Author: Aliette de Bodard; Caroline Yoachim; Rebecca Jordan; Sam J. Miller
Date: 2017-11-26 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Fantasy; Collections & Anthologies; Science Fiction; General
Description: This is the third annual edition of the Long List Anthology. Every year, supporting members of WorldCon nominate their favorite stories first published during the previous year to determine the top five in each category for the final Hugo Award ballot. This is an anthology collecting more of the stories from that nomination list to get them to more readers. The Long List Anthology Volume 3 collects 20 science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories from that nomination list, totaling over 500 pages of fiction by writers from all corners of the world. From intelligent appliances gone feral to Love
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

The Long List Anthology

Volume 3

More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

Edited by David Steffen

THE LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 3: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

edited by David Steffen
www.diabolicalplots.com

Copyright © 2017 David Steffen

Stories copyright © 2016 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: “The Alchemist” by Amanda Makepeace © 2017

Cover layout by Pat R. Steiner

Layout: Polgarus Studio

To my family and everyone who has given encouragement and support in any form.
To everyone out there who tries to make the world a better place
To anyone who feels like they don’t fit in, there is a place for you too.

PERMISSIONS

“Red in Tooth and Cog” by Cat Rambo. Copyright © 2016 by Cat Rambo. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction March/April 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Salvaging of Ghosts” by Amal El-Mohtar. Copyright © 2016 by Aliette de Bodard. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #195. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Research Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” by Caroline M. Yoachim. Copyright © 2016 by Caroline M. Yoachim. First published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 70. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Razorback” by Ursula Vernon. Copyright © 2016 by Ursula Vernon. First published in Apex Magazine, Issue #80. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“We Have a Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You” by Rebecca Ann Jordan. Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Ann Jordan. First published in Strange Horizons, April 18, 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Lullaby for a Lost World” by Aliette de Bodard. Copyright © 2016 by Aliette de Bodard. First published on Tor.com, June 8, 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Terminal” by Lavie Tidhar. Copyright © 2016 by Lavie Tidhar. First published on Tor.com, April 13, 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands” by Seanan McGuire. Copyright © 2016 by Seanan McGuire. First published in Uncanny Magazine May/June 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Things With Beards” by Sam J. Miller. Copyright © 2016 by Sam J. Miller. First published in Clarkesworld #117. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Venus Effect” by Violet Allen. Copyright © 2016 by Violet Allen. First published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue #79. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Visitor From Taured” by Ian R. MacLeod. Copyright © 2016 by Ian R. MacLeod. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction September 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Blood Grains Speak Through Memories” by Jason Sanford. Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sanford. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #195. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker. Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Pinsker. First published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 69. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Dead Djinn in Cairo” by P. Djèlí Clark. Copyright © 2016 by P. Djèlí Clark. First published in Tor.com, May 18, 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Red as Blood and White as Bone” by Theodora Goss. Copyright © 2016 by Theodora Goss. First published in Tor.com, May 4, 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Foxfire, Foxfire” by Yoon Ha Lee. Copyright © 2016 by Yoon Ha Lee. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #194. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Forest of Memory” by Mary Robinette Kowal. Copyright © 2016 by Mary Robinette Kowal. First published by Tor.com Publishing. Reprinted by permission of the author and Tor.com Publishing.

“Chimera” by Gu Shi, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu and Ken Liu. Copyright in English © 2016 by Gu Shi, S. Qiouyi Lu, and Ken Liu. First published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, October 2015. First published in English in Clarkesworld Issue #114. Reprinted by permission of the author and translators.

“Hammers on Bone” by Cassandra Khaw. Copyright © 2016 by Cassandra Khaw. First published by Tor.com Publishing, October 11, 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author and Tor.com Publishing.

“Runtime” by S.B. Divya. Copyright © 2016 by S.B. Divya. First published by Tor.com Publishing. Reprinted by permission of the author and Tor.com Publishing.

Contents

Permissions
Foreword
Red in Tooth and Cog • Cat Rambo
A Salvaging of Ghosts • Aliette de Bodard

Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 • Caroline M. Yoachim

Razorback • Ursula Vernon

We Have a Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You? • Rebecca Ann Jordan

Lullaby for a Lost World • Aliette de Bodard
Terminal • Lavie Tidhar
Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands • Seanan McGuire
Things With Beards • Sam J. Miller
The Venus Effect • Violet Allen
The Visitor From Taured • Ian R. MacLeod

Blood Grains Speak Through Memories • Jason Sanford

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea • Sarah Pinsker

A Dead Djinn in Cairo • P. Djèlí Clark

Red as Blood and White as Bone • Theodora Goss

Foxfire, Foxfire • Yoon Ha Lee

Forest of Memory • Mary Robinette Kowal

Chimera • Gu Shi • Translators S. Qiouyi Lu and Ken Liu

Hammers on Bone • Cassandra Khaw
Runtime • S.B. Divya
Acknowledgments
Backer Appreciation
About the Editor
More From Diabolical Plots Publishing

Foreword

Here we are in the third volume of the Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List. I wasn’t sure if a third volume would fund in the Kickstarter campaign as well as the previous volumes, since the Hugo Award landscape has changed quite a bit this year, so I’m very happy to see that there is still interest from the readers to keep the project going. I’m enjoying the work and I’m enjoying the outcome, so I would like to continue it as an ongoing yearly anthology as long as there’s interest.

If you don’t follow the Hugo Awards, I suggest that you do—anyone can nominate and vote if you pay for a Supporting Membership to that year’s WorldCon. One of the perks of the Supporting Membership is that you get the Hugo Packet, downloadable copies of many of the works on the final ballot. After the Hugo Award ceremony, they also publish a longer list of nominated works, which is the basis of this anthology.

This year’s cover art is “The Alchemist” by an artist new to this series: Amanda Makepeace. I am very glad to work with her!

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

—David Steffen, December 2017—

Red in Tooth and Cog
By Cat Rambo

A phone can be so much. Your memory, your edge against boredom, your source of inspiration. There’s always an app for whatever you need. Renee valued her phone accordingly, even celebrating it by giving way to the trend for fancy phone-cases. Its edges were bezeled with bling she’d won on a cruise the year before, and she’d had some tiny opals, legacy of her godmother, set into the center.

It was an expensive, new-model phone in a pretty case, and that was probably why it was stolen.

Renee was in the park near work. A sunny day, on the edge of cold, the wind carrying spring with it like an accessory it was testing for effect.

She set her phone down on the bench beside her as she unfolded her bento box, foil flaps levering back to reveal still-steaming rice, quivering tofu.

Movement caught her eye. She pulled her feet away as a creature leaped up onto the bench slats beside her, an elastic-band-snap’s worth of fear as it grabbed the phone, half as large as the creature itself, and moved to the other end of the bench.

The bento box clattered as it hit the path, rice grains spilling across the grey concrete.

Renee thought the creature an animal at first, but it was actually a small robot, a can opener that had been greatly and somewhat inexpertly augmented and modified. It had two corkscrew claws, and grasshopper legs made from nutcrackers to supplement the tiny wheels on its base, originally designed to let it move to hand as needed in a kitchen. Frayed raffia wrapped its handles, scratchy strands feathering out to weathered fuzz. Its original plastic had been some sort of blue, faded now to match the sidewalk beneath her sensible shoes.

The bench jerked as the robot leaped again, moving behind the trashcan, still carrying her phone. She stood, stepping over the spilled rice to try to get to it, but the rhododendron leaves thrashed and stilled, and her phone was gone.

She went to the Tellbox to seek the help of the park’s assistant, an older model humanoid with one mismatched, updated arm, all silver and red LED readouts in contrast to the shabbier aged plastic of the original form, built in a time when a slightly retro animatronic look had been popular.

“How do I get my phone back?” she demanded after recounting what had happened.

The robot shook its smiling gender-neutral head. “Gone.” Its shoulders hunched toward her. “I hope you have a backup.”

“Of course,” she snapped, “but that’s my phone. The case was customized. Irreplaceable.” The case reflected her, was her, as though what had been carried off was a doll-sized replica of Renee, clutched in the arms of a robotic King Kong.

“Contact the owner!” she said, but the robot shook its head again.

“No one owns those,” it said.

“But it was modified. Who did that?”

“They do it to themselves. They get thrown out, but their AI chips try to keep them going. That’s the problem with self-repairing, self-charging appliances—they go feral.”

“Feral appliances?” she said in disbelief. She’d heard of such things, but surely they were few and far between. Not something that lived in the same park in which she ate her lunch every once in a while.

• • • •

The next few days she became a regular, haunted the park every lunch hour, looking for any sign of her phone. Her job as a minor advertising functionary gave her lunches plus “creativity breaks” that were served as well by sitting outside as by any of the other approved modes, like music or drugs.

She was on a bench, scrolling through mail on her replacement phone, when she spotted the phenomenon. Tall grass divided like a comb to display a bright wriggle, then another. She didn’t move, didn’t startle them.

Her first thought had been snake and they did resemble snakes. But they were actually styluses, two of the old Google kind, a loose chain of circles in the pocket that would snap into rigidity when you squeezed the ball at one end. One was an iridescent peacock metal, somewhat dust-dulled. The other was a matte black, with little silver marks like scars. It had several long limbs, thin as needles, spiking from its six-inch length. The peacock had no such spurs; it was also a half-inch shorter.

They slithered through the unmown grass, heading for another large rhododendron, its roots covered with English ivy and shadows.

She stood in order to watch the last few feet of their journey. At the motion, they froze, but when she did not move for a few moments, they grew bold again and continued on.

The robot keeper crunched over to stand by Renee as she looked at the rhododendron.

“Why isn’t this place better tended?” she asked the robot.

“It is a nature preserve as well as a park,” it said. “That was the only way we could obtain funding.”

“But everything is growing wild.” She pointed at the bank of English ivy rolling across a rock near them. “That’s an invasive species. If you let it, it will take over.”

It shrugged, one of those mechanical gestures few humans could imitate, boneless and smooth as though the joints were gliding on a track.

“This is one of the few places in the city where feral appliances can run loose,” it said. “Not the big ones, nothing larger than a sewing machine or toaster, no fridges or hot tubs or even a house heart. But your toothbrushes, key fobs, and screwdrivers? There’s plenty of space for them here and enough lunchtime visitors that they can scavenge a few batteries and parts.” Again it shrugged.

The styluses had vanished entirely underneath the rhododendron.

“You don’t do anything about them?” she asked the robot.

“It is not within my directives,” it said.

Two days later, she saw the phone-thief climbing a maple tree. Someone had been tying bits of metal thread on the trunks and the creature was clipping each with an extended claw and tucking them somewhere inside its body. It used its grasshopper legs, set in a new configuration, to grip the bark, moving up and down with surprising speed as it jumped from branch to branch.

She tried to get closer, but moved too fast. Quick as an indrawn breath, it scuttled to the other side of the trunk where she couldn’t see it.

If she stood still long enough, would it grow confident again and reappear? But it did not show itself in the fifteen to twenty minutes she lingered there.

More of the bits of metallic thread were tied on three smaller trees near the bench. She wondered if someone had put them there for the wild appliances, the equivalent of a birdfeeder. How else might you feed them? A thought flickered into her head and that night she looked a few things up on the Internet and placed an order.

She noticed more and more of the creatures as she learned to pick out the traces of their presences from the landscape. She began to recognize the ones she saw on a regular basis, making up names for them: Patches, Prince, Starbucks. They appeared to recognize her, too, and when she began to scatter handfuls of small batteries or microchips near where she sat watching, she found that she could often coax them within a few feet of her, though never within touching distance. She had no urge to touch them—most had their own defenses, small knives or lasers, and she knew better—but she managed, she thought, to convince them she meant no harm.

Even the phone-thief grew easier in her presence. She never saw anything resembling her phone and its case. She didn’t mind that for the most part, but the loss of the opals still ate at her. Australian opals like sunset skies, surrounded by tiny glitters of diamond.

The creature surely would still have the bits of the case somewhere. Track the creature and she might be able to track the gems.

A couple of days later, another sighting. A palm-sized, armadillo-shaped thing she thought must be connected to learning. She watched it rooting through red and yellow maple leaves under a sparse bush. When it saw her watching, it extruded several whisker-thin extensions from its “nose” and used them to burrow away.

She blinked, amused despite her irritation that she was no further along the path to discovering the missing gems.

She hadn’t intended to mention them to her mother, but it slipped out during a vid call.

“You what?” her mother said, voice going high-pitched in alarm. She fanned herself with a hand, leaning back in the chair. “Oh my god. Oh. My. God. You lost Nana Trent’s opals.”

Renee fought to keep from feeling five years old and covered in some forbidden substance. She said, “I’ll get them back.”

“How? You said a robot took them.”

“A little feral robot, Mom. The park’s full of them.”

“I’ve heard of those. That’s how that man died, out in the Rockies. He was hiking. A pack of them attacked him.”

Renee was fascinated despite her growing urge to bring the conversation to an end before her mother returned to the question of the opals.

Too late. Her mother said, “So how will you get them back?”

“I’ll spot the one that took them and find its nest.”

“Nest? They have nests, like birds?” Her mother’s hands still fluttered at her throat as though trying to snatch air and stuff it into her mouth.

“Like rats,” Renee said. Her mother hated rats.

“You’d better get them back,” her mother said. “That’s the sort of thing she’d cut you out of the will for.”

Renee would have liked to protest this dark observation but her mother was right: her godmother was made up of those sorts of selfish and angry motivations. She’d been known to nurse grudges for decades, carrying them forward from grade school days.

“I still have the largest,” she said. “In that ring I had made.”

After saying goodbyes and reassurances, she turned the com off and touched the ring. All of the stones had come from the same mine, one Nana had owned in her earlier years, and they were fire opals, filled with red and pink and yellow and unexpected flashes of green amid the sunset colors.

Why had the robot wanted them? Did they like decoration?

She asked the park robot, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen here?”

Today it was sporting government holiday coloring: red, white, and blue decals, a little seedy and thrice-used around the edges. She thought maybe it’d hesitate or ask her to clarify the parameters of her question, but instead it said, without a tick of hesitation, “Humans.”

She raised an eyebrow, but like most robots it was extremely bad at reading body language. It simply stood there, waiting until she acknowledged it and released it or else thirty minutes passed.

The day was too hot to wait it out. She said, “Is there a party in the park tonight?”

“An ice-cream social and fireworks. Free of charge. Sponsored by Coca-Cola.”

Robots weren’t supposed to understand irony but the way it said the last phrase made her wonder. She said, “Thanks, that’s all.” It nodded at her and moved along to tinker with the garbage can.

Beneath a bench beside her, in the thick grass clumped around its stanchions, a glint of movement. Pretending to tie a shoelace, she went down on one knee to get a better look.

The phone-thief creature, constructing something. She continued her act, readjusting her shoe, even went so far as to take her shoe off, put it back on. The creature was aware of her, she could tell, but it kept right on with what it was doing, cannibalizing bits of its own internal workings to augment what she realized was an eyeglass case with a half-detached rain hat, bright orange, printed with yellow and sky-blue flowers. It was making the case into a thing like itself, assembling legs into short arms for its creation. Only one of these was attached to the body/case right now. It waved absently in the air.

She was watching a birth. She wondered if any of the parts being used to create the baby were from her phone.

She stood with her body angled oddly, not wanting to draw attention to the event, to the vulnerable little machine and its even tinier creation.

People came and went. This side of the park was much used, but no one lingered there. They bought food at the corner kiosk and brought it back to the office to eat rather than sitting on a bench or on the concrete rim surrounding the pool filled with lily pads and frog-legged machines made from waterproof headphones and GPS units.

“Do you require assistance?” The park robot, standing by her side.

She looked everywhere but in the direction of the tiny miracle taking place. She could guess what had happened. Rich finds had led the creature to thoughts of reproduction.

It staggered her. She hadn’t really conceived of the park as an actual ecosystem before, but if the mechanical denizens were reproducing, then maybe it was indeed a strange new paradigm.

“I was tired,” she told the robot.

“Perhaps you would care to step out of the sun? I could bring you a cold beverage,” the robot persisted.

What would it do if it saw the creature and its child? She had no reason to think the robot meant them well, but so far it hadn’t proved actively hostile, either.

She said, “What happens to the big appliances?”

“I beg context,” the robot said.

“You said the larger appliances don’t end up here. Where do they end up?”

“Most of them—almost all— go to the recycling bins,” it said. It cocked its head, scanning something. “A few—very few—make it into the wild. They end up in the radioactive zone in the Southwest or else perhaps in Canada.”

“And any that came here, what would happen to them?”

The robot’s plastic face was blank as a lightbulb. If you split this robot open, it would smell of lemons and grass, an artificially perfumed disinfectant. Its silence was its only reply.

She let her eyes trail along the ground, stealing just a glance before she fumbled in her purse.

“I thought I lost my sunglasses,” she told the robot.

“You know by now to be careful of your belongings while you are here,” the robot said. “Did they perhaps fall from your purse while you were feeding the appliances?”

“Are you programmed for sarcasm?”

“It was an optional upgrade I self-applied.”

“Why don’t you like me feeding them?”

“If you feed them, they will grow larger, in size and numbers. They will outgrow the park. And if they learn to trust humans, it will do them no good when exterminators come.”

She started to say, “They’re only machines,” but the words caught like a cough in her throat.

• • • •

Renee spent more and more of her time observing the feral machines. Before work, she got up an hour and a half earlier and stood watching the park. By now she was there so much she never bothered trying to explain herself to the robot with some concocted story. She took still photos where she could, with her phone, but mostly she relied on watching, observing.

Trying to figure out the patterns of this savage little world, red in tooth and cog.

Because it was a savage life there in the park, for sure. Newer machines that made it to the park had a slim survival rate. She’d seen that demonstrated time and time again. A bottle opener and a lint brush who’d teamed up, clearly both discards of the same household for they were emblazoned DLF in gold letters against the silvery body plastic. She glimpsed them several times, had started to think of them as personalities, but then she found their empty casings beside the path amid a fluff of white optic fibers, fine as feathers.

She was there the week after the phone-thief procreated to witness another birth of sorts. The creation of an entity that the rest of the park’s inhabitants would come to fear, what she would learn to think of as the manticore.

It’d been a late-model Roomba, slow to crawl over the rough ground but durable enough to outlast most attackers. It had a powerful solar battery as well as some sort of electrical backup. She’d seen it nursing at a charging station near the park entrance more than once in early mornings.

A truck sped past in the street. A black garbage sack bounced free from the heaps strapped and bungee-corded together on the truck’s back. Small kitchen appliances spilled out. Renee skipped work that morning to watch as the Roomba killed and assimilated most of them: a crook-handled dogtooth bottle opener, an array of electric knives, and then a several-armed harness the purpose of which she didn’t recognize.

The robot did, though. Standing beside her, it said, without the usual preamble, “Dremels—there should be a better disposal method for those.”

“What’s a Dremel?” she asked.

“A multipurpose tool. Very clever, very adaptable. Combine one with raccoons and you can lose a whole preserve.”

“Lose it?”

“Force the authorities to sterilize the area.”

“Are there raccoons here?”

It shook its head. “Rabbits, squirrels, a few cats. That and hawks. Nothing bigger or smarter.”

They both watched the newly swollen manticore, still ungainly with its acquisitions, trundle into the underbrush. It was quieter than she would’ve expected for a machine of that size.

“It’s hard for those big machines to replicate,” the robot said. The flat black eyes slid toward her. “I’ve told you, you shouldn’t feed them so much. You’ve upset the ecosystem.”

“I don’t bring much,” she said. “A few batteries, some smaller parts.”

It made a sound somewhere between a buzz and a glottal stop. “They will think all humans are tender-hearted like you,” it said. “Most people regard them as vermin. And there are more of them here than you imagine.”

Its fingers flicked up to indicate a tree bole. It took long seconds for her less keen vision to locate the huddled black clumps—a pair of waiting drones—that the robot meant.

She’d learned enough by now to know how the drones survived. They were high on the park’s food chain, able to swoop in silently, preferring to keep owl hours, hunting in dim evening and night light for smaller, unwary ground-bound machines.

Most of the drones that entered the park were not feral, though, but regular office drones using the corner as a shortcut from one building to another. Three rogue drones worked together at the northern archway, ambushing working drones taking advantage of the flight paths the park offered.

The drones knew what was going on by now—you could see them sizing up the bushes, the flat overlooking stone often haunted by the trio. The first, a former bath appliance, scale, and foot-buffer, also had a hobbyist kit’s worth of wood-burning arms, capable of tangling with a drone and setting the cardboard package it carried smoldering. Since the drones’ plastic casing wasn’t heat resistant, the scale/burner was a distinct menace to them.

If a drone made it through that, it still had Scylla and Charybdis to cope with. The former was a small vacuum cleaner and the latter a rock-tumbler, both remnants of the nearby hobby store that had gone out of business recently.

The store’s closing had shaped the denizens of the park to an extent she’d never seen before. The manticore had added several claws and multipurpose tools as well as a shredder ingestion chute. Even Creature, as she’d come to think of the phone-thief, had benefited, taking on a set of small screwdrivers, the same flip-tech as the styluses and equally capable of moving either fluidly or rigidly.

Its child, Baby, had not, though. She’d noticed this phenomenon with the several other young machines: they weren’t allowed to augment themselves. They had to bring all scavenged finds to their parent until some impalpable event happened and the child was cut loose from the parent machine, which subsequently no longer tended it or interacted with it much, if at all—Renee had seen what appeared to be a mated trio of scissors chase their solitary offspring from their niche. Now capable of augmenting themselves, the emancipated young usually did so, fastening on whatever was at hand—bright candy wrappers, bits of stone or plastic, a button—as though to mark the day.

The robot had said the largest creature there was a sewing machine, but even it was diminutive, a ball-shaped thing capable of inhabiting a pants leg to hem it from the inside. It still had thread in it, but every once in a while during walks through the deeper park, she’d come upon a tiny construction made of colored fiber, an Ojo de Dios formed around two crossed toothpicks or twigs, set three or four inches above the ground.

