turkey?”

“Turkey?” He laughed. “Sure. Right after I won the lottery and took that magical tour in the Caribbean.”

I ignored the jest. “Does the phrase ‘Courtesan of the Mughals’ mean anything to you?”

He seemed startled. A smile of such beauty lit up his face that he looked ten years younger. “Ya Allah, I haven’t heard that in forty years. Where’d you read it?”

I shrugged.

“It’s Lahore. My city. That’s what they called it in those books I read as a kid. Because it went through so many royal hands.” He laughed, eyes gleaming with delight and mischief, and lowered his voice. “My friend Habib used to call it La-whore. The Mughal hooker. Now for Allah’s sake, don’t go telling your mother on me.” His gaze turned inward. “Habib. God, I haven’t thought of him in ages.”

“Baba.” I gripped the edge of the kitchen table. “Why don’t you ever go back to Pakistan?”

His smile disappeared. He turned around, slammed the lid of his toolbox, and hefted it up. “Don’t have time.”

“You spent your teenage years there, didn’t you? You obviously have some attachment to the city. Why didn’t you take us back for a visit?”

“What would we go back to? We have no family there. My old friends are probably dead.” He carried the toolbox out into the October sun, sweat gleaming on his forearms. He placed it in the back of his battered truck and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I’ll see you later.”

I looked at him turn the keys in the ignition with fingers that shook. He was off to hammer sparkling new shelves in other people’s garages, replace squirrel-rent screens on their lanais, plant magnolias and palms in their golfing communities, and I could say nothing. I thought I understood why he didn’t want to visit the town where he grew up.

I thought about Mansehra and Turkey. If Baba really didn’t know and Gramps had perfected the deception by concealing the truth within a lie, there was nothing I could do that wouldn’t change, and possibly wreck, my family.

All good stories leave questions, Gramps had said to me.

You bastard, I thought.

“Sure,” I said and watched my baba pull out and drive away, leaving a plumage of dust in his wake.

• • • •

I called Sara when I got home. “Can I see you?” I said as soon as she picked up.

She smiled. I could hear her smile. “That bad, huh?”

“No, it was all right. I just really want to see you.”

“It’s one in the afternoon. I’m on campus.” She paused. In the background birds chittered along with students. Probably the courtyard. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Maybe.” I upended the cardboard box on the carpet. The tower of books stood tall and uneven like a dwarf tree. “Come soon as you can, okay?”

“Sure. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

We hung up. I went to the bathroom and washed my face. I rubbed my eyes and stared at my reflection. It bared its teeth.

“Shut up,” I whispered. “He was senile. Must have been completely insane. I don’t believe a word of it.”

But when Sara came that evening, her red hair streaming like fall leaves, her freckled cheeks dimpling when she saw me, I told her I believed, I really did. She sat and listened and stroked the back of my hand when it trembled as I lay in her lap and told her about Gramps and his journal.

It was an assortment of sketches and scribbling. A talented hand had drawn pastures, mountaintops, a walled city shown as a semicircle with half a dozen doors and hundreds of people bustling within, a farmhouse, and rows of fig and orange trees. Some of these were miniatures: images drawn as scenes witnessed by an omniscient eye above the landscape. Others were more conventional. All had one feature in common: a man and woman present in the center of the scenery going about the mundanities of their lives.

In one scene the man sat in a mosque’s courtyard, performing ablution by the wudu tap. He wore a kurta and shalwar and Peshawari sandals. He was in his early twenties, lean, thickly bearded, with deep-set eyes that watched you impassively. In his hands he held a squalling baby whose tiny wrinkled fist was clenched around a stream of water from the tap. In the background a female face, familiar but older than I remembered, loomed over the courtyard wall, smiling at the pair.

The man was unmistakably Gramps, and the woman . . .

“Are you kidding me?” Sara leaned over and stared at the picture. “That’s the woman in the portrait hanging in his room?”

“He lied to me. To us all. She was my grandma.”

“Who is she?”

“Princess Zeenat Begum,” I said quietly.

Gramps had narrated the story of his life in a series of sketches and notes. The writing was in third person, but it was clear that the protagonist was he.

I imagined him going about the daily rituals of his life in Lahore after Princess Zeenat left. Dropping out of school, going to his father’s shop in the Niche of Calligraphers near Bhati Gate, learning the art of khattati, painting billboards in red and yellow, fusing the ancient art with new slogans and advertisements. Now he’s a lanky brown teenager wetting the tip of his brush, pausing to look up into the sky with its sweeping blue secrets. Now he’s a tall man, yanking bird feathers and cobwebs away from a eucalyptus stump, digging under it in the deep of the night with a flashlight in his hand.

And now—he’s wiping his tears, filling his knapsack with necessaries, burying his newly discovered treasure under a scatter of clothes, hitching the bag up his shoulders, and heading out into the vast unseen. All this time, there’s only one image in his head and one desire.

“He was smitten with her. Probably had been for a long time without knowing it,” I said. “Ruthlessly marked. His youth never had a chance against the siren call of history.”

“Hold on a sec. What was under the tree again?” Sara said.

I shook my head. “He doesn’t say.”

“So he lied again? About not digging it up?”

“Yes.”

“Who was he looking for?”

I looked at her. “My grandmother and her sisters.”

We read his notes and envisioned Gramps’s journey. Abandoning his own family, wandering his way into the mountains, asking everyone he met about a fig-and-orange farm on a quiet fir-covered peak in the heart of Mansehra. He was magnetized to the displaced Mughal family not because of their royalty, but the lack thereof.

And eventually he found them.

“He stayed with them for years, helping the pauper princess’s uncle with farm work. In the summer he calligraphed Quranic verses on the minarets of local mosques. In wintertime he drew portraits for tourists and painted road signs. As years passed, he married Zeenat Begum—whose portrait one summer evening he drew and painted, carried with him, and lied about—and became one of them.”

I looked up at Sara, into her gentle green eyes glittering above me. She bent and kissed my nose.

“They were happy for a while, he and his new family,” I said, “but then, like in so many lives, tragedy came knocking at their door.”

Eyes closed, I pictured the fire: a glowering creature clawing at their windows and door, crisping their apples, billowing flames across the barn to set their hay bales ablaze. The whinnying of the horses, the frantic braying of cattle and, buried in the din, human screams.

“All three Mughal women died that night,” I murmured. “Gramps and his two-year-old son were the only survivors of the brushfire. Broken and bereft, Gramps left Mansehra with the infant and went to Karachi. There he boarded a freighter that took them to Iran, then Turkey, where a sympathetic shopkeeper hired him in his rug shop. Gramps and his son stayed there for four years.”

What a strange life, I thought. I hadn’t known my father had spent part of his childhood in Turkey and apparently neither had he. He remembered nothing. How old was he when they moved back? As I thought this, my heart constricted in my chest, filling my brain with the hum of my blood.

Sara’s face was unreadable when I opened my eyes. “Quite a story, eh?” I said uneasily.

She scratched the groove above her lips with a pink fingernail. “So he digs up whatever was under the tree and it decides him. He leaves everything and goes off to marry a stranger. This is romantic bullshit. You know that, right?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Left everything,” she repeated. Her mouth was parted with wonder. “You think whatever he found under the stump survived the fire?”

“Presumably. But where he took it—who can say? Eventually, though, they returned home. To Lahore, when Gramps had recovered enough sanity, I guess. Where his father, now old, had closed shop. Gramps helped him reopen. Together they ran that design stall for years.”

It must have been a strange time for Gramps, I thought. He loved his parents, but he hated Bhati. Even as he dipped his pen in ink and drew spirals and curlicues, his thoughts drew phantom pictures of those he had lost. Over the years, he came to loathe this art that unlocked so many memories inside him. And after his parents died he had neither heart nor imperative to keep going.

“He was done with the place, the shop, and Lahore. So when a friend offered to help him and his teenage son move to the States, Gramps agreed.”

I turned my head and burrowed into Sara’s lap. Her smell filled my brain: apple blossom, lipstick, and Sara.

She nuzzled my neck. The tip of her nose was cold. “He never talked to you about it? Never said what happened?”

“No.”

“And you and your family had no idea about this artistic side of him? How’s that possible?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “He worked at a 7-Eleven in Houston when he and Baba first came here. Never did any painting or calligraphy, commissioned or otherwise. Maybe he just left all his talent, all his dreams in his hometown. Here, look at this.”

I showed her the phrase that spiraled across the edges of a couple dozen pages: My killer, my deceiver, the Courtesan of the Mughals. “It’s Lahore. He’s talking about the city betraying him.”

“How’s that?”

I shrugged.

“How weird,” Sara said. “Interesting how broken up his story is. As if he’s trying to piece together his own life.”

“Maybe that’s what he was doing. Maybe he forced himself to forget the most painful parts.”

“Lightning trees. Odd thing to say.” She looked at me thoughtfully and put the journal away. “So, you’re the last of the Mughals, huh?” She smiled to show she wasn’t laughing.

I chortled for her. “Seems like it. The Pauper Prince of New England.”

“Wow. You come with a certificate of authenticity?” She nudged her foot at the book tower. “Is it in there somewhere?”

It was getting late. Sara tugged at my shirt, and I got up and carried her to bed, where we celebrated my return with zest. Her face was beautiful in the snow shadows that crept in through the window.

“I love you, I love you,” we murmured, enchanted with each other, drunk with belief in some form of eternity. The dark lay quietly beside us, and, smoldering in its heart, a rotating image.

A dim idea of what was to come.

• • • •

I went through Gramps’s notes. Many were in old Urdu, raikhta, which I wasn’t proficient in. But I got the gist: discourses and rumination on the otherworldly.

Gramps was especially obsessed with Ibn Arabi’s treatise on jinns in The Meccan Revelations. The Lofty Master Arabi says, wrote Gramps, that the meaning of the lexical root J-N-N in Arabic is ‘concealed.’ Jinn isn’t just another created being ontologically placed between man and angel; it is the entirety of the hidden world.

“Isn’t that fucking crazy?” I said to Sara. We were watching a rerun of Finding Neverland, my knuckles caked with butter and flakes of popcorn. On the screen J. M Barrie’s wife was beginning to be upset by the attention he lavished upon the children’s mother, Sylvia. “It kills the traditional narrative of jinns in A Thousand and One Nights. If one were to pursue this train of thought, it would mean relearning the symbolism in this text and virtually all others.”

Sara nodded, her gaze fixed on the TV. “Uh huh.”

“Consider this passage: ‘A thousand years before Darwin, Sufis described the evolution of man as rising from the inorganic state through plant and animal to human. But the mineral consciousness of man, that dim memory of being buried in the great stone mother, lives on.’”

Sara popped a handful of popcorn into her mouth. Munched.

I rubbed my hands together. “‘Jinns are carriers of that concealed memory, much like a firefly carries a memory of the primordial fire.’ It’s the oddest interpretation of jinns I’ve seen.”

“Yeah, it’s great.” Sara shifted on the couch. “But can we please watch the movie?”

“Uh-huh.”

I stared at the TV. Gramps thought jinns weren’t devil-horned creatures bound to a lamp or, for that matter, a tree.

They were flickers of cosmic consciousness.

I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Why was Gramps obsessed with this? How was this related to his life in Lahore? Something to do with the eucalyptus secret?

The next morning I went to Widener Library and dug up all I could about Arabi’s and Ibn Taymeeyah’s treatment of jinns. I read and pondered, went back to Gramps’s notebooks, underlined passages in The Meccan Revelations, and walked the campus with my hands in my pockets and my heart in a world long dissipated.

“Arabi’s cosmovision is staggering,” I told Sara. We were sitting in a coffee shop downtown during lunch break. It was drizzling, just a gentle stutter of gray upon gray outside the window, but it made the brick buildings blush.

Sara sipped her mocha and glanced at her watch. She had to leave soon for her class.

“Consider life as a spark of consciousness. In Islamic cosmology the jinn’s intrinsic nature is that of wind and fire. Adam’s—read, man’s—nature is water and clay, which are more resistant than fire to cold and dryness. As the universe changes, so do the requirements for life’s vehicle. Now it needs creatures more resistant and better adapted. Therefore, from the needs of sentient matter rose the invention that is us.”

I clenched my hand into a fist. “This interpretation is pretty fucking genius. I mean, is it possible Gramps was doing real academic work? For example, had he discovered something in those textbooks that could potentially produce a whole new ideology of creation? Why, it could be the scholarly discovery of the century.”

“Yes, it’s great.” She rapped her spoon against the edge of the table. Glanced at me, looked away.

“What?”

“Nothing. Listen, I gotta run, okay?” She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and slid out of her seat. At the door she hesitated, turned, and stood tapping her shoes, a waiting look in her eyes.

I dabbed pastry crumbs off my lips with a napkin. “Are you okay?”

Annoyance flashed in her face and vanished. “Never better.” She pulled her jacket’s hood over her head, yanked the door open, and strode out into the rain.

It wasn’t until later that evening, when I was finalizing the spring calendar for my freshman class, that I realized I had forgotten our first-date anniversary.

Sara hadn’t. There was a heart-shaped box with a pink bow sitting on the bed when I returned home. Inside was a note laying atop a box of Godiva Chocolates:

Happy Anniversary. May our next one be like your grandfather’s fairy tales.

• • • •

My eyes burned with lack of sleep. It was one in the morning and I’d had a long day at the university. Also, the hour-long apology to Sara had drained me. She had shaken her head and tried to laugh it off, but I took my time, deeming it a wise investment for the future.

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of ice water. Kicked off my slippers, returned to the desk, and continued reading.

I hadn’t lied to Sara. The implications of this new jinn mythology were tremendous. A new origin myth, a bastardized version of the Abrahamic creationist lore. Trouble was these conclusions were tenuous. Gramps had speculated more than logically derived them. Arabi himself had touched on these themes in an abstract manner. To produce a viable theory of this alternate history of the universe, I needed more details, more sources.

Suppose there were other papers, hidden manuscripts. Was it possible that the treasure Gramps had found under the eucalyptus stump was truly ‘the map to the memory of heaven’? Ancient papers of cosmological importance never discovered?

“Shit, Gramps. Where’d you hide them?” I murmured.

His journal said he’d spent quite a bit of time in different places: Mansehra, Iran. Turkey, where he spent four years in a rug shop. The papers could really be anywhere.

My eyes were drawn to the phrase again: the Courtesan of the Mughals. I admired how beautiful the form and composition of the calligraphy was. Gramps had shaped the Urdu alphabet carefully into a flat design so that the conjoined words Mughal and Courtesan turned into an ornate rug. A calligram. The curves of the meem and ghain letters became the tassels and borders of the rug, the laam’s seductive curvature its rippling belly.

Such artistry. One shape discloses another. A secret, symbolic relationship.

There, I thought. The secret hides in the city. The clues to the riddle of the eucalyptus treasure are in Lahore.

I spent the next few days sorting out my finances. Once I was satisfied that the trip was feasible, I began to make arrangements.

Sara stared at me when I told her. “Lahore? You’re going to Lahore?”

“Yes.”

“To look for something your grandpa may or may not have left there fifty-some years ago?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy. I mean it’s one thing to talk about a journal.”

“I know. I still need to go.”

“So you’re telling me, not asking. Why? Why are you so fixed on this? You know that country isn’t safe these days. What if something happens?” She crossed her arms, lifted her feet off the floor, and tucked them under her on the couch. She was shivering a little.

“Nothing’s gonna happen. Look, whatever he left in Lahore, he wanted me to see it. Why else write about it and leave it in his journal which he knew would be found one day? Don’t you see? He was really writing to me.”

“Well, that sounds self-important. Why not your dad? Also, why drop hints then? Why not just tell you straight up what it is?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t want other people to find out.”

“Or maybe he was senile. Look, I’m sorry, but this is crazy. You can’t just fly off to the end of the world on a whim to look for a relic.” She rubbed her legs. “It could take you weeks. Months. How much vacation time do you have left?”

“I’ll take unpaid leave if I have to. Don’t you see? I need to do this.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. “Is this something you plan to keep doing?” she said quietly. “Run off each time anything bothers you.”

“What?” I quirked my eyebrows. “Nothing’s bothering me.”

“No?” She jumped up from the couch and glared at me. “You’ve met my mother and Fanny, but I’ve never met your parents. You didn’t take me to your grandfather’s funeral. And since your return you don’t seem interested in what we have, or once had. Are you trying to avoid talking about us? Are we still in love, Sal, or are we just getting by? Are we really together?”

“Of course we’re together. Don’t be ridiculous,” I mumbled, but there was a constriction in my stomach. It wouldn’t let me meet her eyes.

“Don’t patronize me. You’re obsessed with your own little world. Look, I have no problem with you giving time to your folks. Or your gramps’s work. But we’ve been together for three years and you still find excuses to steer me away from your family. This cultural thing that you claim to resent, you seem almost proud of it. Do you see what I mean?”

“No.” I was beginning to get a bit angry. “And I’m not sure you do either.”

“You’re lying. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Do I? Okay, lemme try to explain what my problem is. Look at me, Sara. What do you see?”

She stared at me, shook her head. “I see a man who doesn’t know he’s lost.”

“Wrong. You see a twenty-eight-year-old brown man living in a shitty apartment, doing a shitty job that doesn’t pay much and has no hope of tenure. You see a man who can’t fend for himself, let alone a wife and kids—”

“No one’s asking you to—”

“—if he doesn’t do something better with his life. But you go on believing all will be well if we trade families? Open your damn eyes.” I leaned against the TV cabinet, suddenly tired. “All my life I was prudent. I planned and planned and gave up one thing for another. Moved here. Never looked back. Did whatever I could to be what I thought I needed to be. The archetypal fucking immigrant in the land of opportunities. But after Gramps died . . .” I closed my eyes, breathed, opened them. “I realize some things are worth more than that. Some things are worth going after.”

“Some things, huh?” Sara half smiled, a trembling flicker that took me aback more than her words did. “Didn’t your grandfather give up everything—his life, his family, his country—for love? And you’re giving up . . . love for . . . what exactly? Shame? Guilt? Identity? A fucking manventure in a foreign land?”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m not—”

But she wasn’t listening. Her chest hitched. Sara turned, walked into the bedroom, and gently closed the door, leaving me standing alone.

• • • •

I stomped down Highland Avenue. It was mid-October and the oaks and silver maples were burning with fall. They blazed yellow and crimson. They made me feel sadder and angrier and more confused.

Had our life together always been this fragile? I wondered if I had missed clues that Sara felt this way. She always was more aware of bumps in our relationship. I recalled watching her seated at the desk marking student papers once, her beautiful, freckled face scrunched in a frown, and thinking she would never really be welcome in my parents’ house. Mama would smile nervously if I brought her home and retreat into the kitchen. Baba wouldn’t say a word and somehow that would be worse than an outraged rejection. And what would Gramps have done? I didn’t know. My head was messed up. It had been since his death.

It was dusk when I returned home, the lights in our neighborhood floating dreamily like gold sequins in black velvet.

Sara wasn’t there.

The bed was made, the empty hangers in the closet pushed neatly together. On the coffee table in the living room under a Valentine mug was yet another note. She had become adept at writing me love letters.

I made myself a sandwich, sat in the dark, and picked at the bread. When I had mustered enough courage, I retrieved the note and began to read:

Salman,

I wrote tried to write this several times and each time my hand shook and made me write things I didn’t want to. It sucks that we’re such damn weaklings, the both of us. I’m stuck in love with you and you are with me. At least I hope so. At least that’s the way I feel read you. But then I think about my mother and my heart begins racing.

You’ve met my family. Mom likes you. Fanny too. They think you’re good for me. But you’ve never met my dad. You don’t know why we never don’t talk about him anymore.

He left Mom when Fanny and I were young. I don’t remember him, although sometimes I think I can. When I close my eyes, I see this big, bulky shadow overwhelm the doorway of my room. There’s this bittersweet smell, gin and sweat and tobacco. I remember not feeling afraid of him, for which I’m grateful.

But Dad left us Mom and he broke her. In especially bitter moments she would say it was another woman, but I don’t think so. At least I never saw any proof of that in my mother’s eyes when she talked about him. (In the beginning she talked a LOT about him.) I think he left her because he wanted more from life and Mom didn’t understand pick that up. I think she didn’t read his unhappiness in time. That’s the vibe I get.

Does that excuse what he did? I don’t think so. My mother’s spent all her life trying to put us back together and she’s done okay, but there are pieces of herself she wasn’t able to find. In either me, or Fanny, or in anyone else.

I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to end up like my mother. That’s pretty much it. If you didn’t love me, I’d understand. I’d be hurt, but I could live with it. But living with this uncertainty, never knowing when you might get that wanderlust I’ve seen in your eyes lately, is impossible for me. There’s so much I want to say to you. Things you need to know if we’re to have a future together. But the last thing I want to do is force you.

So I’m leaving. I’m going to stay at Fanny’s. Think things through. It will be good for both of us. It will help me get my head straight and will let you do whatever you want to get your fucking demons out. So fly free. Go to Pakistan. Follow your goddamn heart or whatever. Just remember I won’t wait all my life.

You know where to find me.

Love,

Sara

I put down the letter and stared out the window. Night rain drummed on the glass. I tapped my finger to its tune, fascinated by how difficult it was to keep time with it. A weight had settled on my chest and I couldn’t push it off.

If an asshole weeps in the forest and no one is around to witness, is he still an asshole?

Nobody was there to answer.

• • • •

For most of the fifteen-hour flight from New York to Lahore I was out. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I slumped into the economy seat and woke up half-dazed when the flight attendant gently shook my shoulder.

“Lahore, sir.” She smiled when I continued to stare at her. The lipstick smudge on her teeth glistened. “Allama Iqbal International Airport.”

“Yes,” I said, struggling up and out. The plane was empty, the seats gaping. “How’s the weather?”

“Cold. Bit misty. Fog bank’s coming, they said. Early this year.”

That didn’t sound promising. I thanked her and hurried out, my carry-on clattering against the aisle armrests.

I exited the airport into the arms of a mid-November day and the air was fresh but full of teeth. The pale sea-glass sky seemed to wrap around the airport. I hailed a cab and asked for Bhati Gate. As we sped out of the terminal, whiteness seethed on the runway and blanketed the horizon. The flight attendant was right. Fog was on the way.

At a busy traffic signal the cabbie took a right. Past army barracks, the redbrick Aitchison College, and colonial-era Jinnah Gardens we went, until the roads narrowed and we hiccuped through a sea of motorbikes, rickshaws, cars, and pedestrians. TERRORISTS ARE ENEMIES OF PEACE, said a large black placard on a wall that jutted out left of a fifty-foot high stone gate. The looming structure had a massive central arch with eight small arches above it. It had a painting of the Kaaba on the right and Prophet Muhammad’s shrine on the left with vermilion roses embossed in the middle. Another sign hung near it: WELCOME TO OLD LAHORE BY THE GRACE OF ALLAH.

We were at Bhati Gate.

The cab rolled to a stop in front of Kashi Manzil. A tall, narrow historical-home-turned-hotel with a facade made of ochre and azure faience tiles. A wide terrace ran around the second floor and a small black copper pot hung from a nail on the edge of the doorway awning.

I recognized the superstition. Black to ward off black. Protection against the evil eye.

Welcome to Gramps’s world, I thought.

I looked down the street. Roadside bakeries, paan-and-cigarette shops, pirated DVD stalls, a girls’ school with peeling walls, and dust, dust everywhere; but my gaze of course went to Bhati and its double row of arches.

This was the place my grandfather had once gazed at, lived by, walked through. Somewhere around here used to be a tea stall run by a Mughal princess. Someplace close had been a eucalyptus from which a kid had fallen and gashed his head. A secret that had traveled the globe had come here with Gramps and awaited me in some dingy old alcove.

That stupid wanderlust in your eyes.

Sara’s voice in my brain was a gentle rebuke.

Later, I thought fiercely. Later.

• • • •

The next day I began my search.

I had planned to start with the tea stalls. Places like this have long memories. Old Lahore was more or less the city’s ancient downtown and people here wouldn’t forget much. Least of all a Mughal princess who ran a tea shop. Gramps’s journal didn’t much touch on his life in the walled city. I certainly couldn’t discern any clues about the location of the eucalyptus treasure.

Where did you hide it, old man? Your shack? A friend’s place? Under that fucking tree stump?

If Gramps was correct and the tree had fallen half a century ago, that landmark was probably irretrievable. Gramps’s house seemed the next logical place. Trouble was I didn’t know where Gramps had lived. Before I left, I’d called Baba and asked him. He wasn’t helpful.

“It’s been a long time, son. Fifty years. Don’t tax an old man’s memory. You’ll make me senile.”

When I pressed, he reluctantly gave me the street where they used to live and his childhood friend Habib’s last name.

“I don’t remember our address, but I remember the street. Ask anyone in Hakiman Bazaar for Khajoor Gali. They’ll know it.”

Encircled by a wall raised by Akbar the Great, Old Lahore was bustling and dense. Two hundred thousand people lived in an area less than one square mile. Breezes drunk with the odor of cardamom, grease, and tobacco. The place boggled my mind as I strolled around taking in the niche pharmacies, foundries, rug shops, kite shops, and baked mud eateries.

I talked to everyone I encountered. The tea stall owner who poured Peshawari kahva in my clay cup. The fruit seller who handed me sliced oranges and guavas and frowned when I mentioned the pauper princess. Rug merchants, cigarette vendors, knife sellers. No one had heard of Zeenat Begum. Nobody knew of a young man named Sharif or his father who ran a calligraphy-and-design stall.

“Not around my shop, sahib.” They shook their heads and turned away.

I located Khajoor Gali—a winding narrow alley once dotted by palm trees (or so the locals claimed) now home to dusty ramshackle buildings hunched behind open manholes—and went door to door, asking. No luck. An aged man with henna-dyed hair and a shishamwood cane stared at me when I mentioned Baba’s friend Habib Ataywala, and said, “Habib. Ah, he and his family moved to Karachi several years ago. No one knows where.”

“How about a eucalyptus tree?” I asked. “An ancient eucalyptus that used to stand next to Bhati Gate?”

Nope.

Listlessly I wandered, gazing at the mist lifting off the edges of the streets and billowing toward me. On the third day it was like slicing through a hundred rippling white shrouds. As night fell and fairy lights blinked on the minarets of Lahore’s patron saint Data Sahib’s shrine across the road from Bhati, I felt displaced. Depersonalized. I was a mote drifting in a slat of light surrounded by endless dark. Gramps was correct. Old Lahore had betrayed him. It was as if the city had deliberately rescinded all memory or trace of his family and the princess’s. Sara was right. Coming here was a mistake. My life since Gramps’s death was a mistake. Seeing this world as it was rather than through the fabular lens of Gramps’s stories was fucking enlightening.

In this fog, the city’s fresh anemia, I thought of things I hadn’t thought about in years. The time Gramps taught me to perform the salat. The first time he brought my palms together to form the supplicant’s cup. Be the beggar at Allah’s door, he told me gently. He loves humility. It’s in the mendicant’s bowl that the secrets of Self are revealed. In the tashahuud position Gramps’s index finger would shoot from a clenched fist and flutter up and down.

“This is how we beat the devil on the head,” he said.

But what devil was I trying to beat? I’d been following a ghost and hoping for recognition from the living.

By the fifth day I’d made up my mind. I sat shivering on a wooden bench and watched my breath flute its way across Khajoor Gali as my finger tapped my cell phone and thousands of miles away Sara’s phone rang.

She picked up almost immediately. Her voice was wary. “Sal?”

“Hey.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

A pause. “You didn’t call before you left.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to.”

“I was worried sick. One call after you landed would’ve been nice.”

I was surprised but pleased. After so much disappointment, her concern was welcome. “Sorry.”

“Jesus. I was . . .” She trailed off, her breath harsh and rapid in my ear. “Find the magic treasure yet?”

“No.”

“Pity.” She seemed distracted now. In the background water was running. “How long will you stay there?”

“I honest to God don’t know, but I’ll tell you this. I’m fucking exhausted.”

“I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry. I smiled a little.

“Must be around five in the morning there. Why’re you up?” I said.

“I was . . . worried, I guess. Couldn’t sleep. Bad dreams.” She sighed. I imagined her rubbing her neck, her long fingers curling around the muscles, kneading them, and I wanted to touch her.

“I miss you,” I said.

Pause. “Yeah. Me too. It’s a mystery how much I’m used to you being around. And now that . . .” She stopped and exhaled. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She grunted. “This damn weather. I think I’m coming down with something. Been headachy all day.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. It’ll go away. Listen, I’m gonna go take a shower. You have fun.”

Was that reproach? “Yeah, you too. Be safe.”

“Sure.” She sounded as if she were pondering. “Hey, I discovered something. Been meaning to tell you, but . . . you know.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Remember what your gramps said in the story. Lightning trees?”

“Yes.”

“Well, lemme text it to you. I mentioned the term to a friend at school and turned out he recognized it too. From a lecture we both attended at MIT years ago about fractal similarities and diffusion-limited aggregation.”

“Fractal what?” My phone beeped. I removed it from my ear and looked at the screen. A high-definition picture of a man with what looked like a tree-shaped henna tattoo on his left shoulder branching all the way down his arm. Pretty.

I put her on speakerphone. “Why’re you sending me pictures of henna tattoos?”

She was quiet, then started laughing. “That didn’t even occur to me, but, yeah, it does look like henna art.”

“It isn’t?”

“Nope. What you’re seeing is a Lichtenberg figure created when branching electrical charges run through insulating material. Glass, resin, human skin—you name it. This man was hit by lightning and survived with this stamped on his flesh.”

“What?”

“Yup. It can be created in any modern lab using nonconducting plates. Called electric treeing. Or lightning trees.”

The lightning trees are dying.

“Holy shit,” I said softly.

“Yup.”

I tapped the touch screen to zoom in for a closer look. “How could Gramps know about this? If he made up the stories, how the fuck would he know something like this?”

“No idea. Maybe he knew someone who had this happen to them.”

“But what does it mean?”

“The heck should I know. Anyways, I gotta go. Figured it might help you with whatever you’re looking for.”

“Thanks.”

She hung up. I stared at the pattern on the man’s arm. It was reddish, fernlike, and quite detailed. The illusion was so perfect I could even see buds and leaves. A breathtaking electric foliage. A map of lightning.

A memory of heaven.

• • • •

I went to sleep early that night.

At five in the morning the Fajar call to prayer woke me up. I lay in bed watching fog drift through the skylight window, listening to the mullah’s sonorous azaan, and suddenly I jolted upright.

The mosque of Ghulam Rasool, the Master of Cats.

Wasn’t that what Gramps had told me a million years ago? That there was a mosque near Bhati Gate that faced his house?

I hadn’t seen any mosques around.

I slipped on clothes and ran outside.

The morning smelled like burnished metal. The light was soft, the shape of early risers gentle in the mist-draped streets. A rooster crowed in the next alley. It had drizzled the night before and the ground was muddy. I half slipped, half leapt my way toward the mullah’s voice rising and falling like an ocean heard in one’s dream.

Wisps of white drifted around me like twilit angels. The azaan had stopped. I stared at the narrow doorway next to a rug merchant’s shop ten feet away. Its entrance nearly hidden by an apple tree growing in the middle of the sidewalk, the place was tucked well away from traffic. Green light spilled from it. Tiny replicas of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina and Rumi’s shrine in Turkey were painted above the door.

Who would put Rumi here when Data Sahib’s shrine was just across the road?

I took off my shoes and entered the mosque.

A tiny room with a low ceiling set with zero-watt green bulbs. On reed mats the congregation stood shoulder to shoulder in two rows behind a smallish man in shalwar kameez and a turban. The Imam sahib clicked the mute button on the standing microphone in front, touched his earlobes, and Fajar began.

Feeling oddly guilty, I sat down in a corner. Looked around the room. Ninety-nine names of Allah and Muhammad, prayers and Quranic verses belching from the corners, twisting and pirouetting across the walls. Calligrams in the shape of a mynah bird, a charging lion, a man prostrate in sajdah, his hands out before him shaping a beggar’s bowl filled with alphabet vapors. Gorgeous work.

Salat was over. The namazis began to leave. Imam sahib turned. In his hands he held a tally counter for tasbih. Click click! Murmuring prayers, he rose and hobbled toward me.

“Assalam-o-alaikum. May I help you, son?” he said in Urdu.

“Wa Laikum Assalam. Yes,” I said. “Is this Masjid Ghulam Rasool?”

He shook his head. He was in his seventies at least, long noorani beard, white hair sticking out of his ears. His paunch bulged through the striped-flannel kameez flowing past his ankles. “No. That mosque was closed and martyred in the nineties. Sectarian attacks. Left a dozen men dead. Shia mosque, you know. Used to stand in Khajoor Gali, I believe.”

“Oh.” I told myself I’d been expecting this, but my voice was heavy with disappointment. “I’m sorry to bother you then. I’ll leave you to finish up.”

“You’re not local, son. Your salam has an accent,” he said. “Amreekan, I think. You look troubled. How can I help you?” He looked at me, took his turban off. He had a pale scar near his left temple shaped like a climbing vine.

I watched him. His hair was silver. His sharp eyes were blue, submerged in a sea of wrinkles. “I was looking for a house. My late grandfather’s. He lived close to the mosque, next door to a lady named Zeenat Begum. She used to run a tea stall.”

“Zeenat Begum.” His eyes narrowed, the blues receding into shadow. “And your grandfather’s name?” he asked, watching the last of the worshippers rise to his feet.

“Sharif. Muhammad Sharif.”

The oddest feeling, a sort of déjà vu, came over me. Something had changed in the air of the room. Even the last namazi felt it and glanced over his shoulder on his way out.

“Who did you say you were again?” Imam sahib said quietly.

“Salman Ali Zaidi.”

“I see. Yes, I do believe I can help you out. This way.”

He turned around, limping, and beckoned me to follow. We exited the mosque. He padlocked it, parted the bead curtain in the doorway of the rug shop next door, stepped in.

When I hesitated, he paused, the tasbih counter clicking in his hands. “Come in, son. My place is your place.”

I studied the rug shop. It was located between the mosque and a souvenir stall. The awning above the arched doorway was gray, the brick voussoirs and keystone of the arch faded and peeling. The plaque by the entrance said Karavan Kilim.

Kilim is a kind of Turkish carpet. What was a kilim shop doing in Old Lahore?

He led me through a narrow well-lit corridor into a hardwood-floored showroom. Mounds of neatly folded rugs sat next to walls covered in rectangles of rich tapestries, carpets, and pottery-filled shelves. Stunning illustrations and calligraphy swirled across the high wooden ceiling. Here an entranced dervish whirled in blue, one palm toward the sky and one to the ground. There a crowd haloed with golden light held out dozens of drinking goblets, an Urdu inscription spiraling into a vast cloud above their heads: They hear his hidden hand pour truth in the heavens.

A bald middle-aged man dressed in a checkered brown half-sleeve shirt sat behind a desk. Imam Sahib nodded at him. “My nephew Khalid.”

Khalid and I exchanged pleasantries. Imam sahib placed the tasbih counter and his turban on the desk. I gazed around me. “Imam sahib,” I said. “This is a Turkish carpet shop. You run an imported rug business in your spare time?”

“Turkish design, yes, but not imported. My apprentices make them right here in the walled city.” Without looking back, he began walking. “You can call me Bashir.”

We went to the back of the shop, weaving our way through rug piles into a storeroom lit by sunlight from a narrow window. Filled to the ceiling with mountains of fabric rolls and broken looms, the room smelled of damp, rotten wood, and tobacco. In a corner was a large box covered with a bedsheet. Bashir yanked the sheet away and a puff of dust bloomed and clouded the air.

“Sharif,” said the merchant Imam. “He’s dead, huh?”

“You knew him?”

“Of course. He was friends with the Mughal princess. The lady who used to give us tea.”

“How do you know that?” I stared at him. “Who are you?”

His eyes hung like sapphires in the dimness, gaze fixed on me, one hand resting atop the embossed six-foot-long metal trunk that had emerged. He tilted his head so the feeble light fell on his left temple. The twisted pale scar gleamed.