“Does anyone ever come to check on this place?” she asked the park robot.

It was examining the plants using colored lenses to augment the black ovoids set into its facial curve. The shiny arcs canted in their plastic sockets, swiveling in silent interrogation as the robot said, “Every six months, a Park Inspector walks through, but primarily she relies on logs from the kiosk restock here. I perform all necessary maintenance and provide a weekly report.”

“Do the appliances go in the report?”

The eyes tilted again as though looking downward. “There is no line item for mechanical devices.”

“The Park Inspector doesn’t see them?”

“She never lingers long. Plus they are, as you have noticed, shy and prone to avoid noise, and the inspector’s voice can be piercing.”

“When is she due again?”

“Next month.”

She looked around the park, at the double red and orange of the maples, the ardent yellow of the ginkgos, dinosaur trees, the same shell-shape that they had thousands of years ago now sheltering humanity’s creation in the random golden heaps of their leaves.

• • • •

It had rained the night before and then frozen: everything in the park looked glazed and blurry. She chose not to wander the outskirts but took one of the inner footpaths. Under the trees the footing was less slick.

She was surprised to find the robot in the middle of the park. It was using some sort of gun-shaped implement on the flowering statues in the center courtyard, a thirty-meter circle of pea gravel and monuments, thawing them out one by one. A slow and tedious task, she thought, but how much else did it have to do?

Here the ground was visible near the path but then folded into ferns and hillsides. As she stood watching, she saw Creature and Baby moving along one of the hillsides, climbing through the moss and mud.

She waited until the robot had finished and moved out of sight before kneeling and rolling the steel ball bearings and round batteries towards the pair.

The larger one intercepted almost all of them and tucked them away in a recess. The smaller did take one steel ball, which it grappled with, half-play, half-practice, like a lion cub in training.

The larger one ignored the smaller’s antics and watched Renee. It wasn’t until she backed off that it appeared to relax, but then another sound caught its attention and it coaxed the smaller unit away. One of the baby’s new legs was shorter than the others, which gave it a lurching gait, as though perpetually falling sideways.

• • • •

Work was suffering. Renee was coming in too late, taking breaks that bordered on too long and lunches that slipped close to two hours.

The hidden world of the park pulled too hard. Each of the machines had its own behaviors; Baby, for instance, used an odd gesture from time to time, a twist of two limbs over and over each other that reminded her of a toddler’s hands wringing together. It was not a random communication, she decided. Baby used it as both greeting and farewell.

Others produced sounds—she had heard Creature more than once making a melody like a bird’s in the underbrush, and the manticore had a rhythmic chuff-cough that appeared to escape it involuntarily sometimes when hunting.

In high school biology, they had to analyze an ecosystem. Renee had picked coral reefs but the more she found out about them, the sadder they made her feel. All those reefs, and then parrot fish, jaws like iron, chomping away at them faster than the reefs could grow. She even listened to an underwater audio file of some of them eating. That sound sometimes came back in her dreams, a relentless crunch of the sort you hear in your bones, a “something’s wrong” sensation that’s impossible to ignore.

But she understood what an ecosystem was by the end of things and to her mind the park qualified. She wasn’t worried about disturbing the system, though. The world outside shaped the park much more than any of her offerings ever would, she thought.

Today she knelt to release a handful of gold sequins, each a microchip, that she’d found on sale at a fabric store the previous weekend. The flashing rounds scattered in between brown roots, white tufted leaves. One rolled to the foot of a bot, a hairy green caterpillar adorned with sparkler-wire arms that held it high above the grass, encased in the cage of sparking, pulsing wire. The spindly arms extended down to retrieve the sequins, then tucked them away in the hollow of its body.

This early, the park robot was usually sweeping the outer sidewalks, but today was unexpectedly present at this semi-private clearing where the archway overhung the sidewalk, dry remnants of wisteria bushing up over the ice-glazed stone. Renee only saw it when it stepped out from the archway’s shadow. It didn’t speak, but the way its head tilted to view the last sequin, nestled between two knuckled roots and obscured by the roof of a yellow gingko leaf, was as eloquent as a camera lens framing a significant moment.

Renee said, “They were left over from a crafting project.”

The robot said, “The Park Inspector is coming next week.”

“Yesterday you said next month.”

“The schedule has been changed with the city’s acquisition of new technology.”

It paused. Renee offered the question up like a sequin held between thumb and fingertip. “What sort of new technology?”

“Microdrones. They are released from a central point and proceed outward in a wave, capturing a snapshot of the park that will be analyzed so that any necessary repairs or changes can be made.”

The sequin winked in the half-light under the leaf. Renee said, “They’ll catalog all the creatures here, you mean?”

The robot nodded.

“You said this is a nature preserve—that they won’t interfere with it.”

The robot’s head ratcheted in one of those uncannily, inhumanly smooth gestures. A crafted nod, designed in a lab. “The natural creatures, yes.”

“The machines don’t count as natural.”

Again, constructed negation.

“What will they do with them?”

“There are no shelters for abandoned machines,” it said. “We are reprocessed. Recycled.” A twitch of a shrug. “Reborn, perhaps. Probably not.”

Baby appeared from beneath the shelter of a statue, making the odd little greeting gesture, two limb-tips sliding around and around each other. It began to pick its way over to the tree where the sequin lay. It gave Renee a considering look, its message a clear you could have saved me some that made her laugh. She pulled three extra sequins from her pocket, letting them glitter in the sunlight, then tossed one out midway between herself and Baby.

The robot didn’t say a word. Baby edged toward the original sequin, plucked the leaf aside and picked it up. It was still unadorned, and Renee wondered when she’d see it with the baubles and bling that meant it was its own creature. Baby slid the sequin into a compartment, then wavered its way toward them. The click of its feet was audible against the path despite the traffic roar beginning to stir with the dawn.

“What can you do?” she asked the robot.

The robot shrugged. Baby reached the sequin, considered it, then plucked it up in order to put it in a compartment on the opposite side from the last pocketing. Machines liked symmetry, Renee had learned. They were worse than any OCD patient, prone to doing things in pairs and threes and, in more extreme (and usually short-lived) cases, many more than that. Everything had to be even, had to be balanced.

Renee tossed another sequin, again to a midpoint between Baby and herself. Voices hadn’t disturbed it thus far, so she looked at the park robot and said, “You can’t do anything? What about caging them for a few days, then releasing them back into the park?”

“There are no facilities suitable for temporarily caging them.”

She held out the last sequin, willing Baby to come and take it from her. The little robot drifted closer, closer, finally plucked it as delicately as a fish’s kiss from her fingertips, then darted away. It stopped a few feet off, turning the sequin over and over in its claws, watching her, making its hello/goodbye gesture.

Based on what she’d observed so far, it was almost an adult. She wondered if it and Creature would keep interacting after Baby was full-fledged, its back studded with bits of rubbish or perhaps even her opals, or whether they would be as aloof as the scissors to each other.

“Would you be willing to take some home?” the robot said.

She looked down at the claws, at the plier-grip tips capable of cracking a finger. She’d seen it destroy a small tree in order to harvest the limp Mylar balloon tangled in its upper branches. She had nothing capable of keeping it caged.

She shook her head.

• • • •

Her supervisor called her in, a special meeting that left her hot-eyed, fighting back tears.

She’d known she was skirting the edges, but when she was in the office, she worked twice as hard and twice as smart as anyone there, she’d rationalized. She’d thought she could cover for herself, use her skills and experience to compensate for slack caused by bot-watching.

She was wrong, and the aftermath was the thin, stretched feeling of embarrassment and shame and anger that sent her marching quickly through the September rain to the park.

She couldn’t give them up entirely, could she? Maybe the Park Inspector shutting things down was the best possible outcome. Saved her from her own obsession. But it would be like losing a host of friends. It would leave her days so gray.

“There’s a way to save the creatures,” the robot said.

“What is it?”

“It’s illegal.”

“But what is it?”

The robot held out a metal orb inlaid with golden dots, dull black mesh at eight points. “If you trigger this while the drone wave is going past, it’ll overwrite the actual data with a false version that I’ve constructed.”

Renee didn’t move to take it. “Why can’t you set it off?” she asked.

“My actions are logged,” the robot said. “Most are categorized. This conversation, for example, falls under interaction with park visitors. Programming the image of the park falls under preservation of data, but triggering it would be flagged. Someone would notice.”

Reluctantly, Renee took it. “What if she arrives at a time when I can’t be here?” she said.

“I don’t know,” the robot said. “You’re the only hope the creatures have, and I never said the plan was foolproof. But she’ll be doing the inspection at one on Monday afternoon.”

Relief surged in Renee. That was easy enough. She could take a late lunch that Monday. She’d make sure of it by building up as much goodwill and bonus time as she could by then.

• • • •

Her mother said, “Nana’s coming to town. She’ll expect to see you.”

Renee’s mouth watered at the thought. Nana always paid for dinner, and she liked nice restaurants, places where they served old-style proteins and fresh-grown greens.

“Wear the opals,” her mother said.

Renee’s heart sank. But she simply said, “All right,” and got the details for the dinner.

Afterward she laid her head down flat on her kitchen table and closed her eyes, trying to savor the cool, slick surface throbbing against her headache.

The Park Inspector would be there the day before Nana’s visit. If she could figure out the location of Creature’s lair—maybe the robot would have some suspicions?—then she might recover them and no one would be the wiser, particularly Nana. She took a deep breath.

The com chimed again. The office this time, wanting her to come in and initial a set of layouts. She needed to build goodwill, needed to look like a team player, so she made no fuss about it.

She was lucky; the errand took only a few minutes. Leaving, she hesitated, then turned her footsteps toward the park.

It was a cold, rain-washed night and she pulled her jacket tight around herself as she stepped onto the tree-lined path.

Ahead, a cluster of small red lights, low above the ground. She stopped. They continued moving, a swirl around a point off to one side of the path. As she approached, she saw several of the bots gathered near an overturned trashcan beside the path. Inside it was Creature. Someone, perhaps a mischievous child, had trapped Creature under the heavy mesh and it was unable to lift the can enough to extricate itself.

A brighter light, like a bicycle, flashed in the distance, and she heard the manticore’s cry, coming closer.

She braced herself, shoved the trashcan over. It was much heavier than she expected; her feet slipped on the icy path. It banged onto its side, rolling as it went. Creature stood motionless except for a swiveling eye. She backed away a few feet and knelt, keeping still.

The night was quiet, and the little red lights from the machines cast greasy trails of color on the wet leaves and the concrete. She stayed where she was, crouched by the path despite the hard surface biting at her knees.

Creature finally stirred. The struggle with the trashcan had damaged it. It limped towards her.

Had she trained them too well? Did it expect her to have something for it? She held out her hands, spread them wide to show them empty.

Creature stopped for a moment, then kept moving toward her. She lowered her hands, uncertain what to do.

It stopped a foot from her and lowered its body to the concrete. Indicator lights played across its side but the patterns were indecipherable.

Perhaps it was saying thank you? She returned her hands to her sides and said, tentatively, “You’re welcome.”

But it stayed in place, lights still flickering. It whistled a few notes, the song she’d sometimes heard from the underbrush.

A thought occurred to her. She held out her right hand, tapping the ring on it with her left. “You have the stones like this one. If you want to thank me, just give those back. Please.”

Her voice quavered on that last word. Please just let something go right for once.

It stretched out a limb and touched the opal. She held her hand still, despite its metal cold as ice against her skin.

Creature sang two notes, sad and slow, and retracted its arm. The manticore coughed once in the underbrush but stayed where it was, perhaps deterred by her presence. She gathered herself and went home.

• • • •

The next day she felt happier. She woke early, refreshed, lighter. She’d swing through the park in the morning on the way to work and then again at 1:00, when the Park Inspector would be there. She’d set the device off. Then the park robot would help her find her opals. They had to be there somewhere.

As she came up the path, she saw Creature close to where it had been the night before. It made her smile. Even Creature, who had always been so shy, was getting to know her.

But as she moved toward it, Creature slipped away, leaving a glittering heap where it had been sitting.

Her opals! Though the pile looked, surely, too large.

Then, as she moved closer, horrified realization hit her in the pit of her stomach, taking her breath.

Baby, dismantled.

The parts laid in neat little heaps, stacked in rows: the gears, the wheels, the blank lenses of its eyes.

The back panels, each inlaid with a starburst of her opals. She picked them up, held them in her palms.

The metal bit at her skin as she gathered her fists together to her mouth as though to cram the burgeoning scream back inside the hollow shell she had become.

The brush rustled. The manticore emerged beside the heap.

She couldn’t look, couldn’t watch it scavenge what was left behind. She fled.

All through the morning, tears kept ambushing her. Her coworkers could tell something was wrong. She heard them conferring in hushed whispers in the break room.

Why bother going back at one? she thought. Let the creatures die. They were all going to eventually anyway. And they weren’t even real creatures! Just machine bits, going through the motions programmed into them.

Even so, at 1:00 she was there. She’d packed a lunch specifically so she could escape the office, orb tucked inside her pocket. She wouldn’t press it, though. Wouldn’t save Creature or the manticore. They didn’t deserve it.

The Park Inspector was a pinch-faced woman in a navy and umber uniform, datapad sewn into the right sleeve, her lensed eyes recording everything they passed over. Renee saw her scolding the park robot for something as the robot began to set up the cylinder that would release the microdrones in the center of the park.

She went to the Park Inspector, said, “Ma’am?”

The Inspector turned her head. Her nametag read Chloe Mesaros. This close up she looked even more daunting, held herself even more rigidly. “Yes?”

“Is it safe to set that off when people are around?” Renee asked, nodding at the cylinder.

The Inspector sniffed, a fastidious, delicate little sound of scorn. “Of course. The drones are programmed to avoid humans.”

The Park Robot was almost done setting up the cylinder. It didn’t acknowledge Renee, which made her feel like a conspirator in a movie.

“Will we see them?” Renee asked. She could feel the weight of the orb at her side.

Was there any reason to save the park creatures? Maybe this was a blessing in disguise, the universe plucking away the temptation she’d been unable to resist, the temptation that was affecting her very job?

“No. The only indication that they’ve been triggered will be the light turning from red to amber and then to green when they’re done.”

She’d have to press the orb while the light was amber, the robot had told her.

If she chose to do it.

After all, who was to say that the plan the robot had come up with was a good one, that it even had a chance of working? Perhaps the Inspector would notice it. Perhaps Renee would be charged with crimes—wouldn’t that be a nice capper to this shitty day?

She avoided looking at the robot. It was, like the others, just a machine.

Far away she heard the manticore’s cough. Hunting other creatures in this savage little jungle. Red in tooth and cog, she’d thought at one point, an amusing verbal joke but it was true, it was savage and horrible and not worth preserving.

The robot stepped away from the cylinder. “Ready, Inspector,” it said.

The Inspector tapped at her sleeve, inputting numbers. “On my mark.”

The orb was hard and unyielding in her fingers. There was no need to press the button.

“Three.”

Let them die, the lot of them. Not even die, really. Just be unplugged. Shut down.

“Two.”

There are no shelters for abandoned machines, the robot said in her memory. We are reprocessed. Recycled. Reborn, perhaps.

Probably not.

“One.”

She looked at the park robot. It stared impassively back.

“Engage.”

The light went from red to amber.

Renee thumbed the button on the orb.

• • • •

The Inspector had been right; there was no visible sign of the microdrones. Within a half-minute, the light shifted to green. The Inspector tabbed in more data. The park robot remained motionless.

If she got back to the office now, she could be seen putting in a little extra work. She could still redeem herself. She started down the path that crossed the park.

Perhaps a third of the way along, the manticore flashed in the underbrush, a few meters from the path.

She stopped, waited to see what it would do.

It assessed her. She had no fear of it attacking. While it was capable of destroying small bots, one good solid kick from her would have sent it tumbling.

Two arms raised, one tipped with a screwdriver bit, the other with a clipper.

They writhed around each other, briefly, the familiar sign.

Baby’s sign.

Something gone right.

Relief surged, overpowered her, made her grin helplessly. She lifted on her toes, almost laughed out loud as her heels came back down.

It was an ecosystem, and in it the little lives moved along the chain, mechanical flower and fruit as well as tooth and cog. A chain into which, somehow, she and her handfuls of batteries and microchips fit.

She looked back to where the robot stood with the Inspector. It nodded at her and appeared to shrug, its hands spreading infinitesimally, and she could hear its voice in memory, Probably not.

Did it matter? Probably not. But she would act as though it did. She went back to work, whistling.

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and the magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). She is currently working on Exiles of Tabat, the third book of the Tabat Quartet. A new story collection, Neither Here Nor There, appears from Hydra House this fall.

A Salvaging of Ghosts
By Aliette de Bodard

Thuy’s hands have just closed on the gem—she can’t feel its warmth with her gloves, but her daughter’s ghost is just by her side, at the hole in the side of the ship’s hull, blurred and indistinct—when the currents of unreality catch her. Her tether to The Azure Serpent, her only lifeline to the ship, stretches; snaps.

And then she’s gone, carried forward into the depths.

• • • •

On the night before the dive, Thuy goes below decks with Xuan and Le Hoa. It’s traditional; just as it is traditional that, when she comes back from a dive, she’ll claim her salvage and they’ll have another rousing party in which they’ll drink far too many gems dissolved in rice wine and shout poetry until The Azure Serpent’s Mind kindly dampens their incoherent ravings to give others their sleep—but not too much, as it’s good to remember life; to know that others onship celebrate surviving one more dive, like notches on a belt or vermillion beads slid on an abacus.

One more. Always one more.

Until, like Thuy’s daughter Kim Anh, that one last dive kills you and strands your body out there, in the dark. It’s a diver’s fate, utterly expected; but she was Thuy’s child—an adult when she died, yet forever Thuy’s little girl—and Thuy’s world contracts and blurs whenever she thinks of Kim Anh’s corpse, drifting for months in the cold alien loneliness of deep spaces.

Not for much longer; because this dive has brought them back where Kim Anh died. One last evening, one last fateful set of drinks with her friends, before Thuy sees her daughter again.

Her friends… Xuan is in a bad mood. No gem-drinking on a pre-dive party, so she nurses her rice wine as if she wishes it contains other things, and contributes only monosyllables to the conversation. Le Hoa, as usual, is elated; talking too much and without focus—dealing with her fears through drink, and food, and being uncharacteristically expansive.

“Nervous, lil’ sis?” she asks Thuy.

Thuy stares into the depth of her cup. “I don’t know.” It’s all she’s hoped for; the only chance she’ll ever get that will take her close enough to her daughter’s remains to retrieve them. But it’s also a dangerous dive into deep spaces, well into layers of unreality that could kill them all. “We’ll see. What about you?”

Le Hoa sips at her cup, her round face flushed with drink. She calls up, with a gesture, the wreck of the mindship they’re going to dive into; highlights, one after the other, the strings of gems that the scanners have thrown up. “Lots of easy pickings, if you don’t get too close to the wreck. And that’s just the biggest ones. Smallest ones won’t show up on sensors.”

Which is why they send divers. Or perhaps merely because it’s cheaper and less of an investment to send human beings, instead of small and lithe mindships that would effortlessly survive deep spaces, but each cost several lifetimes to build and properly train.

Thuy traces, gently, the contours of the wreck on the hologram—there’s a big hole in the side of the hull, something that blew up in transit, killing everyone onboard. Passengers’ corpses have spilled out like innards—all unrecognisable of course, flesh and muscles disintegrated, bones slowly torn and broken and compressed until only a string of gems remains to mark their presence.

Kim Anh, too, is gone: nothing left of Thuy’s precocious, foolhardy daughter who struggled every morning with braiding her hair—just a scattering of gems they will collect and sell offworld, or claim as salvage and drink away for a rush of short-lived euphoria.

There isn’t much to a gem—just that familiar spike of bliss, no connection to the dead it was salvaged from. Deep spaces strip corpses, and compress them into… these. Into an impersonal, addictive drug.

Still… still, divers cannibalise the dead; and they all know that the dead might be them, one day. It’s the way it’s always been done, on The Azure Serpent and all the other diver-ships: the unsaid, unbreakable traditions that bind them all.

It didn’t use to bother Thuy so much, before Kim Anh died.

“Do you know where she is?” Xuan asks.

“I’m not sure. Here, perhaps.” Thuy points, carefully, to somewhere very near the wreck of the ship. “It’s where she was when—”

When her suit failed her. When the comms finally fell silent.

Xuan sucks in a sharp breath. “Tricky.” She doesn’t try to dissuade Thuy, though. They all know that’s the way it goes, too.

Le Hoa attempts, forcefully, to change the subject. “Two more dives and Tran and I might have enough to get married. A real couple’s compartment, can you imagine?”

Thuy forces a smile. She hasn’t drunk enough; but she just doesn’t feel like rice wine: it’ll go to her head, and if there’s any point in her life when she needs to be there; to be clear-headed and prescient… “We’ll all get together and give you a proper send-off.”

All their brocade clothes retrieved from storage, and the rice wine they’ve been saving in long-term compartments onboard the ship taken out, sipped at until everything seems to glow; and the small, round gem-dreams dumplings—there’s no actual gems in them, but they’re deliberately shaped and positioned like a string of gems, to call for good fortune and riches to fall into the newlyweds’ hands, for enough that they can leave the ship, leave this life of dives and slow death…

Kim Anh never had a chance for any of this. When she died, she’d barely begun a relationship with one of the older divers—a fling, the kind that’s not meant to last onboard The Azure Serpent. Except, of course, that it was cut short, became frozen in grief and regrets and recriminations.

Thuy and Kim Anh’s ex seldom speak; though they do get drunk together, sometimes. And Cong Hoan, her eldest son, has been posted to another diver-ship. They talk on comms, and see each other for festivals and death anniversaries: he’s more distant than she’d like, but still alive—all that matters.

“You’re morbid again,” Xuan says. “I can see it in your face.”

Thuy makes a grimace. “I don’t feel like drinking.”

“Quite obviously,” Le Hoa says. “Shall we go straight to the poetry?”

“She’s not drunk enough,” Xuan says before Thuy can open her mouth.

Thuy flushes. “I’m not good at poetry, in any case.”

Le Hoa snorts. “I know. The point isn’t that you’re good. We’re all terrible at it, else we would be officials on a numbered planet with scores of servants at our beck and call. The point is forgetting.” She stops, then, looks at Thuy. “I’m sorry.”

Thuy forces a shrug she doesn’t feel. “Doesn’t matter.”

Le Hoa opens her mouth, and then closes it again. “Look…” she says. She reaches inside her robes and withdraws something—Thuy knows, even before she opens her hand, what it will be.

The gem is small, and misshapen: the supervisors won’t let them keep the big, pretty ones as salvage; those go to offworld customers, the kind rich enough to pay good money for them. It glistens like spilled oil in the light of the teahouse; and in that light, the dumplings on the table and the tea seem to fade into the background; to recede into tasteless, odourless insignificance. “Try this.”

“I—” Thuy shakes her head. “It’s yours. And before a dive…”

Le Hoa shrugs. “Screw tradition, Thuy. You know it’s not going to change anything. Besides, I have some stash. Don’t need this one.”

Thuy stares at it—thinking of dropping it in the cup and watching it dissolve; of the warmth that will slide down into her stomach when she drinks; of the rising euphoria seizing all her limbs until everything seems to shake with the bliss of desire—of how to step away, for a time; away from tomorrow and the dive, and Kim Anh’s remains.

“Come on, lil’ sis.”

Thuy shakes her head. She reaches for the cup of rice wine, drains it in one gulp; leaving the gem still on the table.

“Time for poetry,” she says, aloud. The Azure Serpent doesn’t say anything—he so seldom speaks, not to the divers, those doomed to die—but he dims the lights and the sound as Thuy stands up, waiting for words to well up from the empty pit in her chest.

Xuan was right: you need to be much drunker than this, for decent verses.

• • • •

Thuy knows where her parents died. The wreck they were scavenging from is on her ancestral altar, at the end of the cycling of holos that shows First and Second Mother go from newlyweds flushed with drink and happiness, to older, greyer women holding their grandchild in their arms, their smile cautious; tentative; as if they already know they will have to relinquish her.

Aboard The Azure Serpent, they’re legends, spoken of in hushed tones. They went deeper, farther into unreality than anyone else ever has. Divers call them The Long Breathers, and they have their own temple, spreading over three compartments and always smelling of incense. On the temple walls, they are depicted in their diving suits, with the bodhisattva Quan Am showing them the way into an empty cabin; where divers leave offerings praying for good fortune and prosperity.

They left nothing behind. Their suits crumbled with them, and their bodies are deep within the wreck of that mindship: two scatterings of gems in a cabin or a corridor somewhere, forever irretrievable; too deep for anyone to survive retrieval, even if they could be located anymore, in the twenty-one years since they died.

On the altar is Bao Thach: her husband, not smiling but stern and unyielding, as utterly serious in death as he was mischievous and whimsical in life.

She has nothing left of him, either.

Kim Anh… Kim Anh is by her father’s side; because she died childless and unmarried; because there is no one else who will mourn her or say the prayers to ease her passage. Thuy isn’t the first, or the last, to do this onboard the ship.

There’s a box, with enough space for a single gem. For what Thuy has earned the right to salvage from her daughter’s body: something tangible, palpable that she can hold onto, not the holos or her own hazy-coloured and shrivelled memories—holding a small, wrinkled baby nursing at her breast and feeling contentment well up in her, stronger than any gem-induced euphoria—Kim Anh at age ten, trying to walk in a suit two sizes too big for her—and a few days before her death, the last meal she and Thuy had in the teahouse: translucent dumplings served with tea the colour of jade, with a smell like cut grass on a planet neither of them will ever live to see.

Kim Anh isn’t like Thuy’s mothers: she died outside a different mindship, far enough from the wreck that it’s possible to retrieve her. Tricky, as Xuan said; but what price wouldn’t Thuy pay, to have something of her daughter back?

• • • •

In the darkness at the hole in the ship’s hull, Thuy isn’t blind. Her suit lights up with warnings—temperature, pressure, distortions. That last is what will kill her: the layers of unreality utterly unsuited to human existence, getting stronger and stronger as the current carries her closer to the wreck of the mindship, crushing her lungs and vital organs like crumpled paper when her suit finally fails.

It’s what killed Kim Anh on her last dive; what eventually kills most divers. Almost everyone on The Azure Serpent—minus the supervisors, of course—lives with that knowledge, that suspended death sentence.

Thuy would pray to her ancestors—to her mothers the Long Breathers—if only she knew what to ask for.

Thuy closes her hand over the gem. She deactivates the suits’ propulsion units and watches her daughter’s remains, floating beside her.

Gems and more gems—ranging from the small one she has in her hand to the larger, spherical ones that have replaced the organs in the torso. It’s a recent death compared to that of the mindship: the gems still form something vaguely like a human shape, if humans could be drawn in small, round items like droplets of water; or like tears.

And, as the unreality readings spike, the ghost by her side becomes sharper and sharper, until she sees, once more, Kim Anh as she was in life. Her hair is braided—always with the messy ends, the ribbon tied haphazardly; they used to joke that she didn’t need a tether, because the ribbon would get caught in the ship’s airlock in strands thick and solid enough to bring her back. Her eyes are glinting—with tears, or perhaps with the same oily light as that of a gem.

Hello, Mother.

“Child”, Thuy whispers, and the currents take her voice and scatter it—and the ghost nods, but it might as well be at something Thuy can’t see.

Long time no see.

They’re drifting apart now: hurtling down some dark, silent corridor into the wreck that dilates open like an eye—no no no, not after all of this, not after the certainty she’ll lose her own life to the dive—and Thuy shifts, making the propulsion units in the suit strain against the currents, trying to reach Kim Anh; to hold her, to hold something of her, down there in the dark…

And then something rushes at her from behind, and she feels a sharp, pressing pain through the nape of the suit—before everything fades away.

• • • •

When Thuy wakes up—nauseous, disoriented—the comms are speaking to her.

“Thuy? Where are you?” It’s Xuan’s voice, breathless and panicking. “I can help you get back, if you didn’t drift too far.”

“I’m here,” she tries to say; and has to speak three times before her voice stops shaking; becomes audible enough. There is no answer. Wherever she is—and, judging by the readings, it’s deep—comms don’t emit anymore.

She can’t see Kim Anh’s body—she remembers scrabbling, struggling to remain close to it as the currents separated them, but now there is nothing. The ghost, though, is still there, in the same room, wavering in the layers of unreality; defined in traceries of light that seem to encompass her daughter’s very essence in a few sharp lines.

Thuy still has the gem in her hand, tucked under the guard of her wrist. The rest of her daughter’s gems—they’ve fallen in and are now floating somewhere in the wreck, somewhere far away and inaccessible, and…

Her gaze, roaming, focuses on where she is; and she has to stop herself from gasping.

It’s a huge, vaulted room like a mausoleum—five ribs spreading from a central point, and racks of electronics and organics, most of them scuffed and knocked over; pulsing cables converging on each other in tight knots, merging and parting like an alchemist’s twisted idea of a nervous system. In the centre is something like a chair, or a throne, all ridges and protrusions, looking grown rather than manufactured. Swarms of repair bots lie quiescent; they must have given up, unable to raise the dead.

The heartroom. The centre of the ship, where the Mind once rested—the small, wilted thing in the throne is all that’s left of its corpse. Of course. Minds aren’t quite human; and they were made to better withstand deep spaces.

“Thuy? Please come in. Please…” Xuan is pleading now, her voice, growing fainter and fainter. Thuy knows about this too: the loss of hope.

“Thuy? Is that your name?”

The voice is not Xuan’s. It’s deeper and more resonant; and its sound make the walls shake—equipment shivers and sweats dust; and the cables writhe and twist like maddened snakes.

“I have waited so long.”

“You—” Thuy licks dry lips. Her suit is telling her—reassuringly, or not, she’s not certain—that unreality has stabilised; and that she has about ten minutes left before her suit fails. Before she dies, holding onto her daughter’s gem, with her daughter’s ghost by her side. “Who are you?”

It’s been years, and unreality has washed over the ship, in eroding tide after eroding tide. No one can have survived. No one, not even the Long Breathers.

Ancestors, watch over me.

“The Boat Sent by the Bell,” the voice says. The walls of the room light up, bright and red and unbearable—-characters start scrolling across walls on all sides of Thuy, poems and novels and fragments of words bleeding from the oily metal, all going too fast for her to catch anything but bits and pieces, with that touch of bare, disquieting familiarity. “I—am—was—the ship.”

“You’re alive.” He… he should be dead. Ships don’t survive. They die, just like their passengers. They—

“Of course. We are built to withstand the farthest, more distorted areas of deep spaces.”

“Of course.” The words taste like ashes on her mouth. “What have you been waiting for?”

The ship’s answer is low, and brutally simple. “To die.”

Still alive. Still waiting. Oh, ancestors. When did the ship explode? Thirty, forty years ago? How long has the Mind been down here, in the depths—crippled and unable to move, unable to call out for help; like a human locked in their own body after a stroke?

Seven minutes, Thuy’s suit says. Her hands are already tingling, as if too much blood were flooding to them. By her side, Kim Anh’s ghost is silent, unmoving, its shape almost too sharp; too real; too alien. “Waiting to die? Then that makes two of us.”

“I would be glad for some company.” The Boat Sent by the Bell’s voice is grave, thoughtful. Thuy would go mad, if she were down here for so long—but perhaps mindships are more resistant to this kind of thing. “But your comrades are calling for you.”

The comms have sunk to crackles; one of her gloves is flickering away, caught halfway between its normal shape and a clawed, distorted paw with fingers at an impossible angle. It doesn’t hurt; not yet. “Yes.” Thuy swallows. She puts the gem into her left hand—the good one, the one that’s not disappearing, and wraps her fingers around it, as if she were holding Kim Anh. She’d hold the ghost, too, if she could grasp it. “It’s too deep. I can’t go back. Not before the suit fails.”

Silence. Now there’s pain—faint and almost imperceptible, but steadily rising, in every one of her knuckles. She tries to flex her fingers; but the pain shifts to a sharp, unbearable stab that makes her cry out.

Five minutes.

At length the ship says, “A bargain, if you will, diver.”

Bargains made on the edge of death, with neither of them in a position to deliver. She’d have found this funny, in other circumstances. “I don’t have much time.”

“Come here. At the centre. I can show you the way out.”

“It’s—” Thuy grits her teeth against the rising pain—“useless. I told you. We’re too deep. Too far away.”

“Not if I help you.” The ship’s voice is serene. “Come.”

And, in spite of herself—because, even now, even here, she clings to what she has—Thuy propels herself closer to the centre; lays her hand, her contracting, aching right hand, on the surface of the Mind.

She’s heard, a long time ago, that Minds didn’t want to be touched this way. That the heartroom was their sanctuary; their skin their own private province, not meant to be stroked or kissed, lest it hurt them.

What she feels, instead, is… serenity—a stretching of time until it feels almost meaningless, her five minutes forgotten; what she sees, for a bare moment, is how beautiful it is, when currents aren’t trying to kill you or distort you beyond the bounds of the bearable, and how utterly, intolerably lonely it is, to be forever shut off from the communion of ships and space; to no longer be able to move; to be whole in a body that won’t shift, that is too damaged for repairs and yet not damaged enough to die.

I didn’t know, she wants to say, but the words won’t come out of her mouth. The ship, of course, doesn’t answer.

Behind her, the swarms of bots rise—cover her like a cloud of butterflies, blocking off her field of view; a scattering of them on her hand, and a feeling of something sucking away at her flesh, parting muscle from bone.

When The Boat Sent by the Bell releases her, Thuy stands, shaking—trying to breathe again, as the bots slough away from her like shed skin and settle on a protuberance near the Mind. Her suit has been patched and augmented; the display, flickering in and out of existence, tells her she has twenty minutes. Pain throbs, a slow burn in the flesh of her repaired hand; a reminder of what awaits her if she fails.

On the walls, the characters have been replaced by a map, twisting and turning from the heartroom to the breach in the hull. “Thirteen minutes and fifty-seven seconds,” the ship says, serenely. “If you can propel fast enough.”

“I—” She tries to say something, anything. “Why?” is the only thought she can utter.

“Not a gift, child. A bargain.” The ship’s voice has that same toneless, emotionless serenity to it—and she realises that The Boat Sent by the Bell has gone mad after all; cracks in the structure small and minute, like a fractured porcelain cup, it still holds water, but it’s no longer whole. “Where the bots are… tear that out, when you leave.”

“The bots could have done that for you,” Thuy says.

If the ship were human, he would have shaken his head. “No. They can repair small things, but not.. this.”

Not kill. Not even fix the breach in the hull, or make the ship mobile. She doesn’t know why she’s fighting back tears—it’s not even as if she knew the ship, insofar as anyone can claim to know a being that has lived for centuries.

She moves towards the part the bots have nestled on, a twisted protuberance linked to five cables, small enough to fit into her hand, beating and writhing, bleeding iridescent oil over her fingers. The bots rise, like a swarm of bees, trying to fight her. But they’re spent from their repairs, and their movements are slow and sluggish. She bats them away, as easily as one would bat a fly—sends them flying into walls dark with the contours of the ship’s map, watches them bleed oil and machine guts all over the heartroom, until not one remains functional.

When she tears out the part, The Boat Sent by the Bell sighs, once—and then it’s just Thuy and the ghost, ascending through layers of fractured, cooling corpse.

• • • •

Later—much, much later, after Thuy has crawled, breathless, out of the wreck, with two minutes to spare—after she’s managed to radio Xuan—after they find her another tether, whirl her back to the ship and the impassive doctor—after they debrief her—she walks back to her compartment. Kim Anh’s ghost comes with her, blurred and indistinct; though no one but Thuy seems to be able to see it.

She stands for a while in the small space, facing the ancestral altar. Her two mothers are watching her, impassive and distant—the Long Breathers, and who’s to say she didn’t have their blessing, in the end?

Kim Anh is there too, in the holos—smiling and turning her head to look back at something long gone—the box on the altar awaiting its promised gem; its keepsake she’s sacrificed so much for. Someone—Xuan, or Le Hoa, probably—has laid out a tray with a cup of rice wine, and the misshapen gem she refused back in the teahouse.

“I didn’t know,” she says, aloud. The Azure Serpent is silent, but she can feel him listening. “I didn’t know ships could survive.”

What else are we built for? whispers The Boat Sent by the Bell, in her thoughts; and Thuy has no answer.

She fishes inside her robes, and puts Kim Anh’s gem in the palm of her right hand. They allowed her to keep it as salvage, as a testament to how much she’s endured.

The hand looks normal, but feels… odd, distant, as if it were no longer part of her, the touch of the gem on it an alien thing, happening to her in another universe.

Her tale, she knows, is already going up and down the ship—she might yet find out they have raised her an altar and a temple, and are praying to her as they pray to her mothers. On the other side of the table, by the blind wall that closes off her compartment, her daughter’s ghost, translucent and almost featureless, is waiting for her.

Hello, Mother.

She thinks of The Boat Sent by the Bell, alone in the depths—of suits and promises and ghosts, and remnants of things that never really die, and need to be set free.

“Hello, child,” she whispers. And, before she can change her mind, drops the gem into the waiting cup.

The ghost dissolves like a shrinking candle-flame; and darkness closes in—silent and profound and peaceful.

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories which have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a book set in the same universe as her Vietnamese science fiction On a Red Station Drifting. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, Gollancz).

Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station |
Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0
By Caroline M. Yoachim

A. You take a shortcut through the hydroponics bay on your way to work, and notice that the tomato plants are covered in tiny crawling insects that look like miniature beetles. One of the insects skitters up your leg, so you reach down and brush it off. It bites your hand. The area around the bite turns purple and swollen.

You run down a long metal hallway to the Medical Clinic, grateful for the artificially-generated gravity that defies the laws of physics and yet is surprisingly common in fictional space stations. The sign on the clinic door says “hours since the last patient death:” The number currently posted on the sign is zero. If you enter the clinic anyway, go to C. If you seek medical care elsewhere, go to B.

B. You are in a relay station in orbit halfway between Saturn and Uranus. There is no other medical care available. Proceed to C.

Why are you still reading this? You’re supposed to go to C. Are you sure you won’t go into the clinic? No? Fine. You return to your quarters and search the station’s database to find a cure for the raised purple scabs that are now spreading up your arm. Most of the database entries recommend amputation. The rash looks pretty serious, and you probably ought to go to C, but if you absolutely refuse to go to the clinic, go to Z and die a horrible, painful death.

C. Inside the clinic, a message plays over the loudspeakers: “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station, please sign your name on the clipboard. Patients will be seen in the order that they arrive. If this is an emergency, we’re sorry—you’re probably screwed. The current wait time is six hours.” The message is on endless repeat, cycling through dozens of different languages.

The clipboard is covered in green mucus, probably from a Saturnian slug-monkey. They are exceedingly rude creatures, always hungry and extremely temperamental. You wipe away the slime with the sleeve of your shirt and enter your information. The clipboard chirps in a cheerful voice, “you are number 283. If you leave the waiting room, you will be moved to the end of the queue. If your physiology is incompatible with long waiting room stays, you may request a mobile tracker and wait in one of our satellite rooms. The current wait for a mobile tracker is four hours.”

If you decide to wait in the waiting room, go to D. If you request a mobile tracker, go to D anyway, because there is no chance you will get one.

D. You hand the clipboard to the patient behind you, a Tarmandian Spacemite from the mining colonies. As you hand it off, you realize the clipboard is printing a receipt. The sound of the printer triggers the spacemite’s predatory response, and it eats the clipboard.

“Attention patients, the clipboard has been lost. Patients will be seen in the order they arrived. Please line up using the number listed on your receipt. If you do not have a receipt, you will need to wait and sign in when a new clipboard is assembled.”

If you wait for the new clipboard, go back to C. If you are smart enough to recognize that going back to C will result in a loop that does not advance the story, proceed to E.

E. Instead of waiting in line, you take advantage of the waiting room chaos to go to the nurses’ station and demand treatment. There are two nurses at the station, a tired-looking human and a Uranian Doodoo. The Doodoo is approximately twice your size, covered in dark brown fur, and speaks a language that only contains the letters, d, t, b, p, and o. If you talk to the human nurse, go to F. If you talk to the big brown Doodoo from Uranus, go to G. Also, stop snickering. The planet is pronounced “urine iss” not “your anus.”

F. The human nurse sees the nasty purple rash on your arm and demands that you quarantine yourself in your quarters. If you accept this advice, go back to B. Have you noticed all the loops in this story? The loops simulate the ultimate futility of attempting to get medical care. What are you still doing here? Go back to B. Next time you get to the nurses’ station, remember to pick the non-human nurse.

G. You approach the Uranian nurse and babble a bunch of words that end in “oo” which is your best approximation of Doodoo language. Honestly, the attempt is kind of offensive. The Doodoos are a civilization older than humankind with a nuanced language steeped in a complex alien culture. Why would you expect a random assortment of words ending in “oo” to communicate something meaningful?

Thankfully, the nurse does not respond to your blatant mockery of its language, so you hold out your arm and point to the purple rash. In a single bite, it eats your entire arm, cauterizing the wound with its highly acidic saliva. The rash is gone. If you consider yourself cured, proceed to Y. If you stay at the clinic in hopes of getting a prosthetic arm, go to H.

H. You approach the human nurse and ask about the availability of prosthetic limbs. He hands you a stack of twenty-four forms to fill out. The Doodoo nurse has eaten the hand you usually write with. If you fill out all the forms with your remaining hand, go to I. If you fill out only the top form and leave the rest blank, hoping that no one will notice, go to I.

I. The nurse takes your paperwork and shoves it into a folder. He leads you down a hallway to an exam room filled with an assortment of syringes and dissection tools. “Take off all your clothes and put on this gown,” the nurse instructs, “and someone will be in to see you soon.” If you do what the nurse says, go to J. If you keep your clothes on, go to K.

J. The exam room is cold and the gown is three sizes too small and paper thin. You sit down, only to notice that the tissue paper that covers the exam table hasn’t been changed and is covered in tiny crawling insects that look like miniature beetles. Sitting down is a decision that has literally come back to bite you in the ass. If you leap up screaming and brush the insects off your bare skin, go to L. If you calmly brush the insects away and then yell for someone to come in and clean the room, go to L.

K. Three hours later, the doctor arrives. You are relieved to see that she is human. You ask her if she can issue you a prosthetic limb. She says no, mumbles something about resource allocation forms, and leaves. If you accept her refusal and decide to consider yourself cured, go to Y. If you scream down the hall at the departing doctor that you must have a new arm, go to L.

L. A security officer comes, attracted by the sound of your screams. Clinic security is handled by a 6-foot-tall Tarmandian Spacemite with poisonous venom, sharp teeth, and a fondness for US tax law. If you run, go to M. If you are secretly a trained warrior and decide to kill the Tarmandian Spacemite with your bare hands so you can eat its head, go to N. If you sit very still and hope the Tarmandian Spacemite goes away, go to O.

M. Running triggers the predatory instincts of the Tarmandian Spacemite. Go to Z.

N. You use your completely unforeshadowed (but useful!) fighting skills to overpower the security officer. The head of the Tarmandian Spacemite is a delicious delicacy, salty and crunchy and full of delightful worms that squiggle all the way down your throat. Unfortunately, you forgot to remove the venomous fangs. Go to Z.

O. You sit perfectly still on the exam table, and tiny insects that resemble miniature beetles crawl into your pants and bite you repeatedly, leaving a clump of purple bumps that look suspiciously similar to the scabby rash you had on your arm when you arrived at the clinic. When you’re sure the Tarmandian Spacemite is gone, go to P.