“The boy who fell from the eucalyptus tree,” I whispered. “He gashed his head and the princess bandaged it for him. You’re him.”

The old man smiled. “Who I am is not important, son. What’s important is this room where your grandfather worked for years.”

Speechless, I gaped at him. After days of frustration and disappointment, I was standing in the room Gramps had occupied decades ago, this dingy store with its decaying inhabitants. I looked around as if at any moment Gramps might step out from the shadows.

“He was the best teacher I ever had,” Bashir said. “We used to call him the Calligrapher Prince.”

He flashed a smile. It brightened Bashir the merchant’s tired, old face like a flame.

• • • •

I watched this man with his wispy moonlight hair and that coiled scar who had kept my grandfather’s secret for half a century. We sat around a low circular table, dipping cake rusk into mugs of milk chai sweetened with brown sugar. It was eight in the morning.

Bashir gripped his cup with both hands and frowned into it.

“My father was an electrician,” he said. “By the time he was fifty he’d saved enough to buy a carpet shop. With lots of construction going on, he was able to get this shop dirt cheap.

“Rugs were an easy trade back in the seventies. You hired weavers, most of ’em immigrants from up north, and managed the product. We didn’t have good relations with neighboring countries, so high demand existed for local rugs and tapestries without us worrying about competition. After the dictator Zia came, all that changed. Our shop didn’t do well, what with rugs being imported cheap from the Middle East and Afghanistan. We began to get desperate.

“Right about then a stranger came to us.”

It began, Bashir said, the evening someone knocked on their door with a rosy-cheeked child by his side and told Bashir’s father he was looking for work. Bashir, then in his late teens, stood behind his baba, watching the visitor. Wary, the rug merchant asked where they hailed from. The man lifted his head and his face shone with the strangest light Bashir had seen on a human countenance.

“It swept across his cheeks, it flared in his eyes, it illuminated the cuts and angles of his bones,” said Bashir, mesmerized by memory. “It was as if he had been touched by an angel or a demon. I’ll never forget it.”

“From thousands of miles away,” said the man quietly. “From many years away.”

It was Gramps, of course.

Bashir’s father didn’t recognize him, but he knew the man’s family. Their only son, Muhammad Sharif, had been abroad for years, he’d heard. Lived in Iran, Turkey, Allah knew where else. Sharif’s aged father still lived on Khajoor Gali in Old Lahore, but he’d shut down his design stall in the Niche of Calligraphers years ago.

“Sharif had been back for a few months and he and his son were living with his father. Now they needed money to reopen their shop.” Bashir smiled. “Turned out your grandfather was an expert rug weaver. He said he learned it in Turkey near Maulana Rumi’s shrine. My father offered him a job and he accepted. He worked with us for three years while he taught kilim weaving to our apprentices.

“He was young, hardly a few years older than I, but when he showed me his notebook, I knew he was no ordinary artist. He had drawn mystical poetry in animal shapes. Taken the quill and created dazzling worlds. Later, when my father put him before the loom, Sharif produced wonders such as we’d never seen.”

Merchant Bashir got up and plodded to a pile of rugs. He grabbed a kilim and unrolled it across the floor. A mosaic of black, yellow, and maroon geometries glimmered.

“He taught me rug weaving. It’s a nomadic art, he said. Pattern making carries the past into the future.” Bashir pointed to a recurrent cross motif that ran down the kilim’s center. “The four corners of the cross are the four corners of the universe. The scorpion here”—he toed a many-legged symmetric creature woven in yellow—“represents freedom. Sharif taught me this and more. He was a natural at symbols. I asked him why he went to Turkey. He looked at me and said, ‘To learn to weave the best kilim in the world.’”

I cocked my head, rapt. I had believed it was grief that banished Gramps from Pakistan and love that bade him return. Now this man was telling me Gramps went to Turkey purposefully. How many other secrets had my grandfather left out?

“I didn’t know he was a rug weaver,” I said.

“Certainly was. One of the best we ever saw. He knew what silk on silk warping was. Don’t weave on a poor warp. Never work on a loom out of alignment. He knew all this. Yet, he didn’t consider himself a weaver. He learned the craft to carry out a duty, he said. His passion was calligraphy. All this you see”—Bashir waved a hand at the brilliant kilims and tapestries around us, at the twists and curlicues of the verses on the walls, the wondrous illustrations—“is his genius manifested. The Ottoman Turkish script, those calligrams in our mosque, the paintings. It’s all him and his obsession with the Turkish masters.”

“He ever say why he left Pakistan or why he returned?”

Bashir shrugged. “We never asked. As long as it wasn’t criminal, we didn’t care.”

“Why’d you call him the Calligrapher Prince?”

The old man laughed. “It was a nickname the apprentices gave him and it stuck. Seemed so fitting.” Bashir lifted his cup and swallowed the last mouthful of tea along with the grounds. I winced. “Sharif was courteous and diligent. Hardly went home before midnight and he helped the business run more smoothly than it had in years, but I knew he was waiting for something. His eyes were always restless. Inward.”

In the evenings when the shop had closed Sharif drew and carved keenly. For hours he engraved, his cotton swabs with lacquer thinner in one hand, his burin and flat gravers in the other. What he was making was no secret. Bashir watched the process and the product: a large brass trunk with a complex inlay in its lid. A labyrinthine repoussé network gouged into the metal, spiraling into itself. Such fine work it took one’s breath away.

“Never, never, never,” said Bashir, “have I seen such a thing of beauty evolve in a craftsman’s hand again.”

Sharif’s concentration was diabolical, his hands careful as nature’s might have been as it designed the ornate shells of certain mollusks or the divine geometry of certain leaves.

“What are you making and why?” Bashir had asked his master.

Sharif shrugged. “A nest for ages,” he said, and the rug merchant’s son had to be content with the baffling reply.

Two years passed. One evening Bashir’s father got drenched in a downpour and caught pneumonia, which turned aggressive. Despite rapid treatment, he passed away. Bashir took over the shop. In his father’s name, he turned their old house into a small Quran center (which would eventually become Bhati’s only mosque). He ran the rug shop honestly and with Sharif’s help was able to maintain business the way it had been.

At the end of his third year Sharif came to Bashir.

“My friend,” he said. “I came here for a purpose. Something precious was given to me that is not mine to keep. It must wait here in the protection of the tree, even as I go help my father reopen his calligraphy stall.”

The young rug merchant was not surprised. He had glimpsed his master’s departure in his face the night he arrived. But what was that about a tree?

Sharif saw his student’s face and smiled. “You don’t remember, do you? Where your shop is now the eucalyptus tree used to stand.”

Bashir was stunned. He had forgotten all about the tree and the incident with the jinn. It was as if a firm hand had descended and swept all memory of the incident from his brain, like a sand picture.

He waited for Sharif to go on, but the Calligrapher Prince rose, grasped Bashir’s hand, and thrust two heavy envelopes into it.

“The first one is for you. Enough money to rent space for my trunk.”

“You’re not taking it with you?” Bashir was dumbfounded. The trunk with its elaborate design was worth hundreds, maybe thousands of rupees.

“No. It must stay here.” Sharif looked his student in the eye. “And it must not be opened till a particular someone comes.”

“Who?” said Bashir, and wished he hadn’t. These were curious things and they made his spine tingle and his legs shake. A strange thought entered his head: A burden the mountains couldn’t bear settles on me tonight. It vanished quick as it had come.

Sharif’s voice was dry like swiftly turning thread when he said, “Look at the name on the second envelope.”

And his heart full of misgivings, fears, and wonder—most of all, wonder—Bashir did.

• • • •

I give myself credit: I was calm. My hands were steady. I didn’t bat an eye when I took the yellowed envelope from Merchant Bashir’s hands.

“It is yours,” said Bashir. “The envelope, the secret, the burden.” He wiped his face with the hem of his kameez. “Fifty years I carried it. Allah be praised, today it’s passed on to you.”

A burden the mountains couldn’t bear settles on me tonight.

I shivered a little.

“It’s cold,” Bashir said. “I will turn the heat on and leave you to peruse the contents of the envelope alone. I’ll be in the tea stall two shops down. Take as long as you wish.”

“You kept your word,” I said softly. “You didn’t open the envelope.”

Bashir nodded. “I asked Sharif how in God’s name he could trust me with it when I didn’t trust myself. A secret is like a disease, I said. It begins with an itch in a corner of your flesh, then spreads like cancer, until you’re overcome and give in. He just smiled and said he knew I wouldn’t open it.” The rug weaver dabbed a kerchief at his grimy cheeks. “Maybe because he had such faith in me, it helped keep wicked desire at bay.”

Or maybe he knew you wouldn’t, I thought, holding the envelope, feeling my pulse beat in my fingertips. Just like he knew the name of the rightful owner decades before he was born.

My name.

Through the back window I watched Bashir tromp down the street. The mist had thickened and the alley was submerged in blue-white. A steady whine of wind and the occasional thump as pedestrians walked into trash cans and bicycle stands. A whorl of fog shimmered around the streetlight on the far corner.

I turned and went to the counter. Picked up the envelope. Sliced it open. Inside was a sheaf of blank papers. I pulled them out and a small object swept out and fell on the floor. I reached down and picked it up, its radiance casting a twitching halo on my palm.

It was a silver key with a grooved golden stud for a blade, dangling from a rusted hoop.

Impossible.

My gaze was riveted on the golden stud. It took a considerable amount of effort to force my eyes away, to pocket the key, rise, and shamble to the storeroom.

It was dark. Fog had weakened the daylight. Broken looms with their limp warp strings and tipping beams gaped. I crossed the room and stood in front of the brass trunk. The padlock was tarnished. Round keyhole. I retrieved the key and stared at it, this centuries-old gold stud—if one were to believe Gramps—fused to a silver handle.

The instruction was clear.

I brushed the dust away from the lid. A floral design was carved into it, wreathed with grime but still visible: a medallion motif in a gilt finish with a Quranic verse running through its heart like an artery.

“Those who believe in the Great Unseen,” I whispered. In my head Baba smiled and a row of pine trees cast a long shadow across Gramps’s tombstone where I had last read a similar epitaph.

I inserted the Mughal key into the padlock, turned it twice, and opened the trunk.

• • • •

A rug. A rolled-up kilim, judging by its thinness.

I stared at it, at the lavish weave of its edges that shone from light within the rolled layers. Was there a flashlight inside? Ridiculous idea. I leaned in.

The kilim smelled of sunshine. Of leaves and earth and fresh rainfall. Scents that filled my nostrils and tapped my taste buds, flooded my mouth with a sweet tang, not unlike cardamom tea.

My palms were sweating despite the cold. I tugged at the fat end of the rug and it fell to the floor, unspooling. It was seven by five feet, its borders perfectly even, and as it raced across the room, the storeroom was inundated with colors: primrose yellow, iris white, smoke blue. A bright scarlet sparked in the air that reminded me of the sharbat Mama used to make during Ramadan.

I fell back. Awestruck, I watched this display of lights surging from the kilim. Thrashing and gusting and slamming into one another, spinning faster and faster until they became a dancing shadow with many rainbow arms, each pointing earthward to their source—the carpet.

The shadow pirouetted once more and began to sink. The myriad images in the carpet flashed as it dissolved into them, and within moments the room was dark. The only evidence of the specter’s presence was the afterglow on my retina.

I breathed. My knees were weak, the base of my spine thrummed with charge. A smell like burning refuse lingered in my nostrils.

What was that?

A miracle, Gramps spoke in my head softly.

I went to the carpet. It was gorgeous. Multitudes of figures ran in every shape around its edges. Flora and fauna. Grotesques and arabesques. They seethed over nomadic symbols. I traced my finger across the surface. Cabalistic squares, hexagrams, eight-pointed stars, a barb-tailed scorpion. A concoction of emblems swirled together by the artisan’s finger until it seemed the carpet crawled with arcana I’d seen in ancient texts used mostly for one purpose.

Traps, I thought. For what?

I peered closer. The central figures eddied to form the armature of a tower with four jagged limbs shot into the corners of the rug where they were pinned down with pieces of glass. Four curved symmetric pieces, clear with the slightest tinge of purple. Together these four quarter-circles stuck out from the corners of the kilim as if they had once belonged to a cup.

They shimmered.

“What are you,” I whispered. The carpet and the embedded glass said nothing. I hesitated, the soles of my feet tingling, then bent and looked inside the upper right shard.

A man looked back at me, his face expressionless, young, and not mine.

“Salam, beta,” Gramps said in Urdu, still smiling. “Welcome.”

• • • •

The age of wonders shivered and died when the world changed.

In the summer of 1963, however, an eighteen-year-old boy named Sharif discovered a miracle as he panted and dug and heaved an earthen pot out from under a rotten eucalyptus stump.

It was night, there were no streetlamps, and, by all laws holy, the dark should have been supreme. Except a light emanated from the pot.

Sharif wiped his forehead and removed the pot’s lid. Inside was a purple glass chalice glowing with brightness he couldn’t look upon. He had to carry it home and put on dark shades before he could peer in.

The chalice was empty and the light came from the glass itself.

Trembling with excitement, the boy wrapped it in a blanket and hid it under the bed. The next day when his parents were gone, he poured water into it and watched the liquid’s meniscus bubble and seethe on the kitchen table. The water was the light and the light all liquid.

The fakir had warned the Mughal princess that the secret was not for human eyes, but since that fateful night when the boy had first glimpsed the eucalyptus jinn, saw his fetters stretch from sky to earth, his dreams had been transformed. He saw nightscapes that he shouldn’t see. Found himself in places that shouldn’t exist. And now here was an enchanted cup frothing with liquid light on his kitchen table.

The boy looked at the chalice again. The churning motion of its contents hypnotized him. He raised it, and drank the light.

Such was how unfortunate, young Sharif discovered the secrets of Jaam-e-Jam.

The Cup of Heaven.

Legends of the Jaam have been passed down for generations in the Islamic world. Jamshed, the Zoroastrian emperor of Persia, was said to have possessed a seven-ringed scrying cup that revealed the mysteries of heaven to him. Persian mythmakers ascribed the centuries-long success of the empire to the magic of the Cup of Heaven.

And now it was in Sharif’s hand.

The Mother of Revelations. It swept across the boy’s body like a fever. It seeped inside his skin, blanched the marrow of his bones, until every last bit of him understood. He knew what he had to do next, and if he could he would destroy the cup, but that wasn’t his choice anymore. The cup gave him much, including foreknowledge with all the knots that weave the future. Everything from that moment on he remembered already.

And now he needed to conceal it.

So Sharif left for the rest of his life. He went to Mansehra. Found the Mughal princess. Married her. He made her very happy for the rest of her brief life, and on a sunny Friday afternoon he took his goggling, squalling son with him to pray Juma in a mosque in the mountains, where he would stay the night for worship and meditation.

Even though he knew it was the day appointed for his wife’s death.

There was no thought, no coercion, no struggle. Just the wisdom of extinction, the doggedness of destiny that steered his way. He and his son would return to find their family incinerated. Sharif and the villagers would carry out their charred corpses and he would weep; he was allowed that much.

After, he took his son to Turkey.

For years he learned rug weaving at a master weaver’s atelier. His newfound knowledge demanded he rein in the Cup of Heaven’s contents till the time for their disclosure returned. For that he must learn to prepare a special trap.

It took his fingers time to learn the trick even if his brain knew it. Years of mistakes and practice. Eventually he mastered the most sublime ways of weaving. He could apply them to create a trap so elegant, so fast and wise that nothing would escape it.

Sharif had learned how to weave the fabric of light itself.

Now he could return to his hometown, seek out the shadow of the eucalyptus tree, and prepare the device for imprisoning the cup.

First, he designed a kilim with the holy names of reality woven into it. Carefully, with a diamond-tipped glasscutter, he took the Jaam-e-Jam apart into four pieces and set them into the kilim. Next, he snared waves of light that fell in through the workshop window. He looped the peaks and troughs and braided them into a net. He stretched the net over the glass shards and warped them into place. He constructed a brass trunk and etched binding symbols on its lid, then rolled up the kilim and placed it inside.

Last, a special key was prepared. This part took some sorting out—he had to fetch certain particles farther along in time—but he succeeded; and finally he had the key. It was designed to talk to the blood-light in one person only, one descended from Sharif’s line and the Mughal princess’s.

Me.

• • • •

Incredulous, I gazed at my dead grandfather as he told me his last story.

His cheeks glowed with youth, his eyes sharp and filled with truth. His hair was black, parted on the left. Maybe the glass shone, or his eyes, but the effect was the same: an incredible halo of light, near holy in its alienness, surrounded him. When he shook his head, the halo wobbled. When he spoke, the carpet’s fringe threads stirred as if a breeze moved them, but the voice was sourceless and everywhere.

“Today is the sixteenth of November, 2013,” he had said before launching into narration like a machine. “You’re twenty-eight. The woman you love will be twenty-five in three months. As for me”—he smiled—“I’m dead.”

He was telling me the future. Prescience, it seemed, had been his forte.

And now I knew how. The Cup of Heaven.

“Is it really you?” I said when he was done, my voice full of awe.

Gramps nodded. “More a portion of my punishment than me.”

“What does that mean? What other secrets were in the cup? Tell me everything, Gramps,” I said, “before I go crazy.”

“All good stories leave questions. Isn’t that what I will say?” He watched me, serious. “You should understand that I’m sorry. For bringing you here. For passing this on to you. I wish I’d never dug under that tree. But it is the way it is. I was handed a responsibility. I suppose we all get our burdens.”

The air in the room was thick and musty. Our eyes were locked together. He lured me here, I thought. My hands were shaking and this time it was with anger. Rage at being manipulated. All those stories of princesses and paupers, those lies he told for years while all the time he knew exactly what he was doing and how he was preparing me for this burden, whatever it was.

Gramps’s spirit, or whoever he was in this current state, watched me with eyes that had no room for empathy or guilt. Didn’t he care at all?

“I do, son,” he said gently. He was reading my mind or already knew it—I wasn’t clear which—and that angered me more. “I haven’t gotten to the most important part of the story.”

“I don’t care,” I said in a low voice. “Just tell me what was in the cup.”

“You need to know this.” His tone was mechanical, not my gramps’s voice. The person I knew and loved was not here. “The Jaam gave me much. Visions, power, perfect knowledge, but it cost me too. Quite a bit. You can’t stare into the heart of the Unseen and not have it stare back at you.”

He swept a hand around himself. For the first time I noticed the halo wasn’t just hovering behind his head; it was a luminescent ring blooming from his shoulders, encircling his neck, wrapping around his body.

“It wasn’t for me to decide the cup’s fate, so I hid it away. But because the Unseen’s presence ran like a torrent from it I paid more than a man should ever have to pay for a mistake. I was told to dig up the secret and hide it, not to gaze at its wonders or partake of its mysteries. My punishment hence was remembering the future and being powerless to prevent it. I would lose everything I remembered about the love of my life. Starting from the moment I dug under the eucalyptus, I would forget ever having been with your grandmother. My lovely, luckless Zeenat.

“Once the task was complete and I handed over the trunk to Bashir, my memories began to go. With time, my mind confabulated details to fill in the gaps and I told myself and everyone who’d ask that I had married a woman who died during childbirth. By the time we moved to America, all I remembered was this nostalgia and longing to discover a secret I thought I’d never pursued: the pauper princess and her magical jinn.”

When he stopped, the outline of his face wavered. It was the halo blazing. “What you see before you”—with a manicured finger Gramps made a circle around his face—“is an impression of those lost years. My love’s memory wrenched from me.”

He closed his eyes, letting me study the absence of age on his face. If he were telling the truth, he was a figment of his own imagination, and I . . . I was crazy to believe any of this. This room was a delusion and I was complicit in it, solidifying it.

Maybe that was why he forgot. Maybe the human mind couldn’t marry such unrealities and live with them.

“What about the journal? If you forgot everything, how could you draw? How could you write down details of your life?”

Gramps, his apparition, opened his eyes. “Senility. When my organic memory dissolved, fragments of my other life came seeping back in dreams.”

So he wrote the journal entries like someone else’s story. He had visions and dreams, but didn’t know whose life was flooding his head, filling it with devastating images, maybe even ushering in his death earlier than it otherwise might have come.

I leaned back and watched the threads of the carpet twist. The woven tower shot into the sky with hundreds of creatures gathered around it, looking at its top disappear into the heavens.

“I want to see the cup.” My voice rose like a razor in the dark, cutting through the awkwardness between us. “I want to see the contents.”

“I know.” He nodded. “Even such a warning as you see before you wouldn’t deter you.”

“If the cup’s real, I will take it with me to the States, where historians and mythologists will validate its authenticity and . . .”

And what? Truly believe it was a magical cup and place it in the Smithsonian? The cup’s secret isn’t for human eyes, Gramps had said. But what else are secrets for if not discovery? That is their nature. Only time stands between a mystery and its rightful master.

Gramps’s fingers played with the halo, twisting strands of luminosity like hair between his fingers. “You will have the secret, but before you drink from it, I want you to do something for me.”

He snapped his fingers and threads of light sprang from the halo, brightening as they came apart. Quickly he noosed them until he had a complicated knot with a glowing center and a string dangling at the end.

He offered it to me. “Pull.”

Warily, I looked at the phosphorescent string. “Why?”

“Before you gaze inside the cup, you will have a taste of my memories. After that you decide your own demons.”

I reached out a hand to the glass shard, withdrew, extended it again. When my fingers touched it, I flinched. It was warm. Slowly, I pushed my hand into the glass. It was like forcing it through tangles of leaves hot from the sun.

The string reddened. Its end whipped back and forth. I pinched it, pulled, and the light string rocketed toward me, the brilliant corpuscle at its center thrashing and unraveling into reality.

I gasped. A fat worm of peacock colors was climbing my hand, wrapping itself around my wrist.

“Gramps! What is this?” I shouted, twisting my arm, but the creature was already squirming its way up my arm, its grooves hot against my flesh, leaving shadows of crimson, mauve, azure, muddy green, and yellow on my skin. I could smell its colors. Farm odors. Damp foliage. Herbal teas. Baba’s truck with its ancient vomit-stained upholstery and greasy wheel covers. My mother’s hair. Sara’s embrace.

I shuddered. The worm’s body was taut across the bridge of my nose, its two ends poised like metal filings in front of my eyes.

“These,” Gramps said, “are the stingers of memory.”

The worm’s barbs were like boulders in my vision. As I watched them, terrified, they vibrated once.

Then plunged into my eyes.

• • • •

In the cup was everything, Gramps said. He meant it.

What the teenage boy saw went back all the way until he was destroyed and remade from the complete memory of the universe. From the moment of its birth until the end. Free of space, time, and their building blocks, the boy experienced all at once: a mausoleum of reality that wrapped around him, plunged into which he floated through the Unseen.

And I, a blinking, tumbling speck, followed.

Gramps watched the concussion of first particles reverberate through infinity. He watched instantaneous being bloom from one edge of existence to the other; watched the triumph of fire and ejective forces that shook creation in their fists. He observed these phenomena and knew all the realms of the hidden by heart.

Matter has always been conscious. That was the secret. Sentience is as much its property as gravity and it is always striving toward a new form with better accommodation.

From the needs of sentient matter rose the invention that humans are.

Gramps gripped the darkness of prebeing and billowed inside the cracks of matter. When I tried to go after him, an awful black defied me. To me belonged just a fraction of his immersion.

I sat on a molten petal of creation as it solidified, and watched serpentine fractals of revelation slither toward me. Jinns are carrier particles of sentience, they murmured. Of the universe’s memory of the Great Migration.

My prehuman flesh sang on hearing these words. Truths it had once known made music in my body, even if I didn’t quite remember them.

The Great Migration?

The first fires and winds created many primordials, the fractals said.

You mean jinns?

Beings unfettered by the young principles of matter and energy. As the world began to cool, new rules kicked in. The primordials became obsolete. Now the selfish sentience needed resistant clay-and-water creatures to thrive upon. For humans to exist, the primordials had to migrate.

They complied?

They dug tunnels into space-time and left our corner of existence so it could evolve on its own. Before they departed, however, they caged the memory of their being here, for if such a memory were unleashed upon the world, matter would rescind its newest form and return to the essence. Things as we know them would cease to exist.

So they made the cup, I said. To imprison the memories of a bygone age.

Before they passed into shadow, whispered the fractals, they made sure the old ways would be available. In case the new ones proved fleeting.

An image came to me then: a dazzling array of fantastical creatures—made of light, shadow, earth, inferno, metal, space, and time—traveling across a brimming gray land, their plethora of heads bowed. As they plodded, revolved, and flew, the dimensions of the universe changed around them to accommodate this pilgrimage of the phantastique. Matter erupted into iridescent light. Flames and flagella bloomed and dissolved. Their chiaroscuric anatomies shuttered as the primordials made their way into the breath of the unknown.

The flimsy speck that was I trembled. I was witnessing a colossal sacrifice. A mother of migrations. What should a vehicle of sentience do except bow before its ageless saviors?

In the distance, over the cusp of the planets, a primordial paused, its mammoth body shimmering itself into perception. As I watched it, a dreadful certainty gripped me: this was how Gramps was trapped. If I didn’t look away immediately, I would be punished too, for when have human eyes glimpsed divinity without forsaking every sight they hold dear?

But I was rooted, stilled by the primordial’s composition. Strange minerals gleamed in its haunches. From head to tail, it was decorated with black-and-white orbs like eyes. They twitched like muscles and revolved around its flesh until their center, a gush of flame riding bony gears, was visible to me. Mirages and reveries danced in it, constellations of knowledge ripe for the taking. Twisted ropes of fire shot outward, probing for surface, oscillating up and down.

My gaze went to a peculiar vision bubbling inside the fiery center. I watched it churn inside the primordial, and in the briefest of instants I knew what I knew.

As if sensing my study, the creature began to turn. Fear whipped me forward, a reverential awe goading me closer to these wonders undiluted by human genes, unpolluted by flesh, unmade by sentience.

Sentience is everything, sentience the mystery and the master, I sighed as I drifted closer.

But then came a shock wave that pulsed in my ears like a million crickets chirping. I rode the blast force, grief stricken by this separation, spinning and flickering through string-shaped fractures in reality, like gigantic cracks in the surface of a frozen lake. Somewhere matter bellowed like a swamp gator and the wave rushed at the sound. Tassels of light stirred in the emptiness, sputtering and branching like gargantuan towers—

Lightning trees, I thought.

—and suddenly I was veering toward them, pitched up, tossed down, slung across them until there was a whipping sound like the breaking of a sound barrier, and I was slipping, sliding, and falling through.

• • • •

My eyes felt raw and swollen. I was choking.

I gagged and squirmed up from the carpet as the light worm crawled up my throat and out my left nostril. It rushed out, its segments instantly melting and fading to roseate vapors. The vapors wafted in the darkness like Chinese lanterns, lighting up discarded looms and moth-eaten rug rolls before dissipating into nothing.

I stared around, fell back, and lay spread-eagled on the carpet. The nostril through which the worm had exited was bleeding. A heavy weight had settled on my chest.

A memory came to me. Of being young and very small, standing at the classroom door, nose pressed against the glass, waiting for Mama. She was running late and the terror in me was so powerful, so huge, that all I could do was cry. Only it wasn’t just terror, it was feeling abandoned, feeling insignificant, and knowing there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Footsteps. I forced myself through the lethargy to turn on my side. Bashir the rug merchant stood outlined against the rectangle of light beyond the doorway. His face was in shadow. The blue of his eyes glinted.

“You all right, son?”

My heart pounded so violently I could feel it in every inch of my body. As if I were a leather-taut drum with a kid hammering inside and screaming.

“I don’t know.” I tottered upright, breathed, and glanced at the carpet. The light was gone and it was ordinary. Gramps was gone too. The cup’s pieces in the corners were dull and empty.

Just glass.

I looked at Bashir. “I saw my grandfather.”

“Yes.” The rug merchant’s shadow was long and alien on the carpet. “What will you do now that he’s gone?”

I stared at him. His bright sapphire eyes, not old but ancient, watched me. He was so still. Not a hair stirred on his head. I wiped my mouth and finally understood.

“You’re not the boy who fell,” I said quietly. “The eucalyptus jinn. That’s you.”

He said nothing but his gaze followed me as I stepped away from the carpet, from this magical rectangle woven a half century ago. How long had he guarded the secret? Not the carpet, but the cup? How long since Bashir the rug merchant had died and the eucalyptus jinn had taken his form?

“A very long time,” Bashir said in a voice that gave away nothing.

Our eyes met and at last I knew burden. Left behind by the primordial titans, here was a messenger of times past, the last of his kind, who had kept this unwanted vigil for millennia. Carrying the responsibility of the cup, silently waiting for the end of days. Was there place in this new world for him or that damned chalice? Could there be a fate worse than death?

I stood before the caged shards of the Jaam. Gramps might have traversed the seven layers of heaven, but during my brief visit into the Unseen I’d seen enough to understand the pricelessness of this vehicle. Whatever magic the cup was, it transcended human logic. Were it destroyed, the last vestige of cosmic memory would vanish from our world.

“Whatever you decide,” the jinn said, “remember what you saw in the ideograms of the Eternum.”

For a moment I didn’t understand, then the vision returned to me. The mammoth primordial with its flaming core and the glimpse of what churned between its bonelike gears. My heartbeat quickened.

If what I saw was true, I’d do anything to protect it, even if it meant destroying the most glorious artifact the world would ever know.

The jinn’s face was kind. He knew what I was thinking.

“What about the shop?” I asked, my eyes on the damaged looms, the dead insects, the obsolete designs no one needed.

“Will go to my assistant,” he said. “Bashir’s nephew.”

I looked at him. In his eyes, blue as the deepest ocean’s memory, was a lifetime of waiting. No, several lifetimes.

Oblivion. The eucalyptus jinn courted oblivion. And I would give it to him.

“Thank you,” he said, smiling, and his voice was so full of warmth I wanted to cry.

“You miss the princess. You protected their family?”

“I protected only the cup. The Mughal lineage just happened to be the secret’s bearer,” said the eucalyptus jinn, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

Which was why he couldn’t follow them when they left, until Gramps went after them with the cup. Which was also why he couldn’t save them from the fire that killed them. Gramps knew it too, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to change the future.

Was Gramps’s then the worst burden of all? It made my heart ache to think of it.

We looked at each other. I stepped toward the brass trunk and retrieved the key with the gold stud from the padlock. Without looking at the jinn, I nodded.

He bowed his head, and left to fetch me the instruments of his destruction.

• • • •

The city breathed fog when I left the rug shop. Clouds of white heaved from the ground, silencing the traffic and the streets. Men and women plodded in the alleys, their shadows quivering on dirt roads. I raised my head and imagined stars pricking the night sky, their light so puny, so distant, it made one wistful. Was it my imagination or could I smell them?

The odd notion refused to dissipate even after I returned to the inn and packed for the airport. The colors of the world were flimsy. Things skittered in the corners of my eyes. They vanished in the murmuring fog when I looked at them. Whatever this new state was, it wasn’t disconcerting. I felt warmer than I had in years.

The plane bucked as it lifted, startling the passengers. They looked at one another and laughed. They’d been worried about being grounded because of weather. I stared at the ground falling away, away, the white layers of Lahore undulating atop one another, like a pile of rugs.

My chin was scratchy, my flesh crept, as I brought the hammer down and smashed the pieces of the cup.

I leaned against the plane window. My forehead was hot. Was I coming down with something? Bereavement, PTSD, post-party blues? But I had been through hell. I should expect strange, melancholic moods.

The flame twitched in my hand. The smell of gasoline strong in my nose. At my feet the carpet lay limp like a terrified animal.

“Coffee, sir?” said the stewardess. She was young and had an angular face like a chalice. She smiled at me, flashing teeth that would look wonderful dangling from a hemp string.

“No,” I said, horrified by the idea, and my voice was harsher than I’d intended. Startled, she stepped back. I tried to smile, but she turned and hurried away.

I wiped my sweaty face with a paper napkin and breathed. Weird images, but I felt more in control, and the feeling that the world was losing shape had diminished. I unzipped my carry-on and pulled out Gramps’s journal. So strange he’d left without saying goodbye.

That ghost in the glass was just a fragment of Gramps’s memories, I told myself. It wasn’t him.

Wasn’t it? We are our memories. This mist that falls so vast and brooding can erase so much, but not the man. Will I remember Gramps? Will I remember me and what befell me in this strange land midway between the Old World and the New?

That is a question more difficult to answer, for, you see, about ten hours ago, when I changed planes in Manchester, I realized I am beginning to forget. Bits and pieces, but they are disappearing irrevocably. I have already forgotten the name of the street where Gramps and the princess once lived. I’ve even forgotten what the rug shop looked like. What was its name?

Karavan Kilim! An appropriate name, that. The word is the etymologic root for caravan. A convoy, or a party of pilgrims.

At first, it was terrifying, losing memories like that. But as I pondered the phenomenon, it occurred to me that the erasure of my journey to Old Lahore is so important the rest of my life likely depends on it. I have come to believe that the colorlessness of the world, the canting of things, the jagged movements of shadows is the peeling of the onionskin which separates men from the worlds of jinn. An unfractured reality from the Great Unseen. If the osmosis persisted, it would drive me mad, see?

That was when I decided I would write my testament while I could. I have been writing in this notebook for hours now and my fingers are hurting. The process has been cathartic. I feel more anchored to our world. Soon, I will stop writing and put a reminder in the notebook telling myself to seal it in an envelope along with Gramps’s journal when I get home. I will place them in a deposit box at my bank. I will also prepare a set of instructions for my lawyer that, upon my death, the envelope and its contents be delivered to my grandson who should then read it and decide accordingly.

Decide what? You might say. There’s no more choice to make. Didn’t I destroy the carpet and the cup and the jinn with my own hands? Those are about the few memories left in my head from this experience. I remember destroying the rug and its contents. So vivid those memories, as if someone painted them inside my head. I remember my conversation with the jinn; he was delighted to be banished forever.

Wasn’t he?

This is making me think of the vision I had in—what did the jinn call it?—the Eternum.

The root J-N-N has so many derivatives. Jannah, paradise, is the hidden garden. Majnoon is a crazy person whose intellect has been hidden. My favorite, though, is janin.

The embryo hidden inside the mother.

The jinn are not gone from our world, you see. They’ve just donned new clothes.

My beloved Terry, I saw your face printed in a primordial’s flesh. I know you, my grandson, before you will know yourself. I also saw your father, my son, in his mother’s womb. He is so beautiful. Sara doesn’t know yet, but Neil will be tall and black-haired like me. Even now, his peanut-sized mass is drinking his mother’s fluids. She will get migraines throughout the pregnancy, but that’s him borrowing from his mom. He will return the kindness when he’s all grown up. Sara’s kidneys will fail and my fine boy will give his mother one, smiling and saying she’ll never be able to tell him to piss off again because her piss will be formed through his gift.

My Mughal children, my pauper princes, you and your mother are why I made my decision. The Old World is gone, let it rest. The primordials and other denizens of the Unseen are obsolete. If memory of their days threatens the world, if mere mention of it upsets the order of creation, it’s too dangerous to be left to chance. For another to find.

So I destroyed it.

The historian and the bookkeeper in me wept, but I’d do it a thousand times again if it means the survival of our species. Our children. No use mourning what’s passed. We need to preserve our future.

Soon, I will land in the US of A. I will embrace the love of my life, kiss her, take her to meet my family. They’re wary, but such is the nature of love. It protects us from what is unseen. I will teach my parents to love my wife. They will come to know what I already know. That the new world is not hostile, just different. My parents are afraid and that is okay. Someday I too will despise your girlfriends (and fear them), for that’s how the song goes, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, I’m grateful. I was witness to the passing of the Great Unseen. I saw the anatomy of the phantastique. I saw the pilgrimage of the primordials. Some of their magic still lingers in the corners of our lives, wrapped in breathless shadow, and that is enough. We shall glimpse it in our dreams, taste it in the occasional startling vision, hear it in a night bird’s song. And we will believe for a moment, even if we dismiss these fancies in the morning.

We will believe. And, just like this timeless gold stud that will soon adorn my wife’s nose, the glamour of such belief will endure forever.