P. You have lost an arm and the lower half of your torso is covered in a purple rash. If you decide to cut your losses and consider yourself cured, go to R. If you rummage through the cabinets in the exam room, go to S.

Q. There is nothing in the story that directs you to this section, so if you are reading this, you have failed to follow instructions. Go directly to Z and die your horrible, painful death. Or skip to somewhere else, since you clearly aren’t playing by the rules anyway.

R. You sneak out of the clinic and return to your quarters. You search the station database for treatments for your beetle-induced purple rash. There is no known cure, although some patients have had luck with amputation of the affected areas. Sadly, you are incapable of amputating your own ass. Even if you go back to the clinic, the rash is now too widespread to be treated. Go to Z. Or, if you want to see what would have happened if you’d opted to search through the exam room cabinets, go to S. But remember, going to S is only to see what hypothetically would have happened. Your true fate is Z.

S. You rummage through the cabinets and find an assortment of ointments and lotions. If you read the instructions on all the bottles, go to T. If you select a few bottles at random and slather them on your rash, go to T. Have you noticed how often you end up in the same place no matter what you chose? In the clinic, as in life, decisions that seem important are often ultimately meaningless. In the end, all of us will die and none of this will matter. Now seriously, go to T.

T. None of the ointments or lotions do anything for your rash. The Uranian nurse comes in to clean the room and discovers you. If you pretend to work at the clinic, go to U. If you ask for help with your rash, go to V. If you run away, go to W.

(There is no U, much as there is no hope for patients of the clinic. The nurse would have recognized you anyway. Go to V.)

V. The Doodoo from Uranus (seriously, are you in third grade? Stop pronouncing the planet as “your anus”) examines your rash and amputates the affected areas by eating them, neatly cauterizing the wound with the acid in its saliva. You are now a head with approximately half a torso. If you consider yourself cured, go to X. Otherwise, go to Z.

W. You flee from the Uranian nurse but slip on a puddle of slimy green mucous excreted by another patient, probably that idiot slug-monkey that slimed the clipboard. You crash into the wall, and before you can get back up, the Uranian nurse amputates the areas affected by the rash by eating them, neatly cauterizing the wound with the acid in its saliva. You are now a head with approximately half a torso. If you consider yourself cured, go to X. Otherwise go to Z.

X. You are not cured. You are a head with half a torso, and missing several internal organs. Go to Z.

Y. Congratulations, you have survived your trip to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station! All you have to do now is fill out your discharge papers. You start filling out the forms with your one remaining hand, but you accidentally drop the pen onto the oozing foot of the Saturnian slug-monkey waiting in line behind you. This is undoubtedly the idiot that slimed the sign-in clipboard. You cuss the slug-monkey out with some choice words in French. Choice words because it was rude to leave slime all over the clipboard. French because you know better than to make a slug-monkey angry. You’ve watched enough education vids to know that slug-monkeys are always hungry, which makes them temperamental.

Unfortunately for you, Saturnian slug-monkeys are far better educated than arrogant humans give them credit for. This one is fluent in several languages, including French. It eats you. Go to Z.

Z. You die a horrible, painful death. But at least you won’t have to deal with your insurance company!

Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out with Fairwood Press in 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at http://carolineyoachim.com

Razorback
By Ursula Vernon

Author’s Note: The story of Rawhead and Bloody Bones originated in Europe but migrated to the American South and underwent a local transformation. The definitive folklore version is likely S. E. Schlosser’s and is very much worth reading on its own.

There was a witch who lived up in the mountains, and I never heard but that she was a good one.

Some people will tell you she was old, but I don’t think she was. She just had one of those faces full of lines. With a face like that, you look a lot older than everybody else, but as time goes on, they all look older and you don’t, and you end up looking younger than everybody else by the time you die.

And you do learn early on not to get by on your looks, so there’s that.

I never did learn who her people were or if she had any. A whole lot of people wound up in the mountains—Lumbee and Cherokee and escaped slaves and the grandkids of people who lit off into the hills for one thing or another. Little bitty scraps of this group and that, all of ’em living together and having kids. Leftover people.

She was one of those. Most of us were, one way or another.

The witch had a couple of names, depending who you ask, but everybody in town called her “Sal.” She wasn’t the only witch there, I’ll tell you right now, but she was the best of the lot.

If you went south and east from town, you got into the sandhills, where the rain runs down through the dirt without ever stopping, and there was a witch out there named Elizabeth Gray. Her heart was as dry as the sand and things ran through it without ever stopping. She couldn’t be moved by pity or anger, and she only dealt in cash.

If you went north, you’d run into the river, and there was a shack down on the riverbank and an old woman lived in it who was madder than a shoe. She’d have had to come a long way to just be senile. She believed she was a witch and she’d cast a curse for a slug of whiskey and a couple of cigarettes, but whether the curses did anything much, I couldn’t tell you.

(They do say that the sheriff riled her up and she cursed him and that’s why he took a nail in the foot and got sepsis and his daughter ran off with a horse-thief. If you ask me, though, the nail was bad luck, and his daughter was fixing to run off with the first person who looked at her twice. But I don’t know, maybe it was the woman from down on the mudflats.)

Sal, though … Sal was good. She never promised what she couldn’t deliver, and she wouldn’t ill-wish somebody just on a customer’s say-so. She wouldn’t brew up a love potion, but she’d cook up a charm to make a girl look a bit better or to give a bit of fire back to a man who was down to the last of the coals, if you understand what I’m saying.

And if somebody got a little too much fire in their belly, well, Sal knew how to make some unexpected surprises go away, too. That didn’t put her in good order with the preacher, but preachers aren’t traditionally fond of witches anyhow, so she didn’t lose much by it. You didn’t get so many girls in our town going to visit relatives for a year and turning back up with a baby and a tale of a dead husband, either.

Now, you’d think that somebody who provided this sort of community service would live in the middle of town in a house with glass windows, but you’d be wrong. Sal lived halfway up a mountain in a tumbledown house with a porch like a cow’s hipbones. It was a long trek out to see her, and that was the way she liked it. She didn’t have many friends to be inconvenienced by the walk. People want a witch when they need one, but they don’t much like them. It was a little too easy, when you saw Sal go by, to remember what all she knew about you.

She didn’t make it easy for anybody, either. She’d catch your eye and smile a little, and you’d remember that little matter she took care of for you and know that she was remembering it, too.

She was a good witch and a decent person, but decent people aren’t always easy to live with.

So at the end of the day, Sal’s best friend was a razorback hog.

He was a damn big animal, size of a pony. Some idiot over by Graham got the bright idea to bring in boars for rich people to hunt, thinking he’d keep them fenced up in a park, and of course there were boars on either side of the fence before you could say “Well, that’s a stupid goddamn idea, isn’t it?” So this razorback’s granddaddy was a boar from the old country. Sal used to say he could see the fairies and liked to dig up their nests and gulp ’em down whole.

She called him “Rawhead.” If you’ve ever seen the hogs down at the butcher shop, before they make headcheese, you know what she was talking about. They take the skin right off and what you’ve got left is a bloody skull with teeth like tent pegs.

Rawhead turned up one day in the garden and started rooting around in her compost heap. He had a taste for magic and there was plenty of it there, alongside the eggshells and the wishing melon rinds. (I never met a witch worth her salt who didn’t love her garden more than any mortal soul.)

Well, she busted out of the door shouting at this half-grown hog in her compost heap. He’d been trampling down the pumpkin vines, so she put a curse on him that turned his tail straight. He staggered off and Sal thought she’d seen the last of him, but the very next day he was rooting off in the compost again.

She put a curse on him that time that turned his ears inside out. He staggered off again, his hooves going opposite directions, and took down one of the bean teepees in the process. Sal wanted to scream, but you can’t stop pigs being pigs, so she grabbed her broom and shooed him out by the garden gate.

“Get gone!” she yelled. “You come back, I’ll haul you down to the butcher and you’ll be a raw head and bones by nightfall!”

Third day, she comes out on the porch and there Rawhead is, in the compost heap, with his tail straight, his ears inside out, and a rotten tomato sliding down his chin.

“You don’t learn, do you?” says Sal.

No, ma’am, says Rawhead, and takes another bite of tomato.

You would have had to be a witch to hear him, but it’s not all that surprising. Pigs aren’t that far off from talking, most of them, and it doesn’t take more than a few wishing melons to tip them right over the edge.

Well, things that talk are people, however they look, and you don’t throw people out of the garden without offering them some hospitality. She invited Rawhead up to the porch and gave him a bucket full of water and yesterday’s leftovers, and he sat next to her rocker and thumped his straight tail on the boards.

“How’s that taste, then?”

Tastes good, ma’am.

“I see your momma raised you to be respectful,” said Sal, rocking.

Have to be, ma’am. If you aren’t, she rolls over on you and squashes you flat.

“Huh!” Sal rocked harder. “Not a bad notion. Know a few people who could’ve used a good squashing back in the day.”

It does make you think before you speak, ma’am. He rolled a beady little boar eye up at her. You cook good cornbread, ma’am. Can I stay with you a little while?

“Huh!” said Sal again, and after that, you couldn’t have found a closer pair than Sal and Rawhead the hog.

People tend not to mess with a witch, but there’s always some damn fool who sees a woman living alone and gets thoughts in his head.

The next time someone tried, he got a tusk in his behind and went off yelling.

So word went out that Sal had a razorback hog as her familiar, and that did nothing but good for her reputation.

Well, stories always grow in the telling. Before long, they were saying Rawhead could talk, and after that they said he walked upright and sat in a rocking chair, same as a person.

Couple of people said some other things, too, about Sal and Rawhead, but there are people who say any damn thing.

The truth of the matter, as near as I ever learned it, was that Sal went on and Rawhead went on, and two days out of three, he slept on the porch at her feet and ate her leftovers. A razorback hog is a good friend to have in zucchini season, when the vines get huge and start throwing out zucchinis as big as your thigh. Useful for cleaning up yellow cucumbers, too.

• • • •

Now, the way I always heard it, Silas the hunter had been one of those men who came sniffing around Sal when she was living alone, and it was Rawhead who broke him of that habit. But I’ve also heard that he was one of those folk who come up and try to give you charity you don’t want. There was a lot of that going on up there, and nobody gets mad like a do-gooder if you won’t hold still and let ’em do good on you.

Maybe he had a bit of a fancy for Sal, not in a marrying way, but thinking that somebody plain and lonely ought to be grateful for any attention. Maybe he thought that having a witch be grateful would be worth some trouble, or maybe he thought that a witch as good as Sal had a box full of money around the place.

But maybe those are just ways to make the story tidy again. The hunter could have just been one of those people who thinks he owns anything that doesn’t have somebody else’s name stamped on it. Lord knows, there’s enough of them around.

One way or the other, a day came along when Rawhead didn’t show up, and then another day, and then Sal started to get worried.

It wasn’t like Rawhead to go away for more than a day at a time. His territory was the mountaintop, and he didn’t leave it often. But pigs are social, same as human people, and they like each other’s company. So Sal let two days pass, then three, and then she heaved herself out of her rocking chair and said some words I won’t repeat in company.

She rummaged in her pantry ’til she found a good saucer, then she laid it on the table and filled it up with water and a drop of ink. The ink melted into the water and turned it black, and she breathed a witch’s breath onto it.

Then she tapped her nail on the water’s surface, and it rang like a bell.

“Good,” she said. “Good. Now, show me the front porch.” (Never ask to see something important right off. Water’s tricky, even with ink to gentle it.)

The water showed her the front porch, with the empty rocking chair and the faded mat by the door. A wren flew up to the railing and looked around for something, then flew away again when it didn’t find it.

“Good,” said Sal. “Now, show me the sheriff’s daughter, who ran off with the horse-thief.”

The water swirled—though the surface didn’t change—and Sal was looking at a girl wearing a clean apron, with a light in her eyes.

“Huh!” said Sal, pleased. “Glad it came out all right for her. Now, show me that razorback friend of mine.”

The water darkened.

Under the table, where the water couldn’t see it, Sal clenched her fist.

Then the water got light again—just a little—

And there was Rawhead.

She knew him right away, even though he was lying dead with three other hogs, in the back of a wagon moving down the road. She knew him just fine, and when the driver turned his head, she knew him, too.

Sal jerked back from the table and the water boiled away into steam.

She sat there for a minute, breathing through her nose, then she stood up. She picked up the saucer, because it was a good saucer with a little ink stained on it, and she washed it up careful, because a lifetime’s habits die hard.

Her head ached and her heart ached, but she folded up the dish towel and set it back on its loop. She would have cried, but she didn’t dare start.

“Somebody killed him,” she said out loud. It felt like a knife, and she stabbed herself with it again—“Somebody went and killed my Rawhead.”

That was better. If she said Rawhead’s dead, she was going to fold right up like a broken leaf, but if she said Somebody killed him—well, then, that Somebody was going to have to pay.

The core of being a witch is that you don’t fall down while there’s work to be done. Sometimes that means you invent work to keep yourself standing upright.

She went to the coffee can in her bedroom and took it down. There was eighty-seven dollars stuffed into it, and Sal took the money out. It was all she had, and not a bad amount, but she didn’t think she’d need it much longer.

Sal’s nearest neighbor was a woman named Madeline, who had a hard life and stayed cheerful for it. People like that are a blessing and occasionally an affliction.

Even Madeline was a little surprised when Sal showed up while she was hanging out laundry on the line. She pinned up a sheet and turned around, and there was Sal, not five feet away.

Madeline yelped. “Lord, Sal, you about scared the life out of me!”

“Right,” said Sal. “Came about the chickens.”

Madeline wasn’t quite done yet. “Seeing you right there like that! My heart’s pounding, so it is. Let me sit down a minute. You can kill a body if you scare ’em too hard, you know.”

“Don’t have much time,” said Sal bluntly. “It’s my chickens. I’d appreciate it if you’d look in on ’em tonight and make sure they’re in and fed.”

“Sure, Sal,” said Madeline. And then, though it wasn’t the sort of thing to say to a witch, “You all right, hon? You’re looking hard.”

“Hard times,” said Sal. “Take care of my chickens. If I don’t come back by tomorrow, they’re all yours. Watch for the rooster, he’s a devil.”

She turned away.

Madeline, moved by some spirit, called “You be careful, Sal!” and Sal’s shoulder twitched, but she didn’t make any reply.

She walked into town without talking to anybody. She watched for a certain wagon out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t see it, and she was glad.

“I’ll fix him,” she muttered. “I’ll fix him good for this. But I got to figure out a way.”

That’s the real problem being a good witch all your life. Time comes when you need to do something real bad, and you don’t have the knack for it. If she’d seen the man who murdered Rawhead walking down the street, what would she do?

She didn’t have the sort of magic that made people drop dead. Hardly anybody did.

“I’d yell at him like a crazy old woman,” muttered Sal, “and that’d be the end of me. Just some senile old woman yelling in the street.”

But the wagon wasn’t there, and she was still a witch.

So she walked on south for an hour, into the sandhills, looking for Elizabeth Gray.

• • • •

Sal found her sitting on the front porch, looking over the sundew pool. Sundews are little devil plants, covered in sticky hairs, and when a bug lands on them, the sundew sticks it tight and eats it from the inside out.

Elizabeth Gray found their company congenial.

Sal came up on the porch with her heart in her eyes, and there were two chairs there, and a second cup of tea set out.

“Have a seat,” said Elizabeth Gray.

Neither one of them saw fit to comment on the fact that Sal had been expected. They were both witches, and they knew how things were done. Sal took a sip of her tea and it was still hot, like it had just been poured a moment before.

She let out her breath, and her throat ached from not crying.

“Got a problem, I see,” said Elizabeth Gray.

“It’s my hog,” said Sal. “My friend. That hunter shot him—Paul Silas did it, and he knows full well that was my Rawhead.”

“Silas,” said Elizabeth Gray thoughtfully. “Didn’t his mother come from over by Bynum?”

“That’s him. She wasn’t a bad woman.” Sal took another slug of tea. “Good thing she’s dead. No mother ought to see what I aim to do to him.”

Elizabeth grinned. “Listen to you,” she said. “A white witch and all. What are you planning?”

“Don’t know,” said Sal honestly. “Had a thought, that’s all.”

And then she took a deep breath and said the words that witches hate to say, even to each other. “Need your help.”

The porch creaked as Elizabeth rocked in her chair. Down by the sundew pool, the plants rippled.

“What’s in it for me?” she asked. “That I ought to help you, who never did give me the time of day?”

“That ain’t fair,” said Sal. “You had your spot and I had mine. You ever asked, I’d have come. You know that.”

Elizabeth Gray knew it, even if she didn’t like to admit it. She tilted her head one way and another, and her neck bones popped and creaked like an old man’s knuckles. “It’s so. And you’re in my spot now.”

“I’ve got eighty-seven dollars,” said Sal, and laid it out on the table between the teacups.

“You should’ve said,” said Elizabeth Gray, all business. “Now, what is it you’re looking to do?”

Sal told her.

The sun moved a little bit in the sky before anyone spoke again.

“Listen,” said Elizabeth Gray, “listen close. You’re asking me to bring him back, and I can’t do that. Nobody can. You walk through that door and there’s no walking back through. You know that, Sal, you’re a witch to your teeth. You ever hear of anybody coming back for good?”

Sal stared into her empty teacup. “Thought you might have,” she said quietly. “Figured maybe there was a way.”

Elizabeth Gray shook her head, and that was truth, because witches don’t lie to each other.

Sal stood up. She went down the steps and made three paces.

Then she sank down by the pool filled with sundews and put her bony hands over her face, because her friend was dead.

Elizabeth Gray’s face didn’t change. Her heart was still like sand and triumph ran through and pity ran through and neither one sank in.

But things do grow on sand, complicated things like sundews, and something grew now in the witch’s heart that I wouldn’t try to put a name to.

“I can’t bring him back,” said Elizabeth Gray. “But if you’re willing, I can open the door.”

Sal looked up, her face streaked with an old woman’s tears.

“It’ll take your life,” said Gray, as if a witch’s life wasn’t any big thing. “Somebody’s got to shove their foot in the door. He’s all the way dead and you’re all the way alive, and if you’re willing, I can take you both halfway. I don’t swear you won’t wind up in one skin together, but it’s the best I can do.”

Sal thought about it. She thought about it hard, the way you do when every word in your head has an echo and you slam it down on the floor of your skull. She sat by the sundew pool and she thought, and Elizabeth Gray brought her another cup of tea, but all of it was second-guessing. She’d known what she was going to say as soon as Gray had made her offer.

“Do it,” Sal said.

• • • •

I’m not going to tell you what the spell was like. You think I want that sort of thing being common knowledge? You need a silver spoon to see by and a half-handful of rabbit tobacco, among other things, but that’s as much as you’re going to hear. Some stuff doesn’t need to go any farther. You want to know details, go ask Elizabeth Gray.

She did the spell, anyhow. People say it was a hard spell, but I think that’s because most people don’t understand magic. It was easy, the way dying’s easy or birthing’s easy. It’s not hard, it just hurts a whole hell of a lot.

Sal sat in the sand, because it was easier that way. Her hip joints ached getting her down, and she didn’t think she’d be able to stand back up, but that didn’t matter, because she figured she wouldn’t be standing up again. Not in this life, anyhow.

The moon came up. It reflected in the pool, and Sal watched the sundews thrash and dance in a way that they don’t do by daylight. Tiny little things they were, but they moved more like mice than plants, and they leaned toward Elizabeth Gray.

She was still watching the sundews when Elizabeth came up behind her with the big hog-killing knife and slit her throat from ear to ear.

• • • •

Sal woke up with a scream and a gasp, in a body that wasn’t hers.

She was hung upside down by her heels, and her whole body bucked when she moved and threw her sideways. It turned out to be a blessing, because she’d been hung up with a hook through her legs and she would have been hard pressed to free herself, but the convulsion knocked her right off the hook and onto the floor.

It was a fair bit of luck, witch’s luck, but she was in no position to appreciate it.

It hurt.

It hurt more than anything ever had, more than she thought anything ever could. She’d been dead and now she was alive, and bodies don’t much like that. When you’re dead, all your muscles go limp, even the little ones that hold tense their entire lives. They didn’t take kindly to being told to wake up and work again.

Her heart was the worst. Her heart tried to beat and there was stuff inside it that didn’t want to move. It folded up like a fist around a knife blade and sprang open again.

Sal would have given her hope of heaven to stop that heart from beating, but the magic was in it now and wouldn’t let it rest. It squeezed and opened, squeezed and opened, and inside the clotted heart, the blood broke up like ice on a river and began to flow again.

She had no idea how long she laid on the ground. It could have been hours. It felt like her entire life. But the dead body around her came back to life, slow as slow, and finally she opened her eyes and realized she was in the body of the dead razorback hog.

Ma’am? said a tiny little voice. That you?

If she’d been human, she would have cried, but hogs don’t. She made a little whimpering squealing sound and scraped her trotters along the floorboards.

“Rawhead?” (It wasn’t quite talking aloud, but he got the sense of it.)

Yes, ma’am. What happened?

“Think we’ve been dead, hon.” Sal considered. “Well, you’ve been dead, and my body probably ain’t alive if Elizabeth Gray did proper work with the knife.”

She scrabbled her feet again, trying to get up.

Let me, said Rawhead, and the ungainly body was suddenly graceful, rolling to its feet and shaking all over.

“So that’s the trick of it,” said Sal. “Lord. Not used to being down here on four legs.”

It’s easier than two.

It did seem to be. Her vision wasn’t so good, but things smelled strong, and the smells sort of worked with her eyes in a way she hadn’t expected.

“We’re in a barn, aren’t we?”

Think so, ma’am. Rawhead turned in a circle and then looked up.

There were three dead hogs hanging from hooks overhead, their throats opened up to drain into a gutter in the floor. A fourth hook hung empty.

“Huh!” Sal stared at them. “Surprised there was any blood left in us. Must be the magic. I’ll give her this, Elizabeth Gray’s no slouch with the knife.”

Those three were my friends, said Rawhead. We ran around the mountain together.

“I’m sorry,” said Sal, suddenly shamed. “I didn’t think. I’m sorry for your friends.”

It’s all right. They’ll go on. We all go on. He dropped her—their—head, startling Sal again. I’ll miss them.

There was nothing that a human could add to that eulogy. She didn’t try.

The hog’s body was huge and powerful. Sal tried moving it, walking unsteadily toward the door.

It was exhausting. It moved more or less as she asked—it worked better if she didn’t concentrate too much on how the legs were moving—but the beating of their dead heart did nothing to revive her.

She got them around the corner of the barn. It was dim and noisy with crickets. She could smell turned earth and blood.

Their legs started to shake, and she had to sit down.

This was madness, she thought, trying to keep her thoughts away from Rawhead and not sure if she was succeeding. I’ve trapped us both in this dead body, and for what? Revenge?

A witch should have known better. Now what? Even if I kill that bastard hunter, what then? Lay down and rot until there’s not enough left of the body to hold us here?

It was not a pleasant thought. Even less pleasant was the thought that the hog’s body might rot away and their souls would be left chained to its bones.

Witches generally feel that there’s plenty of work to be done here and now, but I never met one that wasn’t secretly hoping to put their feet up for a while in the afterlife.

Now, though …

Poor sort of friend I am. Silas only killed his body, but I may have made him into a ghost.

You’re a good friend, ma’am, said Rawhead staunchly. Sal realized that he’d been listening to her think the whole time. It would have been embarrassing if he was anybody else. She scuffled their trotters in the dirt.

“Did I hold you back from heaven, Rawhead?”

Doesn’t work like that for us, ma’am. We just go on to the next thing.

“What’s the next thing?” asked Sal. She was exhausted and felt like dying again.

Oh, you know. We go around again. Think I was going to be a bird this time, said Rawhead. All curled up in an egg, with someone tap-tap-tapping on my shell. I like being a bird. It’s good to fly.

Sal wished that she could weep. Their mouth gaped open in distress. “What happened to that bird?”

Won’t hatch, I guess. It happens, ma’am. Don’t worry. It was hard to comfort herself in only one body. Hogs would normally go shoulder to shoulder, lean on one another, but with only one body between them, Rawhead had to settle for leaning against the barn wall and rubbing their jowls against their forelegs. I don’t mind coming back. We’ll die again sooner or later, and I’ll be a different bird.

He paused and added generously, You can come be a bird with me if you like, ma’am. I wouldn’t mind.

Humans are different from hogs in that kindness can break their hearts. Sal moaned through the dead razorback’s throat.

“What the hell is that racket?” yelled a voice from inside the barn.

The boar’s body jerked itself up and made a short bark of surprise before Sal quite realized what she was doing.

It was Paul Silas. Well, who else would it be?

“Damn it,” she muttered, and “Damn it!” said Silas. She heard the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked. It was practically under her ear, on the other side of the wall.

Rawhead wisely took over at this point, backing them into the thicket of dog fennel and Queen Anne’s lace that surrounded the barn. A beam of light came out of the barn, jangling crazily as the hunter carried the lantern. Sal saw the green gleam of spider eyes in the grass as the light moved over it, and a red flash from a whippoorwill blinking in the ditch.

“Who’s there?” shouted Silas. “Who’s sneaking around my—ah, goddamn!”

“Found we were gone,” said Sal silently.

Rawhead sank more deeply into the thicket. The light went flashing by, through the cracks between boards, and lit up the pebbles at the dead hog’s feet.

Silas’s footsteps paused by the empty hook, and then he walked to the mouth of the barn. The whippoorwill flew up and away into the trees.

“You a bear?” asked Silas. “You a bear out there, taking my meat? Or you a man?” He turned in a circle, and Sal saw the rifle outlined against the lantern light.

• • • •

There’s a whole story people tell when they’re telling the story of Rawhead and Sal. It’s a little bit like Little Red Riding Hood—the hunter says, “My, what big eyes you got!” And Rawhead supposedly says, “The better to see your grave.” And the hunter says, “What a bushy tail you got.” And Rawhead says, “The better to sweep your grave.”

Well, a talking hog is one thing, but I never heard of a hog with a bushy tail. They say he took it off a dead raccoon, but if you can tell me why a boar would need a rotten raccoon tail to kill someone with, I’d dearly love to hear it.

No, what happened was that Silas stood in the circle of lantern light, holding his gun, looking for a bear or a thief, and Sal looked at him and heard his whining voice, and she remembered why she was mad.

That bastard killed Rawhead. He’d killed Rawhead’s friends. In a roundabout way, he’d killed Sal herself.

And Sal remembered other things—the way Silas had treated a woman living alone, the way he’d come sniffing around like a dog after a bone, offering charity and more than charity, even when she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in the likes of him. She remembered a couple conversations on the porch that she’d rather not have had.

She thought of how those conversations might have gone if she’d been only a woman alone and not a witch. She remembered how they’d almost gone anyway, and a couple of nights spent with the door barred and her own rifle across her lap.

“I believe that man needs killing, Rawhead,” she said.

Yes, ma’am, said Rawhead.

He moved.

The dead heart hammered in their chest, and Sal threw herself on the pain and took it all. When Rawhead charged, he was as quick on his hooves as a living razorback, and that is very quick indeed.

Silas heard the charge and turned. He got the gun halfway to his shoulder and fired.

The impact knocked the dead boar back a step—but only a step. He did not get time for another shot.

Their jaws closed over his thigh. Silas screamed, but not for very long. Humans die easy compared to hogs.

And then there was quiet.

After awhile the crickets started in again. The fireflies spread themselves out under the trees. The lantern guttered and went out.

Sal sighed. She felt ancient. The bullet in the dead boar’s neck burned and she had no way to pick it out.

“Well,” she said. “Well. I guess that’s that.”

Yes, ma’am.

• • • •

The story that got around was a ghost story, so there’s a proper ghost story end to it. They say Rawhead still rides around on the hunter’s horse, and sometimes his head comes off and he holds it up to scare people with. They say he’s still haunting these hills to this day, one more leftover thing from the old days, like the foundations you find in the woods sometimes, or the bits of barbed wire that turned up rusted in the fields.

But it wasn’t like that, not in the end.

Sal and Rawhead walked. They walked clear back to her house, and that was a long and weary way. Rawhead heaved that dead body up on the porch for the last time and laid it down on the boards.

“Well,” said Sal. She didn’t have any regrets about Silas. She was so tired that regret couldn’t get much foothold. It was more like a list in her head, checking off boxes—die, tick, take revenge, tick, come home, tick.

She felt like she was seeing the world from a long way away. Only Rawhead’s voice was clear in her mind, as if he was standing right at her shoulder. “I … I don’t know what to do now.”

Come with me, suggested Rawhead. We’ll go be birds together.

It sounded good to Sal.

They died again, on the porch. Rawhead knew the way. The dead heart, which had beaten so faithfully for so long, shuddered into stillness.

Madeline found the body the next day, and she knew enough about witches to cry over it. But Sal and Rawhead were long gone.

There’s people who say that witches don’t go to heaven. That sort of person acts like they’re in charge of who goes in and out, though, and I don’t know if God holds with that sort of thing. Maybe Sal did, maybe she didn’t. It’s not for me to say.

But me, I like to think that they found themselves curled up warm in an egg together, to sleep and dream of flying.

Ursula Vernon is the author of the Hugo-award winning comic Digger, as well as multiple children’s book series. She writes for adults under the name T. Kingfisher. Her work has won the Nebula, Mythopoeic, Coyotl, and WSFA Awards. She lives in North Carolina. You can find more of her short stories and novels at Tkingfisher.com.

We Have a Cultural Difference,
Can I Taste You?
By Rebecca Ann Jordan

I’m licking the bronze key with its tiny hook, enfolded into myself. The key is only for emergencies and I’m trying to decide whether this counts.

Then I’m at the door, slipping the thin peg into the emergency keyhole. I know the mechanism well. It clicks, jumps, and I’m in her room.

My appendages linger in piles of half-clean clothes, letting the wall of scent—uneven parts sour-sweet girl-musk, sharp dry cheese, the erasers and graphite and evenly-distributed-mark-makers and something all Nina’s—surround me, and then I’m in: licking little hems and the dry wheaty-taste of threads, rubbing myself across synthetic wood and trying to fit its bulky corners in, pulling whole pens and compasses and rulers through gelatinous openings to puzzle their parts inside of me. Nina’s space is filled with rubbery textures and bitter metallic barriers and pages and pages of paper. In my frenzy I forget that they get offended at the taking of books into oneselves; I tear through An Intergalactic Traveler’s Guide to the Far Reaches, Vol. 4; Extra-Terrestrial Artmaking; and Constructing the 23rd Century: A Brief Discourse into the Age of Progress.

By now I’m feeling weighted down and remembering why I’m here while I suck on Nina’s blanket. There must be something here to explain why Nina’s been low-energy. The pulsations rolling off of her human body are not as enjoyable when she’s sad, and she’s been sad for a while now. Maybe something’s wrong with her fish? I vibrate to echolocate her fish tank on the desk and pull within me the briney droplets of water, then the waxy plasticness of the decorative leaves, then the teacup abyssal grouper, all ruffled-sharp scales and teeth. Its little heart speeds inside my higher viscosity. It nibbles at my insides. I wriggle, delighting in all of these things in me. I want to digest them all.

A yelp from the door pulses against my membrane. The atmosphere shifts, letting in a breeze and also a mixture of soft sweat and graphite and the oil of Nina’s makeup.

I fall very still. I don’t vibrate, not even a little.

In my proprioception, the room’s pressure shifts again—enough to accommodate my other roommate’s, Tinequert’s, softly whirring AI head and her artificial solid-state brain matter. A click. “At least it went for your things this time.” I know what the words mean, but, as usual, can’t comprehend her tone. The pressure from Tinequert’s head in the room disappears as she churns away into the hallway.

In a rush Nina’s short, dense body pushes into the room, snatching away her things and throwing them across the room. There are slams and crashes and ripples in the air, and I burble with the sensory input. I have come to associate this behavior with human rage, but it feels so good against my semi-permeable skin.

“Are you seriously laughing?” squeals Nina. Air presses against me, whirls around me; Nina is on the move. “You have no regard for personal space, Filo/Gee! For common . . . decency! I can’t believe I have to deal with this, with my grandmother…” Her voice goes high and tight, and after a grunt she says: “Can you please carefully take Shakesfeare out of your . . .” I almost feel her lips purse. “Put Shakesfeare back in his tank.”

The grouper wriggles and thrashes as I extend to drop him into what unclean water remains. I miss him already. “I’m sorry!” I say. “We have a cultural difference!” That magic phrase, I’ve come to learn, can usually make Nina smile and forgive me before she lets me taste her old graphite-filled sketches.

This time, waves of flushed rage roll off of Nina. She doesn’t mean to reward me, so I begin to surreptitiously expel the now-slurry particles of fiber, plastic, pigment, paper, and splinters onto the floor. “We’ve been roommates for a year and a half,” comes her boiling voice, so soft normally (I know the softness of her tongue from experience—just once! An accident!). “That’s not an excuse anymore.” And quite abruptly, the pressure in the room dissipates.

I pursue her into the common area. “Where are you going?”

“File a report.” Her tone has quieted again, back to her normal, simmering self. In her methodical way she packs her bag back up, tucking away anything that I could potentially have access to.

This quietness depresses me. I slump against the wall, which tastes of concrete and paint and titanium and bolts. I take no pleasure in it. “About me?”

“Yes, Filo/Gee.” A clearing of her throat, which tickles me. “I thought I was doing a good thing, volunteering to room with you and all. But clearly we just . . . can’t live together.” I feel her skin soften through the air between us. “It’s not your fault. It’s just—cultural differences.” Her voice falls off and she is silent.

I twist inside myself. She doesn’t want to live with me. My Cultural Sensitivity across Species classes have taught me that much, even though I’m not the best student. “Okay,” I say.

Nobody understands. Just because I can’t see doesn’t mean I can’t feel them in the room, their miniscule movements, the turns of their heads and the wringing of their hands. I know she’s there, though when she leaves she tries to close the door quietly.

The key that’s only for emergencies turns inside of me.

• • • •

By the way, I have a lawyer! The AI was assigned to me when I first enrolled, the first of my kind to go to an intergalactic school. So now, even though the administration asks me a few questions, my lawyer whirrs up from the South Fourth Quadrant to tell me the station can’t bring any charges against me regarding the incident. She’s working on getting me upgraded from endangered species to protected class.

So they quietly move my things into a space of my own when Nina is in Structural Integrity IV and Tinequert is in Applications of Advanced Theoretical Physics. I have few items, because even though I’ve had plenty of money donated to me, it is too delicious to part with. And the things I do have are well-turned-over and worn, absorbed into me and licked many times.

After some hours, the delight of the new walls and chair and rug start to leave a bad taste; I’m used to a palate-cleanser of Nina’s pigments after such romps. A doctor comes to let me absorb my antibiotics, which he says helps me counteract the bacteria I ingest while living among humans and other extraterrestrials. The station pumps more highly pressurized air into my room, which calms me down some. Still I wrap the worn blanket around me and then pull it inside to suck on its bare threads.

• • • •

In Cultural Sensitivity across Species 350, it’s my turn to give a presentation. I’m great at speaking now! Ever since I learned to pull some of myself concavely inward, then vibrate the lower palate against the upper, it’s not difficult to shape human sounds into words.

Still, I don’t understand them. Just like they don’t understand what it is to feel everything.

“Whatever is on your desk,” I’m saying, “put it in your mouth.”

There’s the usual mixture of awkward laughter, the turning of feathered and furred and leafed heads to face others, perhaps to exchange some sort of wordless understanding, and outright objection. I pulsate pleasantly with the attention as sounds and words bounce around the room, as the stillness turns to a raucous chorus of sharp bark-sounds, sweat-smells, gases and sound waves and movement all pulsating toward me.

The matter that I am most attuned to is toward the back of the room in a quiet corner. Nina smells today of musk and ink, paper and coffee and sleep still hanging over her, as if she rushed out of the dorm without showering.

The air around her shifts. She puts the cap of an expensive artist’s pen, plastic and metallic, in her mouth and closes her lips.

Nobody notices but me.

The professor tells me to get to my point, and prompts everyone else to quiet down and indulge me because I might just surprise them. They do it, even the AIs who theoretically don’t have taste sensory input (at least on this model). Most put paper in their mouths, or else food, which is cheating, but I don’t mind. “Now,” I say, all my nerves alive, “imagine your mouth is a stomach, and your stomach is the whole of your body. Also, it can smell things. And it’s liquid. Turn it over with your tongue. Describe how it tastes, with your words. How big it is. How thin or thick. . . .”

“I wonder what else they like putting in their mouth,” a student says.

“Everything!” I say. “It’s always like that. Sound waves tickle me. In fact, it’s better when it’s noisier! It strengthens my musculature and increases the variations in my viscosity! This is how I mature, rather than nutrition. And once I’ve experienced enough environmental stimulation—”

Another student says, “I’ll increase their vibrations . . . .”

“All right,” the professor says, her voice tired. “That’s enough. And may I remind you that you are being graded on participation, part of which is your empathy score.”

I slink back to my seat. It’s time for a presentation from the two AIs on theory of mind when you don’t technically have one, traditionally defined.

In the corner, the pen cap turns over and over in Nina’s mouth.

• • • •

In the cafeteria, there’s a human with latex hands who will give me a glove once in a while. I like to sit and sift through the smells wafting around: meat substitute, protein leaflets, still mildly wood-smelling chopsticks, hair product, atmospheric variations, gaseous exhalations, rubber-soled shoes and the feet in them.

I ponder what my classmates could have been referring to. If they were offering to touch me, well, that was kind of them! Tasting organic material is always better than metals or other synthetic products; it is always changing into something new. I attempt to whistle.

Boisterous conversation tickles me. But I feel part of a conversation lapping toward me, and as soon as I hear who it is, I focus my attention.

“. . .It’s plain survival of the fittest,” Tinequert is saying. “They could not survive contact with humanity, which was an inevitability in the ever-increasing intergalactic nature of our universe.”

“Then why is Filo/Gee still around?” a feline biped snorts.

A shrug of titanium shoulders indicates they are sitting somewhere behind me. I shift in the made-for-bipedal-shapes chair to more immediately feel their vibrations. “It defies logic.”

“I imagine they’re pumping the amoeba full of drugs,” the feline sneers. “No wonder it’s so hyped up.”

A human says: “We just have to endure that oversized snot wad until it catches something and goes extinct.”

“Now,” says the furred, fanged creature. “Let’s not be cruel.”

“At least,” says the other AI, “the station’s getting funding for having it here.”

It wouldn’t have bothered me—considering the fact that AIs can only reproduce under human schematics (ironic for them to cite survival of the fittest)—except the AI turns to a second human who smells of softness and architect’s graphite: “How did you put up with the brainless creature?”

Nina stirs her cafeteria stew in silence.

• • • •

Eavesdropping is great fun. Usually. After the incident in the cafeteria I don’t take as much joy in it as usual as I trundle along the bare echo-chambers that are the dorm hallways, sound resonating from every angle. My own echoes are meager snacks, but they’ll do until I hear the secreted stories behind dorm doors.

At one door, someone hums to himself. It makes me feel a little better to hum back, low and soft like the air conditioner so they can’t hear. At the next, I can hear the telltale grunts and creaks of two phaseoloides twining and fertilizing each other in coitus—their thick grapey scent rolls under the door into the hallway. I linger, considering the anatomy of copulation, and the necessity of two of the species to reproduce, like most on this station. It doesn’t seem sustainable in terms of perpetuating the species. Then again, neither does having semi-permeable skin that’s susceptible to human-transmitted diseases.

I wouldn’t mind someone to rub up against and slip into.

This line of thought is enough to make me slump at the next door, which is thick with well-traversed scents. I tremble with nostalgia and press myself up against that door, the door I no longer have the key to.

Their voices oscillate: Nina’s pinched and soft, Tinequert’s full of clicking.

The soft voice hiccups, irregular. I flinch, recoiling for once at the surge of energy roiling off of Nina.

“You’re being irrational,” comes Tinequert’s hollow voice.

“You don’t understand.” I press myself fully against the door to better feel the rise and fall of her vibrations. “My grandmother raised me! How can I just forget. . . .”

“I’m sorry. You are not the first of your kind to be forgotten. It isn’t economical to keep wasting time for an organism that doesn’t remember you or care.” Nina’s choked sob follows. “I’m sorry,” Tinequert says. “I’m trying to help you.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of it.”

“My model came before the invention of empathy-synthesis. I’m not programmed to understand grief,” Tinequert says, and her voice has something in it I haven’t noticed before. “Please don’t storm off. Explain it to me.”

Thudding footsteps, vibrating my foundation. I am absolutely still, so as to catch the tremors. And then the door’s open and I tumble into the suite. Nina hesitates only for a moment, then in a wave scented with salt and sorrow she rushes past me.

“What happened!” I say, playing it cool. Cool like an AI.

Tinequert’s mechanical body approaches mine. “We are in an important discussion, Filo/Gee. Can you come back later?” She’s turned Nina against me, she wishes I’d perished like the rest of my kind. A hot, sour feeling boils in my body, but it’s not coming from outside.

I heave my mass at her and taste her sharp metals, slick bones and rubbery surfaces, and she’s sounding a wailing alarm and yelling at me to protect the hard drive, but I don’t care. I swing myself down to the ground and I take her with me, and her squeals tickle my insides as her copper wirings fray and snap and is that joint oil I’m tasting?

I’m not surprised when the station staffers come, gloved, to pull me away and lock me in my room.

• • • •

It’s a week later and I’m feeling deprived. The station slips trays of pulverized nutrients under the door: protein smoothies, freeze-dried seaweed, slivers of faux animal meat. I attempt to digest them, even though they don’t satisfy. I’m downgraded from endangered species to “corrosive agent.” The doctor from the health center comes, radiating nervousness. He tells me to drink more water and get plenty of sleep, not to overstimulate myself. He ups my antibiotics. I absorb water. I push as much of myself as possible against the corner of the desk and wrap myself around it, begin to bleach all taste from it. I’m too small now for it to really fit.

My lawyer comes all the way up from the South Fourth to explain something to me. She’s making no sense. Words begin to have less meaning. I can’t translate them to feeling. I stop trying to structure them into any kind of sense.

It’s the middle of the night. I feel a click of the lock on my door. It rouses me. I expose more surface area to the vibrations.

The door swings open, bringing with it a rush of the cool air the station pumps into the hallways at night. A human shape parts the air particles around her. I get a rush of musk, sebum, graphite and erasure filings, and come all the way alert.

“Filo/Gee?”

I release myself from around the chewed-upon desk corner. Nina has the emergencies-only key in her hand, and also something with a high rectangular volume. And heavy, too—she sets it on the desk.

Intense, vast relief cools down my body. My liquids slide along my gelatinous parts, loosening my language. “What are you doing here! It’s the middle of the night!”

Nina sits on the bed even as I slide up from it. She runs her fingertips along my threadbare blanket. “I wanted to apologize,” she says quietly, in a low, fine vibration. I suddenly grasp its significance—genuine regret. “I . . . overreacted, before. When you were in my dorm.”

I say nothing; I’m trying to focus on the words she’s saying, but I can’t stop myself from writhing in her scents, from reveling in the soft lilts of her voice. I didn’t even know I missed them. I didn’t even realize how numb I’ve become without her slightly-unwashed scent. “It’s okay,” I burble, the bare minimum response.

“No,” she says softly. Then, more firmly: “No. It’s not your fault. I didn’t realize . . . .” She trails off. “I didn’t think how you must be so . . .”

“What?”