Usman Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories. His work has won a Bram Stoker Award and a British Fantasy Award and is a finalist for the Nebula and the World Fantasy. He resides in two worlds.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps
By Kai Ashante Wilson

Dear Uncle, I am minded to respond as follows, now you tell me that, in striving to retain our provinces beyond the mountains, Imperial Daluz squanders resources and troops we had, given the recent eastern incursions, much better husband: Let the whole ultramontane go. Let us, moreover, manumit every Harudes slave, allowing them all, as each one so desires, to return to his snowbound home. Having read this, and greatly astonished, you will doubtless exclaim: Who then shall plough our fields, and build our cities; care for our trueborn sons, and bear the bastards of our lust? For these questions, too, Uncle, I have the answer: Let us take whom we need from the Summer continent. The blacks of the northern coast are a peaceable and undefended peoples, the men sturdy, the women fine. Let us expand all our colonies there, and begin to cut down and export the cedar forests of Philipium; take for ourselves the pearl beds at Merqerish, the copper mines of Santa Caela. Fear not to awaken the wrath of the mighty Kingdom of Olorum, nor that of the gods of Ashé who protect it; for Great Olorum lies at the southern extreme of Summer, and if its coffers lack for bottoms, and soldiers number beyond count, still the Kingdom sleeps, and will never rouse itself over any act of ours so many thousands of miles to the north. . . .

from Albion the Younger to the Elder, The White Letters, vol. 3, ch. 18

First of Seven

The merchants and burdened camels went on ahead into the Station at Mother of Waters. The guardsmen waited outside. Tufts of rough grass broke from the parched earth, nothing else green nearby. Demane squinted at the oasis. Palm trees and lush growth surrounded the lake, dazzle reflecting from the steely surface. Just look at her, Mother of Waters; was anything in the world more beautiful—?

“Sorcerer,” said the captain, tapping Demane’s arm. He got out of the way. Tall and thin, Captain escorted the caravanmaster to the front of the gathered brothers.

Earthy and round, the little man hopped up on a rock. “Your choices, gentlemen.” Master Suresh l’Merqerim broke it down for them: “Leave us; and join some other group of saltmen going straight back north. Do so, and you go home beggars. Three silver half-weights are what you’ll get from me, and not a whoring penny more. But permit me to ask: Who here has balls? That man I invite to press on with us! Hard men will be required on the road down past Mother of Waters, when we come to the Wildeeps, and later reach the wide prairies north of the great lady herself, Olorum City. Such men of courage as are among you, they shall know a rich reward once we arrive in Olorum. Loot, and more loot, I say! A whole Goddamned fistful of silver full-weight coins. In Olorum, I shall open up a heavy bag. You will stick a greedy hand down into it, and grab out just as much silver as one fat filthy fist can hold.”

Nor had the caravanmaster quite finished. “We stay in Mother of Waters only for one night: tonight. Tomorrow dawn, this caravan hits the fucking road again.” Suresh really could stand to slow down on the cussing. While it was true that most brothers showed purer descent from that half of the mulatto north supposedly more blessed with brawn than brains, and for the merchants it was the other way around—brighter of complexion (and intellect?)—did it necessarily follow that one group deserved fine speech, while the other should get nasty words sprinkled on every single sentence? “You motherfuckers came here on our coin, our camels. And while you lot drink and whore tonight, we merchants must sell the salt, must empty the warehouses, must pack the goods, must swap the camels for burros. Therefore—right now—I need numbers for how many mean to press on with us. Tell Captain Isa your choice: you brave, you venturesome, you men who are men. And may God bless the cowardly cocksuckers we leave behind.”

The caravanmaster hopped down. From a sack, he handed out fragments of a slab-of-salt that had broken in transit. Plentiful chunks, which brothers could trade in the Station for room, board, and vice, went around. On his one free night, Demane wanted only to spend what a later age would call “quality time,” not to run around Mother of Waters rescuing fools from folly. But even leaving aside those brothers intent on browsing the black market or the prefelonious with contraband themselves to fence, the very wisest plans Demane heard his brothers making were nothing of the kind. You had wantons looking forward to boughten love, tipplers to some beverage called “that Demon,” gamblers to the local bloodsports . . . The guardsmen grinned and said Thanky as their cupped hands were filled to brimming. Much could be said of Master Suresh, and not all to his credit; but he wasn’t stingy. Bag empty, all the brothers’ hands full, the caravanmaster headed off for the Station.

“Y’all do what you want,” said Mosteyfa called Teef. “But this nigga here?” They called him that for the obvious reason: long, snaggled, missing . . . “Is going all the way to Olorum.” . . . pewter-black, moss-green, yellow . . . “My ass ain’t tryna go right back up to the desert.” . . . cracked, carious, crooked. “A nigga need some rest behind that motherfucker!”

Demane felt much the same, crudity notwithstanding. A unanimous rumble rolled across the gathering of brothers.

“Anyone?” said the captain. His right hand pantomimed a man walking away, left hand waving goodbye.

“Come this far,” said some brother, “might as well go on.”

“I ain’t never seen Olorum, noway,” said another brother.

“Silver full-boys, y’all!” said a third. “Much as we can grab, y’all!”

Captain cupped one eloquent hand behind an ear, his other urging brothers to speak up now. There could be no change of mind later.

Nobody said anything.

So the captain pointed off the route to the Station—to a field of cropped stubble and petrified goat dung. “Drills,” he said. “Throwing.”

The brothers groaned. They complained. The two words sufficed, however, for them to drop their packs and scramble to join Captain—already run out ahead of them onto the field and waiting. The brothers shaped up like ducklings, all in a row with their spears.

Demane tossed a couple packs off the trail to the Station, over with the other baggage. Lately wounded, Faedou eased himself down, gripping his spear like a cane. He leaned back against the piled packs, good leg bent, trick leg outstretched. Around the back of his head some gray naps grew still, his bald pate shining like volcanic glass.

Looming against the light, Demane stayed afoot as though to see drills better. His broad stature cast commensurate shade down over his brother, seated. Sweating too much, breathing too loud, Faedou kept his face hardened against pain. The odor of infected humors coming off that bad leg stank such that Demane’s sensitive tongue could taste the bacterial action in stagnant blood.

“You oughta let me take a quick look-see,” Demane said, not for the first time. “I won’t even touch my bag unless you say so. Promise.”

“I told you, Sorcerer.” Faedou threw an edgy glance up at Demane’s bag. “I put my hopes in God.”

After that last clash with bandits, Demane had tended the injuries of all the brothers save for Faedou, who, it seemed, feared the pollution of heathen arts even more than death by gangrene.

[Saprogenic possession], [antibiotic exorcism], the perils of [sepsis and necrotizing tissues] . . . Demane had perhaps doomed Faedou, in speaking such terms without knowing them in a common language. To superstitious ears, nothing distinguished those untranslated words from the veriest babble of demon worship. “If that leg get too bad, old man, the only thing will save you is chopping it off.”

Faedou rocked side to side. “Prayer and trust in Him. His justice and mercy: that’s all I need. Maybe I’ll wade in the Blood of the River soon. That’s all right. I asked the Dove to come down to my shoulder long ago. Won’t you ask Him too, brother? For it’s said in the Recital of Life and Days—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

You had to catch them quick—these more religious northerners—or they’d go on that way for a while. Why not get the old man talking about something useful? Nobody except the captain had crisscrossed this quarter of the continent more than Faedou. And so Demane asked about the Wildeeps.

“A strange place, nowhere else like it. Rains a lot down there, but you get sick of it after the first couple days . . .”

Demane listened, keeping an eye on drills. No matter how often he’d seen the captain’s reckless feats of speed and skill, every time was still astonishing. Captain ran far out or in close, depending on the strength of a given brother’s throwing arm. One at a time, they cast spears at him, aimed to kill. He either batted the spear aside or snatched it from the air, and dropped it to the dust. “Foul,” he called or, if some rare effort merited encouragement, “Not bad.” A brother ran to fetch his spear only after Captain had passed three men farther down the line.

“Wildeeps must be far away,” Demane said. “Ain’t much rain falling around these parts.”

“Naw, they real close by.” Faedou waved southward. “It won’t take half a day to get there. See the Daughter?” Faedou pointed to the river that wound southwest, outflowing from Mother of Waters. “A few leagues south of here, Daughter runs into another river called the Crossings that goes straight west. Other side of the Crossings, it’s the Wildeeps. You’ll see what I mean soon enough. It don’t make no kind of sense. North of the Crossings, the land’s just like this: dried up, nothing much growing. On the south, it’s all green. Thick brush, and elephant grass. Jungle. The Road pick up there, south of the Crossings.” Faedou faced away and spat. “That’s some more ole witchcraft.”

“Captain said the Wildeeps dangerous.” Do me a favor, D., will you? Get around to all the brothers and warn them not to stray off-Road when we come to the Wildeeps. Make every brother understand his life depends on obeying. It does. In the Wildeeps there is no safety, except on the Road.

“Well, there’s beast and thing, Sorcerer. Terrible things—what God Hisself couldn’t love. Last time I went through, I swear I seen . . .”

“What, Faedou? What you see?”

“. . . I don’t know, man. Maybe I didn’t see nothing.”

“Aw, come on—what, Faedou? Don’t be like that!”

In motion the captain had the look of a cheetah. Long-legged, swift, too thin. He whirled left and right, away from cast spears, catching some as they passed. At the last man in line, he began back the other way. Ten or so of these circuits was the usual length of drills. After long weeks of Captain’s training, the brothers had the rhythm down. Everyone either threw, sprinted to retrieve his spear, sprinted back to his place in line, or else was bent over, gasping for breath.

“Something like a crocodile. But up on two legs, you know? Mouth just full of teeth! Each one as bad as a knife, Sorcerer. If that thing had bit you, it would of took out as much as my two hands could grab.” Faedou put his palms together at the wrists, curving his fingers like fangs: clamping down on his own thigh by way of demonstration.

“Mighty big bite,” Demane agreed. “Anybody else see this thing, Faedou?”

All earthly creatures shared a common scent, the tellurian signature. But (to Demane’s nose) a rare few smelled also of the stars, as if some subset of their ancestors sprang from other dust than this. There were mortal men and women in the captain’s lines of descent, yes, but the gods abounded too. That voice of his, for one; and who but a cousin descended from the Towers could manage such fast footwork? The captain was plainly too strong, as well, for a man hardly more than cord and bone. Demane reckoned that Captain cut loose this way at drills, and in battle, for brief respite from the terrible self-restraint he imposed on all his deeds, movements, and even speech at other times.

“Just me. But I ain’t crazy, Sorcerer. So don’t be looking at me like that. I seen it. In the middle of the night, I got up to pee. And seen it by the moonlight: right over in some trees. Standing close as that patch of weeds you see right there.”

“Well, how come you didn’t just wake up some—”

“I was scared, is how come. You should of seen that damn thing! Tall as the captain, Sorcerer, I swear it was. Walking around like anybody. Teeth like this!”

“All right, all right. So, what it do next?”

Captain was eating sunlight. Tasting the sun, rather, for he couldn’t absorb much through that headscarf he always wore. Darkling about the captain’s head was a heliovore’s nimbus, a sort of counterhalo—shadowy, half-starved and imperceptible to all eyes present, except Demane’s. I wish you’d take off that stupid scarf, Demane thought, not for the first time. What does it matter if they see your hair? You’d gain weight, strength, decades of life . . .

“Nothing. Just stood watching the camp from the forest. After a while the walking-alligator went back up into the trees. But that’s why everybody keep to the Road going through the Wildeeps. That bad stuff you hear about happen to caravans who go off-Road.”

Demane said, “I don’t see what the Road got to do with it.”

“I told you. Witchcraft.” Faedou sprinkled that word around like a cook sprinkles salt: applicable to any and every dish, useful for all occasions. Perhaps in some sense it was “witchcraft” when Demane waved his hand through a cloud of mosquitoes, and then nobody else was bitten the rest of the night. But was it “witchcraft” when some unlucky brother stubbed his toe? Or bit down on sandy grit in his porridge? Everything can’t be witchcraft! “It’s them magi live down by Olorum who made the Road. Put some kind of hoodoo on it: to keep off beasts and thing. But you oughta know more about all this demon-raising business than me. Right, Sorcerer?”

Demane sighed. Back home in the green hills, they had called him Mountain Bear for his unusual size and strength. On this side of the continent, he’d picked up another name, no matter how many times he said, I ain’t nobody’s “sorcerer,” just call me Demane. He obviously tried for circumspection with the petty miracles, the intelligence gleaned from preternatural senses, the things pulled from his bag in broad daylight . . . Still, he’d picked up a reputation.

Drills were done. Captain dismissed the brothers, keeping back the usual two. Demane tossed brothers their oiled goatskins full of water as they came straggling back.

Messed Up threw himself down in the grass and began to guzzle. Every time the caravan had stopped at wells in the desert, Messed Up had drunk to the point of sickness. And always, in the burning stretches between wells, he’d run short and had to come begging some of yours.

“Slow down,” Demane said. “Not so much.”

Teef said, “It’s too hot for all this!” as he always did after drills. “Why the fuck Captain got us out here running around, throwing spears and shit, in the HOT ASS MOTHERFUCKEN HEAT?”

A couple other brothers—as they always did—said, “Amen. That’s right. Why?” between sips of water.

Demane snatched the upturned goatskin from Messed Up’s mouth. “How you gon’ drink the whole thing straight down? You remember how you made yourself sick all them times. Act like you got some sense for once!”

“What do it matter, Sorcerer?” Once upon a time, Messed Up’s scowl had only bespoken gormless passion. “You see they got a whole big-ass lake right there!”

“You forgot last time already? Throwing up like that? Belly hurting? You done for now.” Demane slung his arm, squeezed his hand. A silver rope of water, airborne, uncoiled above the pale dust, and then darkened a long line across it. He tossed the empty goatskin back.

These days when Messed Up scowled, whoever had thought themselves hideous could take great comfort, now recognizing themselves as beautiful. For ever since a bandit’s machète had sheared half Messed Up’s face from his skull—seventy-eight catgut stitches, to reattach cheek, lips, chin—every mug was a lovely mug by contrast with that warped leer, pulling against its sutures.

“Aw, see there?” Messed Up howled. “Damn, Sorcerer!” He tumbled over backwards, like some twenty-stone baby pounding his fists, kicking his heels, against the dirt.

T-Jawn, with no such lack of decorum, lay back on a grassy spot. “I should so like to sit out these drills as you do, M. Sorcier.” And, peering through the slatted fingers of a languid hand, he asked, “What is your secret? Do tell.” The question, the exhortation, sounded rhetorical to Demane, and he made to turn away. But, nay: earnestly meant, for T-Jawn sat up, asking, “No, truly, mon vieux: From whom did you learn such mastery of the spear?”

Demane shrugged. “My Aunty.”

Brothers fell out rolling in the grass. They joked. They laughed.

“Got my skills from Granny! Where you get yours at?”

“Was my wife learned me up. Old gal got a arm on her!”

“Where I come from, women hunt if they feel like it . . .” Then Demane made himself shut up. You get sick of saying the same thing over and over. Men on this side of the continent thought they were the best at everything. It was stupid! Aunty, however, needed his defense about as much as did Mt. Bittersmoke, where lightning struck in continuous cascade about a lake of brightly splashing lava. “Well, Captain don’t go easy on me, either,” Demane pointed out.

The second or third time Captain had called these drills, a near-metamorphosis had come over Demane unexpectedly. His senses sharpened, reflexes quickened, just before he’d thrown his spear. The point had caught in Captain’s robe, nearly impaled him. Since then, Demane sat out drills. He and the captain sparred spear-to-spear at the end of exercises. Nor did Captain hold back much.

“I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but it’s them two little niggas”—Barkeem nodded toward the brothers still at drills—“I feel sorry for.”

Demane, too. Every now and then, he’d ask Captain again to cut the hapless youngsters a little slack. “No,” said the captain, without variation.

Xho Xho and Walead were all sharp elbows, skinny shanks, bony knees. So were several other brothers. None of those others, however, was so cursed with bungling hands and feet. Xho and Walé were made to throw their spears twice as many times as everyone else. Ungentle hands jerking the boys into correct stance, Captain would fix their grip on the spear, tension and turn of shoulders and hips, even how far up or down they held their chins. When a spearcast failed to please him, which was most of them, the boys had to run full out—that is, stagger, hunched over with side-stitches—back and forth a time or two from where the spear lay, back to where the captain waited, hardfaced as the fatherghost these northerners called God.

“Yo, my dudes,” said a brother. “Heard they got hoes at the Station.”

The truth of this hearsay was by another brother affirmed. “Yeah. Down in some tents out past the big market.”

A latter beside the former two put forward his own intention, and inquired into other brothers’. “I’m heading down that way to see about one, damn betcha. Who else going?”

Nearly every brother was.

“‘Bout you, Sorcerer?”

“I don’t do that.”

“Moi? I most certainly do,” said T-Jawn for the general edification; and then, confidingly, to Demane: “Has no one informed you then, Sorcerer? After Mother of Waters, there shan’t be any further opportunities to, ah—what was that marvelously apt phrase of yours, Barkeem?” T-Jawn popped his fingers encouragingly.

“Get your dick wet.”

“Voilà—before we come to Olorum City?”

• • • •

In the green hills of home there was no such institution. And so when he’d first come from the remotest spur of the continent, to cities of the northern riviera, Demane had thought it to be a route by which men wishing to marry could meet a wife.

There, in old colonial Philipiya, skill won him the position of huntmaster for the city amir. Remunerative but silly work, bagging game for sport; and a lonely life as well, all day speaking languages other than his own, with no one to hold at night. Before a year was out, Demane had begun wondering why he’d ever traveled so far from Saxa, first love and then oldest friend, and especially from Atahly, the woman—on second thought—he really should have married. You’ll love me later as much as I love you now, and regret leaving. She was right.

Whenever he admitted to loneliness, men of Philipiya would commend to him whores. Women of exceeding beauty, was the impression he’d gotten; and not to be approached without wealth. At last, he decided he’d better marry one and settle down.

The shawl cost half his savings. The amir himself had recommended the merchant. You would need six months’ travel by ship to find another like this in the world! The silk was orange and crimson as low clouds above a sunset, stitched in thread-of-gold. Demane bought smaller treats, too, of course: pretty little bangles, candied fruit, perfume. He, the lady, and her advocates would feast together, wouldn’t they? He could discreetly leave the shawl afterwards, if the lady found him congenial. The elders might like an amphora of that grape vinegar, also from overseas and costly, so beloved by Philipiya’s rich . . .

The place was filthy. A long and dark hall; over doorways on the right-side wall, raggedy carpets hung. Hoarse noise and women’s sobs. The fishy reek of sex unwashed for days. Reeling and flinching, his thoughts couldn’t make sense of abomination. A carpet drew back on a girl much too young, lying atop stained sheets. No supper was laid out and there’d be no polite talk. He and his wife-to-be wouldn’t, late in the meal, stare brazenly at each other, and then cast down their eyes again, chastened by a grunt from the chaperones. Nothing he’d imagined. Motes seethed on the verminous pallet. Who fed this little girl? Not enough. “Pretty, ain’t she?” said the . . . merchant . . . proprietor? (The pimp, which word he hadn’t known then.) “Youngest one I got. Silver penny if you want her.”

Gripping the rich fringe, Demane let the shawl unfurl to the floor. He shook the bright silk aloft and let it go, draping the naked child. And left. Not so long as he lived would he forget her eyes, the misuse in them, and expectation of more.

• • • •

“I said,” Demane repeated, “I don’t do that.” His mortal mask slipped a bit askew, and he couldn’t hide, for a moment, the piece of him that was perilous, a god.

T-Jawn’s smirk faltered. Talk of whores diverted elsewhere, now in hushed tones, brothers leaning together like boys trading nasty whispers within earshot of the father.

Demane looked south. Coming up the path their caravan would travel down tomorrow, a northbound caravan was just arriving at the Station of Mother of Waters. Half the size of theirs, this caravan had a couple hundred burros, some fifty men, merchants and brothers. At the back of the caravan, some few dozen buffalo were driven along by men riding camels of a sort Demane had not seen before, sleek and agile.

“Buffalo riders,” said Faedou, eyes too on this arrival. He like Demane cared nothing for what went on in the tents beyond the market, caring only for his two beloved wives and eleven children.

Buffalo riders? Were they? Yes! Look at the beaded leathers, the long locked hair, their complexion not some singular color like other peoples, but three shades at once. How did it go? Oxblood, amber, good earth . . . Everything just as in the tall tales and melancholy songs brothers told or sang at nightly camps. One thing puzzled Demane, though. “Ain’t they suppose to ride the buffalo?” He’d dearly wanted to see that—some rider perched high atop a buffalo’s hump and clinging, presumably, to the horns.

Faedou gave a crack of incredulous laughter. “Ride em?”

“Well, they called buffalo riders, ain’t they?”

“Aw, baby . . . ! What kind of Sorcerer you suppose to be, thinking they ride buffalo, not herd em?”

“Leastways I don’t wrestle bare-handed with bandits trying to stab me with a knife.”

“Ooooooh!” said the brothers. Demane and Faedou went back and forth for a few good-natured rounds of insult.

Xho Xho and Walead ran up. “Captain said.” They blew, they puffed. “The captain said, tell that damn Sorcerer to bring his lazy, loafing ass on.”

No doubt that had been the sense of his message. But Captain stooped neither to low speech, nor ever to profanity.

Demane rose with his spear, and punched at half-speed for Walead’s head. Laughing, the boy just managed to duck away.

“Hold this.” Demane tossed his bag to Cumalo. Some brothers risked a look askance; others gawped in awe at the bag. One or two made a sign against the Beast. Unlike his brothers, easygoing Cumalo suffered no pangs of either fear or curiosity. Certainly one ancient little heirloom, passed down to mortal offspring from the gods gone back to heaven, was not enough to rouse him. Bag on his chest, Cumalo resumed drowsing in the grass.

To the east, as far as sight went, there was a view of overgrazed scrub and cracked earth, all in shades of gray and dun. The weedy field of goat chips inclined slightly, the black-robed figure standing tall against morning’s blue-gold sky. Captain exuded his familiar tang-spice of impatience. Demane hustled up the dry acres to him. One of them bristled and frowned, the other going downcast and quiet, whenever the two came near each other, and why? Hatred, said most brothers: hot and personal. No, it was rivalry, said others: respectful but fierce. And then some brother would mutter half of the proverb, “Two top dogs, just one pack . . .” and everyone would shake his head, eyes peeled for the brewing showdown.

The captain had a tic, at this very moment indulging it. His thumb and forefinger pinched along the edges of his headscarf, though the cloth was cinched too viciously tight for adjustment. As always, it covered Captain’s head even down over the brows (shaved off, anyway). And snug as that scarf was tied, it was no wonder he went around squinting, mouth set in a hard line, as if his head never stopped aching. The captain had rebuffed all of Demane’s inquiries into the need for disguise, and so now he gathered clues only as they dropped. It seemed Captain was nobody awash in glory or scandal, so long as that scarf stayed on. Should the wrong eyes see him with it off, however . . .

“Cain’t see nothing,” Demane said. “You got that scarf on proper, like always.”

Had a scorpion bit it, that hand couldn’t have quit its fussing any quicker. The captain bristled and frowned.

“First touch?” Demane handed over his spear. Captain nodded while swaddling the point of Demane’s spear in thick cloth; he handed it back. His own spearblade unscrewed from an iron mount on the shaft, already disarmed.

Signaling for the watchers’ sake, Captain held up two fingers, then raised a third. Softly he sang: “Two of three.”

That voice! Captain lacked the power of speech, was capable only of song. He could stand dumb, gesturing, or else make incomparable music. Even in a monosyllable, it was possible to hear him struggling to tarnish his pure tones, hoarsen their rich clarity; trying to turn his vox seraphica into a thing befitting the vulgar, violent world of a caravan guardsman. But calliphony was as inseparable from the captain’s voice as blood from a living heart, and he could do nothing, try as he might, to make any utterance of his less than the loveliest you’d heard, or would ever hear, so long as you lived.

Captain attacked. It would seem safer to hang back from the point of another warrior’s spear, and in particular that spearpoint which tracked so closely, punished so fiercely, every instant of proximity, addering in and out with venomous speed, one bite sufficient to kill. Men—nearly every man—had to work up the nerve to skip in close, thrust once and fast, and then skip backwards again, not caring so much whether they’d gotten the kill, just glad to be alive. Demane fought that way, certainly. The captain, however, lunged in close enough to deal death easily, or catch his own, and never quit such closeness until someone fell dead, never yet him.

The captain’s single spear seemed two, even at times three. It darted from the billowing folds of his dark robe with murderous speed and accuracy. Demane scrambled from the thrusts, blocked the slashes. Scarcely could he steal a moment to gasp for breath between attacks. At this pace, defense was the best he could do, offense out of the question.

Then—lightly as a brush of lips—the blunt mount of Captain’s spear tapped the base of Demane’s throat.

Absurd control! Captain could have won the bout at any moment from the first. His own breath bellowing in his ears, Demane could hardly make out the brothers’ raucous encouragement.

“Where’s your fire today, Sorcerer?” So exquisite was the manner of Captain’s speech, meaning of his words was easily missed. “Keep that spear up, and centered here or here.” He tapped his chest, his belly. “And you can hardly win, can you, if you just block and flee?” To hear was like to see a majestic view of mountains; or for the first time, some city teeming with its thousands—such a chill and creep of gooseflesh as that, such wonder . . . “So attack me, man. Attack!”

Next bout. Demane bullied in closer as Captain had often advised him to do, and there his greater strength and heavier spear seemed to tell. Either Demane fought better, or the captain began to tire at last from his mad exertions. They made the same attack, spears harpooning in. Demane parried. The captain spun aside, but coming too near. Without thinking, Demane threw a punch of the sort that cracks a skull, snaps the neck. But didn’t connect—for Captain leaned back easily from that fist, his face just beyond the knuckles. Even so, the spontaneous strike earned Demane a rare “Good!” and a glissando of surprised laughter, Captain’s body releasing the thrill-scent of a fearless man just brushing death.

Right at that moment, the swaddling cloth slipped from Demane’s spearpoint.

There was no moment to disarm the spear again, for Captain, careless that he faced a live spearpoint, jabbed his own shaft with killing force, pressing the offense. Caring in the captain’s stead, Demane gave way and offered only defense. Long practice, however—and Captain’s own masterful training—had ingrained new reflexes in Demane. Those quick feet—always so sure—chanced to stumble, and caution could not quite check the instantaneous drive of Demane’s spear.

The captain should have, as always before, made a light-footed sideways spin. But, as never before, Captain faltered a second time, flat-footed in just the right position to die.

Two things occurred: one thought, one action.

Demane pulled the strike, of course—hauling back and jerking it aside with violence sufficient to knock himself over. Even so, the blade pierced the captain’s robe and some flesh too. And Demane’s thought?

He did that on purpose.

Captain tossed his head, meaning Get up. Demane didn’t rise, staying sprawled on the ground. There was never any time or space for open talk between them, so they’d learned to say a great deal with expression alone. Demane would not play, not with these rules; he made that clear to Captain. Whose face hardened, whose blunted spear darted forwards, a blow that would not feel nice. For the captain held firmly that any insubordination from a man under his command was best answered with the hardest of knocks. Bandits and corsairs, intent upon murder, hadn’t hit Demane so hard as this man.

Would Captain knock the wind from him? A gut-blow? Or would the steel base crack against his forehead, raising an egg? A strike to the mouth, bursting a lip, chipping some tooth . . . ? The plunging spear halted a hair’s breadth above Demane’s navel—content, today, to mime the blow and deal none. Captain wins!

Demane knocked the shaft aside. “Isa! Did I hurt you?” He got up. “Why did you—?”

“Call me Captain.” He wound a fist in his loose robe, pressing the wadded cloth to his side. “Don’t get your people mixed up, brother.” Sun in his eyes, the captain had pretext by which to turn about, his back now to the brothers’ shouts: facing Demane and winning them a moment’s semiprivacy. The aspect of cruel command left the captain’s face, abruptly as if he’d removed a mask. No one had ever looked so changed! There was a deep story here, some great wrong done: how had this man meant only for the gentle and the good been conscripted into service of violence and pain?

You cannot fix the whole world’s pain, Demane; there’s too much. But what about one man’s, Aunty? Can I do that much?

“Listen, D.,” Captain sang not in his customary register, stonehills,[1] but in the one Demane liked, far lovelier. “Would you help me with something?”

“Yeah, but why—and let me see—”

“Stop, man.” Captain brushed the hand away. “It’s just a scratch. Listen to me.” He said such things as—See to the others, I wasn’t hurt; it’s nothing; I’m fine; I don’t feel it—turning aside all help, although he knew, for Demane had warned him the first day they’d met, that all lies were barefaced to Demane’s hypersenses. Scent testifies against a liar, and subtle flinches; a stuttering pulse and mistimed blinks, the tremors and halts of the voice: there were a thousand tells . . . Demane couldn’t help but know truth from falsehood.

The captain faced about again, so all could see him. No longer fey, his face resumed a falcon’s arrogance. “Tell the brothers they’d best behave in the Station. At Mother of Waters, the fort soldiers don’t play. If the fo-so are called out because some brother is wilding, the caravanmaster pays a fine in silver full-weight. You know what Suresh will say then. Leave that fool here at the edge of the desert, with nothing, or maybe he’ll say, Let the brother come with us, but I’ll take it from his pay. Either way, it’s a bad outcome for that brother.”

Demane nodded. He watched to see whether a besoaking gleam would come through the cloth Captain held bunched to his side. Nothing would put him off if that robe showed wet.

“Oh,” said the captain, “and if I’m the one who catches some brother raising a ruckus . . .”

Where had that glimpse of surpassing peace gone? Now there was nothing to be seen in the captain but what long and bloody allegiance to war had made of him. If just he’d talk to the others, too, and let them come to know him truly; joke with the brothers sometimes, sit beside them in easy fraternity. Then there’d be no need to threaten a savage beatdown to get them jumping to obey him . . . ! Demane gave as much of this advice as he could: “All right, Captain; I’ll tell em. But—”

“Not the time or place. Are you going to set me on fire right here, D.? In front of everybody?”

Demane shook his head.

Hand pressed to his side, Captain jogged up to the Station.

• • • •

“You almost got him! That was gold, my nigga. Not fake, not fool’s, not dross: GOLD. Nigga, it was some official shit you just did, almost beating the captain like that! That, my nigga, was straight up gold-plated LIKE SHIT.”

Demane wrapt a prodigious hand about Walead’s nape. With the greatest gentleness, he gave the boy to know how wringably his narrow neck secured his small skull. “How many times I told you, Walé? I don’t like that word.”

“I know, Sorcerer—sorry! Captain just mad, though, cause you almost beat him!”

“For real, Sorcerer; you came this close. You got just about his same speed, and more stremf!”

“Don’t let the man worry to you, son. He just evil like that. Always in a bad mood.”

Their shadows still west-leaning and longish in the forenoon, Demane and his brothers walked up toward the Station. They always surprised him. To Demane, the captain’s front was flimsy and collapsed with the slightest scrutiny. But the brothers stayed convinced, believing Captain to be precisely what he seemed. Demane told them as much of the truth as he could: “Listen up. Y’all know we cain’t carry these spears around the Station, right . . . ?”

[1] Baritone con squillo. A voice to be heard, in every sense: clarion-like over the din of skirmish, agonies, and war-cries; and as daunting to his own as to the enemy.

But none of us would step forward, and we did beg her to be master. She though refused us, saying, Ever since the isle broke and the Towers returned to heaven, I have remained here planetbound, protector of all earthly beings. Now I wish to see the galaxies. Are you all so troubled then, that one of you little powers should become very great?

We answered that it terrified us, one and all, to be bound forever to that wild tract of land, with nowhere to go, nothing to do . . .

Our ignorance amazed her, and she laughed at our fears, saying, How can it be, still, that you understand so little? Whosoever take charge of the Wild Depths shall have the freedom of any place and time among all the worlds that touch and overlap there. They may come and go between universes, do you understand? And when it should come to pall, such long life, such mastery of time and space, only let the master pass custodianship to another, some youthful power of good heart: and then rise up as light to join the gods beyond the sky, even as I am about to do . . .

from [ancestral eidetic memory] of the magi of the Ashëan Enclave

Second of Seven

Only mud came up from the wells at Ajeric, no water. That sometimes happened, and most of the caravan had rationed for it; but many hadn’t. One among the guardsmen, Gangy, who’d been spendthrift with his water, began to mutter in a manner damaging to brotherly morale. It would begin by feeling your eyes dry tearless and unblinkable, said Gangy, your tongue swelling blueblack in your mouth, and skin shriveling up into leather, into jerky. Perhaps a year hence, some wayfarer would spot a skull scoured meatless by the sands, sun-bleached: yours—The seditious remainder cut short by the hard back of Captain’s hand. They would all reach the next wells alive, said Master Suresh, so long as grown men didn’t sit and weep, boo hoo hoo like some sad whore, her six best boys lost this week to marriage. We must do now as she did then: dry the tears, and hustle!

The caravan pressed on. There was no talk, no sound, except the jingling of harness and the vague shush of sands shifted by their passage.

Every night the brazen sphere dissolves in a molten line, compelling the gaze westward when the sky’s dark otherwise. With a similar compulsion, the least dampness in the driest wastes would seize Demane’s whole attention. No stopping at nightfall, nor for midnight, either: the caravan was still going after moonset. Under cloudless constellations, the camels trudged along the banks of a dead river, extinct since prehistory. They came to a stretch of arroyo where humidity hovered, where some deep spring leaked up even to the surface. Demane snapped the reins of his camel, hurrying the beast from midpack to the caravan’s forefront, where Captain rode.

Master Suresh kept watch on all such urgencies. He too brought his camel up abreast, in time to see Demane’s gesture and hear the offending word. “Water?” the caravanmaster cried. “Succubee of thirst and mirage! They have fucked out that man’s brains, Captain. Tell your fevered brother: this river died before the dragons burnt Daluça!”

The captain ran every day, and much farther on some, whether for penance or harder exercise, who knew. That day he’d run from Ajeric’s wells until after sundown. He’d only just mounted his camel. With heart-spoke fatigue, he looked at Demane. Are you sure? Don’t make a fool of me.

“I’m telling you, Captain.” Demane pointed again down the arroyo’s draw. “It’s good water right there.”

Captain turned to the caravanmaster and gave beautiful corroboration. “It’s yours to say: stop or go on. But the water is here, Master Suresh.” The master muttered vile curses—not really doubting, though. The captain’s word had weight.

“Hold here!” the master bellowed to his caravan.

Spades, mallet, chisel. Demane chose Messed Up, Michelo, Wock, and the captain himself: the men strongest in the caravan. The long draw was more rock than sand, but not steep. By dim stars, the chosen picked their way down. The silver night ablaze for him, Demane ran ahead to where wetness rose richest, near a boulder.

Bent over, noses in the sand and pressed to the rim of the half-ton slab, even the others could smell it. But there was no trickle, only a dark stain in the sand. Nor could they shift the stone, and to bring down more hands would only crowd and hinder, not help.

“Let me try something,” Demane said. He had the captain give his highest, sharpest cries, and listening to echoes the rock returned, chose a spot to crouch. He milked his third eye for vitriol. It took time, and to the others it seemed that Demane only knelt, lost in thought or prayer for water. He’d once accomplished this feat as a boy, when still a novice, but never since in earnest.

Master Suresh called down bitterly.

Dolce, the captain called back.

Some time later, Messed Up nudged Demane’s shoulder. “Damn, Sorcerer.” He breathed by mouth, and poked Demane again. “Why you just setting there?” Demane tried to wave him off, focusing on the contract-release of the tiniest, most obscure muscles.

Captain pulled Messed Up back.