“Alone.” Her scent changes: salty sorrow.

We’ve never talked about the human-transmitted disease that wiped out my friends and family and everyone I knew and the fact that I avoided it because my sibling Hali/Koo had sent me here, to this station-school. Sure, I was exposed to humans here, same as everyone else. But when my kind started getting sick, my lawyer got me the best medical care, fast. The rest of my planet? Not so much.

“I know it isn’t the same,” Nina is saying, “but . . .my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse. She had the vaccine, but . . . . One out of a hundred cases, it doesn’t work.” She shakes her head. I get a whiff of her perfume and a taste of her oily split ends. “It’s like . . . To her, I don’t even exist anymore.” A new scent: sweet-sour snot. I stretch to touch her face. She flinches, then holds still as I sop up her nasal fluid and her tears. I pull back, not sure whether I’ve embarrassed myself again.

“I’m sorry.” I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for. Maybe all of it.

Nina shakes her head again; guilt rolls off of her in overly-sweet waves. We’re even. “Listen.” She stands up. “I want you to have Shakesfeare.”

So she’s brought the tank. I remember the soft, ridged scales inside me and can’t help but wriggle. “I thought you loved Shakesfeare.”

“I do.” We cross together to the desk. “I mean, he’s beautiful. But . . . alone. Like—us.”

I dare to slip a toe of myself into the tank. Shakesfeare’s sharp, tiny teeth come up to nibble at me. All of my jelly prickles in response.

Nina’s heat radiates off of her like a low-burning furnace. She’s moving, pressing the hairs of her arms flat against her skin. “They shouldn’t have said that,” she whispers. “Tinequert shouldn’t have said that about your people.”

“It’s all right!” I’m feeling better and better. She hasn’t moved away from me yet, and I feel a flood of a new emotion that makes me feel warm and sweet. “They’re wrong.”

“Your people survived?”

“No. They’re wrong that I’m the last of my kind.” I’m practically purring with pleasure. I would be perfectly fine with letting the grouper nibble off some more of me if I could feel like this in every moment of every day. “When I experience enough matter and energy, I get larger. And when I’m too large, I’ll split into two.”

“You reproduce asexually?” Nina says. “Your species isn’t going extinct!”

“Just the opposite,” I say happily. “And I’m going to name them Filo/Koo and. . .” I had the names for my two selves all picked out in preparation for mitosis, but now everything’s changed. I make a decision. “. . .and Nina/Gee.”

“Oh,” Nina says quietly. “I’m . . . flattered, I think.” The heat is rolling off of her. “Whew. I thought you were going to ask me to incubate your offspring, or something.”

We’re giggling. “I’m not that kind of alien,” I say. “How is Tinequert?”

“They’re putting her back together. With some upgrades, too.”

We trail off to silence, both holding ourselves very still. I’m fighting the urge to reach out to her, to engulf her.

Instead, she whispers: “Can I . . . ?”

Her language runs concurrently over this other layer of understanding, as though she feels some of my vibrations, too. I hum a soft invitation. Her round, thin appendage slips into me, garnished with a keratin surface, and I’m trembling to keep myself from reacting and then I’m suckling at her epidermal ridges, callouses and all, and she tastes like everything she has touched and experienced on this day and all the days that have come before and I invite her in, deeper, surround her up to the wrist and tug at the fine dark hairy roots.

She pulls her hand out from me. Reluctantly, I release her. I’ve forgotten about Shakesfeare, who has been nibbling, and has chewed some of me off. And it hurts, a stamp-sized surface area of me even more exposed, some of my viscosity pouring out, that burst and splatter of joy.

But it doesn’t matter. It will grow back.

Rebecca Ann Jordan is a speculative fiction author, artist, and editor. She’s the artist behind Sad Chimera Princess, and her stories and poems have been published in Strange Horizons, Flapperhouse, Fiction Vortex, Strangelet, and more. In 2015 Becca participated in the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and graduated with an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2016. While Becca first sprung from the earth near the San Diego area, she now sells weird and wonderful books in the mountain town of Durango, Colorado. See more at rebeccaannjordan.com or follow her @beccaquibbles.

Lullaby for a Lost World
By Aliette de Bodard

They bury you at the bottom of the gardens—what’s left of you, pathetic and small and twisted so out of shape it hardly seems human anymore. The river, dark and oily, licks at the ruin of your flesh—at your broken bones—and sings you to sleep in a soft, gentle language like a mother’s lullabies, whispering of rest and forgiveness, of a place where it is forever light, forever safe.

You do not rest. You cannot forgive. You are not safe—you never were.

After your friends have gone, scattering their meager offerings of flowers, after the other archivists have left, it’s just your mother and your master, standing over your grave. Your mother looks years and years older, hollowed out by grief, but your master stands unchanged—tall and dark, with light shining beneath the planes of his face, his skin so thin it might be porcelain.

“Was . . . was there pain?” your mother asks. She clutches your favorite doll—so well-worn it’s going to pieces in her hands. She doesn’t want to let go because, when she’s knelt in the blood-spattered mud of the gardens, she will have to get up, she will have to go back, to move on, as though everything she does from now on does not stand in the shadow of your death.

Your master’s smile is a hollow thing, too; white and quick, perfunctory. “No,” he says. “We gave her poppy. She felt nothing.”

It’s a lie, of course. There was poppy; there were opiates, but nothing could alleviate the pain of being torn apart—of the house gnawing at your innards; of claws teasing open your chest, splitting ribs in their hurry to lick at your heart’s blood—of struggling to breathe through liquid-filled lungs, lifting broken arms and hands to defend yourself against something you couldn’t reach, couldn’t touch.

“I see.” Your mother looks at the earth again; hovers uncertainly on the edge of your burial place. At length she lays down the doll, her hands lingering on it, a prayer on her lips—and you ache to rise up, to comfort her as she’d always comforted you—to find the words that would keep the darkness at bay.

You are dead, and there are no words left; and no lies that will hold.

And then it’s just you and your master. You thought he would leave, too, but instead he kneels, slow and stately, as if bowing to a queen—and remains for a while, staring at the overturned earth. “I’m sorry, Charlotte,” he says at last. His voice is melodious, grave, as impeccably courteous as always—the same one he had when he told you what needed to be done—that it was all for the good of the house. “Better the weak and the sick than all of us. I know it doesn’t excuse anything.”

It doesn’t. It never will. Beneath the earth, you struggle to push at what holds you down—to gather shattered flesh and glistening bones, to rise up like the dead at the resurrection, raging and weeping and demanding justice, but nothing happens. Just a faint bulge on the grave, a slight yielding of the mud. Voiceless, bodiless, you have no power to move anything.

“You keep us safe,” your master says. He looks . . . tired, for a moment, wan and drained of color in the sunlight, his eyes shot with blood. But then he rises, and it’s as if a curtain had been drawn across his face, casting everything in a sharper, merciless light; and once more he is the dapper, effortlessly elegant master of the house, the man who keeps it all together by sheer strength of will. He stares at the blackened water of the river, at the city beyond the boundaries of the house—the smoke of skirmishes and riots, the distant sound of fighting in the streets. “Your blood, your pain is the power we rely on. Remember this, if nothing else.”

You do; but it has no hold on you, not anymore.

He walks away, his swallow-tailed jacket shining like obsidian in the greenness of the gardens.

Time passes—months flipped forward like the pages of the books you used to love so much. Your master sits behind the gleaming windowpanes of the house, smiling and sipping fine wines, ageless and fattened on the blood of his sacrifices. Your mother dies, and your friends move on—your name becomes like you; buried, broken, and forgotten; your place long since taken in the library and, in the depths of the house, the circle where you died grows faint and bloodless, every scrap of pain long since absorbed to feed the magic that keeps the world at bay. Outside, the city is burning, tearing itself apart over polluted water, over grit-filled rice and rotten fish. Inside—green, verdant gardens; food on the plates; and music and love and laughter, all the things you used to take for granted, when you lived.

Time passes—there is a girl who comes to sit by the river’s edge. Who steals books out of the library and knots red ribbons into the raven curls of her hair, unaware of what lies beneath her. Who runs, laughing, with her friends—except that you hear the slight catch of breath—feel the slight stumble as, just for a moment, her heart misses a beat and her feet become unsteady on the ground.

“Isaure!”

“I’m fine,” the girl says, pulling herself together. She looks down, then, at the slight bulge of the earth. “That’s funny. What is—”

“Ssh,” the other, older woman says, shaking her head. “Don’t speak of it. It’s bad luck.”

Beyond the gardens, the house waits—walls of golden stone, paneled doors with intricate carvings that seem to come alive at night and, in the cellar underneath, the circle, almost faded to nothing now, the growing hunger of the house’s magic, the price that must be paid, again and again, by those who cannot be allowed to live.

I’m sorry, Charlotte.

Liar.

When Isaure comes back, she is paler; and unsteady on her feet; and red has bloomed on her cheeks like blood. “I know you’re here,” she says, standing over your grave.

You feel something shift within you—some indefinable rearrangement of your self—a femur, poking upwards, jellied muscles suddenly finding consistency, hair strands spreading farther and farther away from your remains, like tendrils extended toward the house. But you’re still here, still held fast by the earth, by the river’s endless song, the lullaby that offers no solace or appeasement.

“The others won’t talk about it, but I need to know.” Isaure sits, for a while—no red ribbons in her hair, which tumbles thick and unruly in her lap. “I—I don’t even know what happens.”

You could tell her, if you still had a voice—of the day they will come for her, two footmen and a butler and the master behind them, solemn and unsmiling, and as grave as if this were her first communion—of how they will bring her to a part of the house she’s never been to, a place of embroidered carpets and silk curtains and wide, airy rooms—of how they will comb her hair, doing it up with fine silver pins in the shape of butterflies, and give her clothes—a red dress, or a red suit, whichever she prefers—delicate, luxurious confections embroidered with birds and flowers—brand-new, for your own clothes were torn and stained when you died, and were as unrecognizable as your body was, a mess of stiffened lace and slashed cotton that they buried with you, not finding the heart to separate it from your mangled remains.

And then the slow descent into the cellar—that tightness rising in her chest, as if the air she’s breathing was being taken away from her—and the circle, and the altar, and—and a last draught of poppy, an illusory comfort that will not hold when the darkness at the heart of the house rises and she strains against the shackles, trying to stifle the scream that’s tearing its way out of her . . .

Isaure—don’t— you whisper. The earth shifts above you, and your bones push upward, as sharp as razor blades, the tip of one femur barely breaking the surface—and Isaure bends, as if she could hear you.

“Please,” she says.

Don’t, you say, but she’s already gone—her breath coming in short, sharp gasps, her heartbeat irregular, feeling as though it might be snuffed out at any time. You wonder how much time she has—how much time you had, when they came for you and your rotten, consumptive lungs, how much life the house and your master stole from you as it will steal from this child. You’re dead, and the dead cannot intervene, but if only you could—

When Isaure comes next, your master is with her. He looks as he always did—as if time passed him by, leaving him only slightly paler, only slightly thinner—and he moves with the grace and elegance you remember from your own lifetime—you remember him, pausing down the stairs halfway to the cellar and waiting for you as you struggled with the unfamiliar train of the dress, a reassuring presence in this oppressive place—a comfort you could cling to, even if it was a lie.

“There’s not much time left,” your master says. “Isaure—”

Isaure shakes her head. She’s scarecrow-thin, as if a breath of wind would tumble her, her face pale except for her blood-red cheeks; and her legs wobble, sometimes; she keeps herself upright only through strength of will. “It’s too short.”

Your master doesn’t say anything for a while. “It’s always too short. I can’t heal you—I can’t prolong your life—”

“Liar,” Isaure says. “You’ve lived forever.”

Your master grimaces. “It’s not life,” he says at last. “Just . . . a continuation—a stretching of time.”

“I would take that,” Isaure says, slowly, fiercely.

“Don’t be so sure.” His smile is bleak; the mask lifts again, and for a moment he’s nothing more than a skull beneath stretched, paper-thin skin, with eyes shriveling in their orbits, and a heart that keeps beating only because the house stands. “Eternity is a long time.”

“More than I’ve got.”

“Yes,” your master says. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not.” Isaure watches him, for a while, stares at the river again. Today the sounds of fighting are distant: Outside, most people have died, and the sky is dark with poisoned storms and acid rain. There is little to salvage in the city—perhaps in the entire world. “Are you?”

His eyes are dry; his face expressionless, with not an ounce of compassion. “I do what I have to. So that I survive. So that we all survive. And no.” He shakes his head, slowly, gently. “The house will only take you one way, and it’s not the way it took me.”

Isaure shivers. “I see.” And, turning slightly away from him, kneeling on the grass, one hand inches from the edge of your exposed bone—“Will . . . will there be pain?”

He pauses then; and time seems to hang suspended, for a moment; it flows backward until he’s standing at your grave again, and your mother asks that same question, slowly and fearfully—and he could change the course of things, he could speak truth, instead of lying as he’s always lied, but he merely shakes his head. “No. We’ll give you poppy and opiates. It will be like going to sleep.”

Liar. You want to scream the words, to let the winds carry them all the way around the house, so that they know the price they pay for their safety, the price you paid for their sakes, only to lie unremembered and broken beneath the gardens, the only ones who still come a betrayer and a doomed girl—but you have no voice, and the earth chokes you, and you cannot . . .

Above you, Isaure rises, smiles—cautiously, reassured by words, by the presence she’s known all her life.

“It’s time,” your master whispers, and she’s turning toward him to follow him meekly, back into the house, to the wreck of her body and another grave at the bottom of the gardens, and soon they’ll both be gone, beyond your reach until it’s too late for anything but futile grieving—

No!

You push—with broken bones, with decayed hands and arms and legs—and your body twists and shifts as the earth presses against it, and your muscles shiver and coalesce again, and butterfly hairpins melt as if within a furnace—and you turn and turn and change—and rise, bloody-mouthed, four-legged, from the earth.

Your horn is the yellow, gleaming bone of your femur, sharpened to a killing point; your mane is your blood-matted, earth-clogged hair, dragging worms and flies’ eggs from the shadowed rest of your grave; and your skin is scraps of red, blood-drenched cotton, knitted and patched over the rawness of muscles bunched to leap.

Isaure watches you, her mouth open—the flames of your eyes reflected in her own—and your master is watching, too, but—unlike her—he knows.

“Charlotte . . .”

Isaure jerks, as if something had pulled on strings at her back. “No,” she whispers, as you paw at the ground with silver hooves.

You run her through, before she can say another word—her blood splatters, warm and red—the same hue as your skin, drenching the grass in vivid, obscene colors—a crunching of bones beneath you, and then you’ve leapt over her remains, and there is only you and your master.

He has not moved. He stands, watching you—no expression on his face, his blue eyes dry and fearless. “You know I do not lie,” he says. He stands as if rooted within the earth, his swallow-tailed jacket billowing in the wind, his face alight with that same strange, fey radiance. “There is always a price to be paid for safety. Don’t you know this, Charlotte?”

You know this. You have always known this. Blood and pain and sacrifice and the power of the house—the only true things in a dying world, and what does it matter if not everyone pays them? Only the sick and the weak, or the innocent, or the powerless?

There is no rest. There is no forgiveness. And never, ever, any safety.

“It’s too high a price,” you say—every word coming out distorted, through a mouth that wasn’t meant to shape human sounds—and you drive your horn, slowly and deliberately, into his chest—feeling ribs crack and break, and the feel of a body bending backwards, crumpling under you—an odd, twisting sensation as the house flickers—reeling, wounded and in agony, retreating to the safety of the underground altar.

Too high a price.

You look at the house in the twilight, in the rising wind and shadows—at the golden limestone walls still untainted by smoke; at the pristine, unbroken windows facing the desolation of the city; at the vast, brittle abundance of greenery in the gardens—the tapestry of lies that made your old, careless life possible.

It’s gone now, smashed to splinters beneath you, and that price will never be paid again.

Then you move—running toward the house, the grass shriveling under each strike of your hooves, strands of darkness following in your wake like nightfall—toward the fading circle in the cellar and the dozens, hundreds of people who sent girls to die in agony for the good of the house—you run, to finish what you have started here.

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories which have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a book set in the same universe as her Vietnamese science fiction On a Red Station Drifting. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, Gollancz).

Terminal
By Lavie Tidhar

From above the ecliptic the swarm can be seen as a cloud of tiny bullet-shaped insects, their hulls, packed with photovoltaic cells, capturing the sunlight; tiny, tiny flames burning in the vastness of the dark.

They crawl with unbearable slowness across this small section of near space, tiny beetles climbing a sheer obsidian rockface. Only the sun remains constant. The sun, always, dominates their sky.

Inside each jalopy are instrument panels and their like; a sleeping compartment where you must float your way into the secured sleeping bag; a toilet to strap yourself to; a kitchen to prepare your meal supply; and windows to look out of. With every passing day the distance from Earth increases and the time-lag grows a tiny bit longer and the streaming of communication becomes more echoey, the most acute reminder of that finite parting as the blue-green egg that is Earth revolves and grows smaller in your window, and you stand there, sometimes for hours at a time, fingers splayed against the plastic, staring at what has gone and will never come again, for your destination is terminal.

There is such freedom in the letting go.

• • • •

There is the music. Mei listens to the music, endlessly. Alone she floats in her cheap jalopy, and the music soars all about her, an archive of all the music of Earth stored in five hundred terabyte or so, so that Mei can listen to anything ever written and performed, should she so choose, and so she does, in a glorious random selection as the jalopy moves in the endless swarm from Earth to Terminal. Chopin’s Études bring a sharp memory of rain and the smell of wet grass, of damp books and days spent in bed, staring out of windows, the feel of soft sheets and a warm pyjama, a steaming mug of tea. Mei listens to Vanuatu stringband songs in pidgin English, evocative of palm trees and sand beaches and graceful men swaying in the wind; she listens to Congolese Kwasa-Kwasa and dances, floating, shaking and rolling in weightlessness, the music like an infectious laugh and hot tropical rain. The Beatles sing ‘Here Comes the Sun’, Mozart’s Requiem trails off unfinished, David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ haunts the cramped confines of the jalopy: the human race speaks to Mei through notes like precise mathematical notations and, alone, she floats in space, remembering in the way music always makes you remember.

She is not unhappy.

At first there was something seemingly inhuman about using the toilets. It is like a hungry machine, breathing and spitting, and Mei must ride it, strapping herself into leg restraints, attaching the urine funnel which gurgles and hisses as Mei evacuates waste. Now the toilet is like an old friend, its conversation a constant murmur, and she climbs in and out without conscious notice.

At first Mei slept and woke up to a regiment of day and night, but a month out of Earth orbit the old order began to slowly crumble and now she sleeps and wakes when she wants, making day and night appear as if by magic, by a wave of her hand. Still, she maintains a routine, of washing and the brushing of teeth, of wearing clothing, a pretence at humanity which is sometimes hard to maintain being alone. A person is defined by other people.

Three months out of Earth and it’s hard to picture where you’d left, where you’re going. And always that word, like a whisper out of nowhere, Terminal, Terminal…

Mei floats and turns slowly in space, listening to the Beach Boys.

• • • •

‘I have to do this.’

‘You don’t have to,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to do anything. What you mean is that you want to. You want to do it. You think it makes you special but it doesn’t make you special if everyone else is doing it.’ She looks at him with fierce black eyes and tucks a strand of hair, clumped together in her perspiration, behind her ear. He loves her very much at that moment, that fierce protectiveness, the fact someone, anyone, can look at you that way, can look at you and feel love.

‘Not everyone is doing it.’

They’re sitting in a cafe outdoors and it is hot, it is very hot, and overheard the twin Petronas Towers rise like silver rockets into the air. In the square outside KLCC the water features twinkle in the sun and tourists snap photos and waiters glide like unenthusiastic penguins amongst the clientele. He drinks from his kopi ice and traces a trail of moisture on the face of the glass, slowly. ‘You are not dying,’ she says, at last, the words coming as from a great distance. He nods, reluctantly. It is true. He is not dying, immediately, but only in the sense that all living things are dying, that it is a trajectory, the way a jalopy makes its slow but finite way from Earth to Mars. Speaking of jalopies there is a stand under the awnings for such stands are everywhere now and a man shouting through the sound system to come one come all and take the ultimate trip – and so on, and so forth.

But more than that implicit in her words is the question. Is he dying? In the more immediate sense? ‘No,’ he says. ‘But.’

That word lies heavy in the hot and humid air.

She is still attractive to him, even now: even after thirty years, three kids now grown and gone into the world, her hair no longer black all over but flecked with strands of white and grey, his own hair mostly gone, their hands, touching lightly across the table, both showing the signs of gravity and age. And how could he explain?

‘Space,’ he tries to say. ‘The dark starry night which is eternal and forever, or as long as these words mean something in between the beginning and the end of spaceandtime.’ But really is it selfish, is it not inherently selfish to want to leave, to go, up there and beyond – for what? It makes no sense or no more sense than anything else you do or don’t.

‘Responsibility,’ she says. ‘Commitment. Love, damn it, Haziq! You’re not a child, playing with toys, with, with… with spaceships or whatever. You have children, a family, we’ll soon have grandkids if I know Omar, what will they do without you?’

These hypothetical people, not yet born, already laying demands to his time, his being. To be human is to exist in potentia, unborn responsibilities rising like butterflies in a great big obscuring cloud. He waves his hand in front of his face but whether it is to shoo them away or because of the heat he cannot say. ‘We always said we won’t stand in each other’s way,’ he begins, but awkwardly, and she starts to cry, silently, making no move to wipe away the tears, and he feels a great tenderness but also anger, and the combination shocks him. ‘I have never asked for anything,’ he says. ‘I have… have I not been a good son, a good father, a good husband? I never asked for anything –’ and he remembers sneaking away one night, five years before, and wandering the Petaling Street Market with television screens blaring and watching a launch, and a thin string of pearls, broken, scattered across space… perhaps it was then, perhaps it was earlier, or once when he was a boy and he had seen pictures of a vast red planet unmarred by human feet…

‘What did I ask,’ she says, ‘did I complain, did I aspire, did I not fulfil what you and I both wanted? Yes,’ she says, ‘Yes, it is selfish to want to go, and it is selfish to ask you to stay, but if you go, Haziq, you won’t come back. You won’t ever come back.’