Mouth full, Demane bowed and pressed his lips to a crack under the rock. He spat hard. Weak phosphoros was hid by his body, but the rock cried out—inorganic cavils and groans. “¡Coño!” “The fuck was that?” the brothers exclaimed. Virulent potency sheared deep feet through rock, and then sinking, smelted and cracked the stone. Igneous fumes, hot, hissed out. Demane jumped up and back with the rest. When the fiery stink had cleared, Captain waved Demane beside him, and the other three to the rock’s opposite side. This time their strength sufficed to tip the boulder out from the greater shelf beneath. They sent it on its way, sliding to the sandy bottom.

“Pero no veo naá . . .” Wock began, and then heard. So did they all: a burbling sigh, the sweet sound of water pissing through fractured stone; then saw the starlit froth too, as it welled up, running away in glitters over the thirsty sand and gravel. Messed Up fell greedily to hands and knees.

“Water,” Captain sang to the ridge above. “Come down.” The caravan came.

• • • •

Abundant water flowed with the effect of wine. The caravan drank and drank and lay down anywhere. Brothers should have known the routine. Five different men guarded each quarter of the night, while four slept the night through. They’d done so more than eighty times already, at every sleep-camp when Captain called the watch. But by the lucky springs, so late it would dawn soon, Captain sat for a moment in the sand. And it must surely have felt soft to him, for he began to nod, his lips slackening. Across camp, watching between slow blinks, Demane lay stretched out already. It had been a long day of highs and lows; he too was at lowest ebb. His knack for medicinals, as it turned out, had proved no help at all with venoms. That feat had drained Demane to the dregs. He ought to practice more, but why, nasty stuff . . . Demane slept too.

Some nightmare woke him. The fleshcolored sky was sallowing in the orient. Over the lip of the ridge, down the arroyo’s east bank, ragged shapes with machètes or spears loped from rock to rock, sliding where their footing crumbled, descending on the caravan asleep in the bottom sands. Thirty? No, there were fifty of them at least!

Desperados.

Demane’s alarums woke the camp. Snoring brothers took hard kicks. Some sleepers he snatched up by the hair and dropped on foot awake. As soon as Demane began to yell, every bandit set up whooping, lunatic as hyenas. Twice the number of blades bristled downslope as up, and there was nobody silent, everyone screaming. Before the teeth of spears could chew them, the merchants scrambled past the brothers to cower against the western bank; and then top and bottom jaw of the skirmish closed. The merchants all lived. Brothers died.

Where was Captain? Amidst the enemy already, a blur of black robes, quarter-way-up the eastern slope in the thick of them. The captain went from one to another, inspiring shrill agony or utter silence as he passed. By sixes and sevens the bandits would close with him before he got the numbers down. A full half dozen pressing together could scrawl shallow wounds on him, or rend his robe. Captain in turn pocked the crush with every movement.

Chickenty thought he was a hero too. Though Demane called him back where the brothers rallied at the bottom, Chickenty ran on upslope. He speared one desperado, and then another behind that first. He engaged a third. Weeks before, in the last raid, he’d worked wonders with his quick feet on firm ground. But sand shifts and rolls, worse on the uphill, and no one’s feet can be as fast or sure. Some fourth desperado came driving in on Chick’s blindside, and he did hear Demane’s warning shout. But his step sideways was not quick enough, and he slipped. The spear skewered Chick kidney-to-kidney. Crumpling sidewise, he vomited blood, and was the first brother to die.

There is a principle called TSIM. Through deep time the universe complicates, all things whatsoever arising from the mother quantum, precisely so this man (writhing now on Demane’s spearpoint) might enjoy sentience, choice, and love. This is TSIM. And all who claim to follow the principle must have hands loath and cold when it comes time to kill. You’re sworn to better work than murder. Unreckoned aeons gone by, and incalculable effort spent, for what? To kill a man, your unctuous shaft dragging, slippery and bone-caught, through your grasp? Demane braced his foot to the deadman’s chest, crushing ribs and sternum under his heel, until his spearpoint pulled loose. Clear as day he heard the Tower laughing on its left side: TSOA. Chaos and pointlessness are the point! That is TSOA. But divinity knocked about inside Demane like some great-winged bird caught indoors, frantic to find that one open window again; and so, however slow and reluctant, still he had faster hands, stronger arms, than anyone facing him.

Xho Xho, Walead, and Bou, clumsy runts all three, wisely kept together. Four times they repeated the same maneuver—scatter, flank, triple-thrust—that Captain had taught them. But then Walead came up tardy on the left and Bou, in front, died for it. So too might have Xho Xho, when the bandit whirled right, wolf-howling. Demane threw his spear into the man’s warcry. Bad teeth had clamped onto the shaft when Demane wrenched his spearhead out.

Messed Up roared and stabbed. A wattle of gore, long and red, dangled off his jaw. The seemly flesh had been laid back, his bloodwashed molars in naked discovery, also the bones of his cheek and jaw, and much busy undergristle besides. Desperados scattered away from him. But Messed Up caught them, and killed them, anyway. Rats in rout, with the ratter giving chase! Behold the wake of strewn bodies, and here comes the big one himself, red-toothed and crazed. About the business best suiting him.

No one could save Wock. Nor the twins, Cruz and Glório. Demane didn’t even know they’d died ’til afterwards.

Teef and Barkeem, hemmed in by mayhem. Hard pressed by two bandits, T-Jawn scrabbled for footing on a steep patch of sand. He fell, slaughter-ready, before both spears. Demane was too far away to rescue any of the three. Not the captain, though; he swooped in, with the same acts dealing death and deliverance. The point and edge of his spear opened red lips in one bandit’s throat. Lifesblood emptied from that new mouth, while the other bandit took the same blow’s downstroke, which cored his heart. Captain made the body dance with the twist-jerk of freeing his spear. Beside the two abruptly dead, one of the desperadoes attacking Teef quailed and ran. Captain threw his spear half through the fleeing man’s back. He left the corpse transfixed, and yanked his old-style Daluçan knife from its baldric. Called, properly, “sword,” the blade was arm’s length, and much too long to ply for eating, hunting, or any use apart from war. Barkeem backed from some long-armed bandit who had two daggers, twin snakes, striking from either hand. Captain, in the act of drawing his sword, took the top off that bandit’s head. Crown and brow slid, widthwise, from cheeks and jowls. Walead and Xho Xho were in straits again. The captain flew to their salvation—not as some crow might, but his robes as black as wings, and covering the ground as swiftly.

Demane killed the man he fought, and the hot excess of bandit’s blood provoked a vision, a moment of retrospect, or of some life unlived. Bangles, khol’d eyes, ankles chiming tiny bells. The captain’s naked torso, lithe and rippling. His thighs half-clad in gauze of gold, loins in leopard suede. Some history that might have been, or had been: the captain dancing for the Olorumi sovereign or Kidanese empress. When that august hand waved to clear a marble hall, one hot glance said to him: You, stay. Demane glimpsed shadows of a world forgone in Captain’s prosecution of the counterattack. Had nimble limbs turned to other purposes, had they cultivated a different grace. Demane saw some brother down.

Faedou rolled apart from a throttled corpse, the dead man still clutching a knife driven into living flesh. Faedou pried off the futile grip, and plucked the blade from his thigh. On first and second attempt, he couldn’t stand. By the third, Demane had reached him and was kneeling. “Sorcerer . . . , “Faedou panted shallowly, “. . . head up!”

Some mother’s son tilted downhill. About thirteen years old, maybe twelve, the bandit boy held his spear as mounted men hold a lance. There was time and space enough for Demane to throw his spear, but he didn’t. Even a moment later, his reach being much longer, Demane might have simply angled up his spear. Running headlong, the boy would have impaled himself on the point, like a chunk of meat on a skewer. Instead, Demane dropped his spear and caught the boy’s with one hand, just below the point.

Though slowed, the boy wasn’t stopped. Faedou howled and curled like a beetle, his leg kicked or trod in the scuffle. Demane’s palm burned as the spearshaft greased down his bloodslick grip. The leverage was all wrong for him, perfect for the boy: on the downhill, speeding weight behind him, a two-handed grip. Demane had thrown his right and stronger hand back, braced to the ground, to keep himself from reeling ass over end. The child bore down, driving with desperate strength. Chapped lips snarling back from whitest teeth.

This was not the way he’d thought he’d die. But as the spearpoint broke skin on his chest, Demane felt only sublime relief: TSIM. No one else’s son would die by his hands today, or ever again. Then red gleamed, sunlight on wet steel. Smitten off, the boy’s head flew, fell, rolled away downhill. Arterial jets from the stump spewed brighter amidst darker dribble. It listed, its knees buckled, and rather than drop the corpse went subsiding down in stages, to bow over and decant headless onto the sands. Captain—

• • • •

“No, wait!”

Xho Xho grabbed Demane’s arm, swinging off his feet for a moment like a little monkey on a big branch. “We cain’t go in Mother of Waters like this. We gotta go in through there.” Through the great gates puncturing the squat tower on the east, the boy meant, pointing a finger thither. Thick as a man was tall, and painted over with bright murals, adobe ramparts walled only the eastern boundary of the Station. Demane would have led them into town up a shepherds’ path, on the south side.

“Yeah, I know it’s strange, Sorcerer,” the boy said. “I can see what you mean about the walls. But the fo-so don’t play.” Xho Xho had been born at Mother of Waters—or in a tent outside the Station, anyway. “It’s the rules: caravans come in through the gates.”

Foreign taboos, Demane decided.

He sent them on ahead, where fort soldiers were collecting spears beneath the tower. Waving Cumalo to follow, he crouched outside, beside the painted walls. “Stand there, will you?” Demane pointed him into place. The two of them hailed from the same remote spur of the continent, and in these parts that made them countrymen. After the native fashion, Cumalo dressed in a voluminous black robe: perfectly suited to blocking the view of passersby.

Demane opened his bag. He stuck his seven-foot spear down into it.

“Hey, as long as you’ve got that bad boy open . . . ,” Cumalo said. “Do you care if I hold a couple pennies for you, at least ’til we get to Olorum?”

Demane dug out a careless pinch of savings. He stood and handed the coins over uncounted.

“Aw, Sorcerer. This is too much! All I need is—”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on.” Demane laid a hand on Cumalo’s back, guiding him back toward the gates. There was a hard talk about gambling in the offing. Cumalo had never made bride-price, and so his lady up north in Philipiya still lived with her parents: two big boys, one baby girl, and twelve long years into an uneasy approximation of marriage. An ugly possibility troubled Demane’s mind. Could a good friend, your homeboy, also be a shiftless, trifling ne’er-do-well?[1] He looked up at the painted wall.

A hero and his second, beset on all sides by a multinational host, were putting down the enemy with extreme prejudice. No man Demane had met was his match for strength, but the one painted centermost might surpass him in girth and brawn, if true to life. The hero’s right arm bulked with muscle still within human bounds. But that left arm was superhuman, and would have massed as thick as Demane’s thigh. It was the left hand, too, that gripped a rock-hewn axe depicted midstroke, dashing open fully half the front rank of foemen’s skulls. Five heads were as many eggs of bone, blood, brains bursting behind the sweep of the spiked stone that crowned the hero’s weapon. Five more crouched in a desperate scrum, transfixed before the fall of the meteor toward their heads. Beside the hero, his second lay about him with a Daluçan knife—a “sword”—scything the close-ranked enemy as might a farmer his corn. Scattered fingers, another hand still on its forearm, a head cloven crosswise, the crown of another with the cranial bowl dumping its jellies: these and other fruits of the flesh tumbled pell-mell in a grisly harvest. Neither the expression nor appearance of the hero’s second was marked out in particular detail, save for the coloring of his warrior braids. Those paints glistened as bright as agate or lapis lazuli.

“It’s showing the battle of Sweet Wells Station,” Cumalo said.

Demane asked, “Who’s he?”

“Big one’s the Lion of Olorum. Generalissimo and the prince the old King chose to rule after him. But a two-headed mamba bit him and he died. The one with the long knife is—was—his right hand. The Lion loved his women and left twentysome wives, twice as many children; but those two, well, they say . . .” Cumalo looked at Demane askance, and, thinking again, said only, “That blue hair is really something, huh?”

Demane shrugged.

Through the gates was a view down the Mainway, to the bustle on the piazza at the Station’s center and farther, to the glimmer of Mother of Waters. Folk and beasts glutted the Mainway’s length with all the noise and stench to be expected in-town.

Under-tower, a dozen fort soldiers mingled with the brothers. The fo-so handed out reclamation chits, collecting spears. They wore black robes, strung-bead commemorials of past actions; the youngbloods’ hair was plaited in looping designs, the oldheads in simple cornrows. The fo-so were all unmixed Olorumi, and therefore beardless as babies; their right cheeks smooth, the others finely mutilated. Insignia of a thornwasp, the one-stinger drone, was cut into every left cheek.

“. . . vouchsafed none but them keeping to the Road. Certain doom befalls . . .”

“This for that? Unt uh! This spear was my . . .”

“Naw, you niggas right on time, matterfact. They got all the fights going today. Dogs, birds, dudes . . .”

A wealthy merchant, in robes dyed the deepest color of lilies, remonstrated with the garrison’s commandant, whose cicatrix boasted three stingers, a thornwasp prince-of-nest. A handful of fo-so wore breastplates weathered by rust or verdigris; the commandant’s, however, was made of some mirror-polished alloy, flashing even in the shadows under-tower. Not quite able to make out the discussion between the merchant and elite soldier in so much crosstalk and din, Demane sidled closer.

The merchant had just come in with that smaller caravan, fresh off the route Master Suresh l’Merqerim meant to follow tomorrow. Standing attendance on the merchant was a man prepossessing as only brothers were: thick-thewed, with a brawler’s ears, nose, and scars. His master was most insistent: “And yet, that is precisely what we did do. Do you think us fools? All the way through the Wildeeps, not a man jack set foot off the safe way!”

“Then we have misspoken,” said the fo-so in the gorgeous cuirass, “and do most humbly beg your pardon.” A man hopes, of course, to inoculate others with his own sense of serenity, by employing that tranquil tone and placid pose. A shame, then, it serves only to infuriate! “Yet we must request that you please moderate your—”

“You fail to listen. What I am trying to tell you, if you could hear it, is that some eater of men—a lion, something—hunted us south to north across the Wildeeps. Seven men, seven (can you see these fingers? well, count them, then: seven!) were dragged away in the night. Eaten alive, screaming! The beast came onto the Road. I shall repeat that, for the salient detail here seems not to penetrate your stopped-up ears. Onto the Road, man!” As the merchant became exercised, his guardsman shifted impatiently in place. The brother’s coloring was the ruddy-dark iridescence of a plainsman buffalo rider. When he moved, and bone or brawn pressed from beneath the skin, his complexion paled or darkened, going redbone, redbrown, dark brown across his face and bare arms. “There was a caravan some days behind us. Others from the Station will be going south. What of them? You must send down a party of soldiers and root the thing out!”

“Would that our remit did extend to such adventures.” The commandant spoke in round tones, with graceful gestures. “But here at Mother of Water’s garrison, our warrant is the security and defense of this Station, not the mounting of bold expeditions into the bush. Therefore, lacking leave from His Holiest Majesty in Olorum, we must regrettably . . .”

Messed Up roared. “This was my Daddy spear! Fuck if I’m selling it for no chip of wood on a leather string! Y’ALL MUSTA LOSS Y’ALL DAMN MIND.” He threw deadly elbows, shaking his shaggy head, and the brothers couldn’t calm him. Somehow Messed Up had lost none of his corpulent powers to the rigors of the desert crossing. Not easily, then, did Demane bind that tantrum within an embrace.

“I got him, y’all, I got him,” Demane told the others. “Go ahead into the Station. We catch up later.”

He got Messed Up out past the gates into the bright sun.

Messed Up’s eye on the wounded side was squinching tight-shut, and then bugging wide-open. That cheek tic’d; it juddered—not one of his good days.

“Tomorrow when we go, you just hand em that little piece of wood on the string, and you get the spear back. Your spear. Nobody else’s. Feel me?” Demane wondered what other words might explain check and reclamation . . . but then Messed Up meekly nodded.

(And why now? Was this yet more strange sorcery? No: gratitude. After the clash with bandits outside Ajeric, hadn’t the Sorcerer sewn Messed Up whole and fine again, when half his face hung off—hung down—like a flag with no wind to lift it? Hadn’t the Sorcerer bathed that terrible wound, dressed it soft-handedly; slathered all manner of things over it, some cool, some that cut the nightmarish pain? Now it hardly hurt! No, the Sorcerer’s assurances did not make sense, but Messed Up would offer him this leap of faith anyhow. A gift.)

They went in. Messed Up surrendered his spear.

“Bet be RIGHT HERE, too, when I come tamara!” Messed Up shouted at the soldier who stowed the spear in the armory with the rest. Xho Xho and Walead hustled their brother out.

A fo-so turned to Demane. “That’s all you brought with you?” He gestured to the little bag hanging at Demane’s left hip. “Where’s your gear at, your weapons?”

A soldier beside the first leaned over to his friend, whispering (a baseline human could never have overheard): “Naked-ass bush savages. Shouldn’t even let they ass up in here!”

A number of petty miracles lay within Demane’s power. His reflexes, his strength, were rather better than even the most gifted of athletes’; and his sense of sight and smell, and so on, could wax exceedingly keen at times. But the blood of TSIMTSOA ran thin in him, and it seemed he could not manage the metamorphosis into great power. Even so, provoke him enough, and the provoker would catch a glimpse—radiant, dark—of the stormbird. Demane spread his empty hands.

“What you see,” he said, “is what I got.”

A peaceable gesture: and yet one fo-so ducked his head, shuffling, while the other grinned with all his teeth, and said, “‘Joy your stay at Mother of Waters!”

With a bob of the chin, Demane accepted the greeting.

• • • •

Wilfredo wandered off into the westbound traffic on the Mainway.

Teef, Barkeem, T-Jawn, and a couple others were headed to the Fighthouse. Cumalo told them the way.

Faedou limped off north, into labyrinthine alleys.

The remaining brothers either took roost on the split-rail fence or else leaned against the posts of the garrison paddock just round back the tower. “Whatever you looking for, y’all can find it up in the piazza,” Xho Xho was telling these first-timers. At nightfall, daytime commerce cleared from the piazza “and they kimmel[2] a greatorch right in the middle.” Hundreds would dance and dozens drum until dawn . . .

It came to Demane that someone should spare a thought for where brothers would have to meet the caravan tomorrow. Human bustle and metallic bits, however—countless and reflective—were flickering nauseously in the corners of Demane’s eyes. Dense aerosols clogged his nose and tongue, smell and taste inundated with clamorous trivia. Loud, low, soft, shrill: the Station was a high tide of talk, a stormy sea of noise, wave after wave swamping him.

Xho Xho’s disquisition began to cover local outlets for black market and sin. Here as elsewhere, a silver penny was the going rate; but niggas should not sleep on the fact that, up in the piazza after midnight, there would be mad hoes out, offering deep discounts . . . Demane lay a pastoral hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Oh, right, my man. Sorry!” Xho Xho shifted his restless gaze over the Mainway’s traffic. “You had said you wasn’t trying to get into nothing nasty.” The boy, though, was, for bitter, and yet ineffably saccharine, was the aroma of mischief. And Xho Xho stank of it.

A wise man would grab hold of this boy, and get honest answers to hard questions. But Demane let the intuition go by. Squinting, his teeth achy from gritting, he hadn’t yet moderated his senses for city extremes. “Just tell me, Xho,” Demane said, “where at, tomorrow, we suppose to meet up with the caravan?”

Following the boy’s vague gesture, Demane looked across the teeming Mainway. Master Suresh and merchants could not be seen unloading over at that first complex of stables, corrals, and warehouses. “Where, Xho? Someplace on the south side of the Station, you mean?”

“Yeah, Sorcerer. Over there.” Xho Xho eyed and dismissed every passing face, as though in hope or dread of one he knew. “Master Suresh got one of the biggest outfits at Mother of Waters. Cain’t miss it. Ask anybody.” The boy slithered out from under the shepherding hand. “Well, let me get up with you brothers later at the piazza tonight. All right? I need to go holler real quick at these niggas I used to run with. Yo, Walé! I’m out! You coming or what?”

“Yeah! Hold up! Damn!”

What if, as Walead and Messed Up took off after Xho Xho up the Mainway, Demane had only shouted, Hey, y’all be good! Hear me? What then?

His eyes were shut, though. He was rubbing his temples.

The brothers scattered.

Cumalo stayed. “What is it, that in-city thing bothering you? Can I help?”

“. . . No.” Demane blinked and looked around, the sense-ruckus quieting into lucidity. “It’s better now. I’m all right.”

“Well, come on,” Cumalo said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” He took Demane’s hand and tugged.

A block down from the piazza was a shantytown of food vendors. They stopped at a dingy stall and offered she who worked there warm greetings and smiles. The old woman blinked at them, seeming put out by this interruption of her boredom. It was not at first certain that Cumalo’s courteous request and nugget of rock salt would suffice to stir the concessionaire into sullen motion. She slapped the salt onto the countertop, chose a consequent fragment, and popped it into her mouth. Twice—voluptuously—her eyes fell closed and open again. That softened gaze and a slackened scowl made her seem as pleasant as anyone while she savored the salt. And then the urban disdain returned.

With a fat pestle, the old woman mashed black fruit in two bowls.

“They grow it all along the Daughter,” Cumalo said. The mounded berries spat dark juice, disintegrating into pulpy slurry. “Other than back home, I’ve never found it anywhere except in Mother of Waters.” The tart musk of that aroma! “You can bet how surprised I was first time I saw it here.” Men were meant, at this end of the continent, to eke out their tears. Demane therefore hardened his face against the surge of homesickness.

She unstoppered a jar. Hell and its chemicals scorched the air. “You boys take it with that Demon?”

“We good, we good!” Cumalo hurriedly assured her. “Sweet’s just fine, ma’am.”

She grunted and did not pour from the jar but set it aside. She scraped a mugful of dirty crystals from a sack. Half went to either bowl. The pestle worked the grit down into the indigo soup.

She stepped back and grunted once more. You want em, get em.

“Over there?” Cumalo nodded toward a prayerhouse, where northerners made petition to their fathergod. There about the entryway was the typical semicircle of wall, low and squat: just right for tall men to half sit, half stand.

“Hey now. You bring me back them bowls, hear?”

“Yes’m.”

They perched on the balustrade. From within the prayerhouse emerged basso fulminations, and the muttered amen of lighter voices. Sweet and credible are the lies of the Whisperer, enemy of God. So beware such close-close friendship, young brothers, lest Hell’s dragon make you his plaything!

Demane sipped. Every morning of a long romantic year—years ago now—Atahly had handed him bowls of crushed honeyed fruit, just a bit richer than this. And before then, his mother or father, or Saxa’s parents, had fed him breakfast with the same. “How did she get it so sweet? That wasn’t honey.”

“Sugar, they call it. Down around Olorum they grow whole fields of the stuff as wide as kingdoms. Most goes overseas: up on the north continent, they can’t get enough. You can’t really find honey out this side of the continent. Nobody seems to know how to keep bees the way we do back home. Still, this tastes pretty good, I think.” Cumalo looked at him as if fearing to see disappointment. “Or don’t you like it?” Some youth arriving late to worship fled past them into the prayerhouse, casting the brothers a harried glance.

Demane sipped skeptically. “It’s all right,” he said grudgingly, but then couldn’t hold back a huge grin. “Naw. It’s good.”

“See there? I knew you’d like it!”

They drank greedily and returned the bowls. Sat again outside the prayerhouse, Demane watched the flux of passersby, local and foreigner. He worked over in thought the same knotted frustrations as always: nothing coming loose, everything tightening.

Cumalo said, “Bossman’s putting you through it, huh?”

Demane gave a bark of mirthless laughter, and said, For he who is scaly, fanged and hornèd may breathe thusly into your ear, ‘One lickle kiss; where’s the harm?’ “What do you know of the gods, the Towers, and all that?”

Cumalo never looked fully awake, his eyes were so heavy-lidded. In fact, no one saw more, or more clearly. “Those are some deep mysteries right there, brother. You had to be initiated, over where I grew up. So all I really know is the same as everybody.” Cumalo’s speech grew incantatory: “The gods dwelled upon the earth.” He pointed a finger at the dust. “The gods flew again to heaven”—pointing now to the sky—“and the gods did abandon their youngest born,” pointing lastly at Demane, who nodded.

“Yeah, pretty much. As far as that goes.”

“Why’d they do it, though?” Cumalo said. “Abandon y’all here? I always did wonder: the gods, just taking off into the great forever and beyond like that, and leaving behind their own children.” You would have thought this man didn’t have two sons and a baby daughter, fifteen hundred miles away and asking their mama right now, doubtless, When’s Papa coming home?

“Exigencies of FTL,” Demane answered. Distracted by a glimpse from the corners of his eyes, he lapsed into liturgical dialect. “Superluminal travel is noncorporeal: a body must become light.” A tall, thin man passed by: some stranger, not the captain. “The gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most sapiens—even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica—haven’t yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism.”

“No doubt.” Cumalo nodded mellowly. “No doubt. I had always maybe thought it was something like that.”

On the street before them a transient little drama arose and died.

That Demon rode a filthy derelict. Women in conversation scattered around the drunken man’s floundering, doomsday rants, and selfsoiled stench. Once past him, the family of women came together again.

“Most people can’t hold Him,” Cumalo said sadly as someone who knew. “My advice, brother, is to let that Demon alone.”

“I don’t even mess with Him.”

The grandmother, nieces, and aunties hadn’t missed a word of their argument over the feastday menu, nor yet spilled onion, bound fowl, or gnarled tuber from their brimming baskets. And then the ruck of many black robes, and a corner turned, stole the view of importunate and accosted alike.

“Before the Assumption,” Demane said, “the gods lived here on an island, in different Towers. We children only knew our own gods. My Aunty—my ancestor—came from Tower TSIMTSOA. Captain comes of another lineage, Ashé. Following me so far?”

“Uh huh. Go ahead.”

“Coming down from my Tower, we’re all aioloranthropes—”

“Say again?”

“—stormbirds,” Demane said, “thanks to the twenty-fourth chromosome. But in Tower Ashé the gods manipulated the genome another way, for polymorphism. Some Ashëan . . . oh, you won’t know what hyperphenotypes are; some family-groups are stronger and faster. The warriors. Some are smarter: the savants. Others are oracles and magi. I don’t know all the Ashëan types. It’s not my Tower. Back on the island, the family-groups served Ashé each according to their parasomatic strengths. Still with me?”

“Well, a couple words are flying a little high for me there, but I get you basically. You’re saying, the captain comes from a line of warriors.”

“No. I’m saying—” . . . the mouth of the beast! Far better to fling yourself to wild lions, suffering the living flesh rent by tooth and claw, than that you should . . . “—he doesn’t,” Demane said. “I’m saying the captain was never meant for the fighting life at all. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Yeah?” Cumalo turned sleepy eyes on him. “You think so? Man’s twice the warrior you are, and nobody else I ever met can take you.”

“But that’s just it, right there. You see what I mean? I’m no warrior either—”

“If the two of you aren’t, it’s got me wondering who in the Hell is.”

“Come on, Cumalo! You know me better than that. Didn’t my roots bind up the flux for you? And I pulled the poison out of that merchant’s scorpion bite. You sat watching me sew Messed Up’s face back on!”

“Yeah, all right. I see what you mean—a healer, then. And Captain’s in the wrong life too. What’s he supposed to be doing?”

Demane seized Cumalo’s knee. “Hang on a moment, all right?”

Here came a plainsman with ruined ears and twice-broken nose, his broad-shouldered swagger cleaving through the crowd. In the freedom of that brother’s wake strolled a much richer, smaller, older man, in robes the color of late dusk. Demane let go the knee and stood. “I’ll be right back.” Without meaning to, he came up to the strangers on their blind side, far too fast. The brother spun with clenched fists.

Their eyes met, and the feeling surprised them both.

Simpatico, sudden and bone-deep; ill will was impossible. There was a familiar quality about the brother’s face. That aquiline nose . . . was it someone Demane knew? And, hey—the brother had a nice smile, too. They nodded. Their hands joined, snapped apart, and rejoined, shaken in the manner of warriors well met hereabouts. Demane dragged his gaze to the merchant’s.

“You doing all right, boss? I’m Demane,” he said, “a brother with another caravan. I heard what you said back under the tower—”

“Kaffalah!” the merchant interrupted. “What is this man’s purpose? Tell him I neither speak nor understand the rabble’s cant.” The merchant spoke in accents of Merqerim, westernmost of the coastal cities: not one of those Demane had yet visited.

“Kaffalah, brother.” Demane turned back to the plainsman. “I just want to know if any of you seen what that lion look like. The color it was? My caravan, we leaving to go through the Wildeeps tomorrow.”

The brother passed on these words to his master.

“The creature’s color?” cried the merchant. “What earthly difference can that make? Tell this irrelevant fool that it was the king of monster lions! A rabid, man-eating tiger! Some unholy cat-fiend slipped the chains of Hell; a harrower of men who fear God, men who seek but to fare the way in safety, to earn an honest living! Color? Its color be damned! Did we not all hear the hellbeast roaring in the night? You tell him, Kaffalah. Tell him this! That if the greatwork on the Road has lost virtue, such that fell things maraud freely from the Wildeeps, devouring travelers at will, then that caravan which would go south by that route were mad. His caravan had better go west—yes!—even to the Great River itself, taking ferry for the far side, and traveling southward thence: outside the bounds of the Wildeeps. This man and his master count their lives as nothing, should they balk from such sweet wisdom as I speak now. There being no safety on the Road, it should bring them joy to bypass the Wildeeps; yea, even to go half a thousand leagues off the direct route!”

A caravanmaster promises his merchants speed, safety, and thrift. Knowing this, now suppose some man comes whining to Master Suresh l’Merqerim. This man claims they must all take a months-long, budget-busting detour across the continent. Hmm, and on what basis? the master shall quite reasonably ask. Rumor and surmise, is the answer he receives. Well, says the master, extemporizing (for he considers himself a man of wide, deep wits, and so does not dismiss any counsel out of hand, but first weighs the credibility of his source); and whom does Master Suresh l’Merqerim find before him? What wild-eyed woebetider? Just a lowly guardsman—oh, you know the one! That so-called “Sorcerer” fellow, who hails from some green yonder off the very maps of civilization.

Demane’s consternation was plain to see.

Kaffalah half-smiled. “You got all that, right?” He lifted his brows as if to say Yeah, bruh: he be wearing me out too. “It come in the night, so I never did see it myself. I just heard the roar a couple times. Not a lion, though I really couldn’t tell you what. Like this—” The brother’s jaw dropped: the merchant jumped, and the crowd nearby spooked en masse. Demane’s flesh pebbled and chilled at Kaffalah’s uncanny mimicry. “One brother did tangle with it, and got chewed up pretty bad. Before he died, the brother said it was some kind of dark color. Not black. What he said . . .”—Kaffalah squinted and shook his head, acknowledging that his report could only be met with incredulity—“. . . that it was . . .”

“Green,” Demane said in Merqerim; then, in his own tongue: “Jukiere.” Cumalo came up and slung an arm over Demane’s shoulder, nosily leaning in.

“Jooker?” Kaffalah said. “What’s that?”

“You know!” Demane looked from Kaffalah to the merchant. “Jukiere. Big tooth, like lion, but only eat pork pork and . . . we pork.”

The merchant frowned. “Speak sense, man. Who can understand what you are trying to say?”

Demane said, “Cumalo! What is their word for jukiere?”

“Jook-toothed tiger.” Cumalo’s Merqerim was excellent. “They are big cats and prey only on boar and people—they don’t care which. Want a fresh kill every night, too.”

“Jook-toothed tiger? The wizard cats? Do you mean the demons with teeth like this?” The merchant held an index finger curling down at either side of his mouth like outsized fangs. Briefly, he gave them a look of suspended disbelief, as one does when ready to laugh, provided the punchline proves good, and quickly forthcoming. Then the merchant became angry. “An old bush legend. Mere superstitious nonsense! There is no such thing as a jook-toothed tiger.”

Ah, but there was. We, humanity, have our predators too, sir: and bred to the purpose. When the oceans swallowed the island, and the gods wicked and kind returned to heaven in their Towers, they left behind many children, powers that were benign and wrong, both. Among the worst were the wizard cats. The jukiere are clawed like lions, with teeth more terrible; as strong as bears, but wasteful and capricious killers, like polecats. And I’ve not yet spoken of their mastery of maleficia . . . in his own tongue, yes, Demane could have said all this and more. The best he could do in Merqerim, however: “Jooker, them . . . bad. Bad animal.” He turned in frustration to Cumalo. “Will you please tell this fool that a bush legend ate up seven men from his caravan!”

Cumalo answered in Merqerim. “Maybe he’s right, Sorcerer. I never heard of any jook-toothed tiger over here, this side of the continent.”

The merchant had done with such folly. From already a few steps away: “Kaffalah!” He snapped his fingers as for a dog.

No mistaking the rapport went both ways. With surreptitious glances they’d made free of each other’s person, and yet some strange reticence held as well: at least on one side. Kaffalah looked between Demane and Cumalo as if to suss out whether he came third where only two were wanted. Then, reluctantly, he said, “Take care, Dimani,” and helped himself to a final good gander—from head to toe—for the road (only the briefest of nods to Cumalo). Letting go the hand he’d kept all this while, Kaffalah departed.

“Uh oh! What was all that?” Cumalo exclaimed. “I hope I wasn’t breaking up your flow there, was I?”

“Aw, the brother was just being friendly, that’s all.” Demane shrugged off the arm. “Hey, Cumalo, listen. We came all the way across the continent, didn’t we? A jukiere could too.”

“You’ve been out here—what, two or three years? Brother, I came when I was fifteen, and I’ve been traveling ever since. In twenty years I never once saw or heard tale of any jukiere. It just doesn’t seem too likely to me.”

More than simians hate the serpent, stormbird and jukiere nursed ancient enmity. “Well,” Demane said, “I’m going to let the captain know about it.” In soul or flesh, some spark of primal fire seemed to take light in him. “Better to get off flat feet, and get out the knives, before the fight.”—words Captain liked to say.

When youthful friends meet once more in vast old age, often they are astonished by the changes. But, of course, it wasn’t age that Cumalo saw come suddenly over Demane’s face. It was more weird than that, a far richer change. Somewhat wider-eyed than usual, Cumalo said, “Do what you think best, man. But you’d better hope it’s no jook-toothed tiger roaming the Wildeeps.”

“Why me? All of us had better hope . . . Hey! I just thought of something.” A mystery came clear in Demane’s mind. “The captain has some plainsman’s blood, I think. His nose is like that brother Kaffalah’s. And isn’t he sort of red-complected and brown all at once . . . ?”

“If you say so.” The look of alarm passed; Cumalo smiled. This was familiar ground, the enamored bending the conversation back again to his amour. “I don’t see it, myself.”

Teef thrust his head between theirs, slinging his arms across their shoulders. “You two cut out all that ooga-ooga-bug-bug over here.” Which one worse: armpits or breath? Surely, the latter; but the unwashed inferno of his crotch and ass stank worst of all. “Y’all talk so a nigga could understand!”

T-Jawn, Barkeem, and the rest were with him. “Gotta jump, Cumalo,” said a brother. “The dogs is done, and they setting up to put the cocks on next. You had said you wanted to lay a couple coins on the knife-birds. You coming?”

Cumalo looked at Demane. “You oughta come too. Might win you a little something.”

“I’m good. Y’all go ahead.” Demane got out from under the reeking arm. “I’ma go see about a bath over by Mother of Waters.” He backed farther from the propinquities of funk. “Some brothers here might could stand one too.”

“There go the Sorcerer.” Teef shook his head, grinning that wrecked-tooth grin. “Always up in some damn water tryna warsh. Man, one day you gonna turn around, catch cold, and wake up dead behind all that water!”

Demane had tried to explain, in the caravan’s early days, how the auspices of hygiene could ward off many infectious daemons. He’d wasted no end of breath laying out the basics of sanitary rites to the brothers. But all that dropped science had mostly bounced off their hard heads. A few kept clean, and the rest, well . . . “That ain’t really how it work, Teef, but never mind,” Demane said. “I catch up with y’all later.”

Disputing groundbirds versus flyers, rash wagers versus acceptable odds, the brothers betook their stink and themselves up a northwest-running alley.

[1] This hard talk with Cumalo kept getting postponed too because—let’s be honest here—the economics of civilization baffled Demane; no, really, they bored him stupid: bride-price, gambling, the wherefore a half-weight of gold gets you this many silver pennies, while some entirely different exchange the other way around. Aunty used to say that whatever you skip learning is the one thing you’ll end up needing to know most later. But the money-game was unbelievably fussy and rulebound: which little metal counter, and how many of them, and when, and why, for this, for that, for the other thing . . . One of these days Demane meant to get to grips with it all. Real soon now. Yeah.

[2] Enkindle?

First, let it be understood that divinities crave tender companionship no less than we mortals do; thus enlightened, we may now begin to examine what form this tender companion of theirs ideally assumes: meet for the passions of a god, delightful to the heart and sensoria divine . . .

from Appendix H (Extinctions and Reemergent Taxa: type, philomel) of “Résumé of Ashëan Hyperphenotypes”; vol. 6, The Olorumi Grimoire

Third of Seven

He bathed in the Mother of Waters. Returning up the Mainway to the Station, he went this time into the warren of corrals and stables and warehouses, southside. Demane asked of a passerby, “Master Suresh l’Merqerim?” and found that name known. He had no problems following the directions.

Floor-to-ceiling shutters of the gallery above were folded back, and there, upstairs, the merchants reclined at a feast. On deep pillows, Master Suresh and his peers; on their knees, bowing again and again, servitors filled cups no sooner than they were drained. From mountainously heaped platters, merchants pinched up fingerfuls of rice ornate with cinnamon and cashews, charred yet tender bits of cabrito, rock salt and smashed garlic, dried apricots all moist and plump and soft again, onions turned to caramel . . . Such were Demane’s powers of scent and taste that he too partook of the meal, in every way except satisfaction. One of the merchants, if not Suresh himself, would now and again peer down from the gallery, on those busting their asses below, and find some cause to scream abuse.

Under the feast, workmen and the captain unpacked the camels’ luggage, packed the burros’ bags, rushed goods upstairs to be stored in one of three warehouses above the stables, and rushed down yet other goods to be squared away into the outgoing panniers. Captain hustled at his tasks as if his life depended on it. Taking perch on the corral’s fence, Demane sat and watched. For a quarter of every night the captain lay as one dead, and the world’s ending might not wake him. Otherwise, there were no idle moments for him. He ran on foot through the white-hot desert, though everyone else rode upon camels. He drilled himself at arms, or drilled the brothers. If he saw you working and the labors sufficed for two, he lent a hand; otherwise you got nudged aside. The man wore you out just looking at him.

Captain had changed his robe. He hardly smelled of himself, mostly of the aquifer minerals and endemica of Mother of Waters. Though never truly needing it, he’d gone to bathe as well. Ashëan idioviruses kept the captain’s breath sweet, wounds sterile, and body odor, at worst, a musk that was sometimes a bit more peppery than usual. Had Faedou only obeyed, and allowed Captain to spit into that great gaping hole in his leg, as Demane had begged, then the wound wouldn’t be festering, but healed nearly whole by now. “Good juju,” however, had proved a poor translation for “panaceaic endosymbionts.”

The work done, Captain gathered with the drudges around a water barrel, awaiting his turn to dip the ladle. Motion caught his eye: Demane jumping down from the fence. Captain handed off the ladle and started across the paddock. Nothing’s better than your lover smiling to see you.

A shout fell on them from the sky.

“Skipping out, is it? This is how much your promises are worth? No more than a pig-raper’s, set to watch the sty!” Master Suresh l’Merqerim leaned over the upstairs balustrade. “Who then will I get to—?”

Snarling, Captain spun and seized a barrel beside that from which the drudges drank. Was it empty? For he wrenched the barrel off the ground, and above his head, so easily. No—half full: weighing more than himself. Water cascaded from the open side as the barrel came up high and lateral—more splashing forth as it burst to staves and splinters against the side of the stable.

“Do you mind, Suresh? I’m coming right back.” A brass quartet blasting ensemble might make such tuneful thunder.

Burros shied and neighed; the drudges, too. Everyone stared in astonishment, and none more so than Demane. Captain’s anger was the cold kind, never hot.

Master Suresh l’Merqerim, mockingly, ducked as if dodging a wildly swung fist, and then left the balustrade to return to his feast.

Captain crossed to Demane. “Let’s walk around here for a little bit.” His whole organism exhaled the scents and signs of misery, of fury. “I don’t have much time.”

Demane nodded to the north. “Over by the Mainway?”

They vaulted the fence, went up the nearest alley.

“I should tell you something,” the captain said. “I need to.”

“Go ‘head.”

Demane glanced aside in time to see the familiar thing happening on Captain’s face, his usual change of mind. Tensely parted, his lips were relaxing now. Whatever bold intimacy he had for one instant meant to confide would go unsaid after all, lost to habits of private endurance. Indeed as they walked, Captain said nothing at all. He picked at the edges of his headscarf, though of course no hair showed. The sun at zenith would have lit this alley all the way down to the dry packed dust. Now well after noon, oblique brightness crowned the captain’s head, everything lower in shadow. Demane began to speak himself, telling of the encounter with the merchant, and what he suspected of the jukiere.

“A jook-toothed tiger, huh?” Captain, tiredly smiling, shook his head. “Trust you to come at me with a story like that.”

The cool dismissal stabbed right into the heart of any sense that they endured this ordeal together, as one. Did the captain have no confidence in Demane’s expertise, did all the faith flow only one way? It hurt in the belly and chest to be brushed off so. Demane couldn’t have guessed his own expression.

“A good thing you’re always watching out. I’ll say something to Suresh.” Captain draped an arm across Demane’s shoulders. “But if you think he’ll change his plans on my say-so, you must have fallen and bumped your head.” As the captain’s hands could no more roughen with callus than they could scar, and bled every day, his thumb-pad and forefinger (playing with Demane’s ear) were absurdly soft. “It’ll just be the two of us looking out, as usual.”

“Yeah.” Demane swallowed and blinked. “All right.” There’d never been anyone who could knife him so with a momentary word, and then speak the wound away in the very next moment. If all those little boyhood heartbreaks had been supposed to make him ready for this, Demane wasn’t.

They’d nearly reached the sunwashed crowds ahead, when—seizing all Mother of Water’s attention—the civil gong clashed to wake the dead. Men bawled in unison: “Clear the Mainway! Clear the Mainway!” The alley was too narrow to admit either beasts or carts, but a stampede of pedestrians came running up its straits. Demane, smashed against the adobe of some stables, caught the captain, who was thrown bodily against him. An ugly moment, you would have thought, all the screaming and frenzied panic. But Demane had by now learned to recognize cover for a clinch, a pretext to grab two handfuls of ass. He stole that grope, the quick kiss collusive.

A drubbing ovation of horses at full gallop shook the earth. One thousand heads—and theirs, too—leaned out on the emptied Mainway. Twenty-five cavalrymen rode past, and onward through the Station-gates. The mounted fo-so, lances at the ready, ranged out along the east-west trail. Next, from the big western piazza, there came five men on foot. They were hunched over and terrified. Dogs—hacked-up carcasses—had been tied to them.

“Cheaters,” said the captain. “They put poisoned collars on their fighting dogs.” Packed into the alley were other refugees off the Mainway, and the eldest of a mother with more children than arms wriggled nearer: to hear the captain’s song, and see what he glossed. “Or they fixed the odds, or else threw some match. Something like that.”

Thicknecked mastiffs bibbed the men in front, forepaws of the dogs wired at the men’s napes, muzzles slobbering cold gore onto chins and chests. On top of rooves, at windows, and from the mouths of streets and alleys, Mother of Waters jeered.

The men ran up the Mainway. Hecklers flung offal, chucked stones.

“Anyone who makes the one-league waymark goes free.” As in battle, Captain wore a look of bleak detachment. “No one ever makes it that far.” To Demane’s senses, the captain’s mood seemed mostly enrapt attention, a little mixed with grief.

One of the indicted passed their alley—booking. His scentwake entirely fearsweat and adrenaline, this frontrunner doubled his distance from the rest every few steps.

Two others, neck and neck, lagged hindmost. One, a fat man, the other, thin but very old, staggered and lurched more than they ran.

Now a lone horseman emerged from the western piazza.

Captain murmured: “Fanged-drone.”

Demane glanced at him. Above his beard, Captain brushed two fingertips down his own left cheek, scarless and smooth. (Though often wounded, he had no scars.) Demane looked back: the horseman’s left-cheek insignia bore two stingers. Unlike the other calvarymen, he did not wield a lance, but viper of supple rawhide. Moaning like wind through arroyos, the serpent lashed the air about the horseman, in sinuous accord with his whirling arm. Spurred, his stallion surged forward. Mother of Waters cheered. Making no soft sound—shrieking—the snake unfurled to outpace sound itself for twenty feet. The viper kissed the runner midmost.

Bit him, rather: with a thunderclap.

“No, pop.” Captain’s forearms crossed Demane’s chest like iron bars. “Stay with me.” Captain reeled him back against long bones, hard scrawn. “You can’t help them.”

Demane, not even realizing, had moved to succor the stricken man.

The viper’s bite had knocked Middle-Man to his knees. His scream was keening and breathless, nearly silent. His robe was split and gaping open—the shirt beneath as well, and living flesh, too. He reached one hand around his waist, the other over his shoulder, as if to catch some small swift thing nestling at his back. Just behind the man stricken, Fat-Man stumbled in astonished terror. He flopped belly down onto his passenger dog. Air currents moved such that Demane knew when Fat-Man’s bladder voided. The wallowing man didn’t and couldn’t rise, flailing with the heavy stiff dog and swells of his own rolling suet, treading the hem of his robe. “Aw, that nigga there?” muttered some fellow-of-the-alley. “Bout to get kilt.”

Captain sang low. “There’s no reason to watch, Demane.”

Yes, but how to look away?

The horseman pulled up short. (Breeze blowing northwesterly still: Fat-Man’s bowels let go.) The one bitten clambered sobbing to his feet, a generous fillet peeling raw off his back, and struggled off after the old man who was passing the gates. Three times the viper bit the wallowing man. The first bite chunked out pudding from a wide thigh, laying white femur bare in grisly depths. There were screams, pleas, groveling. The next and deadly bite enwrapped Fat-Man’s neck, hungrily gnawing through chins and jowls: crushing vertebrae with a splosive pop. So why then a third bite? Was it done to assure the crowd of a death, to show the body jolting up from the dust, only to fall again, still and silent? Was it done as a droll offering to the great demon, the antiurge, TSOA, that which incites human hearts to senseless evils? Yes.

Up reared the stallion! And how it shone, the breastplate of the rider! Nor with any lack of eloquence did the viper speak its single syllable, spoken in the very tongue of thunder. And the many hundreds who watched, what of them? Mother of Waters roared!

Demane had known noise in nature: he’d heard Mt. Bittersmoke erupt, heard white glaciers calving blue children; he’d stood once knee deep in mud beside his master, on the naked seabed, while she broke a hundred-foot whitewave of returning ocean, her pure will[1] slowing the apocalyptic waters—such noise!—but never before had Demane heard a thousand mortal voices compounding at full cry to deafen like some act of God.

Past the gates the cavalry could be seen distancing. With nimble pageantry, the corridor of lances raveled and rewove down the trail, hemming in the four runners still making dust.

Onward rode the horseman and his viper!

Mother of Waters returned to business. Astride beasts, in vehicles, on foot, the crowd flooded the Mainway from tributary streets and alleys. Demane crouched down by the mouth of the alley, his back to a wall. A dizzying mix of the longing for home with the horrors of abroad made it impossible to keep his feet. “It’s ugly here, Isa,” Demane said, hanging his head between his knees. “How can you stand it?” Through the thickness of his hair, rooting fingers found his scalp, the soft pads kneading. When Captain spoke so softly, and in this timbre, his speech was about as parsable as birdsong, more warble than words. Demane took comfort in the tone and intention, making no effort to decipher what was said. He resolved right then to go back to the green hills, just the moment after this man agreed to come too.

“This will be that Demon’s work!” Master Suresh—jocund, rotund—came up the alleyway. “Taken by drink, is it?” The caravanmaster wagged a finger at Demane, who was crouched in the attitude of one inebriated. “They are sots, young man,” scolded the master, “who would suckle Old Nick’s bitchy teats so much, so early in the day!” To the captain: “About time, isn’t it? Oh yes, indeed: so let’s gitty up, Cap’n!” Master Suresh swept by them in his silks.

Demane made himself stand (the hand in his hair long since whipped away).

“See you tomorrow, all right?” The captain offered a counterfeit smile. “Keep the brothers out of trouble for me.” Nerves and shame were embittering his wonted scent, as if, against honest instincts, Captain were trying to pull over a con—say, to sell twice, to different men, some singular treasure.

Demane looked from the captain to Master Suresh, who was stepping onto the Mainway. Not a comely man, nor kind, either; he was fabulously rich, though, and dressed in the bright-dyed shit of worms. Demane’s guts sickened, on fire. He turned back to Captain, making the same face men betrayed in love have always made.

“No,” Captain whispered. “Don’t even think it.” Somehow, this denial was true, for Demane could spot even dissembling and misdirection. “It’s like I told you before.” Until you there’s been nobody, all my years on the road. And how old was the captain, anyway? About thirty, to the eyes and senses; but . . . the blood-of-heaven ran very pure in him, as it had in Aunty. Although millenarian, she too had smelled confusingly ageless, “about thirty.”

“What’s going on here, Isa?”

“I’ve got to go,” Captain said. “I’m tired of running. And don’t follow, Demane, or I’ll let death catch me.” Here was more truth, and the captain had never yet said to him anything truer, or more heartfelt.

They jumped at a dry-stick report. Master Suresh beckoned. Impatiently, he snapped his fingers again. Captain went. He and the master crossed the Mainway, then walked up a northwestrunning alley. Fo-so were hefting the bodies of man and dog into a cart.

A storm was rising in the blood that pumped wildly through Demane. He couldn’t hear his own thoughts, could hardly think them. Run, since he couldn’t fly. Perform some worthy feat. A feat as hard and perilous as possible. Kill something. He too went out on the Mainway—but eastward through the gates, and then south toward the jukiere and Wildeeps.

• • • •

There is a pace that a fit man can hold, running on and on, nearly forever. The sun westered slowly across the wide afternoon sky. South of Mother of Waters, there was rocky country through which a millennium of caravans had blazed a trail winding far from the Daughter, down shallower stretches of deep-cut arroyos, around high mesas, across scrub flats. This was neither the season nor perhaps the year that rains would fall; only the intermittent green of sagebrush, pampas, and acacia relieved the droughted shades of gray and dun.

Demane at first heard and smelled little more than anyone would. The pounding and raised dust of his own footfalls, mesquite hanging in the hot air, calls of mourning doves and cicada. Then the vacant hush of human perception began to fill with bright effigies of sound and odor. What was long passed, what was hidden, what was remote came clear to his senses.

A subtle roar built of discrete sounds. The stormbird heard insectskitter and the slide of snakes over stone. He felt it, wind too faint for his skin to feel before, and heard it, rasping particles of dust across the hardpan. The dazzle of scents bloomed. He passed the cold acridity of gecko, and rattler, and ground croc. Old bones murmured stories to him in passing. A child mummifying beneath a wayside cairn: dead of blood cancer. Manifold dung and urine, steer men lion antelope dog, whispered what age and sex, sick or healthy, how long since passing this way.

Faraway some early night dog barked. He’d seen the packs harry a solitary lion or stag antelope in the prime of strength, scores of muzzles stripping the prey of its fleshly raiment, gobbet by mouthful, and sacrificing ten or more dogs to immense antlers, or the might of a lion’s paw, before the better beast was pulled down by sheer rabid numbers. Demane masked his body’s odor in the landscape’s, as he should have done at the gates of Mother of Waters. He quit the beaten trail and ran upcountry, where the lookout and cover were better.

The stormbird beat nearer the surface than it had ever risen—even on sacred grounds back home, in the green hills. He ran harder. His legs and lungs refused to tire. Strength and sensation swamped the indweller, that part of consciousness which thinks and feels. I hardly ate today were the last words to trouble his mind for a while. He was ravenous. And below him on the blazed trail, hidden in thick tamarisk, he caught the tattoo of a thumb-sized heart pumping frantic blood. The rich scent came too, of a small shivering body, furred and hot. There was good food just out of sight, a jack-hare about to lose its wager whether to run or hide. In that tussock of weeds right . . . there . . .

Buoyant on spirals of warmth. There athwart the west snaked the Daughter, glittering gray, and down there the southern Crossings, a thicker python, wider waters. He plunged into fresh headwinds. In his shadow stampeding antelope small as crickets separated in the same patternly accord as a birdflock, scores bounding left, scores right, through blond grasses that rippled over the world’s skin. Aw, let them go. He wasn’t so hungry anymore. Better to ride more soft rising heat up where . . . where, exactly? The skyfaring dream came to ground. Every tremor of his lids and lashes abraded the dream’s stuff, and his eyes opening destroyed it.

Fast water sloshed over him, rocking him. Legs outstretched, leaning back on his elbows, Demane awoke in the shoals of a broad stream, wallowing. His bag hung submerged in the current. Panicked, he jumped up. The bag’s flap was thrown back, but water hadn’t entered. Wetness sheeted from the leather and it was dry again in moments. Nothing within was out of place. Aunty used to say, Don’t worry so much: the bag takes care of itself. She had always laughed at his fretful care. Wasn’t it better, though, to err on caution’s side?

And stretching before him was the Wildeeps. Across stream, rich as the rainwoods back home, tangled ancient growth went on and on, green to the east and west horizons. The oceanic foliage rippled and petals like white tongues blew down. The whole southern bank of leafage tossed in gusts of wind which, midstream, Demane felt only as soft breath, scented with frangipani.

And the ground over there was sacred, the jungle godlike and consecrated only to itself. A greatwork lay over the stream where he stood, and over the fast water running on all frontiers of the Wildeeps. Demane laughed. He ran for high steps through the rapids, and crouched down, to swing an open hand against the water’s rush and knock up white splashes. The two greatest wonders of his life, both together at once: one of nature, the Wildeeps where many worlds overlapped; and another wonder, this artifice of magi, the greatwork that bound this savage country and its denizens.

Downstream, he saw a weird pulsing light, stationary just above the trees. Demane waded with the flow, west.

Nude black dirt, a southrunning trail, cut into the greenery across stream. Some bright sign—a thunderbolt, caught and twisted by almighty hands—hovered coruscating at treetop-height over the mouth of the trail. Demane knew what amounted to a library’s worth of disparate lore, and all of it word-perfect, though he was illiterate in the four languages he spoke. Still, that brightness in the sky was legible to his very blood. It read, Here is the Safe Road. Eyes closed, his face could find the folded lightning and know its meaning too, even as the blind feel upon their faces where the sun sits in the sky.

The hard current dragged and eddied about his feet. Demane shuddered, and looked bewilderedly around him, coming fully alert like a slapped sleepwalker.

What had he meant to do, exactly? Track the jukiere across the Wildeeps, kill the wizard somehow, and then return to Mother of Waters, all in one slender evening—was that the plan, then? No, of course not! He’d only wanted to . . . scout out the lay of the land. Ye-ah. That made some kind of sense.

Well, brave scout, will you look at the hour? In the west one low cloud glowed sullen and red, its underbelly brass-bright. The blue dusk was blackening, the sun already below the horizon. Perfect nightvision had let the dark creep up on him again. Demane recalled some little animal in the grass. And he’d . . . killed it? And then what? Not eaten it, surely, had he? How? His spear, blades, and bow were all untouched in the bag. Running his tongue (not leathery and rough, but a soft fragile slug, like anyone’s) over his teeth: they were all blunt, not mostly pointed ivory tines. He examined his hands. Quarter-moon talons, keen-edged as scimitars along the undersides? Since when? Of course there were ordinary human nails at the tips of his fingers. He shrugged: nor did any strange new muscles move in his back. He was wingless. Some half-fledged potential stirred in him, though. Limitless and untapped, the wellspring of the Wildeeps awaited the one who would drink. So close to the Wildeeps, nothing was beyond achieving if only Demane would cease to hold himself back so fiercely. And is that what you still want, no longer to be a man but a god . . . ? He spun around and ran for the north bank of the fords. He fled back toward Mother of Waters.

It was as though a great wind carried him across that first leg upcountry, not any strength of his own. But the Wildeeps dropped leagues behind, and the stormbird waned. Fatigue began to drag at his legs and Demane slackened from his best pace to one he could hold. The slow air momentarily strengthened to a breeze. Very nearby, in the dark above the trail, a night dog bayed. In a sweat of sage musk, green attar, and chlorophyll, Demane expunged his scent; but it was too late. The pack had sight and sound of him. Coursing and unshakeable, a score of dogs set up frenzied barking. Demane fled without any plan except to live longer, his feet quickening again.

Dogs run much faster, however, and soon closed the distance. He had to turn and face them. Six in front all but snapping at his heels leapt, jowls foaming, teeth sharp. Time left him again. Coming to he spat a foul mouthful of furred meat. Doubtfully he tottered, nodding with unfocused eyes. Aching up and down his arms and legs: the print of savage bites which hadn’t broken skin. Limbs and carcasses strew the churned mud about him, his hands gloved in blood. He needed food—cooked, spiced, vegetable. Hunger had drawn his stomach tight as a fist.

Demane spat again, a thirsty paste, and began to run. There was a stitch under his ribs, cramps in his thighs, and fatigue that made him wish to lie down anywhere. But he wouldn’t survive another attack, and so step after step, his scent belatedly hidden, he ran on through the starblown night.

Human noise and stink wafted toward him across the drylands. The Station glowed in the distance. Ahead on the trail, barking, savage and remote, addressed some other prey; Demane had to detour far and wide. Meanwhile the moon’s jaundiced eye wandered half its nightly course across heaven. The gates at the tower stood closed.

He circled west to the lake, and washed away the muck and dust. With his legs turning hard and stiff, Demane gimped up the Mainway from Mother of Waters. Fatty smoke from barbecue and his roaring hunger pulled him through the glad crush of the Station’s night crowd, and then down a street above the revels on the piazza. He walked past every grill to a particular fellow, turning a haunch over spluttering coals. “Fresh!” said the man, full of pride, grinning at Demane. “Killed it just this evening, not long ago!”

Demane knew that, smelled it, and made his order.

He kept his eyes squinted, for the more sensitive the nightvision, the more cruel the artificial lights of civilization. On a dish of unfired clay the grillmen handed Demane: mashed yam, half charred tips of rare beef, once-tough greens tender from long simmering in pot liquor. Demane set the dish on the ground and tore a withered pepper over top, spilling pale seeds. He rasped two little saltrocks together, dusting the food thoroughly, and handed up both pieces to the vendor, who smiled again. The grillman turned to serve another.

[1] That is, psychokinesis. Her wings beating: embubbled by her protection, and through the roiling aquatic chasm, he and Aunty came popping upwards into light and air. While he dogpaddled on the surface, she dragged herself airborne off turbulent chop. Then she plucked him from the waves, and flew them back toward the green hills, the undestroyed coast.

“How you all do complicate the thing! Yes, there is the problem of witches: whether they be stronger than natural men, dodging blows which should have landed, or exploiting other such fraudulent advantages. But only think for a moment. Every one of us knows perfectly well what a proper fight looks like. A man who wins legitimately comes up from his descent into the pit spitting blood, staggering, hard-used, hideous to see. And where is there the creature to take such a battering an he need not? He, however, who passes unscathed from bout to bout—making easy mince of formidable opponents—that man is a witch! Watch for him! Let’s not overcomplicate the matter. To catch a witch-cheater needs nothing more than to keep our eyes peeled . . .”

His Excellency Sabiq bgm Qaby, Royalcousin, speaking to fellow trustees of the Fighthouse at Mother of Waters

Fourth of Seven

A town like no other in his experience, the Station at Mother of Waters, where noise and business picked up after dark. There were more people on the piazza than all the men, women, and children living in Demane’s hometown, whose houses spread out over three hills, the farthest families a whole morning’s walk away. He came upon Faedou sitting on the margins of the piazza. He had a jar beside him, his bad leg stretched along a wall, out from under the feet of enraptured dancers or the blundering Demonridden. Demane pressed one hand flat to the wall, leaned heavily, and worked his sore legs down to sitting. But he’d hardly got settled and halfway comfortable before Cumalo came out of the crowd.

“Sorcerer!” Cumalo’s fingertips tapped upon the air, playing invisible beats. “Get my drum out for me, will you? The good one. I want to play!”

“All right.” Demane fought laboriously to standing. “Be right back.” He looked for a corner out of the good light, hidden.

“Aw, man, come on! Why you going off somewheres? Just pull it out of your bag right here. Nobody cares!” Cumalo danced, hands busily pantomiming. Miracles didn’t seem to faze him. What a strange, wonderful town he’d come from! Demane’s own mother, father, and siblings used to avert their eyes, sneering in terror, at the smallest miracle—to say nothing of these superstitious northerners!

“Can’t do that, brother. I’ll be right back.”

Down between two inns bordering the piazza, there was a cul-de-sac that ended against a remnant of the old fortwall. Where men had pissed out that Demon since before the fall of Daluça, Demane stooped in ammonia shadows and felt around in his bag. The drums were in the back bottom hall, past tarp and tent, surgical kit and medicines, food and sealed jars of pure water, knives, bow and arrows, his spear, various leather saddles, for dromedary and equus . . . ay, Aunty! Would you scold or laugh—shocked, either way—to see the bag so messy, things spread out everywhere? He found Cumalo’s jimbay and pulled it forth. Back in brightness around the greatorch, Demane handed the drum over. Cumalo joined the twenty or so others playing.

The moment Cumalo lit into the opening evolutions of a hotter, faster rhythm, the other drummers fell in behind his mastery. “The old music,” Demane said, throwing up a palm in excitement. “That’s some church he playing!” Dozens talking, dozens standing, rushed out to join the hundreds who danced. The crowd jumped like waterdrops flicked onto a hot greased griddle. How to sit out this joyful noise, the spirit so willing! But the body begged to stay put.

“Well, go dance, then!” Faedou waved him up. “Thought you would of been out there, if anybody.”

Demane grinned and shook his head. “I’m getting old, old man.”

Faedou blew like a horse. “Boy, I got two sons and a daughter older’n you.”

Maybe just stand up and shuffle a little, at least? He reached back to push off the wall and began to raise up, but his own abused flesh fought the unfolding of his legs with such ferocity, all stiff and chilled, Demane lost heart and settled back down sitting.

“Cut out all that groaning!” Faedou hooted. He drank from his jar. “You sound worse than me!”

A waif appeared, and stood by patiently. Faedou gulped the dregs from his jar and handed it up. The child sped away, and then with slow careful steps returned, bearing back the jar brimful.

Demane asked, “How’s that leg doing you?”

“Same way it’s been doing,” Faedou said. “Let me be, Sorcerer. I ain’t in no kind of mood to talk about it.”

So they talked of the road ahead. About as many leagues farther to the south as they’d already come, Great Olorum sprawled on the Gulf. It was a kingdom of many principalities grown together into the vastest of cities, none bigger in the world. And close by Olorum, Faedou said, could be found an outpost of heaven where seven-foot giants lived, supposedly the children of the gods. The Ashëan Enclave, Demane thought but did not say. More edifying to listen, he had learned. He tried to square the science Aunty had taught him with Faedou’s superstitious account, all gilded with legend and rumor. There being no god but God, said the old man, those tall folk could hardly be his special children, now, could they? They surely were a sight to behold, though. The naps growing blue on their heads, if you could believe it; and hair that glimmered like the sunplay of precious stones handled in bright sunlight. And what were they called, anyway, the blue ones . . . ?

“Em’ralds?” Demane put forward.

“No, man: wrong one! I mean the other’n. Blue.”

Faedou swore up and down that he’d once seen such a sky-coiffed man, passing through the far crowd: taller even than the captain, and his hair like cobwebs, with the refractive lucency of . . . those blue rocks.

“Rubies?”

“No!”

Every day of his life until today, Demane had grieved to be born so late a grandchild of TSIMTSOA, so many mortal generations from his divine progenitor, that there was small hope of ever attaining the glories of the stormbird. He’d failed to give much thought, however, to problems facing cousins born of the other Towers. Suppose you didn’t have two faces, one mundane, one miraculous, but just a singular that combined both qualities? Then you’d have to go through life revealing all your secrets to whoever threw you a glance. That, or else be fretting every moment of every day over some tightly wrapped headscarf . . . And yet, to eat stellar radiance! What does a sunrise taste of? Not the same as starlight, surely. And the equatorial sun at noon? (Remember these thoughts: ask him.) Suppose that gross food altogether were something you could take or leave, like hot peppers, or sweets? Oh, thank you, but no: just this sublimity of light’s enough for me. Someday[1] Demane would like to examine the heliophages of Captain’s scalp carefully, up close. The curly wires on his chin and chest and so forth were darkest brown, a little chestnut, a little fawn intermingled, and one or two strands the vivid shade of the setting sun halved at the horizon—

“Son, you doing all right over there?”

“Mm, what happen?” said Demane. He looked around, rallying back to the here and now.

“Seem like I lost you there, for a moment. You feel all right?”

“Yeah, Faedou. Naw, I’m listening.” Demane banged a fist on his thigh, waking up dormant aches, getting his thoughts back on path. “So what about ‘sapphire’? Zat what the blue one called?”

Nine or ten brothers drifted off the piazza to sit with them and talk the night out, the morning in. The adept spends a long time under tuition, but none of his studies readies him, afterwards, for the loud surmise of men in fellowship, each one shouting genial ignorance at his fellows. Mostly, Demane could nod and smile, laughing when the others laughed. Kazza, who was a fount for the songs and customs of diverse peoples, objected when someone’s guesses ranged too far off the mark.

“No, that’s not why! It’s the old way in Sea-john, where he’s from. Men and women there, they only bare their heads for a lover. For husband or wife. Don’t you just love that? I love it! So romantic. That’s why Captain never takes that scarf off.”

“El capitán got him a woman somewhere?” Wilfredo looked around to see who knew. “¿Ehtá casao?”

“Won’t you just ask’im, Willy?” Cumalo urged in his lazy drawl. “You know it ain’t nothing the captain love better than some newzy-ass sumbitch all up in his business.”

Demane laughed loudest of all. He hadn’t known that Sea-john custom!

Faedou changed his mind which wife he loved better; here, tonight, drunk: “the Old Girl.” So many in the telling were his first wife’s charms, it was hard to see how “the Little Missus” had ever got ahead in his affections, even for a little while. Other men spoke of their wives, and brothers of women they hoped to marry; and when the theme was passed to Demane, he spoke too.

“We do it another way where I come from,” he said. “The lady choose for herself. And my Atahly, her mother was—I guess you say, here—king. The chief? That’s why Atahly could do whatever she want, have any man. She said, let me try you, Demane, for a year or two, then maybe we marry.”

“You two have a baby, Sorcerer?”

“No.” Though there would be one by now, surely. Sucking a tiny thumb, other hand grabbed in mama’s skirts: a sturdy baby girl, maybe, toddling after her lovely mother; not Demane’s daughter, though. “Stay and marry me, Atahly said. Then a baby. But I left.”

“Ain’t you suppose to be the smart one here, Sorcerer?” said Faried. “I would of married a girl like that! How could you just up and leave?”

“Baby, looking at y’all ugly face everyday, I wonder sometime too.”

Kazza had a nose for sad romance. “You ever love anybody else, Sorcerer?”

“Oh, sure. For a long time before me and Atahly got together.”

“What happened? What was her name?”

His name was Saxa. “It’s a whole long story.” Demane sighed.

The night then began its descent, down and down, to become the ugliest yet of Demane’s life.

There came fetching up from the flooded piazza another noisy bunch of brothers, T-Jawn, Barkeem, Teef: that whole rough crew. They were on fire about what had just gone down at the Fighthouse: “Niggas was smashed up in there ’til you couldn’t move.” “Hot like midday up in the desert.” “Everybody screaming they head off!” Telling the tale, the brothers passed a triplesize Demoniac jar from hand to hand, drinking thirstily.

Barkeem: “Why y’all didn’t come? Should of seen that shit!” The captain, it seemed, had fought seven men, one after the next, and “knocked” (Teef speaking) “err last one of em out.” “Mais hélas” (T-Jawn) the captain was so well known at the Fighthouse, odds had been set at 50/1; nor could all Master Suresh’s guardsmen together have produced the fifty silver pennies necessary to make a wager. “Yeah, but” (another brother) the caravanmaster and four or five of those other merchants had put down “crazy money on the captain. Them motherfuckers made out like BANDITS.”

In gore-soaked detail they recounted the casualties of Captain’s clean sweep. A man’s pulped nose, another’s mouthful of shattered teeth. Yet some other man who, shoulder wrenched from its socket and twisted up his back, had screamed Mama. A man’s eye burst to jelly in its socket. A hand stomped, the fingers limp as raw calamari. Knee wrong way back. Sudden silly swooning fall.

“Captain was a MONSTER.” The five come from the Fighthouse all agreed no other word suited: Monster, they said several times praisefully, eyes ashine, heads nodding. They would persuade all who’d missed the show of this truth: what a monster!

“Hoshit, though! Y’all remember that next-to-last one?”

“Yeah, he could fight. Knocked Captain down twice!”

“None of them other niggas lasted as long as that one. Didn’t y’all think . . . was a little while there, I thought Captain might be gon’ lose. Bossman was looking toredown that second time he got up.”

Oh, sorry, says your lover to you. Can’t tonight; I’ve other business! So what’s he doing then? The man is maiming seven weaker men, that’s what: this, for the captain, being the most delightful of all ways to pass the first free night they’d had in months. Oh, and let’s not forget that—according to eyewitnesses—he killed at least one of those seven. Killed a man. And for what? For sport, for lucre. Not in self-defense, not to save a friend, but murder in pursuit of the shiny trash-metals that civilization prized more highly than human life. Tell us, my son: how are you faring in those strange lands, so far from home? We your parents do so often think of you and worry. Whom have you chosen to walk with, to talk to: some good woman, some kind man? Nothing Demane had ever felt, no past high or low, could match the intensity of his frustration then. Such emotion needed an out. Yes: other heads were about to feel this balked love as a rain of fire. For such virile alchemy was commonplace in those parts, at that time: there, with wearisome ease, the men could turn private pain into public fury.

“He won, though. And GotDAMN! Y’all seen how Captain kicked that brother, at the end? So the man jaw drop off his face, onto his chest? Then stomped that nigga when he down?”

“Yo, I heard em say: Captain broke dude’s back! Just broke it. Couple of them barber-surgeons they had up in there was saying, wasn’t no way brother was gon’ make it through the night.”

“Nor even so long; that soul has already flown. I did linger to watch, me, after you lot rushed out—fiending, that’s the word, n’est-ce pas?—to suck upon that Demon’s poisoned cock. (I say there, White Boy! Are the rest of us meant to perish of thirst, then? All the niggers who sit to your left? MERde! Let’s have those evil spirits passed this way too!) The chirurgeons of the Fighthouse could do nothing for the man. He died. But not before taking all manner of fits. Comme ça.” T-Jawn feigned grand mal: limbs aflail, foaming at the mouth, head flung back, eyes bugged and rolling in their sockets.

“Ha ha! You stupid, Jawny. Why you so damn crazy?”

“Wait, wait. Which one was that? Big plainsman motherfucker, with the jacked-up ears? Nose coulda been broke like ten, twelve times? That brother—wossname—Kafflay or some shit?”

“Yeah, fool. Who your dumb-ass THINK we talking about?”

“Y’all,” said Cumalo. “Come on now, y’all. Simmer down some. You finna make him mad.”

“Who mad? But for real, Sorcerer. You shoulda been there! That was some sure ’nough shit you missed, my nigga!”