And he says, ‘I know,’ and she shakes her head, and she is no longer crying, and there is that hard, practical look in her eyes, the one he was always a little bit afraid of. She picks up the bill and roots in her purse and brings out the money and puts it on the table. ‘I have to go,’ she says, ‘I have an appointment at the hair dresser’s.’ She gets up and he does not stand to stop her, and she walks away; and he knows that all he has to do is follow her; and yet he doesn’t, he remains seated, watching her weaving her way through the crowds, until she disappears inside the giant mall; and she never once looks back.

• • • •

But really it is the sick, the slowly-dying, those who have nothing to lose, those untied by earthly bonds, those whose spirits are as light as air: the loners and the crazy and worst of all the artists, so many artists, each convinced in his or her own way of the uniqueness of the opportunity, exchanging life for immortality, floating in space heels and toe heels and toe, transmuting space into art in the way of the dead, for they are legally-dead, now, each in his or her own jalopy, this cheap mass manufactured container made for this one singular trip, from this planet to the next, from the living world to the dead one.

‘Sign here, initial here, and here, and here –’ and what does it feel like for those everyday astronauts, those would-be Martians, departing their homes for one last time, a last glance back, some leaving gladly, some tearfully, some with indifference: these Terminals, these walking dead, having signed over their assets, completed their wills, attended, in some instances, their very own wakes: leaving with nothing, boarding taxis or flights in daytime or night, to the launch site for rudimentary training of instruments they will never have use to control, from Earth to orbit in a space plane, a reusable launch vehicle, and thence to Gateway, in Low Earth Orbit, that ramshackle construction floating like a spider web in the skies of Earth, made up of modules some new some decades old, joined together in an ungainly fashion, a makeshift thing.

Here we are all astronauts. The permanent staff is multinational, harassed, monkey-like we climb heel and toe heel and toe, handholds along the walls no up no down but three dimensional space as a many splendored thing. Here the astronauts are trained hastily in maintaining their craft and themselves and the jalopies extend out of Gateway, beyond orbit, thousands of cheap little tin cans aimed like skipping stones at the big red rock yonder.

Here, too, you can still change your mind. Here comes a man now, a big man, an American man, with very white face and hands, a man used to being in control, a man used to being deferred to – an artist, in fact; a writer. He had made his money imagining the way the future was, but the future had passed him by and he found himself spending his time on message boards and the like, bemoaning youth and their folly. Now he has a new lease on life, or thought he had, with this plan of going into space, to Terminal Beach: six months floating in a tin can high above no world, to write his masterpiece, the thing he is to be remembered by, his novel, damn it, in which he’s to lay down his entire philosophical framework of a libertarian bent: only he has, at the last moment, perhaps on smelling the interior of his assigned jalopy, changed his mind. Now he comes inexpertly floating like a beach ball down the shaft, bouncing here and there from the walls and bellowing for the agent, those sleazy jalopymen, for the final signature on the contract is digital, and sent once the jalopy is slingshot to Mars. It takes three orderlies to hold him down and a nurse injects him with something to calm him down. Later he would go back down the gravity well, poorer yet wiser, but never again will he write that novel: space eludes him.

Meanwhile the nurse helps carry the now-unconscious American down to the hospital suite, a house-sized unit overlooking the curve of the Earth. Her name is Eliza and she watches day chase night across the globe and looks for her home, for the islands of the Philippines to come into view, their lights scattered like shards of shining glass, but it is the wrong time to see them. She monitors the IV distractedly, feeling tiredness wash over her like the first exploratory wave of a grey and endless sea. For Eliza space means always being in sight of this great living world, this Earth, its oceans and its green landmasses and its bright night lights, a world that dominates her view, always, that glares like an eye through pale white clouds. To be this close to it and yet to see it separate, not of it but apart, is an amazing thing; while beyond, where the Terminals go, or further yet, where the stars coalesce as thick as clouds, who knows what lies? And she fingers the gold cross on the chain around her neck, as she always does when she thinks of things alien beyond knowing, and she shudders, just a little bit; but everywhere else, so far, the universe is silent, and we alone shout.

• • • •

‘Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Hello?’

‘This is jalopy A-5011 sending out a call to the faithful to prayer –’

‘This is Bremen in B-9012, is there anyone there? Hello? I am very weak. Is there a doctor, can you help me, I do not think I’ll make it to the rock, hello, hello –’

‘This is jalopy B-2031 to jalopy C-3398, bishop to king 7, I said bishop to king 7, take that Shen you twisted old fruit!’

‘Hello? Has anyone heard from Shiri Applebaum in C-5591, has anyone heard from Shiri Applebaum in C-5591, she has not been in touch in two days and I am getting worried, this is Robin in C-5523, we were at Gateway together before the launch, hello, hello –’

‘Hello –’

Mei turns down the volume of the music and listens to the endless chatter of the swarm rise alongside it, day or night neither of which matter or exist here, unbound by planetary rotation and that old artificial divide of darkness and the light. Many like Mei have abandoned the twenty-four hour cycle to sleep and rise ceaselessly and almost incessantly with some desperate need to experience all of this, this one-time only journey, this slow beetle’s crawl across trans-solar space. Mei swoops and turns with the music and the chatter and she idly wonders of the fate to have befallen Shiri Applebaum in C-5591: is she merely keeping quiet or is she dead or in a coma, never to wake up again, only her corpse and her cheap little jalopy hitting the surface of Mars in ninety more days? Across the swarm’s radio network the muezzin in A-5011 sends out the call to prayer, the singsong words so beautiful that Mei stops, suspended in mid air, and breathes deeply, her chest rising and falling steadily, space all around her. She has degenerative bone disease, there isn’t a question of starting a new life at Terminal, only this achingly beautiful song that rises all about her, and the stars, and silent space.

• • • •

Two days later Bremen’s calls abruptly cease. B-9012 still hurtles on with the rest towards Mars. Haziq tries to picture Bremen: what was he like? What did he love? He thinks he remembers him, vaguely, a once-fat man now wasted with folded awkward skin, large glasses, a Scandinavian man maybe, Haziq thought, but all he knows or will ever know of Bremen is the man’s voice on the radio bouncing from jalopy to jalopy and on to Earth where jalopy-chasers scan the bands and listen in a sort of awed or voyeuristic pleasure.

‘This is Haziq, C-6173…’ he coughs and clears his throat. He drinks his miso soup awkwardly, suckling from its pouch. He sits formally, strapped by Velcro, the tray of food before him, and out of his window he stares not back to Earth or forward to Mars but directly onto the swarm, trying to picture each man and woman inside, trying to imagine what brought them here. Does one need a reason? Haziq wonders. Or is it merely that gradual feeling of discomfort in one’s own life, one’s own skin, a slowly-dawning realisation that you have passed like a grey ghost through your own life, leaving no impression, that soon you might fade away entirely, to dust and ash and nothingness, a mild regret in your children’s minds that they never really knew you at all.

‘This is Haziq, C-6173, is there anyone hearing me, my name is Haziq and I am going to Terminal –’ and a sudden excitement takes him, ‘My name is Haziq and I am going to Terminal!’ he shouts, and all around him the endless chatter rises, of humans in space, so needy for talk like sustenance, ‘We’re all going to Terminal!’ and Haziq, shy again, says, ‘Please, is there anyone there, won’t someone talk to me. What is it like, on Terminal?’

• • • •

But that is a question that brings down the silence; it is there in the echoes of words ords rds and in the pauses, in punctuation missing or overstated, in the endless chess moves, worried queries, unwanted confessionals, declarations of love, in this desperate sudden need that binds them together, the swarm, and makes all that has been before become obsolete, lose definition and meaning. For the past is a world one cannot return to, and the future is a world none had seen.

Mei floats half-asleep half-awake, but the voice awakens her, why this voice she never knows, cannot articulate. ‘Hello. Hello. Hello…’ and she swims through the air to the kitchenette and heats up tea and drinks it from the suction cup. There are no fizzy drinks on board the jalopies, the lack of gravity would not separate liquid and gas in the human stomach and the astronaut would wet burp vomit. Mei drinks slowly, carefully, all her movements are careful. ‘Hello?’ she says, ‘Hello, this is Mei in A-3357, this is Mei in A-3357, can you hear me, Haziq, can you hear me?’

A pause, a micro-silence, the air filled with the hundreds of other conversations through which a voice, his voice, says, ‘This is Haziq! Hello A-3357, hello!’

‘Hello,’ Mei says, surprised and strangely happy, and she realises it is the first time she has spoken in three months. ‘Let me tell you, Haziq,’ she says, and her voice is like music between worlds, ‘let me tell you about Terminal.’

• • • •

It was raining in the city. She had come out of the hospital and looked up at the sky and saw nothing there, no stars no sun, just clouds and smoke and fog. It rained, the rain collected in rainbow puddles in the street, the chemicals inside it painted the world and made it brighter. There was a jalopy vendor on the corner of the street, above his head a promotional video in 3D, and she was drawn to it. The vendor played loud K-pop and the film looped in on itself, but Mei didn’t mind the vendor’s shouts, the smell of acid rain or frying pork sticks and garlic or the music’s beat which rolled on like thunder. Mei stood and rested against the stand and watched the video play. The vendor gave her glasses, embossed with the jalopy sub-agent’s logo. She watched the swarm like a majestic silver web spread out across space, hurtling (or so it seemed) from Earth to Mars. The red planet was so beautiful and round, its dry seas and massive mountain peaks, its volcanoes and canals. She watched the polar ice caps. Watched Mons Olympus breaking out of the atmosphere. Imagined a mountain so high it reached up into space. Imagined women like her climbing it, smaller than ants but with that same ferocious dedication. Somewhere on that world was Terminal.

‘Picture yourself standing on the red sands for the very first time,’ she tells Haziq, her voice the same singsong of the muezzin at prayer, ‘that very first step, the mark of your boot in the fine sand. It won’t stay there forever, you know. This is not the moon, the winds will come and sweep it away, reminding you of the temporality of all living things.’ And she pictures Armstrong on the moon, that first impossible step, the mark of the boots still there in the lunar dust. ‘But you are on a different world now,’ she says, to Haziq or to herself, or to the others listening, and the jalopy-chasers back on Earth. ‘With different moons hanging like fruit in the sky. And you take that first step in your suit, the gravity hits you suddenly, you are barely able to drag yourself out of the jalopy, everything is labour and pain. Who knew gravity could hurt so much,’ she says, as though in wonder. She closes her eyes and floats slowly upwards, picturing it. She can see it so clearly, Terminal Beach where the jalopies wash ashore, endlessly, like seashells, as far as the eye can see the sand is covered in the units out of which a temporary city rises, a tent city, all those bright objects on the sand, ‘And as you emerge into the sunlight they stand there, welcoming you, can you see them? In suits and helmets they extend open arms, those Martians, Come, they say, over the radio comms, come, and you follow, painfully and awkwardly, leaving tracks in the sand, into the temporary domes and the linked together jalopies and the underground caves which they are digging, always, extending this makeshift city downwards, and you pass through the airlock and take off your helmet and breathe the air, and you are no longer alone, you are amongst people, real people, not just voices carried on the solar winds.’

She falls silent, then. Breathes the limited air of the cabin. ‘They would be planting seeds,’ she says, softly, ‘underground, and in greenhouses, all the plants of Earth, a paradise of watermelons and orchids, of frangipani and durian, jasmine and rambutan…’ she breathes deeply, evenly. The pain is just a part of her, now. She no longer takes the pills they gave her. She wants to be herself; pain and all.

In jalopies scattered across this narrow silver band astronauts like canned sardines marinate in their own stale sweat and listen to her voice. Her words, converted into a signal inaudible by human ears, travel across local space for whole minutes until they hit the Earth’s atmosphere at last, already old and outdated, a record of a past event; here they bounce off the Earth to the ionosphere and back again, jaggedy waves like a terminal patient’s heart monitor circumnavigating this rotating globe until they are deciphered by machines and converted once more into sound:

Mei’s voice speaking into rooms, across hospital beds, in dark bars filled with the fug of electronic cigarettes’ smoke-like vapoured steam, in lonely bedrooms where her voice keeps company to cats, in cabs driving through rain and from tinny speakers on white sand beaches where coconut crabs emerge into sunset, their blue metallic shells glinting like jalopies. Mei’s voice soothes unease and fills the jalopy-chasers’ minds with bright images, a panoramic view of a red world seen from space, suspended against the blackness of space; the profusion of bright galaxies and stars behind it is like a movie screen.

‘Take a step, and then another and another. The sunlight caresses your skin but its rays have travelled longer to reach you, and when you raise your head the sun shines down from a clay-red sun, and you know you will never again see the sky blue. Think of that light. It has travelled longer and faster than you ever will, its speed in vacuum a constant 299,792,458 meters per second. Think of that number, that strange little fundamental constant, seemingly arbitrary: around that number faith can be woven and broken like silk, for is it a randomly-created universe we live in or an ordained one? Why the speed of light, why the gravitational constant, why Planck’s? And as you stand there, healthy or ill, on the sands of Terminal Beach and raise your face to the sun, are you happy or sad?’

Mei’s voice makes them wonder, some simply and with devotion, some uneasily. But wonder they do and some will go outside one day and encounter the ubiquitous stand of a jalopyman and be seduced by its simple promise, abandon everything to gain a nebulous idea, that boot mark in the fine-grained red sand, so easily wiped away by the winds.

And Mei tells Haziq about Olympus Mons and its shadow falling on the land and its peak in space, she tells him of the falling snow, made of frozen carbon dioxide, of men and women becoming children again building snowmen in the airless atmosphere, and she tells him of the Valles Marineris where they go suited up hand in gloved hand through the canyons whose walls rise above them, east of Tharsis.

Perhaps it is then that Haziq falls in love, a little bit, through walls and vacuum, the way a boy does, not with a real person but with an ideal, an image. Not the way he had fallen in love with his wife, not even the way he loves his children, who talk to him across the planetary gap, their words and moving images beamed to him from Earth, but they seldom do, any more, it is as if they had resigned themselves to his departure, as if by crossing the atmosphere into space he had already died and they were done with mourning.

It is her voice he fastens onto; almost greedily; with need. And as for Mei, it is as if she had absorbed the silence of three months and more than a hundred million kilometres, consumed it somehow, was sustained by it, her own silence with only the music for company, and now she must speak, speak only for the sake of it, like eating or breathing or making love, the first two of which she will soon do no more and the last of which is already gone, a thing of the past. And so she tells the swarm about Terminal.

• • • •

But what is Terminal? Eliza wonders, floating in the corridors of Gateway, watching the RLVs rise into low Earth orbit, the continents shifting past, the clouds swirling, endlessly, this whole strange giant spaceship planet as it travels at 1200 kilometres an hour around the sun, while at the same time Earth, Mars, Venus, Sun and all travel at a nearly 800,000 kilometres per hour around the centre of the galaxy, while at the same time this speed machine, Earth and sun and the galaxy itself move at 1000 kilometres per second towards the Great Attractor, that most mysterious of gravitational enigmas, this anomaly of mass that pulls to it the Milky Way as if it were a pebble: all this and we think we’re still, and it makes Eliza dizzy just to think about it.

But she thinks of such things more and more. Space changes you, somehow. It tears you out of certainties, it makes you see your world at a distance, no longer of it but apart. It makes her sad, the old certainties washed away, and more and more she finds herself thinking of Mars; of Terminal.

To never see your home again; your family, your mother, your uncles, brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins and second cousins and third cousins twice removed and all the rest of them: never to walk under open skies and never to sail on a sea, never to hear the sound of frogs mating by a river or hear the whooshing sound of fruit bats in the trees. All those things and all the others you will never do, and people carry bucket lists around with them before they become Terminal, but at long last everything they ever knew and owned is gone and then there is only the jalopy confines, only that and the stars in the window and the voice of the swarm. And Eliza thinks that maybe she wouldn’t mind leaving it all behind, just for a chance at… what? something so untenable, as will-o’-the-wisp as ideology or faith and yet as hard and precisely defined as prime numbers or fundamental constants. Perhaps it is the way Irish immigrants felt on going to America, with nothing but a vague hope that the future would be different than the past. Eliza had been to nursing school, had loved, had seen the world rotate below her; had been to space, had worked on amputations, births, tumour removals, fevers turned fatal, transfusions and malarias, has held a patient’s hand as she died or dried a boy’s tears or made a cup of tea for the bereaved, monitored IVs, changed sheets and bedpans, took blood and gave injections, and now she floats in freefall high above the world, watching the Terminals come and go, come and go, endlessly, and the string of silver jalopies extends in a great horde from Earth’s orbit to the Martian surface, and she imagines jalopies fall down like silver drops of rain, gently they glide down through the thin Martian atmosphere to land on the alien sands.

She pictures Terminal and listens to Mei’s voice, one amongst so many but somehow it is the voice others return to, it is as though Mei speaks for all of them, telling them of the city being built out of cheap used bruised jalopies, the way Gateway had been put together, a lot of mismatched units joined up, and she tells them, you could fall in love again, with yourself, with another, with a world.

• • • •

‘Why?’ Mei says to Haziq, one night period, a month away from planetfall. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Why did I go?’

She waits; she likes his voice. She floats in the cabin, her mind like a calm sea. She listens to the sounds of the jalopy, the instruments and the toilet and the creaks and rustle of all the invisible things. She is taking the pills again, she must, for the pain is too great now, and the morphine, so innocent a substance to come out like blood out of the vibrant red poppies, is helping. She knows she is addicted. She knows it won’t last. It makes her laugh. Everything delights her. The music is all around her now, Lao singing accompanied by a khene changing into South African kwaito becoming reggae from PNG.

‘I don’t know,’ Haziq says. He sounds so vulnerable then. Mei says, ‘You were married.’

‘Yes.’

Curiosity compels her. ‘Why didn’t she come with you?’

‘She would never have come with me,’ Haziq says, and Mei feels her heart shudder inside her like a caged bird and she says, ‘But you didn’t ask.’

‘No,’ Haziq says. The long silence is interrupted by others on the shared primitive radio band, hellos and groans and threats and prayers, and someone singing, drunk.

‘No,’ Haziq says. ‘I didn’t ask.’

• • • •

One month to planetfall. And Mei falls silent. Haziq tries to raise her on the radio but there is no reply. ‘Hello, hello, this is Haziq, C-6173, this is Haziq, C-6173, has anyone heard from Mei in A-3357, has anyone heard from Mei?’

‘This is Henrik in D-7479, I am in a great deal of pain, could somebody help me? Please could somebody help me?’

‘This is Cobb in E-1255, I have figured it all out, there is no Mars, they lied to us, we’ll die in these tin cans, how much air, how much air is left?’

‘This is jalopy B-2031 to jalopy C-3398, queen to pawn 4, I said queen to pawn 4, and check and mate, take that Shen you twisted old bat!’

‘This is David in B-1201, jalopy B-1200 can you hear me, jalopy B-1200 can you hear me, I love you, Joy. Will you marry me? Will you –’

‘Yes! Yes!’

‘We might not make it. But I feel like I know you, like I’ve always known you, in my mind you are as beautiful as your words.’

‘I will see you, I will know you, there on the red sands, there on Terminal Beach, oh, David –’

‘My darling –’

‘This is jalopy C-6669, will you two get a room -?’ and laughter on the radio waves, and shouts of cheers, congrats, mazel tov and the like. But Mei cannot be raised, her jalopy’s silent.

• • • •

Not jalopies but empty containers with nothing but air floating along with the swarm, destined for Terminal, supplements for the plants, and water and other supplies, and some say these settlers, if that’s what they be, are dying faster than we can replace them but so what. They had paid for their trip. Mars is a madhouse, its inmates wander their rubbish heap town, and Mei, floating with a happy distracted mind, no longer hears even the music. And she thinks of all the things she didn’t say. Of stepping out onto Terminal Beach, of coming through the airlock, yes, but then, almost immediately, coming out again, suited uncomfortably, how hard it was, to strip the jalopies of everything inside and, worse, to go on corpse duty.

She does not want to tell all this to Haziq, does not want to picture him landing, and going with the others, this gruesome initiation ceremony for the newly-arrived: to check on the jalopies no longer responding, the ones that didn’t open, the ones from which no one has emerged. And she hopes, without reason, that it is Haziq who finds her, no longer floating but pressed down by gravity, her fragile bones fractured and crushed; that he would know her, somehow. That he would raise her in his arms, gently, and carry her out, and lay her down on the Martian sand.

Then they would strip the jalopy and push it and join it to the others, this spider bite of a city sprawling out of those first crude jalopies to crash land, and Haziq might sleep, fitfully, in the dormitory with all the others, and then, perhaps, Mei could be buried. Or left to the Martian winds.

She imagines the wind howling through the canyons of the Valles Marinaris. Imagines the snow falling, kissing her face. Imagines the howling winds stripping her of skin and polishing her bones, imagines herself scattered at last, every tiny bit of her blown apart and spread across the planet.

And she imagines jalopies like meteorites coming down. Imagines the music the planet makes, if only you could hear it. And she closes her eyes and she smiles.

• • • •

‘I hope it’s you…’ she whispers, says.

• • • •

‘Sign here, initial here, and here, and here.’

The jalopyman is young and friendly, and she knows his face if not his name. He says, perhaps in surprise or in genuine interest, for they never, usually, ask, ‘Are you sure you want to do it?’

And Eliza signs, and she nods, quickly, like a bird. And she pushes the pen back at him, as if to stop from changing her mind.

• • • •

‘I hope it’s you…’

‘Mei? Is that you? Is that you?’

But there is no one there, nothing but a scratchy echo on the radio; like the sound of desert winds.