Demane blazed up like a dry thatched roof. “Didn’t I say DON’T BE CALLING ME THAT.” Biggest anyway, he shot to his feet in the seated gathering. He meant just to kick the jar from Barkeem’s hands; the cheap crockery exploded.

Barkeem curled up on his side, a fetus, or exposed bug. “Please,” he said, and, “I’m sorry!” asking, “What I do? What I do?” One hand he stretched out to soak up the force of any falling blow; the other arm he curled round his head, for a helmet against kicks. Just a year had passed since Barkeem had fled his father’s house, and the sudden furies racking it; sixteen long years he’d lived in that hell. That Demon soaked his robes.

“Get outta here, all y’all,” Demane said to those come from the Fighthouse. “I don’t wanna hear no more!” Barkeem wasn’t wrong: there’d be fists and stomps for any slow to take their heels. But, as no one there had ever seen the Sorcerer enraged, they all sat gaping. “GO!” Demane lunged and five brothers scrambled up and away. One not fast enough: White Boy caught a foot to the backside. That kick, with a yelp and three huge staggering steps, sent the brother veering off into some dancer’s embrace, who at once shoved him away. He fell sprawling.

At one time or another, from sickness, or wound, or other misery, Demane had succored them all. And so those five brothers—astounded by this abuse without precedent—wheeled around in confusion, right nearby: doublechecking that Demane and this mad stranger were truly one and the same. He snarled and balled his fists. “Get y’all dusty tails away from here.”

They slunk off.

“Dang, Sorcerer,” said Kazza. “You scared them bad.” Scared himself, it was clear, by the wary awe with which he watched for the big man’s next act.

Fuck them niggas. “They be all right,” Demane said. And his body all charged with righteous violence, but the villain nowhere in sight, he swung his heavy arms out and jerked them back in, banging his own chest once with each fist. Captain had destroyed seven men, one of them dead. And what shape would the monster be in himself; all bloody and bruised now, torn and staggering?

“Somebody here”—Demane squinted around painfully, the greatorch at center-piazza dazzling his nightvision—“point me to the Fighthouse.” It was one of those cubic hulks looming on the piazza’s northwest peripheries, wasn’t it? Or a block or two farther north?

“Nah.” Faedou shook his head. “You don’t need to go over there.” He patted the ground. “How about you set right back down, instead.”

“Captain . . .”

“. . . ain’t studn you, Sorcerer. He don’t need, damn sure don’t want, none of your do-gooding, witchcrafting help. What Captain would appreciate round about now is some peace and quiet, to be sick and in pain all by hisself. That’s how he was the last six times we come through Mother of Waters. I figure he that same way tonight. Would probably knock your head off, you come near him right now. So might as well just set right back on down where it was you got up from.”

Demane looked around him in befuddlement, and the brothers stared back. The sweep of his gaze came to rest on a brother in particular: “You knew he was going to the Fighthouse tonight.” Cumalo’s mouth dropped open, but he got no sound out, only sat gobbling. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Hey there,” called Faedou. “Hey now. Before you go shouting whatever you shouting at your homeboy Cumalo, you might wanna hear the reason why the captain done it.”

“Why he done it?” Demane shouted. “Ain’t no reason why, old man! Captain took a mean cold look around him, and figured the world could use five or six more cripples, and a couple dead dudes on top. So he says, hows about I get myself down to the Fighthouse, see what I can do about this. Earn me some full-boys, too.”

“No, son. And it really gotta be said—I ain’t never seenchu so out your right mind and good sense. You just as wrong as you wanna be.” Faedou lifted his jar between both hands prayerfully, fortified himself deeply, and then sighed. “Sure you don’t wanna hear why he done it? I hold the man in some esteem and admiration, myself.”

Pricked already by intimations of his own foolishness, Demane doubled down, and puffed out his chest. “Well, why then?”

“Set.”

Demane didn’t sit. And then slowly, very stiffly, he did.

“Your first time crossing down to Olorum, ain’t it?”

They all knew it was. Why ask?

“Cause I’ma give you something to think about,” said Faedou. Here at Mother of Waters, the caravan had just reached the halfway point, with already six brothers bandit-killed out of twenty-five starting out. They still had the Wildeeps to go, and the endless prairies; and past those, eight or nine days in the monkey forests just north of the Kingdom, and there, under the trees, the desperados just about ruled, ever since the death of the great prince, called the Lion of Olorum; ever since the old King had slipped into his final senility. Other caravanmasters paid their guardsmen five silver full-weights, seven if you were lucky. With a little scuffle and thrift, a man could keep a wife and baby fed, under a roof, and in clothes for two or three years on a half dozen full-weights. But a lot of brothers were carrying much more family than that. So this here caravan wasn’t some sightseeing jaunt across the continent for them. The whole fortunes of families, from greatgrands to great-grandchildren, hung in the balance.

“You ain’t heard what I said, so let me say it again? For all that distance, all that danger, most brothers just get peanuts: six silver full-boys.”

Now did you ever stop and wonder why this caravan, out of all of them, paid so much? Master Suresh was going to open up a sack loaded down with silver and let each brother take a good grab out. A small hand could pull out ten or twelve full-boys easy. Big-ass ones like Demane’s? Might get up to twenty. So why in the Hell was Master Suresh paying that much? Where all that damn money coming from? Who—care to guess who, Mister Sorcerer—had put up his own life in the Fighthouse of Mother of Waters, just so those greasy fat-cat money-bags could make them a killing, and some the sweet juice of that haul could trickle down to the brothers? “So then. Tell me now what you gotta say for yourself, all big and bad?”

Nothing; for a long moment Demane sat contemplating the juncture of his crossed legs, his empty hands resting there, feeling the heart chewed up and spat back into his chest, and then looked up.

“Let me get a sip of that, what you drinking.”

“Aw, son.” Faedou shook his head. “That Demon don’t fix nothing. You too good for this shit.”

“No, I ain’t.” Demane reached out a hand. “Let me try some.”

“Son, I’m telling you.”

“Pass me that jar, old man.”

In prurient anticipation of disaster, ten brothers leaned as one to watch when Faedou handed over the jar. Demane lifted it and sniffed. Elsewhere in the world, one cur of a famished pack was sniffing at strychnined meat, and suffering the very same qualms as Demane. Poison, said these fumes; but look at all the others partaking. Was it not primitive and backcountry, then, always to be trusting one’s own senses? Thus, even forewarned, dog ate, man drank. Bad water in a ditch where geese, crossing the continent, alit to crap, bears stopped to piss, and up through which foul gas, clots of oil, were burbling from the green sludge of the bottom; and this whole foul brew—thanks to a storm last night, some lightning strike—set on fire . . . That Demon was so much worse than this. Demane gagged. He wheezed breath in. He hacked it back out.

Brothers fell out laughing.

Faedou retrieved his jar. Cumalo beat upon his brother’s back. “Told you not to be messing with it.” Hangdog and gasping, Demane could only cough upon his knees and shake his sorry head. Which he lifted up, as some fresh stir moved through the gathered brotherhood.

“By the Holy Recital of Life and Days, looky here,” said old Faedou, eyes on the piazza’s crowd. “Bet your ass, this is some trouble coming.” Brothers with backs to the view turned around, Demane among them. “Here come the king and prince of chuckleheads, bringing us some news. Ain’t no good news, though! Watch.”

It was Xho Xho and Walead, at a dead run. “Yo! Yo! Sorcerer!” The boys were beside themselves. “So this man. This bad man? This man we had ran into, right? He sold Messed Up some qaïf.” So wicked and busy a fellow is This Man We Had Ran Into! Has anyone else ever stirred up such trouble across all worlds, from the deepest past to the very days we are living in? “So then, Messed Up was smoking with dude, right?” But not, one could hardly fail to note, smoking alone. For a mighty funk of burnt herb had come wafting in with Xho Xho and Walead, and their eyes were droopy, awfully bloodshot. “It was that good shit, Sorcerer. Everything, chill. So then why did dude have to just up and say something to Messed Up like that? You know Messed Up don’t be tryna hear it! Now that nigga STRAIGHT BUGGING. Yo, Sorcerer, you gotta come quick—fore Captain or the fo-so get him!”

Having just set the house on fire, two boys would raise the alarm with this same whine and dance. Demane let himself be pulled up and dragged (a skinny brother at each hand) through the riotous boogie and bounce on the piazza. Coming and going in the heatless glare of the greatorch, his sight was a sometime thing. Every other brother, of course, pushed along through the revels too, all save their eldest, lame and dying.

Conjoined in violence to the familiar gargantua, a little stranger fought to free himself. Messed Up righthandedly flung about and shook his most unwilling detainee, while lefthandedly trying to inflict fatal damage on another—any other—from the usual heckling monkeyhouse of fightwatchers.

The wrappings of Messed Up’s loincloth showed, his robe was so far ripped down. Teeth had worried his right forearm to gruesome effect. Nose freshly pulped, the face of This Man We Had Ran Into was a monster mask of blackslimed teeth. Messed Up screamed pure madness.

“Ahm bout to WHOOP somebody ass! Who else want some? You? You, then? How come y’all running—stop running! Ain’t NOBODY here wont they ass whoop? Awls ah see is a buncha scaredycat jumpback turntail COWARD RABBITS.”

Demane, sick and tired of the bullshit, nevertheless waded in.

Making twelve, he added four limbs to the brawl’s previous eight. Though a man speaks only wisdom—even shouts it—does the mudslide, avalanche, cyclone choose to heed? Next Demane tried to pry the stranger loose. Clinging like a fanatic to his relic, Messed Up committed both hands to retaining the prize.

“You motherfuckers must think Messed Up care.” He clarified his position: “Messed Up DON’T care! Messed Up don’t give a shit!”

Even the world’s strongest man has a hard limit. This he cannot do: overcome another very strong man supercharged with hysteria, unless he cuts loose. In case of which, be ready to accept punctured lungs, a spine stove in, spleen ruptured, or neck snapped. Said otherwise, Demane’s choice was to talk Messed Up down, or else kill him. No third option.

He’d never cut loose in his life, and was hardly going to do so tonight, against a brother. For a ridiculous eternity, then—while strangers jeered and the brothers put their loudest faith in Demane—the three men waddled side to side, back and forth: one bawling swears, one sense, one silently biting. Then a boy or woman screamed—it was Walead, in fact—splitting the crowd’s hoarse noise with a treble axe.

The captain was come.

The heel of a bloody hand blew past Demane’s shoulder, staunching the flow of Messed Up’s raving upon impact. That clobbering strike knocked the colossus of the riot slack in Demane’s arms, and loose from the stranger—who absconded. Quick as that first blow, another came just behind. Demane pivoted, taking the captain’s fist on the hard meat of his shoulder, lest Messed Up’s lolling head receive a lethal excess. That hurt. Both big men sagged toward the ground. With all the gentleness he could, Demane laid out Messed Up’s deadweight. The brotherly part of the crowd surged inward.

“Damn it, Captain, he down!”

“Why you hitting him again? Dag!”

“Cain’t you see the man out cold?”

Captain spun on them, his seeing eye wild. Got whoop-ass to go around! Who else wants some?

Not a brother did, and they swept—tidelike—out again. Demane got Messed Up turned on one side, the red flux of his nose wetting the cobbles, no longer drowning him.

“It’s all right now, Isa.” Demane caught the hem of Captain’s robe above a sandaled foot. “I got him. Won’t be no more trouble out of him or nobody. I mean it.” He let go, and patted the instep.

At that touch strange sound and overheated odor bloomed into the night from the captain, recollections of some long-ago event. Demane caught his breath at the intensity. He smelled seabrine, waterlogged wood; he heard combers foaming, surf breaking. Trade winds blew in from the austral continent, full of spice and pollens unknown to him. And what stench was that . . . the bloody ordure of a market butcheryard? The site of some big-game slaughter, buffalo or elephant? No; already attuned to the scent of Captain’s blood, and Messed Up’s, Demane recognized this vast spilled quantity as human blood . . . several dozen men, gutted, all of whom had died within moments of one another. The corpses overcrowded some tightly enclosed space near the ocean . . . rocking atop it: a ship. The captain stood tottering over him, and shed these remembered sensations so potently, Demane could have pointed to where each phantom body lay, eviscerated in the suffocating swelter. There was a scent-memory of the captain as well among those massed corpses, his unearthly blood leaking, the signature tattoo of his strong heart feeble and stuttering . . . Then it broke, whether rapport or fugue, whatever that nightmare had been. Demane was again at the Station of Mother of Waters, fifteen hundred miles from any ocean. At the edge of the desert this warm night was cool—sweet indeed—beside that memory out of Hell.

Captain looked down at Demane, then all around. Who are you? Where am I? said these looks. The backsplash of other men’s blood freckled his face, which was some stranger’s, it was so pummeled and cut. His cyclopean left eye glared, his right one swollen up blind. The knuckles of his hands were raw gore, the flesh stripped in spots to glimpses of bone. By slow changes in stance and expression Demane marked the captain’s return from wandering among ghosts and memories, to this night, these people. He stepped away from Demane’s hand. He slumped to one side, swayed as though to fall and then, catching himself, painfully stood back upright.

Of course a doctor who was also lover would wish for nothing except to say, Let me help you. But more forthcoming than anything a man can ever say aloud—whether you may care for his wounds, whether you may watch over his sleep—is the silent testimony of his bearing and demeanor. For the body tells all to him who knows the language, and doesn’t lie. The captain would sooner have leapt into the fiery lake atop Mt. Bittersmoke than accepted even so much as a shoulder to lean on.

Captain staggered off, one-leg-dragging, into darkness and glare. Brothers flushed from his way like pigeons from a loose dog.

Messed Up mumbled and stirred.

T-Jawn knelt beside Demane. “I should be only too happy to fuck right off again, if you are still wroth with me. But, please, Sorcerer, permettez-moi: shall I take feet or shoulders?”

“Salright.” Demane lurched to a squat and then—making faces, all a-tremble—came to standing: hefting Messed Up in his arms. “I got him.”

“Mais, mon vieux! Are you quite sure . . . ?”

“Yeah, Jawny. Just get em out the way for me.” Demane nodded toward the brothers uselessly crowding in. And to that most useless pair:

“Xho, Walé!” Demane called. “Tell me where y’all staying at.”

Nearby, in some travelers’ barracks. The adobe hall was low-ceilinged, the doors narrow, and most of the brothers shared the biggest room in back. Men dropped onto their pallets, and into sleep within a breath or two. A few sat up whispering in the dark, rehearsing the night’s events to one another. He laid Messed Up on the pallet nearest the window. Demane blinked to clear his eyes.

No longer bleeding, the nose was swollen tight as if to burst. He propped Messed Up’s head on a rolled sheet, broached a jar of sterile water, and washed away caked blood. Flexing tiny muscles, praying under his breath, Demane began to nurse down a precious drop of ichor from his third eye. Forgive me this venom. It is weak and will save a life, taking none. In TSOA they say, Let us hasten to the heat death, for its arrival is inevitable. Yet in TSIM we say, No; we shall keep on fixing the machine unto the last moment. So then account me TSIMTSOA, spinning on the Tower’s right. Forgive me this venom . . . Those brothers still awake gaped blindly toward this catechistic mutter. The light too dim for their eyes, they started at the little sounds Demane made, taking from his bag and putting back.

He prayed, blinking, and then at last his tongue deliquesced. It split into tapered, coiling halves: the hot prehensile right, the cold secretory left—from which expressed a droplet viscid as quicksilver. Demane scooped up the mercurial drop in his venom sac, and faster than eyes rewet themselves with a blink, lashed half his tongue across a full yard, stroking its load precisely across the crushed bridge of Messed Up’s nose. At once the black swelling went brown. Demane, blinking, allowed the vitriol a moment to anesthetize, to sink as deeply as bone. Then he pinched the nose’s jumbled rubble back into order. His tongue sealed and shortened, trembling and achy. Estranged from his own emotion and fatigue, he cleaned wounds, sewing some. He kept having to blink to clear away his leaking tears. And why tears? Why not? This night had been long, trying, and widely various in its trials. And now that the last of the fires was all put out, he must not forget to grab by the neckscruff the rascals who set this blaze, and make them contemplate the smoky ruins.

“Xho and Walé, you two listen up.” Demane began to pack up his medicia. “What happen is, sometimes qaïf can go bad, see, and [mycotoxic fungus] grow on it . . . like a rot, you understand? That’s why you don’t smoke it. Shouldn’t. Smoke some bad qaïf, and it [can induce choleric schizophrenia] . . . mess up your head for good. That’s what he done a long time ago, what messed him up in the first place. Qaïf poison, very dangerous. It’s [an insult to the homeostasis of body and mind]. You understand me?” Well, how can they, fool? You’re speaking half in your own language!

Anxious to demonstrate rehabilitation, Xho Xho and Walead said, “We ain’t smoking no more.”

“Nope. Not again, uh uh.”

“I don’t even really like qaïf, never did. You, Walé?”

“Hell no—I hate that shit!”

There was a bit of back-and-forth over whether that one dude, or Messed Up, or indeed some other dude, had first thought it a good idea to do something so bad—“Myself, I was like, ‘I don’t think we should, though, y’all. I don’t think it’s right.’”—but certainly neither of them, the two boys concurring here, had been the original instigator.

Such eagerness to create space between present self and past sins obliges adults in the room to wonder whether callow youth has really wised up. “What if the fo-so had showed up?” Cumalo spoke harshly from the dark. “What if Captain had gone upside y’all peanut heads hard as he did Messed Up?”

“He has before.”

“Yup! Cause, remember that time? I couldn’t see straight for days . . .”

The noise of frustration Demane made turned to a huge yawn. His burning eyes, all at once, would hardly stay open.

T-Jawn groped for Demane’s shoulder. “You sound all done in, Sorcerer. Vous pouvez partir, and take your rest. Messrs. Xho Xho and Walead shall retire for the evening, while Cumalo and I keep our eyes on things. I daresay no further mischief can be forthcoming from our sleeper—not tonight, non?”

So Demane left.

There was to be, after all, no rendezvous, laid up together under palm tree fronds on the banks of Mother of Waters. That hope had always been a mirage, though anticipation of it had carried Demane through all the weeks of the desert crossing. Now he’d find some spot in the open air to sleep beside the lake. But not quite yet: a night so evil required exorcizing before sleep. Wise words, or even the company of wisdom though nothing was said, would be enough. Along empty alleys, Demane returned to the piazza. The throngs there had become stragglers, and the awful fluorescence of the greatorch banked down to a sulfurous glow. And yes: Faedou and his jar even now sat against the wall. Demane took seat beside his elder brother. Content to say nothing, they watched the remnants of the night revels.

A lone drummer beat his jimbay with closed eyes, inspiring the feet of the last score dancers. Two of the caravan’s merchants, Qabr and Iuliano, slowstepped tiredly and in synch among those final revolving few. The two men possessed the same fine manners, eloquent hands, and trim small size: alike as twins, though obviously not kin—the one being pale and sharp-featured; the other dark, full of mouth and nose. What a blessing, what wonderful good luck, Demane thought, to make this long crossing with such a friend to share the travails. Never did you see those two apart! One night years ago perhaps they’d twirled through the piazza’s crowd and bumped into each other for the first time. And now, in memory of that first night perhaps it was their habit to dance away another whenever passing through town—

“Tch.” Faedou sucked his teeth, scowling. “It ain’t right.” He nodded toward the merchants dancing. “You know them two be smoking, right?”

Demane shook his head. “No, Faedou, not those two.” Men of such quality would never touch qaïf, and he said so.

“No, man.” With thumb upright, Faedou pursed his lips and crudely mimed the act he meant. “You know—’unnatural connections.’” He turned his head aside and spat. “Faggits.”

“Slate,” Demane said finally (for you need to be braced when such a roundhouse comes in, or else it knocks the breath right out of you). He clapped hands down against his knees. “Bout time for me to go lay down.” He stood and while turning away tapped Faedou’s shoulder. “Don’t be out here all night, old man.”

Demane made his way to the lakeshore. The moon had set. Passing the canvas slums, his steps in the gravel brought some lady to a tent’s open flaps. She was about the age of his own mother. From within, he heard her pickney sleeping, a child’s slow, even breaths. The matron could have made out his silhouette, nothing more, in this dim starlight; still, she called to him, “Sex you, poppy?” as he went by.

By Mother of Waters he unfolded a buffalo hide onto the sands, and stretched out. The lake breathed coolly over his skin. The sand beneath his groundsheet leached heat up into his body. An unbroken field of stars, the sky glittered without a single spot wholly dark. His blood whispered to him of the first Home, there, a flickering as yellow as firelight, no brighter than ten billion other stars. Demane might still have people up there. Cousins.

[1] Of all words, none more purely distills the futility of human hope, mortal dreams. Did we but know the end is foreordained and soon, who could go on making such tender plans—someday I shall run my fingers through my lover’s hair—when the very next step we take shall pitch us into the sinkhole, there to be crushed to nothingness, smothered in an instant, by a thousand tonnes of earth? “Someday.” Ha!

And with her to marshal us, we then were able to bind the wild depths of time and space, as well as those [anachronisms] and [extradimensionalities] that had come ravening therefrom. We asked, How shall we call you, and she answered, Howsoever; for my name has no acoustics but is rather [scent-pheromone-fragrance] and you lack the faculty to [utter] it. So we named her Preema because she was first in power. Preema, before taking leave of us, said let one of you magi forsake your Enclave and assume dominion over that place. For the Wild Depths cannot remain so but must needs be mastered. Before any could obey her, we were beset by the dragons that burnt Daluz, and iron dogs which came out of the eastern bush; there was also war with Hell, with the so-called Children of the Lie; and earthquake and plague and famine racked our friend and neighbor, Great Olorum: so that for all of a generation, and much of the next, the talents of the magi were sore-tried. By the time of the Respite, no magi living knew how to effect that mastery which Preema had enjoined; but anyway the Road was still holding safe three centuries after laying the greatwork, then as now.

from [ancestral eidetic memory] of the magi of the Ashëan Enclave

Fifth of Seven

Hey, I gave you the choice, didn’t I? Sit jawing or make love. And you didn’t choose “talk,” so don’t try to change it up now.

Southbound from Mother of Waters, eldest brother rode his burro between the two youngest, and told them tales—filling up the green brakes and jungle the caravan approached with a tribe of rapacious cannibals.

No. Suresh paid me no mind; I told you that he wouldn’t.

The name of this cannibal tribe was supposed to be “sharken”: so called because they had mouths full of crooked sawteeth in double rows, like the pale man-eaters that preyed upon fishermen and pearl divers on the northern coasts; called sharken too, for that way of theirs, lurking invisibly in the shadows: until such moment as they brought down swift, terrible death upon the unawares.

You have to understand, man. They sank whole fortunes into this caravan, Suresh and the merchants. The Great Father, God, couldn’t make them turn back or aside now. We’ll just have to keep an eye out, you and me.

These folk—extraordinarily plump and well fed, fanged and wholly merciless—refused all meats except for tender cuts flayed off the shanks of men—and boys, especially—who set unwary feet off-Road while traveling through the Wildeeps.

Mmm . . . but no more, D. I’m serious now. That’s enough. Are you listening? Are you going to let me go? I need to get down to the emburdening. And you need to go roust the brothers out of bed, make sure everybody gets over to Suresh’s on time. And unless I say so, D.: no brother steps off-Road, nobody. You tell them.

He wanted only to savor this mood, pure joy. Demane dropped a word to the wise, but decided that somebody else, just this once, could go about marshaling the scrappy forces of good sense, those few and sore-beset, against the nigh-invincible armies of foolish hard-headedness. Anyway, it was often true that fear best motivated fools; in which case no one was better suited than Faedou, so deft with a scary story, for persuading Xho Xho and Walead to keep to the straight course. That old man could have you jumping at the knock of your own heart!

“Just thought you two might like a little heads up,” said Faedou. “Cause those sharken will fry your ass up with some peppers and onions in a heartbeat. Watch out, is all I’m really saying here.”

Xho Xho and Walead doubted.

This one said, “You know you lying, Faedou!”

And that one: “Ain’t no cannibals in the Wildeeps!”

“Well.” Faedou wearily shook his head. “It’s on you, then.” There was very much a feeling he’d done all any man could: some folks were just doomed. Nothing could save them. “Go on off-Road into them woods if you want to, I guess.” The very cadences of his voice evoked the scene: two young brothers joking, acting a fool, the leaf shadows, some twig breaks, one or the other would whisper (his last words) Man, did you just hear that? What was that? then nothing but screams, blood splattering, limbs in flight asunder from torsos. Both our young heroes ripped horribly to bits. As if to get it right for the eulogy, Faedou asked, “Wha’chall got, sixteen, seventeen years? Not a long life. Sad is what it is. But, yeah, I known some brothers to go that young. Always a damn shame, though.”

Walead sucked his teeth. Xho Xho drew a deep breath, trying to make his caved chest seem barrel. “I ain’t never scared!” And yet didn’t these two, of all the brothers and merchants, keep most cautiously to the Road? During the hailstorm, Walead and Xho Xho even took a savage beating rather than run for shelter with the rest. The boys pissed from the dirt into the green, fell to the rear of the baggage train for squats right there center-Road, before running to catch up with the caravan’s stragglers.

• • • •

Aunty was sister neither to his mother nor father, but seven times the great-grandmother of the former, and five times the latter. She’d neglected to die in the way of other people, and came back through the green hills once or twice each generation. When Demane was six years old, Aunty came again and word went around that nobody younger than thirty should fail to visit her next full moon morning. She meant to teach some likely youth or child to work miracles.

“Now, I want you to stay your little backside right here in the house.” Demane’s mother held his chin firmly, keeping his gaze fixed to hers. “Do you hear me talking, little boy?”

“Yes, ma’am.” What he couldn’t understand was why his younger brother and older sister—in fact, the entire world—got to go to Aunty’s gathering. Everyone except for him. “But I want to come too!”

Whenever Mama took a hard line, sometimes it worked to appeal to Papa. This time, however: “You do what your mama said, Mountain Bear.” His parents looked at each other, an exchange full of tacit secrets. They shed a strange and particular frequency of fear-scent—as before, when Demane used to sniff the air and offer careless remarks concerning someone’s mood, or recent whereabouts. But he knew better now, and never did that anymore, ever, so there was no justice in these deserts, this punishment. The family left. He stayed.

Some are hellions, and some children a comfort to their parents; some, take your eyes off them for an instant, and they’re already into every sort of mischief. Until that day, Demane had always belonged to that rare few to whom you might speak one gentle word and then trust to obey. But after the family had gone, he waited a while in terror and excitement—then he too donned his wick-leaf cloak, and ran out into the rainy forest, toward the big gathering-house.

• • • •

The caravan left the Station much later than planned, not at crack of dawn but nigh unto noon; still, they rode without haste down toward the Wildeeps. It often happens that, when the revels of a night have passed, and the sun sits on high again, a long day follows where nothing much gets done, or only half-assed and very slowly. For the suffering is widespread and horrendous as men repent what they did and shouldn’t have the night before.

Speaking to the general sentiment, Barkeem said, “That Demon will fuck you up, mayne. I’m hungover as shit.”

“Somebody kept passing me the jar, though,” said another brother riding, squinty eyed, at one side. “Do any of y’allses head feel like it’s gon’ bust?”

Yeah, said a majority.

“We had all better partaken, I warrant, of that potion which does allow the Sorcerer to smile so,” said T-Jawn; “yea, though the sun beats down, and my head cracks apart. For there rides a man qui ne sait rien de notre douleur!”

“He do look kinda happy, though, don’t he?”

“Damn, Sorcerer; all your teeth showing! What you got to grin about?”

“For real, my dude—I need a sip of whatever you had!”

Demane couldn’t dim the grin, nor even get his lips covering his teeth. “Just a beautiful day out here, is all. Won’t y’all let young Demane be glad for once?”

“Tch. Cain’t nobody tell me that brother didn’t get him a piece last night. Ain’t nothing but some reeeeeeeally good ass gon’ have a man smiling like that.”

“Teef, don’t start up. You know the Sorcerer ain’t been up in them damn tents carrying on. It’s true love or nothing for him. Right, Sorcerer? “

“That’s right, Kazza. Me and the Station just didn’t get along too good. So it feel nice to be on road again.”

The afternoon reddened and evening came on and still Demane felt in remarkable charity with the world. Slow thunderheads bore down on them. No: as the caravan drew nearer the Crossings they saw it was the towering clouds that stayed put, while their own progress southward overtook the stationary storm.

Men and their burros straggled out along the Crossings’ pebbled north shore. Oldtimers said nothing should have been easier than to look across the broad shallows and spot the Road, a wide black gap in the jungle’s green wall. But fog had rolled east to west across the south bank as far as eyes could see, and hard rain was falling over the Wildeeps, and only over there. The skies above the caravan were clear.

“See, this what they need to do,” said Michelo. “Stack up some stones over here on this side—see what I’m saying—to mark where the Road is at over there.”

“Yeah!” Wilfredo said. “Then you could find that shit, no matter if it was all foggy over the Wildeeps.”

“No,” said Faedou. “Y’all don’t get it. That wouldn’t work.”

“Why not, pray?” said T-Jawn. “Some signpost—a waymark—raised here on the north shore, just across from the Road là-bas: that strikes me a fine idea, Faedou.”

“Problem is,” said the old man, “it would be ‘waymarks’ all up and down the Crossings. The Road don’t keep to just one spot. Moves around.”

Across unspeakably vast vacancies, the nearest star blew toward the earth a wind of poisonous fire, which passed harmlessly through the sphere’s upper firmament, never catastrophically across the living surface, thanks to a field surrounding the earth, which fixed the location of all things on the planet by means of subtle pressure-lines palpable to birds, and other sensitive beings. Thanks, of course, to that undimmable brightness in the sky above the Road, Demane could see precisely where it began; but he knew moreover that the Road had shifted in relation to the northbank, nearly three miles eastward from yesterday’s latitude. He wasn’t sure it was wise to admit any of this knowledge.

He urged his burro nearer the riverbank. Six or seven merchants were there wrangling with Master Suresh over what was to be done. Astride his own burro, the caravanmaster peered at the farshore with a hand at his brow, as if a brave pose might help him see through lashing rain and dense fog. Gathered about and querulously howling at him was that quarter of the merchants most difficult to please. The sense of the mob seemed to be that it was too early to call halt for the day; certainly not before reaching the first well on the Road. There was the feeling too that the rain and fog, that the Road should be hidden from view, represented an outrageous dereliction of Suresh’s responsibilities as caravanmaster.

The remainder of merchants, and the brothers, all rested, letting their burros graze or drink. Most lay sacked out in the grass, a hood or sleeve drawn over their eyes, while awaiting some decision to come down. Demane examined the caravan for any other who showed signs of being able to see the sky beacon that marked the Road.

Oh, and whence this high, fine mood of his? Demane had retreated at dawn to a leafy bower in the thickets surrounding Mother of Waters, for the sun rose too bright and timely for further sleep on the sands. But neither had those deep shadows been a site for sleep: he’d just stretched out, just closed his eyes, when the last man expected had come crawling under the briars to him. For such a long time Demane had felt parched and colorless as the landscape through which the caravan had come wending down from Mother of Waters. And how did he feel now, as it got on for dusk, at the threshold of the Wildeeps? Well. Even as this cracked gray earth would revive under the softest downpour, there had fallen on Demane, as it were, a sweet and drenching rain. And just as this dust and these rocks, rained-upon, might sheen over with fresh verdancy, so was Demane turning a toothy grin onto everyone—glad in his heart!—body satisfied, his every thought a hopeful one. Picture the badlands blooming with many-colored wildflowers: some snow-white as eyes rolled back in ecstasy, others the incarnadine of wet lips slack and ajar in desire’s surcease; and little blossoms, springing up among the new grass, mauve as a lover’s bruised flanks, your hands so gently steadying his half of the act up and down in place, on your lap. And where’s he, now? There! Captain stood in the water, the reins of his burro in hand, while the hard current creamed about his ankles and its hooves. He stared crossriver and upwards, at that folded lightning bolt in the sky, shining through rain and fog, marking the Road.

Last night’s injuries from the Fighthouse could have been healing a fortnight rather than only one, by the looks. At dawn, there’d been nothing halt in Captain’s movements, no wincing wherever touched. Those torn knuckles had already grown thick dry scab. Demane himself was quick to heal from wounds, but hardly like this, not overnight. Now, at the day’s second twilight, about to cross over into the Wildeeps, even the scabs on Captain’s hands had fallen away, and the skin of his knuckles showed raw and pale, not yet tawnied to the proper brownish gold. His bruises, not livid: faded; and the last remnant wound, his left eye, only a little puffy, but fully open, its sclera white and clear.

Startled, Captain spun about—as happened often when anyone’s regard tarried too long on him. He and Demane spoke then, entirely in nods and glances, a conversation that might be rendered thus:

You see that there?

Sure do.

What should we do?

My man, YOU the captain.

Well, I can’t speak in front of all those merchants. Go and tell Master Suresh for me where we should cross for the Road. . . . Please?

Come on now, I’m just another one of the brothers! You know it’s not right making me talk to the caravanmaster!

All right, all right. I’ll go too and support what you say, but you speak for me. Let’s go.

Are you ready to admit yet, chump—that you’re the softest touch there is? Demane sighed. Dismounting he gave his reins to the brother beside him. Then, walking over to Master Suresh amidst the fractious merchants, he felt his stomach sour. However well Demane understood Merqerim, he spoke that dialect poorly. In a bad mood, the caravanmaster liked to mock a foreigner nastily, pretending not to understand a bad accent. It was a bit rough on the feelings, to tell the truth. Demane tried to work up a few short phrases in his head. But you were forever changing the ending-sound of words in Merqerim, which had to go in a very precise order, which was also ever-changing . . . About to turn and say, no, look, wait, the objection was checked with a touch. The captain lay a hand between Demane’s shoulder blades, and sliding that hand to the small of his back, top of his ass, steered Demane through the press of merchants. A friend’s touch—a touch that meant nothing, one that didn’t count—would have been flat and firm, not there and gone, so maddeningly light. Chump!

“Master Suresh, the Road, she,” (he, it? shoot! which one?) “is right there. I see she.” (No, her, shouldn’t it be? Yes, it should.)

“What? Are you claiming to know where the Road is?” Peering down, Master Suresh l’Merqerim blinked and bugged his eyes, as if he’d never seen Demane before: this unasked for barbarian in his state of folkloric undress, quite an outlandish interloper, among the garbed and sober colloquies of civilization. “Now I forget: which one would you be? Odell, is it—or is your name Birthday Suit?” Master Suresh enjoyed the pretence that his guardsmen, none of them, were to be told from one another, any more than a perfect stranger from his identical twin. No brother was exempt from this indignity except the captain, who (slick as a snake) had disappeared some few steps back.

The merchant Iuliano said, “Oh, Suresh, what can you be playing at? This strapping fellow could never be mistaken for another! He is the guardsman the rest of them call ‘the Sorcerer.’” Iuliano’s regard was warm—a bit chilly, though, that of his man Qabr, riding beside him.

“I, Demane, yes. And the Road is there.” Demane pointed crossriver upstream. “Right there. I sure. I am sure.” Aback their burros, the high-toned crowd all turned to look where Demane pointed. Utterly featureless to their eyes, that foggy bank billowed high as heaven, the color of smoke and ash. They looked back at him; but before the clamor of disbelief could break out, the captain shoved forward. He draped a certifying arm across Demane’s shoulders and said, “It’s true,” his voice as little beautiful, as much gruff[1] as he could make it. Demane forgave the little disappearing act and fell in love all over again, or more so. Whichever. Both.

The impending uproar dispersed into murmurs.

“You know as well as I, Captain, what doom befalls that caravan which strays off the safe path. If we cross to the far bank and attempt to wander the perilous wood hoping to chance upon the Road, all our lives may be forfeit. Are you sure then, Captain Isa, we can follow this, this sorcerous fellow?”

The captain nodded. Suresh stood in his stirrups and bellowed: “FORM UP.”

• • • •

She showed her other face to him. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“No, Aunty.” Demane looked up; and he’d thought her tall before! “Let me see your teeth again.”

She grinned: a maw full of ivory spikes. When she stretched out both arms, unfurling veiny thinskinned wings, Demane laughed and jumped up and down. “Fly! Go up in the air with them!”

“Not by day, child.” She put down her arms. “Maybe I’ll take you up after dark. If your cousins see something just small and wonderful, they’re ready to scream and cover their eyes. Can you imagine if they saw me looking this way, flying around?”

“I want to change too! Teach me that.”

“Ah, Demane, we’ll just have to see, now, won’t we? There’s only a spot of old blood left in you, but it is possible. You’ve got the blood-grace stronger than just about anybody I’ve seen these last couple generations.”

Every talon on her massive hands looked as bladed and sharp as his mother’s gutting knife. Demane tested with a fingertip.

“Careful, boy!”

“Ouch.”

• • • •

They forded and crossed the wall of fog. Beyond it, a muggy mist crept along the ground at knee height, and broken cloudcover spat single fat drops, not hard rain. Nothing grew from the black dirt of the Road, which was wide enough for ten to ride abreast. The jungle at either side wasn’t continuous trees but intermittent stands, all overgrown with creepers, moss, and ferns. Between one copse and the next grew tracts of brakes and elephant grass. The greatwork on the Road dimmed Demane’s senses such that, eerily, he could plumb the steamy green landscape with hardly more than human clarity, his scent and taste and hearing so vague and weak that—

“Hey, Sorcerer. You can ride that burro, you know. Why you down there walking in the dirt?”

Because he could take the Road’s measure only by touch, through his bare feet. And what had he learned of the Road? “I’m too big,” Demane said, patting at his burro. “Gotta give the poor guy a break every now and then.”

“They small, but just as strong as camels,” Faedou said. “Son, it ain’t hurting him none for you to ride.”

“Naw, naw. I’ll tell you why he walking,” Xho Xho said. “Sorcerer wanna be hard like the captain. That’s why!”

Walead said, “Yup, yup,” and even Faedou smiled, for there was a whiff of the plausible about that explanation. To keep his body stropped to a razor’s-edge condition, Captain rarely rode; he jogged at the forefront of the caravan for most of every day. For such unflinching commitment to doing everything the hardest way possible, the brothers all thought him a bit mad; Demane too.

“Was I really trying to be hard like Captain,” Demane said, “I’d haveta snatch you sideways for talking smart, Xho.”

Walead cackled, and Faedou said, “Sorcerer got you right there, young brother!”

The butt of his spear thumped against the earth. Demane understood little about the greatwork laid over the Road—except that it was unimaginably powerful, and its warding virtue undiminished. But a jukiere wasn’t native to the Wildeeps, and so as free to wander from woods to Road as Demane himself.

• • • •

“I’m going to leave the bag here with you.” Aunty handed it to him. “It’s better to have it out in the world, in good hands. And you’re the best one of mine I’ve seen come along since the last time I rested. Now, stop that, Mountain Bear! Cut out all that crying right now, and I mean it. You start up, you’ll get me going too. I told you I was old, boy. Some of these hills aren’t old as me. Anyway, I’m not necessarily passing on. Just, when I lay me down this time, I’m going to have a good long sleep. Might be I don’t wake up again.”

• • • •

Not long past first light on the second day, the pale and cloudy morning turned lilac, and then murkier still. At intervals livid fire brightened the skies, with thunder cracking hard by. A strange rain began to fall: stinging, gritty, almost like spatters of scalding water.

“What is this shit?” Teef held out a cupped hand trying to catch the hard, hot water.

Or no, not hot at all—the downpour was so cold, it seemed to burn.

“I know,” Cumalo exclaimed. “I saw this up in the Titans once, crossing the mountains. It’s called snow.”

A merchant screamed then, and right thereafter so did everyone else. The burros brayed and fought on their leads. From above and all sides, pebbles and goodsized stones pelted the caravan savagely.

“No,” Demane said, “it’s hail!” Right here, the worlds on and off this stretch of Road happened to be aligned in time and place. So, it might be safer for them to . . . Captain looked at Demane and nodded sharply. The Sorcerer shouted, “Get under the trees!”

The caravan abandoned the Road. Monkeys shrieked and gibbered overhead in the canopy. Torrents of ice thrashed the leaf cover, making a terrific noise, the foliage drifting thickly down in green tatters and rags.

Several brothers sheltered beneath the same huge tree as Demane. “Why don’t you pull something outta that bag for these fucken sky-rocks?” Teef said. “Do something, Sorcerer!”

He was just talking smart, but Demane answered anyway. “Aunty never taught me anything for this.”

“Huh?”

He’d spoken his mothertongue, but Demane didn’t repeat himself, only shook his head.

They weathered the hailstorm well enough under the trees. Few stones reached them under the canopy, and those hit harmlessly, all force lost passing through the density of leaves and limbs.

The freak storm quickly passed, the clouds lifting and whitening. There was afterwards a tedious business of accounting for things and persons, recapturing the scattered burros, two of which lay dead, tongues lolling beside ice-chunks of skull-crushing size. Walead and Xho Xho had never left the open Road. Hail had pummeled them bloody. Walead was hysterical with terror and pain, Xho Xho stunned and clingy. Demane cleaned their cuts, having to sew and bandage the worst. In the manner that comforts, he fussed over them; but Walead was inconsolable. At last Demane resorted to a drop of poppy philter under the boy’s tongue.

A merchant had gone missing. Naturally no one had seen or heard anything. The friend of Iuliano, Qabr, came and knelt beside Demane. “When your call rang out to take shelter beneath the trees, I fled without thinking to one side of the Road, Iuly to the other.” Helplessly his suave hand gestured east, then west. “Everyone swears to know nothing. But you, Mr. Sorcerer, I have heard them say, are the best tracksman and hunter among us. Will you not have a look about?” The merchant Qabr caught one of Demane’s hands in his, and pressed beseechingly. What to say but yes, of course?

He made to stand; Xho Xho grabbed at him. “Hey, little man, hey there,” Cumalo said, prying loose the fingers, nodding Go to Demane. “Check this out! Sorcerer ain’t the only one, you know. I got tricks too.” Cumalo took out his bone dice.

He went to the captain, who then spoke to Master Suresh: the caravan was told to make ready for travel, and then to wait. Captain and Demane, one on either side, worked the grounds with slow steps for longer than the muster could patiently abide. Guardsmen began to joke and laugh. Merchants complained bitterly to Master Suresh of time wasted, daylight lost. The forest thereabouts was such a trampled mess and profusion of scents and sign, blurred beneath rain and melting hail, Demane couldn’t hope for pugmarks. And he found none, nor any splashed blood, either (and the merchant Iuliano was so slight, so small-boned, that a jukiere might have lifted the man off the ground and carried him away, instead of dragging the body . . .), but at length he stopped short and called, “Captain!” The crowd on the Road fell silent, staring.

Demane pointed without explanation into the shadows where a dense growth of leaning canebrake half-hid clods of dung.

Master Suresh l’Merqerim rushed to them. “What have you found? Is that lion scat? It looks fresh!” The man spun about wildly, as if to spot the crouching predator before it sprang. But the thick grass surrounding them might have covered a whole pride, and the nearby copse, elephants. “Has a lion taken him?”

The merchant Qabr wafted nearer, listening, both arms crossed before him, either hand draping the opposite shoulder.

The captain squatted down. With a woody length of cane, he poked apart the moist rubble, and with the stick’s point, nudged forth a mudcaked bit of wool. Sharply he looked upwards. Demane, who leaned over him, had grunted.

“You’re sure?” the captain sang leggiero.

“Ain’t a doubt in my mind.”

“What?” Master Suresh l’Merqerim looked back and forth between them. “I see nothing here but a shitty piece of fur. What does this signify?”

The captain, sotto voce to Demane: “Many beasts have dark fur. A boar, perhaps—?”

“Baby, come on.” Demane sucked his teeth. “You see them curls too tight. How you gon’ tell me they come off some pig?”

“All right”—the captain’s song grim now—“all right.” He stood.

“Yes? He said what? Tell me, Captain Isa! What is the meaning of all that bushman rabble-babble?”

Impatiently, Captain sang a long line. “Demane understands your every word perfectly, Master Suresh l’Merqerim.”

“And what? I insist that you—!”

“It was no lion dropped this dung, Master Suresh. And that is not fur, but a piece from a man’s scalp. The jook-toothed tiger has eaten someone before.”

He was singing past the caravanmaster, to Qabr. Captain sang in a minor key, inflected with blue notes. At once Qabr grasped the vanity of hope. He made a northern man’s sound of terrible pain: a scream swallowed, choked upon. Then the small man opened his mouth wide and wailed.

Neither Demane nor the captain found any other sign.

[1] Who minds, on the season’s very best day, the briars on the bushes of the rosegarden? No one, Captain. And what man given a treat—who’s gone without, who has a sweet tooth—even notices the bits of comb in your honey? No man, Captain.

Ashé’s children wish us well,
but never trust them, born of Hell.

TsimTsoa’s by far the best,
for weal and woe, than all the rest!

from “Tower Song,” chanted for skip-stone games in Great Olorum

Sixth of Seven

Master Suresh required them to pick up the pace. One stop, once a day, at the midday well; nor would they linger there. The caravan would press on as near full dark as possible. He wanted them across the Wildeeps in four nights, though the customary number was six.

Things shook out otherwise.

The skies slowly dimmed, an overcast louring, black and heavy. As this premature night fell, the malevolence of the flanking forests seemed to close in upon them. By late afternoon the feeble daylight had nearly died. From the blustery dark above, rain fell softly on them: very cold. The tropical evening waxed ever chillier, the breeze freshening from moment to moment, until it cut raw and harsh. Men saw their breath—many for the first time. Merchants and brothers who had them pulled out second and third robes and every blanket and scrap of cloth they owned, the caravan swaddling itself up. Some dismounted to trot alongside their burros, warming themselves with exertion. Demane slipped lightly into trance.

“Ain’t you cold like that, Sorcerer?”

“Yeah, I’m freezing my ass off just looking at you!”

“Si no tieneh con qué abrigarte, take my blanket, Sorcerer. Here.”

“I’m straight, Willy,” said Demane. “You keep it.” The fine drizzle, no sooner alighting, dried from Demane’s skin, and ghostly vapor wished about him. “I got my inside-fires burning high.” He reached and patted the cheek of each brother in turn: Wilfredo, Teef, Barkeem.

“You burning up hot!” Wilfredo grabbed Demane’s hand tight, as if to squeeze some heat into his own numb fingers. “¿Cómo lo haceh? Teach me!”

“All right. But answer me this: Will you sit still half the day, every day, for the next five years?”

“¡Coño! The trick take so long to learn?”

“Could be longer,” Demane said. “Some people, they thoughts won’t settle down, and just keep jumping around like monkeys . . .”

He didn’t tell them that this winter, small and local, was stalking them across the Wildeeps. Just off-Road, a few steps away, it was steamy and hot beneath the trees, the drizzle falling blood-warm. The evening, there, was orange and bright, not clouded and dark as the last watch before dawn. This weather was more jukiere mischief. Well before sundown, daylight had nearly expired, and so Master Suresh had to call halt far earlier than he’d wished. Few had tents, or any recourse but to lie down in the mud, rained upon, wrapped in wet and sour-smelling blankets.

In such bedraggled straits Xho Xho sat, embraced by his own thin arms. The brown-blotched white bandages swathing his gashed scalp and forehead were wet through with rainwater. “Cain’t you do something, Sorcerer?” The boy spoke through rattling teeth. “Pleeeeease?”

“Aw, Xho.” Demane sat too; sharing out the hot fruits of an accelerated metabolism, he put his arm around the boy. “You don’t really think I could just open my bag, and the sky would clear up, do you?”

Aunty had very rarely scrupled to work the weather, saying that far too easily you might misalign patterns of drought and flood the whole sphere over; he’d one time, however, seen her break a full-blown cyclone into mere brisk wind and rain. So no doubt she could have waved away this conjured inclemency, but such feats were well beyond him.

“Something, Sorcerer. Anything.” Xho Xho huddled under the heat of Demane’s arm. “You sure it ain’t nothing you can do?”

Demane thought, Well . . . and a whiff of his hesitant consideration must have communicated itself to the boy, for he threw off Demane’s arm and seized his hand in supplication. Would you be healed? Show faith! quoth the Patriarch in verses of Holy Recitature, speaking unto a mendicant leper. And with belief and fervor and pleas quite like that sick man’s, Xho Xho begged Demane.

“You can do something, Sorcerer! You got to, man: we dying out here!” Well, nobody was dying; but few in the caravan had ever known such bitter chill, and no one had come prepared for it.

“All right, all right.” Demane shook free of the boy, fending off his histrionics. “Turn down some, little brother. I’ll make a couple big fires.”

“Never do I doubt you, mind,” said T-Jawn, from the depths of his cowl. “Mais je voudrais remarquer que, even were these rains to cease, Sorcerer, where in all this Godforsaken show could we turn up dry wood?” T-Jawn waved broadly, a gesture encompassing the muddy Road, and the trees’ plentiful deadfall strewn all over it. “Such as this will not burn.”

“Even water burn, hot enough,” Demane replied, and so he looked to Captain, and was given the nod. Brothers had gathered round about, for such had become the tendency when a problem was set before Demane. He drew the sort of deep, deep breath particular to the adept who means to dip into the perilous end of his knowledge. Slowly he let the breath out. “Don’t even like fooling with this stuff, really,” Demane said to them. “And, brothers, y’all listen to me. These fires could go all night, or might burn just half the night, all right? But let’s start piling some wood up-Road a ways, not right here by the burros. Don’t worry about tinder. All I need is sticks and big wood. Enough for two big fires, so everybody—merchants, too—could get warm.”

They got to it.

Whoever is not master of all that arises, in every instant, was never master at all: Suresh l’Merqerim shot out from among the merchants, intent upon putting down what looked to be a mad uprising. The captain intercepted him, and lullabyishly sang down Suresh’s obscenities and shouts. While the caravanmaster stood by, scowling and watching brothers gather the wood, Captain went back to helping disburden the burros for the night.

“Mostly green stuff,” Walead said bitterly of the storm-fallen branches. “And wet.” He and Xho Xho stripped the leaves from a heavy bough, and together dragged it to Demane; who stomped halfway down its length and, with a heave and grunt, broke the thick limb in twain.

Twice, Cumalo put down a crosshatched base of logs, and propped up the stick-towers to make two bonfires.

The sons and nephews traveling with the merchants were made to work like dogs. When the burros had all been unloaded and hobbled, given water from the well, and their buckets filled with fodder, the boys’ uncles and fathers sent them to join the brothers’ labors. Neither merchant nor boy asked how these heaping stacks of wood, drenched from the day’s steady rain, would be set ablaze. Except by way of Master Suresh, the merchant elite never addressed their brotherly help. That was the way of things.

In the midst of all this activity Faedou stood looking like the very next man upon whom Death must call. Leaning tripod on his spear, and doddering from agony and chill, he could no longer be mistaken for his own son; more likely for his own grandfather, though a score years in the grave. Faedou’s deep glossy color had gone ashen. Despite the cold, he stank of feverish sweat. And even stifled by the greatwork on the Road, Demane’s nose knew well the nature of that sweetish rot wafting from the wound beneath his brother’s robe. Demane went to him, tried to speak to him; but Faedou would not leave off his litany of prayers. Peevishly he shook his head, and as before, slapped away all offers of help.

The brothers called for Demane to bring the sorcery. The wood awaited, the two towers assembled, and so he had to leave Faedou’s side.

Conical and about man-height, the pyres stood at center-Road, one ten long strides from the other.

Now, I’m warning you, Mountain Bear: they’re not to be trifled with. The wisest thing would be to let them alone forever. I inherited these, and never touched them myself. So you want to think twice, and go ahead and think another time, before you call yourself trying to make use of them. I hope you’re listening; I really do. Up and kill yourself, or somebody else, or burn down a whole town justlikethat. Aunty had given him many precautions, and Demane, crouched beside the first tower, needed a long moment to review them all. At his back, the muttersome pipe and rumble of men and boys.

“It’s cold, the wood soaking wet,” Walead complained. “I’m tired. It’s raining on my Goddamn head. I don’t see what we had to get all that wood for. How this gon’ work? It ain’t gon’ work!”

“Yo, nigga! Shut up with that shit, will you?” said Xho Xho, through. “Sorcerer said he could, he CAN.”

“Dang! You ain’t got to get all mad, I’m just saying . . .”

His hand, his whole arm, in the depths of the bag, Demane felt through the straw cushioning a solid chest. He found a globe of sealed clay. He thought at first he’d misremembered there being two, and then his tentative fingers brushed the shape of the second. He shifted aside one of the upright logs, and tenderly set a sphere atop the interior base of stacked sticks and branches. Daylight was fast failing. He of course could see fine, but that only made it harder to judge a practical distance for other eyes. Far enough away for safety, yet close enough to make out this gap in the logs.

Not a single one of the caravan’s twelve dozen looked anywhere but at Demane’s obscure antics. Boys shivered in the bite of sleety wind. Men blew onto curled fingers, stamping to get feeling back into bare sandaled feet. Demane called to the crowd, “Michelo!” and that brother came forth: he was the dead shot among them. Michelo could knock a bird from flight, or kill a bolting rabbit, with one thrown stone. “You see where it’s a black hole in them sticks?”

Michelo leaned and squinted. “. . . think so.”

Demane dropped a pebble into his hands.

Michelo’s first throw struck a log, deflecting off into the shadows of the forest. Master Suresh l’Merqerim had seen enough. “Perhaps it’s slops, not brains, in your skulls! Or is it rather piss and night soil?” Shouting, he came forward. “Can you not see, you simple no-school idjits, that the wood is wet? That God is pissing down rain?”

Michelo’s second throw went true.

Luminous blue and yellow splashed from the clay sphere. Liquid-fire splattered within the bundled sticks and stacked logs; they caught, the wet wood combusting eagerly. Dark and dead one moment, the pyre was toweringly ablaze the next. Men exclaimed at the roar and sudden brilliance. Demane had made the crowd stand far back, but faint warmth washed them even there, and he had to shout down a general rush forward into luxurious heat. There was still the second pyre to be lit.

A single gobbet of bright jelly had splashed out of the wood tower, and glowed amidst the puddles of the Road. Undimmed by rain, like some imp from the firefields of Sol, it danced in the mud. Demane conjured a jar from his bag and with a single spilled drop quenched this molten errancy. He and Michelo kindled the other pyre.

The merchant Qabr refused to sleep fireside with the rest of the caravan; not for this evening, no. Too many eyes on him, the others all murmuring, and with Dom Iuliano’s . . . absence, it was all rather too much, just now. Sincere thanks, however, for the concern, very kind—too kind. Demane spoke of the safety in numbers, of the dangers to the outlier who wanders from the herd; but with poignant little gestures and appalled stares, the merchant inspired in Demane such a feeling of brutish presumption that his tongue tripped over these warnings. “Bay, would you talk to him? See what you could do?” But neither could the captain’s most suasive song convince. Qabr sent back his nephews—one pale, one dark—to sleep among the crowds about the bonfires, after the boys had pitched the two-man tent in the darkness up-Road from the caravan proper. He went into the tent alone.

Captain quartered the night, as always. No brother was to stand still or sit while on watch. Five would walk up and down with their spears at all times. On nights past the captain himself had often watched three full quarters, and slept only when Demane—“You, nobody else”—was awake and on watch. It seemed he meant to do the same tonight. Captain stalked restlessly, with the camp, the Road, and Wildeeps at either side, all under his fierce regard. Never did you see such an enemy of sleep!

For his part, Demane had no quarrel with the body’s requirements, sleep least of all. Master Suresh had held the caravan to a cruel pace, with little rest: that, and stoking his metabolic blaze so high, had taken a toll on Demane. The sleepers lay tight-packed around the sorcerous fires. Ceding his spot to someone needing it, Demane spread his groundscloth outside those spheres of brightness and warmth. He sat crosslegged, spear easy to hand, and closed his eyes. Sleet fell on him, steamed away, and more fell. His trance deepened.

Now and again he surfaced. Sleepless and unflagging, the captain could always be seen either pacing, or else startling to wakefulness some night’s watchman just beginning to nod. Captain had ridden hardly at all today, although keeping pace on foot at the caravan’s forefront had meant flat-out running. Demane thought, as often before: The littlest children do this. A baby rages against the eyes closing as if nothing were more hateful. Infants fight for every last instant awake, before being pulled suddenly under, as the captain soon would be, into a vortex of compulsory sleep.

Demane at times could seem to be reading the soul’s deepest secrets, but no; it was the body he read. Or that was usually so. Now, in a trance mixing full consciousness with deepest dream, he could glimpse, and even read, a line or two of the soul’s secret script. “Hey,” he called, beckoning to Captain—who looked first to the sentries: Cumalo, Messed Up, Kazza, Faried, Michelo.

Kazza, in soft falsetto crooning. I love my wife. She went away from me. What more is there to say? The other four brothers whose watch it rightly was were all alert too, and pacing up and down. So the captain came over and sat. Say you were a big and burly man who by nature was greatly radiant of heat; then you must learn that your lover would in hot oppressive weathers prefer some distance between you at the hour of sleep, and must learn never to take that move away personally, for it wasn’t meant so, not at all. Still, how deeply gratifying, on a raw chill night, to be so jealously pressed against, when you gathered him in snug under a heavy arm. Some other night, Captain would have flung the arm off, overcautious of any touch nearly to the point of giving himself away (for the deeply secretive cannot grasp that protecting your secret too fiercely exposes it). I’d give my life to set eyes on her again. I loved my wife. Tonight, Captain’s robe was soaked through, and he might be agile, might be quick, but when hawk blew like this, you wanted thickness, not rawboned whipcord—or at least a thick lover. Here, under this arm and against this body, there was vast and soporific warmth.

“Now you free,” Demane said, not quite whispering—nor quite awake. “He been dead and gone, you know.”

Captain sleepily rolled his head on Demane’s shoulder to look at him. What and who are you talking about?

“That man that tangled fingers in your hair and took away your choice. A prince, I think. No, wait: a king? King-prince. Lion-prince. The Lion.”

At Demane’s words the captain’s face went slack with horror.

“So young back then, you made a bad choice, Captain. Amante, bailarín, cantante. My Isa of the Song and Inner Chambers. But it was a very long time ago, wasn’t it? Free now, you could make another choice. A good one. For your happiness—”

Captain slapped a hand over Demane’s mouth. “Sorcerer: hush.”

Demane blinked slowly, and came fully awake. “Sorry, Captain,” he said once the reluctant palm allowed him speech. “Sometimes in trance I get to talking out of turn. Did I say what I had no business knowing? Don’t let it worry you. I always forget by morning.”

Would this prophetic indiscretion put him to flight, drive the captain back out prowling in the cold? No. Though a mind twists and turns, most complicated of all things, the body is a simple creature, and prefers love and comfort, to be where it feels safe. On a freezing night, this one spot right here, ahhh . . . Captain fell asleep. Cumalo glanced over. He signed with a hand as folk did back home in the green hills, when the hunt was successful, or some athlete won in the games, or sweethearts were finally wed. Victory, blessings, congratulations! Cumalo thankfully did not whoop out the ululating cry as well. Demane smiled, made a shooing gesture, and closed his eyes. He set himself to wake at the final quarter of the night, his watch.

The adept will keep an ear out, even when asleep. Such a big camp never ceases to rustle with a thousand small sounds, but the deepest part of the mind, although sleeping, can sort out that noise which doesn’t fit. That one there. Bone cracking? Demane opened his eyes and spotted Cumalo, up-Road—and there: the sucking withdrawl of deep-embedded fangs?—leaning over at the tent of the merchant Qabr. Sir? Are you well? Cumalo whispered. Then from within the tent, a great dark hand swiped out, brushing his brother’s belly.

Cumalo toppled backwards, screaming. His innards rippled greasily forth. Blasted out of sleep, Demane lurched upright, spear in hand: already running. Captain came afoot beside him, passing him by the third stride. A red maw emerged from the tent’s flaps, its tusks and teeth all golden-plaqued. They snapped onto Cumalo’s shoulder, and bones cracked loudly again, this time such that everyone heard. The tent collapsed just as he and the captain had closed nine and twelve of the twenty strides’ distance. Bulk crashed into the nightwood on the east, and all the noise and disturbance of leaves and branches that could be made was made. They’d reached the fallen tent by their sixth heartbeat, but still too late.

The screaming stopped.

Hell broke loose, the whole camp awake. Anarch of the chaos, Messed Up ran to the dark edge of the Road. “Where it at? Where it go?” There, haranguing the wall of brush—though not entering it, mind—Messed Up scuttled back and forth. “I just need to see that mammerjammer to kill it!” He stabbed his spearpoint into leaves. Silhouetted in orange shadows about the fires, better than one hundred heads raised up, all of them shouting the same, what just happened, what was that, the whole camp like a yard full of dogs baying at the night, though the house was already plundered, the thief long fled.

“BE STILL.”

Captain’s voice smote and crushed the uproar. These words rang out huge and bronze as peals struck off some twelve-ton bell, STILL echoing back and subsumed by BE, and this rich noise continuing to compound as it diminished in slow opulence.

Struck dumb, no one in the caravan missed Cumalo gag his last. That noise, and the rain hissing into the fires: otherwise the camp was silent. The caravan heard that moan, cut short. From the noctuarium, on its own ground, the great cat purred resonant malice. Captain took the bait and bolted toward the monster, which seemed to lurk in shadows only a few steps off-Road. To step off here, however, was to cross planets and millennia; for all the worlds were in flux, and poised to change on the moment for anyplace in the wild depths of time and space. A trap: to fling any pursuit into a random point of infinity—

Demane lunged, catching Captain’s shins, and bore them both down to the ground.

“Stop, Isa, stop. I couldn’t catch him like this, at night under a cloudy sky. No way you can!” Demane brought his weight to bear, pinning the thrashing man beneath him. “Tiger killed him already, and will eat you too.” Wildly Captain fought to rise, but Demane was stronger. “By day, Isa, in the sun. When we can see the signs. We both go and catch him then, that jukiere!”

The captain’s frenzy stilled. One of his hands touched Demane’s wrist and, suddenly by some wrestler’s black magic, Demane found himself stunned and on the bottom, Captain on top. He got off and to his feet, looking blankly down—but accepted an outstretched hand, to pull Demane up beside him.

The caravan watched its two best. No differently would children watch mama and papa squabble in the parlor as the house went up, the heat intolerable, and fire washing over the walls: desperately hanging on to every word, for their lives depended on this outcome. Firelight flickering on wet skin picked out the dark crowd in orange glimmers. Then a pyre came crashing down upon itself, and grown men gave the shrieks of merest girls. There was sheepish silence afterwards, in which they heard heavy meat dragged away through thicket and underbrush. The bitter wind already was warming and dying down. Hot raindrops fell more and more among the cold, and soon only hot.

They drew the merchant Qabr out feet first through the slashes in the tent’s back side. Nor were any wounds to be seen on his feet or legs, his robe all unstained, not one mark upon his torso: such that, at first, it seemed the merchant might emerge in their arms alive, only in a swoon. Then a stir of condolence moved through the littler brotherhood of merchant boys. The pale and dark nephews, one a fifth son, the other a seventh, had become sole and sudden inheritants of two fortunes. By their grief and its abandon, however, they’d rather had the uncles than coin. Below the neck, Qabr’s body was pristine and unharmed. His head, caught and crushed by long teeth, was a torn and punctured bag, slopping bloody curd and shards of skull.

“For this we pay you full-weights of gold, Captain Isa Johnny?” Master Suresh l’Merqerim declaimed like a politician in the marketplace. “That some bitching whore out of Hell should come and go, butchering us merchants with impunity?” He gave them high-flown hands, outraged finger-pointing, the whole bit. “How will you make this good? Two excellent men dead already, two! And a brother.”

“No one else will die,” sang the captain to the caravan basso profundissimo, that voice which is palpable in teeth and bones. “At daybreak, I’ll go into the Wildeeps and kill the jooker tiger.”

That, obviously, wanted amending: “Me and Captain, both,” Demane said.

The night was raw no longer, now sultry, without nip to the breeze. Still, an outcry went up when Demane moved to quench the fires. So he left the lights burning. In that hellish heat, son huddled beside father, nephew by uncle, brother with brother. The caravan had stopped quite early for the night; day therefore took its sweet time coming. A few more tired than afraid succumbed to sleep, and Captain among them. Several times, as a swimmer drowns, he nodded up to wakefulness, but slipped always back under, until his head came up no more.

Man or woman, everyone in the green hills was permitted three days after any death during which to howl out their grief. On the fourth day you had to begin picking up your responsibilities again. Here, though . . . a tight jaw, a little red-eyed blinking, was meant to be the extent of it. Cumalo! Not being made for such noiseless tears, Demane cheated, storing away his grief.[1] He breathed in the measured way Aunty had taught him, and opened his senses fully to the surroundings, allowing his observation of every stimulus to hone ever finer and more granular until he became a sentinel unbeholden to thought or feeling, only alert, only watching.

The sleepless faced the east. And hardly did dawn extend a rosy finger to caress the sky before Master Suresh crossed the mud from one of the lowburning fires. He made to kick Captain’s foot and waken him, but thought better and checked, seeing Demane’s face. There, something deep—fell and deep—came very near the surface. The Sorcerer shrugged and the captain’s head rolled upon his shoulder—he jerked awake. They stood. From the gore-spatter in the mud up-Road, and thence into the greenish murk of the Wildeeps, they followed the dragtrail of Cumalo’s body.

[1] You will knock, and a sharp-eyed old man answer. “Yes?” He’ll look you over and see what you hold: a fist-size pouch, fat with coin. “What do you want?”“To talk to the lady of the warrior Cumalo, please. I was a friend of his.” You see the elder grasps at once what news you bring, but he’ll bridle and bluster anyway, in the tedious way of northern men. “No call to go bothering my daughter. And it ain’t proper, nohow, you calling on a married lady. Speak your piece to me.” Not to bandy words on some doorstep will you have come fifteen hundred miles, nor yet will you have learned to fully bank the fires of godhead—still there will be flares—and this with nothing said of divinity’s concomitants: the great arrogance, the small sufferance of fools. “Bring me before his wife, little man, and you’d best not make me say it again.” Through successive dark rooms you will follow toward a doorway full of white glare, the old man calling Janisse, somebody come for you! Sun shall beat upon a courtyard. Hen and pullets scratch the dust. Two olivos grow ancient and gnarled. Mother wash child. The woman, her skirts wet, lifts a towel-wrapped baby into her arms from gray water filling a tub. She’s taller than you, long-armed, smelling of benignity and fatigue: everything as Cumalo described. It’s the sight of the baby, however, that undoes you. Three years old and very much alive, she has the same heavy-lidded eyes, same untroubled air, as the dead man who was her father. “Ma’am . . . ,” you’ll say, holding out the little bag of full-weights. “Your husband . . .” Then your voice clots, and your eyes spill the first tears they will have shed for poor Cumalo; Janisse shaking her head slowly at first, and then with vehemence. These will be the gesture and instant comprehension of someone who’s always known she’d have to hear what’s about to be said. The child, too young to understand, sleepily sucks her thumb, looking between weeping mother, weeping stranger.

Whereof no one dared speak but all did wonder, that among them a single disciple should be held, and he alone, in deeper confidence. Once in bitter jest a brother called that preferred disciple the Lover: hence the name, not his own, which comes down to us. None save for the Lover accompanied the Patriarch upon the unknown errand when nights were dark, nor did anyone see them again before the morning . . .

from Commentaries on Holy Recitature

Seventh of Seven

. . . into a place of deciduous gigantism, the air too rich and stinking of sulfur, of ozone, some unearthly black snow—ash, rather—sifting down: another world, and bright midmorning here. Muttering earthquake, muttering pyroclastic surge, the ground underfoot thrummed. “You near about beat,” Demane said, urgency giving his tone an edge. “Snatch that off your head, and you won’t be.”

Captain glanced over his shoulder at the Road. A few from the caravan, like children standing before a mirror, gaped blindly back at him.

“They cain’t see you,” Demane snapped. “It’s another world from there. And we gotta go—so, right now, Isa.” To stand atop a supervolcano, nine months gravid and about to blow, was nerve-wracking. “Quick!”

Not so quick: just a headscarf, but there have been many shy virgins who shimmied from their drawers more boldly. Uncovered, Captain’s hair flashed once blindingly (Demane—eyes closed, a hand thrown up to shield them further—saw that red flare) and then, gorging widely upon EMR, the heliophages dimmed and darkened past matte, past black, to the fuliginous. Some other time, Demane would have lingered over this sight, for it was wonderful to see how Captain’s eyes, bloodshot and purple-shadowed, instantly clarified, and every sign of fatigue and endurance sloughed from him, exchanged for the fretful antsiness of a superb and rested athlete. But they were standing on a continent that was about to halve in size. Demane rechecked the spoor and trail, seized the captain’s hand, and flung him forward through dense foliage into the next world, himself right behind . . .

. . . pulling the captain second to take point himself, as soon as the leaves snapped closed behind them. “Come here,” he said; Captain came into his arms. “Close your eyes.” Demane’s pores drenched them both, misting aroma herbaceous and evergreen. The air around them cleared, clouds of midge and mosquito falling away.

The captain screwed up his face, blinking away tears. “Ah! Stinks like rosemary.”

Nothing would scent their approach or passage now, either by nose or tongue. They would still, of course, have to watch out, and take care about making noise. And on, to the next world . . .

Had he gone home to the green hills, Demane would have seen men dressed sensibly for the heat, women walking boldly about their business; he could again have expressed himself in the mothertongue, and stopped trying to uphold foreign ways. Going off-Road into the Wildeeps was a joyful homecoming of another kind. Only in the most perilous wilderness could wild power safely unleash itself.

Monsters filled the forest. Twice Demane tore away at a dead run and Captain paced him, half a step behind. Twice again, he held them both flat to the ground, while through the jungle nearby some colossus passed unseen, the earth and trees quaking with fourfooted booms, and they lying under the thickets, with breath held, or scarcely breathing.

Only one of them could perceive the wizard cat’s wake. Only one of them could track the sign under leafy darkness, through mist and rain, and see them safely past every peril. And so no talk, no conflict, entered into who would boldly lead, who meekly follow. The trail took them as much from glade to glade as between worlds. Aunty would have been proud. Demane learned miracles she’d never taught, and learned them on his feet, at speed.

. . . breathing in the minutely floating odorants left by the jukiere’s passage. Molecules mixed on his tongue with secretions of the pineal gland—which, in the Wildeeps, was no longer a rare ichor to eke out in meager drops. Here, his third eye abundantly replenished itself. The wonders he could work! Demane spat. The hot expectoration seethed onto the path ahead, and the way to the next world opened. An effluvious gate . . .

Even in deepest shadow of the understorey Demane was aware when infinities of scent suddenly vanished away, and myriad new odors bloomed over the space of a single step. Families of flora would regress to emergent infancy or advance to atrophied old age. Brethrens of beasts disappeared, and came back anew in strange variants. Nothing remained the same over distances, except the wizard’s vagrant trail. As the worlds changed, so did the times—by leaps of innumerate years: millennia of millennia, if such numbers existed.

. . . careful! There—a toad, beetle-small and searingly green as pond scum, crept on the path ahead. It so reeked of murderous fumes that Demane, though all but unpoisonable, had no wish to touch it. For another man to brush the tiny creature even glancingly would kill him on the spot. With the butt of his spear, Demane gouged the dirt and slung the virid speck, mud-engulfed, off the path where Captain’s foot (half naked in a sandal) would step a moment after his own . . .

. . . and the broadleaf canopy sealed above them. Though late morning, it was midnight on the forest floor—light in plenty, of course, for the eyes of a child of Tower TSIMTSOA. All this while, and from world to world, Captain had dogged Demane’s heels with the same lightly treading mimicry of a shadow. Now, he shook his hand loose; for just ahead the black-on-black brocade of the jungle shredded, with the tatters admitting sunlight. The captain went to this expanse of dappled foliage and, like some man parched with thirst ducking his face into a pool of water, thrust his head through the leaves to take some sun. According to the spoor, the jukiere had also stopped here not so long ago. Demane stepped up to the prospect beside Captain.

They stood atop a forested bluff, which commanded a view of valley, river running through, and surrounding ridges. At their feet the abrupt slope dropped off into depthless tangles of weed that overgrew the valley from end to end. This world or time was far ancestral to their own, Demane judged. Infusing the scent-drenched air was not one whiff of plant or animal known to him. Across the lush weedfields, in the middle distance, flowed a sludgy river. Sheersided crags, facelike, closed the valley in: the cliffs as smooth as cheeks, the dark bosky heights suggesting hair. One sight held both men captive. Sized so as to beggar comparison, some great vast beast extended its sinuous neck from the muddy waters of the river. If not the whole, could a much smaller part of its body be likened, then? The head was elephantine, and swept up to tree height in order to chew, and then down, to snatch immense tracts of greenery from the riverbank. And the beast’s head was minute beside the forehaunches which rose tremendously above the water’s surface.

“Something’s strange, D.” Captain murmured so softly he must have guessed the range of Demane’s hearing. “Have you seen how the forest keeps changing . . . ?” He took a step almost into full sunlight.

“Yeah—” The breeze shifted: charged with carnivorous reptile. Demane lunged, seized the captain, and drew him back under good cover.

“Tiger? Nearby?” He asked almost without sound. But Demane fiercely shook his head, and covered the captain’s mouth. He lifted his little finger to point down toward the river.

The leviathan fed. Hard by, some new prodigy erupted from the depths of weeds. This, by teeth and claws, was no eater of plants! From subtle creeping the monster launched upwards into the air. That leap could not have spanned half a league, surely, however far it seemed—some great distance, though: powered by hugely muscled legs many times the size of its short withered arms. Off the shore of the river there was a muddy island. . . . Ah, no: that was the weed-eater’s back! There, the other landed, claws furrowing through flesh; the fanged jaws snapped down for a mouthful that could have champed a rhino in two. An unspeakable live butchery commenced.

Here, it would help to have seen the Assumption of the Towers. Such a cataclysm! Tongues of fire licked the clouds; eruptions of steam such as the gods in bright ascent saw blot the sphere below them; tsunami, worldwide; and the isle itself dissolving as does a clump of wet sand, held in a child’s cupped palm which she then ducks, open, under the froth of an incoming wave. Or it would help to know as much of shock and awe as those farflung few, survivors of the long night of dragons, when the Assassin of Cities, Rain of Fire, Lightstorm, Death from Above, Utter Ruin, and Torrent of Thunderbolts brought low the empire of Daluça, capital and colonies, burning and blasting the flower of mortal civilization. But without a cheek or brow brushed by edgefeathers of the archangel’s wings, while you stood a witness to somesuch enormity and from so near, what hope of understanding what they felt?

This is what they saw:

The excavations of the carnivore sent up blasts like storm surge against a rocky headland. Oceanic and salty: though these waters were scarlet blood. Honks of the leviathan cracked back from the cliffs of the valley, echoing, and the outflow of its gore purpled the brown river. The breeze ripened, coating Demane’s tongue and filling his nose with odor and savor of snake’s blood, snake’s meat. He could hardly make out the captain’s mélange of earthling and stardust, though in his very arms. From roosts in the basalt visages—from eyes and nostrils—shadows of greatwinged manikins launched into the upper void.

The sky was cloudless and the river without fog, but throughout the valley a misty pall floated in the middle of the air. Those huge birds wheeled down from the cliff faces, down through suspended vapor, down into the lower clarity. There, they took shape as feathered crocodiles. Half the monstrous flock was bigger and more gaudily colored than the other. One by one the raptors, sized like little men, alighted on the bountiful carcass. Soon dozens of them sawed away with barbed bills. The flux of the river foamed pink and white around the behemoth as submerged scavengers began to feed.

Lord of them all, the twolegged dragon glutted itself, and lesser monsters scattered whereverfrom it wished to bite. Even the rocs, scaly titans, and river sharks couldn’t strip the meat off that mountain in the time the two of them stood watching; still, substructures of skeleton, like support beams of a palace under construction, began to come into view.

The primordial awe ebbed from Demane first. His hand still lightly cupped the captain’s mouth. When he slid it away Captain turned vague, astonished eyes on him. They were the last shade of brown before black, color of coffee, and just now neither grim nor sad but wonderstruck. He was all soft-side-up for a change. And unplucked there on his mouth were kisses like lowhanging fruit, ripe and deeply pink. But the beloved too has extraordinary senses; he scents importunity. “The tiger,” Captain murmured and, blinking himself fully alert, spoke a word chilling even to the hottest lover: “Cumalo.”

Demane turned back to the depths of the forest. “Well, come on with you, then.”

• • • •

A season ago, Demane walked in low spirits through the market of Philipiya. On that afternoon, rather than pass by, he stopped at the mercenaries’ post. There was a man crying as usual: “Warriors! Brave men! Wealth!” Beside the crier stood another man, who smelled richly of extraterrestrial heritage. Demane went over. The one who cried put questions to him; Demane answered, his eyes on the other all the while, addressing him. Alumnus of many wars by the beads round his neck, and speechless in a black robe, black headscarf, there was no reason to believe the man other than mute—not deaf, though, for he attended Demane’s answers closely. Then they sparred for a brief bout. Demane spoke. “You staying over in a travelers’ barracks? They kind of nasty, ain’t they? You ought to come with me.” However this man answered, Demane knew his life was about to change. “I got good rooms in the amir’s palace. What’s your name, anyway?”

The man dismissed the crier with a glance. And then for the first time Demane heard Captain’s voice:

“I’m Isa of Sea-john, Demane. But if you come with the caravan, you must call me Captain.”

Wait, now: hush, Demane thought to himself. He’s bitterly ashamed of his voice. So you’d better not say, ‘Your talk is like a song. I never heard anything so beautiful in my life!’ “Where’s Sea-john at, Captain?”

“It’s the borough where foreigners live, down in Great Olorum. Call me Isa when it’s just us.”

“I don’t know that place, Olorum, either.” Demane said. They were crossing out of the market. The crowd among the vegetable stands convulsed, women with baskets fleeing toward the wharves: the late fishermen were coming in. Demane caught the captain’s hand and even when the jostling rush had passed kept hold of it.

“Look, Isa, I don’t get how you all do it here,” he said, “but I want to . . . love you. Understand me?”

The captain looked sideways at him and did not quite smile. But the handclasp lost neutrality and became erotic, a sign of something sure. For this man, Demane decided—on the spot, at that moment—he would stick it out, cross continents, do whatever love required. Captain said, “I understand you just fine.” The sublime low throb of his whisper!

Day after next, midmorning, he departed Philipiya with the caravan of Master Suresh l’Merqerim—without a word of goodbye to either the amir, or that harried ruler’s spoiled son. Menials know all that happens in a palace, however. And so two marble-swabbers, some laundresses, and a run-fetch boy were able to variously report having seen him leave in the company of an Olorumi mercenary, quite thin, unusually tall. And though Demane left behind emptied room, abandoning not one fine rich robe, nor the smallest gaud his patron had given him, the reports of all these menials coincided: as he’d shown up, so did he leave—in the altogether, and carrying just that same ratty little bag.

• • • •

Demane waited until he drew a breath smacking of carrion, and then said, “Let me see the point of your spear.” Captain presented his spear. Demane pulled the shaft lower and pricked a finger on the tip, smearing his blood so that it glazed the spearleaf entirely.

“Demane . . . ?” the captain sang low.

“With the magis’ greatwork, any knife, spear, rock or whatever can hurt a creature spinning on the Towers’ left while you’re on the Road. But off-Road, you need, uh . . . a sorcerer’s blessing. As long as you can see me, or me you, that spear’s good against the jukiere. All right?”

Captain nodded. And soon thereafter, in his nostrils too the reek of putrescence began to bloom and burn. A dull buzzing roar began to rise: countless thousands of flies, still at some distance. The captain’s face assumed its severest aspect, braced against a stench that could be little short of emetic for him.

Demane whispered, “If you need some help standing the smell . . .”

Manfully—foolishly—Captain shook his head.

A clearing. Flies frenzied in the air. The sun shone down upon a massive stump, truncated by lightning-strike about ten feet above their heads. The cataclysmic fall of this adolescent redwood had smashed a long glade through the jungle. The gap in the canopy admitted light by which all the boneyard’s horrors could be seen: several dozen bodies, human and swine.

Some butcher had not judged them different meats. For with intimate promiscuity cadaver of man and carcass of pig lay strewn together, in every attitude and condition of death. A few freshkill, some fallen to bones. Most bodies in intermediate states: well and thoroughly dead—liquescent, bloated, purpling—and yet quick with life too, such were the worms, the seething coverlet of flies. Disjointed limbs were littered round about; and everywhere underfoot, clots of errant pork, strange gobbets, ribbons of flesh. Bad as these sights were, for Captain the smell could only be worse. Breathe by mouth if he liked, but the gases of decomposition would be stinking to point of savor. Every breath over his tongue would taste of vile broth.

Cravenly, Demane invoked arts to which Captain had no recourse. He kept raw emotion at bay, his sensibilities more nearly animal than a man’s.

As Aunty had once with him, he murmured and gestured: “. . . see how the wizard’s two-times picky? Us or pigs: nothing else. Ah, look at that one there. The way the jukiere take only two or three good bites? It won’t fill up on just one body, they always waste. It is a [mainstay of entropic necromancy] . . . part of their bad juju . . .”

And there was Cumalo. The cat had kicked sticks, leaves, dirt over the body. Out from under this mess extended their brother’s legs and sandaled feet. Demane and the captain approached. A half-dozen crows saucily dawdled, gouging out last bits, cawing complaints at them, before at last taking to wing and scattering down to other feasts. With the butt of his spear Demane knocked aside the shoddy cairn. Facedown, Cumalo lay atop swatches of his clawed-apart robe. The rigid fingers of one hand clenched about some final treasure, which Demane crouched to recover: a knucklebone die. Iridescent flies resettled along the white and red-gummed exposure of his pelvis and femur bones. The back of the body, apart from the mauled shoulder, and the neck, lolling askew—“You see, Captain? They kill by choking”—remained whole. Demane swung the butt of his spear toward bushes a few long strides away, under which were heaped the ropes and bags of their brother’s entrails, pulled out whither the taint couldn’t turn the meat faster. Demane paused doubtfully. Did he belabor? Was he speaking with strange dispassion? Both of these? He peeked sidelong.

Captain sweated copiously. His face was drawn taut, immobile but for his upper lip quivering in a nauseated sneer. Abruptly he staggered back, bowed forcibly: retching forth a mouthful of water, and then heaving dryly several times. There was no reckless courage in this world—no hardihood, no manful strength, no mad feats on fields of battle—that would keep down the gorge in the boneyard of a jukiere. Demane allowed bitter citrus attar to flood his mouth. He pulled the captain upright and forced a deep strange kiss. The agile mollusc of his tongue lapped over and under Captain’s, and then around and up into either nostril. Once let go, Captain sucked in a long breath and rubbed at his nose, while the tart potency stunned his sense of taste and smell. He grunted—hornlike, tuneful—and nodded ungracious thanks.

The men this side of the continent didn’t like their weakness watched, so Demane turned away, studying the ground. He wandered, and hunkered down next to prints lately pressed into bloody muck. The noisome airs and flies’ whining roar blunted the fine acuity of his nose and ears; but sight had all its sharpness. Something was bothering him about the sign, these prints; what? When Demane next glanced over, Captain had found the remains of the merchant Iuliano. Demane looked down again, trying to grasp what eluded him. Jukiere tracks, no doubt about that: the spread and shape of toes, the forefoot polydactyl where the claws didn’t retract . . . And this was sure enough the boneyard of a jukiere, all the waste of half eaten bodies, and yet, something—

A dry stick cracked, nearby.

“Here it come!” Demane shouted.

The great cat roared, just out of sight in the trees. Closer to the noise, Captain bolted toward it, spear in hand. Demane had followed only three steps when the jukiere broke cover and streaked across his path, crashing westward into the brush, though the captain had gone north. “West, Captain, west!” Demane shouted, while turning to give chase.

His attention narrowed to matters of pursuit. The great cat surged around the trunks of trees, plunged through black densities of brush. Demane held his best sprint without tiring; but faster over the short distance, the jukiere kept easily ahead. The ground began to grade upwards, and there Demane found himself gaining with every step. He burst into sunlight where the slope cleared to treelessness between thickets. Only a short lunge away up the embankment, the tiger whirled at bay. It leapt back downwards.

Male. The bearded ruff, those thickly gnarled foreshoulders. Downcurved tusks a full foot long—

Demane moved with instinctual speed. Planting his spear’s butt against the ground, he leveled its point toward the cat, and braced for impact. The shaft jarred deeply into leaf-rot. Demane ducked from scrabbling claws, yanking with all his might. Impaled, the jukiere vaulted overhead and on down the embankment. The spear tore loose from his grasp, he himself somersaulting downward one time, before arresting his descent with a snatched handhold of rank vine.

Only in movement could the jukiere be seen. When still, the creature’s brindled coat merged with the jungle’s greenish light and shadow. The fur of its flanks and back was mature evergreen, dark-stippled as if muddy. Its fur hung thick and longer along throat and underbelly, new-grass-color, white with age at the fringes. The spear had broken the joint of the great cat’s left foreshoulder, and there was lodged. The cat stepped its right forepaw and great weight onto the shaft, but the wood held, unbending. Not would it ever break, so long as Demane lived. Batting at the shaft, the jukiere worried at it until the spear fell free.

Demane kicked against slick crushed greenery and mud. His hand clutching at vines, his feet gaining purchase neither to move upwards nor to stand. Wind rose at his back, blowing to the jukiere and past him came a windborne power spinning counter to his own, TSIMTSOA. The hot air became foul with maneater’s funk, with bowels torn bloodily open; the wind rang with such cries as quarry gives when caught, when eaten alive: the squeals and screams, a rare decipherable word, help. As the jukiere pulled strength from the Wildeeps, this shrieking miasma whipped about it. The red hole in the tiger’s shoulder ceased to bleed, and fleshed over, and the nude flesh furred. That fourth paw came down gingerly. The cat put confident weight on it.

He could do the same, Demane saw: spinning the power as TSIM rather than TSOA. A chrism of bright sun poured down, and humanity dropped off him like a cloak. His imperfect flesh ripped itself inside-out with the rise to perfection, Not piece by piece, all at once: metamorphosis is like death, as he welcomed the change he’d fought off since crossing over into the Wildeeps in that it ruptures mind from body. By grace of the blood, though, your consciousness can cohere into flesh and bone after transformation. If you’re strong enough, if you don’t vanish into the void. Only you can judge whether the gods’ heritage is enough expressed in you to bring you back past throwing off human shape. No one can tell you that; only you will know. For a talisman, gather thoughts of what matters most to you.

—All mine shall live so long as I do: I spear these desperadoes in defense of my brothers. For clumsy little Walead; for Faedou who took a knife to the leg; for Ca—

Join together these precious lights as a beacon, and the gathered shining of your treasures will call you back from the fall into death.

—Aunty needed one of us to pick up the burden. Somebody has to. I’m not leaving the green hills to hurt you, whom I love. I go because I’m the last one left who can—

Becoming the stormbird is as easy for me as you put on your mantle for holidays; I’ve got the trick of it. I think you can get it too. But don’t hurt yourself, Mountain Bear. A heart like yours or mine works miracles best doing for others. So wait on your cause. Or on love. His talons, rootlike, sank lengthily into the mud. Demane came back within a heartbeat: winged and leatherskinned, now. He was no longer a couple inches shy of six feet but just past seven, with hands and maw full of knives.

The tiger made to spring, low and hunch-shouldered. Its sooty lips curled up, the ribbon of its tongue lolling. Fiery pinpricks glowed in its wizard-eyes.

Demane fell back a step, and another man’s last thoughts became his own:

Four lines of black ice slit his belly to tatters. His first scream owed more to fright and surprise, not yet wholly to pain. Hot wet weight slopped down his lap and legs, the living burden of his body suddenly lightened. He thought only to—run! But already too weak, he fell sprawling about to shout Help! Captain! Sorcerer! But agony forestalled any such outcry: fingerlength spikes drove through his shoulder. The socket burst, collarbone crumbled, and bony wing of his back shattered. Great rough strength slung him through the mud. The bonfires on the Road went dark. He saw nothing, felt only the scratching smack of leaves, and weird soft loops entangling his legs. He could scream, he could kick—there was nothing else left to do. A gamey fetor lunged at him, hot, faceward. Last act in life, he got up his elbow, somehow, into the way. Almighty teeth savaged that arm, and folded it down throttlingly around his own throat. There was no breath and no breath and still there was none, and still none. You could count these last slow final blinks on the fingers of one hand, nor need all five. Drugged sleep dampened the fires of his terror. This world ebbing, the enigma burgeoned . . .

Cumalo died. Demane woke, toppling backwards under the weight of the wizard. Claws raked down his chest unable to score his hide. Fangs closed on his impenetrable throat. Stronger, he tore himself free of the crushing maw. The evil wind blew again, and the wizard’s green brindled coat went black and bright as a thundercloud, its fur blazing and freezing in restless patches. Crackling flashes snapped between the hot and cold spots. Demane struck again and again, with all his strength, but his bladed fingers turned on the jukiere’s flesh, and frost bit his hands. Fire scorched them. Where was his spear? The absent gods had left that spear for this very purpose: killing jukiere. Where was it? Neither talon nor claw drawing any blood, they traded blows, impervious to each other. The cat snarled, and Demane husked the strange roar that bespoke his anger in this shape.

And still the Wildeeps went without master, its numina inexhaustible and unclaimed: so draw again. Drink!

Demane drank. His galled and ashen hands blackened, sleek and whole. When I was even younger than you, my mother came back from a long time away—but not in the flesh. She came as light, only to say goodbye. I think she’d gone too far or too deep working some great miracle, and so lost the route back to humanity. He batted the jukiere off its feet and against a great tree, which burst to flinders, the splintered wood into flames. Back broken, the jukiere tried to rise, front paws scrabbling. Time to finish it. Laying his talons point-on-point to make spears of his hands, Demane winged toward the cat. Which drink would be one too far? When was the last line crossed? Already?

In unison Demane and the wizard reached to partake of the Wildeeps—and neither could. Back and forth, they wrestled for ascendancy, the jukiere winning. It surged to its feet. On patches of its fur the action of minute particles ceased, or nearly so; but the hot patches blazed with diametric heat. When Demane speared down a hand to impale the cat, his hand burst into flames. The talons shattered on contact. Seething eruptions of blisters went up his arm. Body and wings: his whole self began to smoke. He crashed to earth. Trees—all the vegetation roundabout—crisped to black, the cinders falling to white ash, and the ash too burning. In another moment, some patch of the jukiere’s fur, infinitely cold, would meet parallel fires, and the resulting discharge . . .

One last drink, then: nothing measured, as much as he could hold. Everything. The talons that had broken regrew, the intact hardened to adamant, and then tapered finer than a hairsbreadth. He flung that hand around, knifing into flesh, cleaving between ribs. The wizard halted the talons’ plunge with its whole visceral will; its stormy fur went dark. They strained against one another. And still Demane drank, as the river below drinks when the dam above has broken. “The gods travel as light,” she said. “I’m joining the Tower in the purissime. You and the children come up when you can.” A star falling the wrong way: that’s how she left me. It is possible for one to win and yet lose—or the other to lose, and die, but take out the enemy too. The jukiere stopped its struggles and instead lunged, with jaws fully agape, forward onto the impaling talons. The tiger’s fangs and tusks, death-limned and aglow with every mustered erg of necromancy, would for a last act snap shut upon Demane’s head.

There’s another, deeper metamorphosis, I think. No, I can’t tell you anything about that one. We’ll learn it by ourselves, if we ever do. You and me both.

Demane spat forth a black glimmering particulate which unmade everything it touched. Each annihilative spark vanished in the instant of unmaking until, headless, the jukiere fell—stormbird triumphant! Demane roared as strength upon strength poured unstoppably into him. His skin took light, sublimating off his bones, and they themselves began to glow, turning to hot gas. Up or away he was carried at great speed across darkness into some dense, rushing, many-layered radiance. In the tidal light he found his tier among winged brethren, who gladly made room for him. And having gathered him up, glory deepened to sweep him from the shores of Earth back toward infinity, but she caught his arm. The woman had the quiet poise of Demane’s elder sister, a muscled shape like his own, Aunty’s stature, the ageless looks of his parents: so that they all must share close blood, though who this stranger was Demane couldn’t guess. “Stay longer than a moment, boy, and there’s no going back. Will you let that jukiere take over the Wild Depths?” Hard to care about terrestrial trivia when the gods of TSIMTSOA called from only a little farther upstream . . . “Wait, boy—wait! Didn’t you leave somebody behind? What was it you kept meaning to say to him?”

—But you hate this life, Captain; you know you do. So if you promised ole Suresh this last journey, then come away with me after we get to Great Olorum. All this is so easy in the green hills. There, you and me could—

Demane broke from the light, and fought his way back down toward mortality.

• • • •

“Ha!” Demane laughed; the sonority was palpable in his belly, his bones, his teeth. “I can feel that one. My teeth jumping.” Next, Isa gave a rich whistle too high and fast to credit from human lips, except that Demane lay there watching the feat, listening rapt. It was like a bitty songbird’s welcome to the sunrise. “Now that one’s pretty, right there. But say again? It went by so fast, I couldn’t catch one word.” Other voices too, none of them any strain at all for him, every one equally his own. And at last Demane exclaimed, “No, no, no: that one! I like that one best.”

“This is a woman’s voice, you know.”

“Is it? Beautiful on anybody. Just seem like it fit you, that’s all. But I could see a man or woman, really.”

“No, it’s a woman’s voice. Deepwaters,[1] we say in Sea-john. Men’s start just a little bit deeper, and not so rich. I like this one, too. A long time ago, I used to . . . well, that stuff doesn’t matter now. All right, pop—for you. But only when we’re alone, you hear? On caravan I have to speak much lower; for respect, so brothers will follow. This one’s still too high.”

• • • •

The weight of the jukiere towed him to his knees, and from there sprawled facedown in its clammy fur. Just a man again, with little more than any man’s strength, Demane couldn’t shift it. The wizard was heavy. Its eyes had turned to glass, its flesh to a quarter ton of clay. He braced his heels to the headless carcass and, pulling back against the wet-suck of the wound, dredged forth his arm. It came free badly scored along its length, all gashed and chewed by splintered bone.

He cradled his torn arm to him. A sip of power from the Wildeeps would heal these injuries. But could he hold himself to that, just a sip, or would another apocalyptic binge rapture him beyond the sky, newest and least godling of the radiant pantheons? Well before noon on the day he decides to go dry, the drunkard already finds himself trembling. That Demon whispers: You can handle it. A little taste. Just get your lips wet.

No . . . he’d better let the wounds stand.

Captain was nowhere in sight, and nowhere close by: must have gotten turned around. He’d know to go back and wait at the boneyard. And just how long would he abide there before striking out alone? In space, it was only a quarter league east to reach the Road, but there were several millennia to cross in time . . . Demane cut off that thought. He fetched his spear from where it had fallen. The captain, no fool, would wait longer than the short while that had passed.

Demane jogged back the way he’d come.

Just a man again, child of TSIMTSOA? Knifesharp leaves struck him always flat-side, never edged; thickets thinned for him, and fanged thornbrakes, pulled aside, whipped back and missed, points always angled to his advantage: the briars caught by greenery, or broken off or blunted. Any other man—just a man—would wonder that all the rotten bits of debris, the sticks and rocks underfoot, kept presenting only soft or smooth-side-up to his soles. But His Majesty, thinking deep thoughts, was oblivious to the scramble of his countless servitors. Demane had yet to learn he’d never be quit of godhead having now put it on.

Ahead was a tree. Approaching it Demane’s step slowed, his knees made weak by sudden understanding. Jukiere piss-sign had splashed all over the tree’s roots, wet only a day ago: at most two. But the scent didn’t belong to the jukiere cooling stiff and flyblown on the embankment behind him. There was another, nor aged nor male. She was in fresh youth, just a few days from throwing a litter of fiends. Demane ran.

• • • •

Soft fingers held him, a damp cloth wiping. He blinked sleepily.

Back from bathing, Isa looked up from these ministrations. “It’s true, what you said. But you don’t know the brothers yet, Demane. Somebody’s got to look out for them.” He tossed the cloth aside, beyond the sheets. “It’s in you to learn fast. So after we come to Great Olorum, take over the captaincy if you want.” Isa smiled. “I’d follow you. You’d be ten times better at it than I am.”

Demane sat up, caught him, pulled him down. “You just now met me in the market. Where do you get all this?”

“I’m telling you, D., you’ve got a hero’s shine on you. Just as bright as anybody I ever knew. I know it when I see it.”

“Me? Naw; I’m no hero. You got me mixed with yourself, maybe. You been in big battles, ain’t you? And wasn’t you over there in that war?” Demane tapped the red coral and white shell necklace Isa wore, one among many, and many-colored. Isa gave him no reply, only a glance that said too much, or said it too vaguely, for interpretation (his finger tracing vascular bulk and striation of Demane’s shoulder and arm). Over there, yes: and marshal of the campaign, too. But Demane would only learn this much later on, when the knowledge could make no difference. “Me, I don’t know nothing about big combat or command. You the one.”

“I know what I’m good for. Believe that, Demane. And I know that if you keep up your wandering, this whole continent will know your name one day.”

Demane smiled peaceably, settling deeper in the pillows; his fastidious new lover sprawled half on, half beside him. If the point was to please him, then Isa could just as well have lain beside him until morning, smelling funky and used. But during two days in bed, with only a quick step out here and there to wolf some meal in the market, Isa always found an imperceptible moment to slip off and bathe, between each time they made love and next. And he never spoiled the afterglow, nor lingered long enough to be missed. What timing! A supernatural gift for love, you’d almost have said. So off south—tomorrow morning!—over the burning rocky hills, across the weeks-wide desert, and finally to some distant, meridonal city called Great Olorum? Sure, all right. This man’s reverent touch, his vox seraphica; the beard that looked to be coarse, but was downy to the touch . . . what was there to complain of here?

“I was wrong about one thing, though.”

“Yeah, whas that?”

“I thought you were going to be a hard man. You know—mean to me.”

“What?” Demane frowned. “But why would you go with somebody like that?” He sat up on an elbow. “Why—?”

“Aw, don’t get upset, pop. I’m glad you’re kind.” If you’d distract a lion? Throw some bloody steak. “Hey!” Captain slipped a smooth long leg across Demane’s lap to straddle him. “Ready to go again? Uh huh, I see. We’ve got to make sure you get plenty now, because I can’t let you have it like this on the road . . .”

• • • •

Overcast warred with blue in the windy firmament. It was sweltering, not long past noon. Two heaps of ash remained of the night’s bonfires, red cinders winking in the white powder. A half dozen burros wandered on the black earth verge, heads in the green while they stood in the mud of the Road. The caravan had decamped, all save for a few brothers—three, four, or five—prayerfully huddled at center-Road. Past the distortion of the veil, the brotherly shapes wavered as if seen through heat shimmer; only the faintest trace of their wet and unwashed humanity came to his nose, their voices remote echoes in his ears. He tossed his burden onto the Road. The grisly decapitation of the monster struck the ground not far from where they knelt in strange vigil, and the head rolled closer still. Five dim forms rose, making noises that were murmurs to him, too faint to make sense of. Walead?—yes; it was Walé who crouched down again to poke at the gore, the tusks, the tongue lolling over the sharp teeth of the gaping mouth.

Xho Xho ran up to the edge of the Road where Demane stood like a revenant on the threshold.

“Where the captain went?” the boy asked. “Why you don’t come out of the trees, Sorcerer?”

“I cain’t, Xho.”

“Hey, you watch out,” Kazza called. “Hear me, Xho Xho? Watch out now!”

The other brothers kept a warier distance. Something wasn’t right. The Sorcerer was barked over with half-dried mud, jellied gore, twigs, and bits of leaves. Blood slathered his left hand and arm to the elbow, the right one lacerated and ensleeved with blood right to the shoulder. He looked to have gathered up some man’s spilled wet insides and tried, by hand, to restore them to the voided cavity. Invisible yet bright, heatless but unbearably hot, he bore a corona any fool could feel. Xho Xho alone was unawed, hanging back from fear of the forest, not of the Sorcerer.

Demane knew them by turban, shaggy hair, narrow shoulders. Kazza, Wilfredo, Faried. He called. “I’ma do my best to meet up with you down south. Go on! Catch up with the caravan. I see you when the caravan cross that other stream southside of the Wildeeps, all right?”

Kazza crept a little closer. “You dead, Sorcerer? Come back some kind of haint?”

Demane chuckled. “No, baby.” A grim noise, for a chuckle. “I just made a bargain, became what y’all been calling me—a sorcerer. It ain’t easy for me to get on the Road or leave the Wildeeps anymore.” Demane put a hand back against the nearest trunk and leaned, taking seat at the roots. He rested his hands on updrawn knees. “I want to see Sea-john down in Great Olorum. Y’all go run after the caravan. I see you down at other end of the Wildeeps, Godwilling, as Faedou say. Take that jukiere head to show Master Suresh and them.”

Xho Xho stepped into the forest. The rest cried out in alarm. The smeared apparition of the boy wobbled as if seen through rheum or tears, and became clear once off the Road, by the tree where Demane sat. “Faedou all of a sudden just up and fell out. You better come see, Sorcerer. He dying, I think.” Xho Xho took hold of a filthy hand and tried to pull Demane to standing: budging him not. “And where’s the captain?”

“I told you, little man,” Demane said. “I cain’t get onto the Road.” On both cheeks he bore a delta of rinsed skin.

Willy called. “Ehtá a punto de morir, Sorcerer. I seen his leg, and it look about rotted off already. How he come this far on it, I don’t even know. Tell you this, though. If you don’t work some kind of sorcery on him quick, Faedou will be stone dead fore the night come.”

Demane looked out onto the Road. Someone lay there stretched out on blankets just where the brothers had knelt. It was like peering down into deep running water, trying to see across the veil between the Road and Wildeeps. From here, he couldn’t make out who lay there, or whether that brother stirred, or his chest still rose and fell.

Demane stood and wiped either eye with a wrist. “Let me see what I could do. Y’all carry him to me. The Wildeeps won’t hurt none of you. This whole place is my house now.” Afraid, the brothers dithered. Demane spoke again, in tones to get them jumping. “All right! Don’t just stand there stupid! Bring him here.” As they moved to obey Demane gave Xho Xho a little push back towards the others. “Help em carry, little man. You and Walead can lift one corner of the blankets together.”

Like a son too often told before, Be patient, your father’s coming back soon, Xho Xho clung to the Sorcerer’s hand. “Wait. Tell me something, though,” the boy said. “What happen to the captain?”

Demane might have answered, but a fit of palsy took his face. His mouth worked soundlessly. He shook his head.

• • • •

The shroud of leaves frays and a brightness ahead dapples the jungle. There are glimpses of the jagged stump rising into sunlight. He can hear but not yet see the jook-toothed tiger growling, the captain and his harsh, controlled pants. All while Demane runs, he shouts too, I’m coming. Hang on. There was another one. I killed it. He bursts out into hot glare. Captain and the tiger are a hundred long paces up, tangling where other trees overshadow the compost of leaf and woodrot remaining of the felled tree’s canopy. Captain has lost his spear and fights with a sword. It’s always been sheathed across his back, although he but rarely draws it. A sword’s very much the wrong weapon, requiring far too close quarters, for the power and claws of a jukiere. Captain’s spear must have broken. He wouldn’t just throw it aside, he wouldn’t.

First one paw and then the other bats at him. As sails of a ship belly in the wind, when tacking hard off one course to another, Captain bows deeply over the claws, and as fast again, bows at a slightly altered angle. His robe’s much slashed but person still unscathed. As if down some abyss in freefall, Captain drops. The tiger leaps over and misses pinning him flat. He’s up off the ground, afoot when she wheels on him with chops snapping. He skips back blindly from the fangs and bringing around his sword twohanded, all his might in the blow, arrests the jukiere’s whirling lunge. This lays another thin red stripe through the cat’s darkbrindled fur. She flinches, though not much. That cut and the others are weirdly shallow. The wizard won’t be killed without a better weapon than the one Captain holds . . . Demane should have been at his side all along. Isa. Hang on, Isa. Captain’s attention splits for an instant. He must see Demane coming through the light and hear his shouts. That much he’s almost sure of.

Demane turns an ankle in foul grease: Some meatstuff or slick runoff, once a pig or man. He springs up and hobbles on. If delayed at all, it’s half an instant, if hurt he’s hardly slower than before: still, these charges will figure among those he tenders against himself on nights hereafter, when once more sitting up in sleepless reverie. The man you could have saved if you’d gotten him sooner under your care lies struggling in his agonies. And now, only at the very end, he turns to your voice and chooses to trust. There you kneel and whisper, urging him toward the one choice life still offers. He takes it. There’s a look to that, as grace suffuses a wracked visage. Let go, Faedou. It’s all right now. Let go. Even the best of healers come to learn this look. It steals then over the captain’s face. He quits his brilliant efforts and stops moving within easy reach of teeth and claws. The sword slips from his hand. Demane shouts. The distance is chancy, his throwing arm badly wounded, but still he hurls the spear.

[1] Tiefer alt. A voice to sing the pale sour out of lemons, sing them luscious orange; as much the sensations of eros on the body as mere sound in the ears.

Kai Ashante Wilson’s stories, “Super Bass” and “The Devil in America,” can be read for free online at Tor.com; and his story, “Kaiju maximus®,” at Fantasy-magazine.com. His novella A Taste of Honey is available for purchase from all fine e-book purveyors. His novelette, «Légendaire.», can be read in theanthology Stories for Chip. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards, with his novella The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps winning the Crawford Award for best debut novel of 2015. Kai Ashante Wilson lives in New York City.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of the backers and readers of the first volume last year and this year. This is all for you, and I hope you enjoy the book.

Thank you to all the writers who allowed me to reprint their amazing work for this anthology. Thank you to Galen Dara for creating the incredible original art for the cover of the book—a good cover is a powerful thing to draw the reader’s eye. Thank you to Polgarus Studios for the interior layout and Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout.

Thank you to Skyboat Media for putting together another excellent audiobook.

My friends in the Dire Turtle writing group, thank you as ever for your support and enthusiasm. (And thanks for letting me stay in the group even though I’ve barely found the time to write!)

Thank you for those who offered rewards for the Kickstarter: Erica L. Satifka, Martin L. Shoemaker, Sunil Patel, and Naomi Kritzer.

Many people helped spread the word, including Mike Glyer at File770, Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, and the good folks at Escape Artists.

Thank you all, so much.

—David Steffen—

Backer Appreciation

This is a partial list of those who backed the Kickstarter campaign. There were many others, and they all made this project possible.

Abital and Daryl

Kate Baker

Steve Barnett

Jonathan D. Beer

The Bradley-Ryder Family

Chris Brant

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Caeoltoiri

Neil Campbell

Ian Chung

Rich Coker

Crazy Lady Used Books

Dani Daly

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Doire

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Mr. Glass

Steve Gold

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Jim Gotaas

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Michael Green

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Jaciad2

K.G. Jewell

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Luke Johnson

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Ken Josenhans

Michelle Kurrle

Michael Lehrman

Lennhoff Family

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E.M. Middel

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RBC

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Michael Scholl

Michael Scott Shappe

Jeff Soesbe

Brian Vander Veen

Bonnie Warford

Izaak Weiss

Jon White

Shara S. White

John Winkelman

Peter Y. Wong

About the Editor

David Steffen is an editor, writer, publisher, and software engineer. He has edited and written for the Diabolical Plots zine 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, 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 last year’s first 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.