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming(2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the critically-acclaimed and Seiun Award nominated The Violent Century (2013). His latest novel is the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
By Seanan McGuire

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where have you been?
They have slain the Earl of Moray,
And they laid him on the green.
—Child Ballad 181, “The Bonny Earl of Moray.”

Things have consequences.

Kids figure that out around the time they’re old enough to realize that when they touch a hot stove, they pull back burnt fingers. Things have consequences. Pull a cat’s tail, the cat will scratch. Drop a glass, the glass will break. Things have consequences. Everybody knows that.

But somehow, when science has consequences, when science touches the hot stove and pulls back burnt fingers, when science pulls the cat’s tail, the consequences are “unforeseen” and “just the cost of progress.” Science is immune from bad results. All results are good results, coming from science.

Angie is shivering like she’s going to fly apart, like her bones have turned to ice inside her skin. Nate isn’t sleeping. He isn’t even closing his eyes. He’s watching everything with the harried silence of a wounded child, and every time he looks at me, it’s like he’s waiting for me to take it all back, to say that no kids, it’s all right, if science doesn’t have consequences, you don’t either. If science doesn’t have to pay the piper, it’s not fair that you should have to foot the bill.

I can’t tell him that he’s wrong and I can’t make them understand what’s happened and I can’t take back what we did, and so I reach over and I stroke Angie’s hair, and I wonder when the sky is going to fall.

Science has consequences.

Why the fuck didn’t we figure that out sooner?

“This is not just a great day for American ingenuity and progress,” boomed the President of the United States, gripping the sides of the podium like he thought that leaning forward with just a little more intensity, speaking with just a little more religious fervor, would somehow bring his flagging approval numbers back up from the graveyard of political hopes and dreams. And maybe they would: after all, he was in the process of dedicating the greatest advancement in transportation science since some brave Cro–Magnon first said “What if we made this thing on the bottom round?” Of such accomplishments are Presidential legacies made.

“No,” he continued. “This is a leap forward for the human race as a whole. Our children’s children will look back upon this day and say ‘That was the moment, that was the time when we turned our eyes away from the cool, green hills of Earth and turned them toward the bright and shining promise of the galaxy.’”

“Nice Heinlein reference,” murmured Lo Hsien. She was one of the astrophysicists who had dedicated the last six years of their lives to the star charts that made the Hephaestus Project feasible, much less functional. She was exhausted and smirking, and looked like she was on the verge of collapse.

I smirked back. “Bets that his scriptwriter snuck it in without telling him what it was?” I asked, and she swallowed her laughter, and we were rulers of the world in that moment; we were at the peak of our careers. The President of the United–goddamn–States was praising us! Nothing was ever going to be that good again.

“I still say we should have pressed for the name ‘Stargate,’” she said, and I elbowed her, and everything was perfect.

We’d known, even then, even at the height of our triumph, that it was all going to be downhill from there. If we’d had any concept of how far downhill, I would have smashed the machine that had defined the past decade of my life with my own two hands, accepted whatever consequences came with the action, and been glad. But I had no idea. No one had any idea.

The President spoke, and the band played, and NASA unveiled Hephaestus as everyone ooh–ed and ahh–ed and pretended to understand what they were looking at: a screen, roughly the size of a suburban garage, ringed with lights and complex electrical systems. Nothing special. It could have been a particularly extravagant flat screen TV.

Until the crew up in the control room flipped the switch to turn it on.

Until the screen began to crackle with bolts of rainbow light, turning into a burning prism so bright and so beautiful that it hurt to look at directly.

Until the prism turned clear as water, and we were looking out on the surface of an alien planet, like something out of science fiction, but it was real, it was happening, it was there in front of us, and even though I had seen that particular view dozens of times, my heart still stuttered in my chest and my mouth still went dry with the wonder and the importance of it all.

“Millions of light years, ladies and gentlemen,” boomed the President. “That’s what we’ve just skipped over: millions of light years of distance, of empty space, between us and another world.”

That was the cue for the control team. They rolled out a bevy of little robots, intentionally anthropomorphic things, designed to look adorable and non–threatening on magazine covers and news blogs all around the world. They rolled on treads instead of walking on legs, but they had things people would recognize as “faces,” and they had arms with grasping hands at the ends, and they were going to be our ambassadors to a whole new world.

They weren’t the first things we’d sent through—that would have been hubris, making our first crossing for a live audience and the President. More traditional robots were already on the other side, building a return gate, gathering samples, doing the things explorers have always done. These robots were our ambassadors to the human race as much as to the stars. Look, they said, with their adorable faces and their relatable forms, look; humanity is conquering this new place. Look, they said, this isn’t just science, this is adventure. This is discovery. And you’re part of it, every single one of you. Look.

The President was explaining how each of the robots had been loaded with recordings explaining their purpose in every known human language—including Klingon, which got a laugh from the watching journalists. They would tell our story to the stars until we were ready to go out there and tell it for ourselves. They would tell anything that moved who we were and that we were coming in peace.

(And I do mean “anything that moved.” We didn’t know what life might look like, that far out and that far away from home. Maybe it would be mammalian, bipedal, alien life through the Roddenberry lens. Or maybe it would be glittering and silicate, or a sequence of musical notes suspended in an organic wind. We had no way of predicting what our first contact would be, and so we had programmed the robots to stop and deliver their spiel to anything that seemed like it might be even potentially receptive. A lot of rocks were going to hear about how peaceful humanity was.)

The sun was shining and the reporters were asking the President questions he was in no way qualified to answer, and my team had done what no other group of people past, present, or future had been able to do: we had given mankind the stars. We had changed the universe forever.

Things have consequences.

Angie isn’t shivering anymore. I have to resist the urge to reach over and shake her, to confirm with my hands what I can see with my eyes: she’s just asleep. She’s exhausted, she’s fifteen, and she’s sleeping. The fact that she’s stopped shivering is a mercy, not a warning sign. Maybe. Maybe.

It’s not like it makes any difference one way or the other. I can’t help her. I can’t save her. I can’t do anything for her, or for Nate, except to keep them moving, keep them fleeing from the epicenter, while the people who were able to get into clean rooms—the people who had no one outside the compound that they cared about—keep arguing with our visitors, trying to make them understand that they got it wrong, they got it wrong, this isn’t what we asked for. This isn’t what we asked for at all.

Nate still isn’t sleeping. I offer him as much of a smile as I can dredge up from the bottom of my broken heart, leaning a little closer and saying softly, “Hey, buddy, try to get some rest while you can, okay? We’re going to be moving again soon.”

He looks at me with narrow, wary eyes, and he doesn’t say anything. I don’t think he’s ever going to say anything again. I don’t think—honestly—I don’t think he’s going to have time to get over the shock and remember what it is to scream.

The last email I got before the Internet went down like the house of electronic cards it always was indicated that the chemical compounds our visitors (not guests, never guests; guests don’t do this to their hosts, guests bring wine and cheese and platitudes, not wind and chaos and pathogens) have been pumping into the atmosphere are heavy. They’re taking out the lowlands first. Denver is supposedly fine. Thriving, even, as waves of refugees come staggering past the city limits with their worldly possessions on their backs, ready to pay anything for a glass of water and a place to sleep.

All those people have been exposed. All those people are counting down on a clock no one human has ever seen, and when they start to fall apart, Denver’s going to have a whole new set of problems. There’s a reason we’re not heading for the Mile–High City. If there’s going to be any chance of survival, we’re not going to find it there.

Besides, we wouldn’t make it to Denver. We wouldn’t even make it halfway there. Angie has almost certainly been exposed, and Nate… I don’t know about Nate. I wish I knew. I wish I could say that it wouldn’t make a difference.

I wish he could tell me.

He looks at me with those wounded eyes, and I sigh. “Would you like me to sing for you?” I ask. He nods, fractionally, and so I scoot a little closer, and slip my arm around his shoulders, and sing softly, “Oh ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, oh, where have you been…”

He closes his eyes. He rests his head against my shoulder. And we’re all going to die, because things have consequences, but we’re not dead yet, and if there’s anyone left in the world with a responsibility to keep fighting until the end, it’s me.

The robots rolled through the portal, and the crowds cheered, and we all got our pictures with the President before he went home and we got back to work. Our funding still wasn’t limitless. We might have cracked the code of the greater universe, but so far, we hadn’t discovered anything that was actually useful, no rare minerals or magical cures for every human disease. We hadn’t even confirmed whether we had intelligent neighbors. We needed to keep working, and we needed to find a way to justify the continued existence of the project that had consumed us all for the past decade.

We lost a few of our junior members after it became clear that success didn’t come with a pay raise when you were working for the government. They hadn’t been expecting to get rich, but they’d been expecting to get, I don’t know, a little job security. A promise that they’d be able to keep refining what they’d made for at least the next five years. When that didn’t materialize, they’d walked away for the sake of their own sanity, and none of us had blamed them.

Besides, having a string of departures from the project right after we’d dropped off the front pages of all the magazines was a great excuse to keep having cake, and any excuse for cake was a good one.

It was sort of amazing at the time, how quickly people got over the magnitude of our discovery. Oh, there were Tumblrs and roleplay blogs dedicated to our intentionally adorable robots, and one of our mechanical engineers got to go on the Discovery Channel and help their latest crop of pop scientists blow stuff up for an afternoon, but for the most part, people forgot we were there almost as quickly as they’d noticed us. We had no relevance in their daily lives. Let us figure out how to move people from airport to airport, instead of moving robots from solar system to solar system, and maybe then we’d talk.

Life went on. Angie started a new school year, with all the tears and little traumas that accompanied a life change of that magnitude—no sarcasm intended. She was fifteen. A year of school was a huge deal. Hell, I was thirty–seven, and a year of school was a huge deal. My little girl was growing up. I covered her in kisses and sent her out the door into the hands of strangers, while I went back to my lab and kept trying to find a way to change the world.

Looking back, I wish I’d taken more time off. I wish I’d pulled her out of classes and gone to see the country. I wish I’d talked Lisa into doing the same with Nate, so that all four of us could have gone to California like we’d always threatened. I wish we’d taken the kids to Disneyland.

I wish we’d gotten married. Lisa had been hinting for the better part of a year and I’d been brushing her off every time, making excuses, claiming that my work needed me. My work had needed me, but not nearly as much as my girlfriend had, as the boy who was my son in all but the eyes of the law had. They had been my world, not some distant alien planet, and they had needed me, and I had ignored them in the interest of making history.

Well, we’d made history after all. There wasn’t going to be any history after this; we’d made it all, at least so far as the human race was concerned. We wrote the last chapter and then we closed the book, and we’d been totally open while we were doing it, and somehow no one had noticed what was going on. Not even us.

Nate is a boneless weight in my arms, not moving, not even seeming to breathe. I close my eyes and hold my own breath, trying to pick up a sign that he’s still alive. I could check his pulse, or pull out my compact and see if the mirror goes foggy when I hold it up to his mouth, but once I start doing that, it’s over. I’ll have admitted that we’ve lost.

Angie stirs, lifts her head, blinks blearily at me. “Mom?” she asks, in a voice that barely registers as a whisper. “What’s wrong with Nate?”

“He’s sleeping,” I say, and that’s a lie, but for right now, I’ll take it. Sometimes the truth is an unfair burden to put on anyone. Especially a fifteen–year–old girl. Especially my fifteen–year–old girl. She should be thinking about homecoming games and dates and final exams, not the end of the world. So I’ll lie to her, because she deserves it.

Because I have nothing else to give her.

“Maybe they’ll leave,” she says. “Maybe they’ll… maybe they’ll realize that we don’t want this, and they’ll leave.”

“Maybe,” I say, and I’m still lying, and I think she knows that. She crawls to me, putting her head on my shoulder, and closes her eyes. I close mine, and we exist, the three of us, for one brief and shining moment. We exist.

We were here. Things have consequences, but we were here, and nothing anyone does can take that away from us.

We were here.

The first sign of trouble came eight months after the first robots trundled through the gateway and onto the world we’d been casually referring to as “Way Over Yonder,” or “Yonder” for short. (The official name would be chosen by committee and to placate whatever governmental branch needed placating when the time came, which most of us assumed would be five minutes after we found something valuable.) We’d been monitoring their progress, sending new units through when necessary, and passing the samples they brought back on to the relevant scientific teams. The botanists were having a field day. Half the “plants” we gave them turned out to be minerals of some kind, but enough of them had been actual, honest–to–God vegetation that there were about nine new schools of thought forming, with another half dozen waiting in the wings.

I was on duty, thinking idly about what I was going to make for dinner, when the board began to flash. Not a warning light, which would have been red and accompanied by a warning klaxon; just a little green light turning on in the upper corner and starting to blink. It was almost friendly. Here I am, said the light. Look at me. I am scientific discovery made manifest. I am your future. Hi.

We had been waiting for that light, all of us, for months. We had been living for that light. And I sat there, motionless, staring at it with uncomprehending eyes, because we had all been waiting for that light for so long that it no longer made any sense. That light never flashed. That light never turned on. But it was flashing. It was on. Bit by bit, I adjusted my impressions of the world.

The light was on.

“We have a light!” I shouted. I also stood up. Probably unnecessary—the light didn’t care whether I was sitting down—but it felt right. “People, we have a light!”

The reaction was immediate and deeply validating. Technicians and researchers rushed in from every corner of the room, crowding around the control board as if proximity would be enough to guarantee them their place in the discoveries to follow.

“Calm down!” shouted Earl. He was one of our shift leaders; it was a matter of five minutes and bad luck that he hadn’t been the one manning the board when the light started flashing. “Calm down, all of you! There’s enough science here for everyone!”

Someone laughed. Someone else whooped, a joyful sound that could have come from almost any throat, one that was felt in every single heart. Because we had a light, and if we had a light we had done it: after doing the improbable, we had followed it up by doing the impossible. We had made contact.

“Do we have a visual?” barked Earl. He was never a man who did anything at a normal volume.

(He’d been one of the first to die, slowing and finally stopping altogether as the water in his cells converted into a crystalline dust. When his body had collapsed inward on itself and blown away, we’d all thought that it was an accident, an unexpected interface between Earth and alien biology. We’d been so wrong. We’d already been too late.)

“I’m on it,” I said, my hands moving rapidly across the controls. One of the screens began to roll in lines of irregular static, finally stabilizing on a picture of an alien world. Our alien world, Yonder, which remained as beautiful as ever, but had grown somewhat familiar and hence not as exciting as it had been. Now, as the amber and peach glory of it came into focus on the screen, I remembered how beautiful it was, and how excited I had been the first time I’d seen it.

Now, the most exciting thing was the alien—the alien—standing in front of our robot.

Everyone saw the aliens inside of the week, of course: even if we’d wanted to classify their existence, we couldn’t have done it. The project was too public, and there were too many leaks for us to have closed them all that late in the game. They made the cover of every magazine in the world. It didn’t help that they looked like velvet worms the size of anacondas, waving their stubby little legs and their featureless antennae at our robots like some sort of threat display.

A few people murmured, disappointed by what seemed to be an enormous, if alien, animal. Earl motioned for them to be quiet. The alien kept waving its stubby little legs. The light kept flashing. And then, in a slow crawl across the bottom of the screen, came the sentence that changed the world:

“What do you mean, ‘hello’?”

The room exploded again. This time, Earl couldn’t get us back under control. He barely even tried. We had discovered an alien world; we had discovered alien life; we had done it all, and history was going to remember our names.

Things have consequences.

Angie lifts her head from my shoulder and sighs, a long, slow exhalation that bears no resemblance to the giddy cheers that still echo like ghosts in the haunted hallways of my memory. She sounds utterly broken, utterly defeated, and for a moment, my heart seizes in my chest, because that’s my daughter making that sound, my daughter with the life beaten half out of her by the uncaring, uncompassionate world.

“Mom,” she says. “Look.”

I don’t want to. Things have consequences, yes, but I am tired of consequences, and I don’t want to look.

I look.

Nate isn’t moving. Nate isn’t breathing, either; Nate hasn’t been breathing for quite some time. The skin on his face is waxy and tight, and already crumbling around the edges. Skin has edges, especially on the face; nostrils, eyes, the mouth. Everything about it seems to have been essentially designed to fall apart.

“He’s sleeping,” I lie.

Angie doesn’t meet my eyes.

“He’ll wake up soon.”

“Mom, if he was exposed…”

“Don’t finish that sentence, baby girl. We’re going to be fine. We’re going to keep climbing, and we’re going to be fine.”

More lies. We’re not going to be fine. No one is going to be fine. If Nate was exposed, so was Angie, and if they both crumble into dust in my arms, that’s it: that’s the ballgame, at least for me. Let someone else fight to save the human race. I helped to condemn it, and that seems like more than enough.

Someone else will be the hero in this story. Someone else will storm the mothership or charge through the shimmering gateway that connects us to an alien world, an alien sky; someone else will find the words to say in the necessary order to convince our next door neighbors to stop killing us. Someone else. Not me. I’m a nameless, faceless extra in this story, one of the white–coated scientists from the first ten minutes of the movie, the ones who set events in motion and doom us all. Because things have consequences. Things have always, always had consequences.

“Do we even know why?” asks Angie.

“Because they’ve killed the Earl of Moray, and the Lady Mondegreen,” I say.

She looks at me blankly. I sigh. A lock of Nate’s hair crumbles and blows away. I close my eyes. I don’t want to see the look on her face when she realizes just how stupid this has all been, or how easily it could all have been avoided.

“We didn’t stop to think about atmospheric density,” I say, and on that hinges the world.

The light was on: nothing was going to change that. Even if the alien got bored and wandered away, we would always have made first contact. Us, a group of physicists and astronomers just trying to better the future of mankind, we had made first contact.

“It’s like living in a science fiction novel,” said one of the assistants, and everyone laughed, and everyone secretly—or not–so–secretly—agreed with her.

(She would die shortly after Earl, shattering when she was knocked over by a fleeing engineer. Her body would blow away in the wind from the open laboratory door. So far as I know, nobody called her family.)

The alien continued to wave its legs at our helpful robot as, one sentence at a time, we unlocked the world.

“The translator program is working,” I breathed. Oh, how I wished Lisa had come to visit the office, so she could see it: see the moment when my late nights and long hours transformed into something concrete, something real, like lead turning into gold. This was the moment when we made history once and for all.

We’d been so set on making history that we had never stopped to ask ourselves whether making history mattered. Maybe it would have been better to sit back and accept that history made itself, assembling a grand puzzle one minute at a time, until we found ourselves standing on the other side of it. We’d been working hard, eyes on the prize, and we’d been so busy wallowing in intellectual ideals that we’d never stopped to think.

Earl grabbed the microphone. “Hello,” he said, pulling it close to his mouth, so that not a sound would be missed. Was that the problem? Was that where the interference had come in, where things had gone askew?

I don’t think so. I think the trouble started with “hello.” It was such an innocuous word, “hello.” It only made sense that it would be the word that doomed us.

The robot relayed Earl’s voice. The alien pulled back, arms waving in dismay, before it leaned closer once more, studying our emissary.

“Hello?” it echoed. “Are you hello?”

“This is the planet Earth, speaking to you across the cosmos,” said Earl, and the robot relayed his words, translating them into a dozen languages, into pulses of light, into mathematical sigils. It translated them every way it knew how, and the alien waved its arms, and this was going better than we could possibly have hoped.

(We couldn’t read the alien’s reactions—it was too alien, too much like the sort of thing you might find under a rock, rather than having a coherent conversation with a space–faring robot—but we were encouraged when two more appeared to join the discussion. They waved their arms and they spoke slowly to the robot, and we were making history, and things have consequences.)

“Hello,” said the newest alien. “You are sure hello?”

“Hello,” repeated Earl, and “Hello,” repeated the robot, and someone ran to fetch a reporter while someone else went to call the President.

The aliens stayed close to the robot for three days, coming and going and always circling back to one question:

“You are sure hello?”

Nate barely weighs anything. If I opened my eyes, I’m sure I would find him more than halfway gone, dissolving into the wind. I don’t open my eyes.

When the first ship appeared above us, a thing that was half saucer and half ornate coral structure, too delicate and fractal to have been constructed within planetary gravity, people rejoiced. Most people. I was back in the lab, running and rerunning hours of footage of our first meeting with the aliens. Something was troubling me. It was such a small thing, but…

We knew they were intelligent. We had observed tool use. Not just sticks and rocks and other things that a creature with a dozen grasping appendages might be expected to pick up and use: complicated little machines with lights that flashed and disks that spun, which had sent our xeno anthropologists into fits of delight. It seemed likely that we had opened our gate onto their home world, based on how many of them there were and how well they fit into their environment, but that was just a guess: human scientists had been talking about Terraforming for decades. Who was to say that Yonder wasn’t the result of Wormforming?

We had so much left to learn. They spoke to our robots in short, measured sentences, and they grasped all our languages with remarkable speed…but a few words seemed to stymie them. Including, surprisingly, the innocuous “hello.”

When we said it, they waved their limbs and asked if we were sure. They became distressed. Some members of the team theorized that greetings were somehow taboo in their culture; we started trying to avoid them.

And then the President had come to visit again, and had boomed hello after hello across the unfathomable distance at our space–worm friends. They had slowly stopped their waving. They had stopped sounding distressed. One—the first one, the Prime Worm—had bowed its head and said, “We understand.”

The next morning, all the worms had been gone.

A week later, the ships had arrived. We had yet to see the pilots, but most people were assuming that they contained our friends the worms, who had been charming and friendly and seemed harmless, if anything alien could be considered “harmless.” I locked myself in the lab, watching and re–watching every scrap of footage, trying to figure out what they were reacting to.

Something about the word “hello.”

On a whim, I began enhancing the background noise, trying to pull up the conversations the aliens had amongst themselves. They were garbled slightly by wind and distance, but I was able to piece together a relatively clean string of words and accent sounds. I fed it into the translator.

The translator flashed red.

Frowning, I looked at the screen.

> MULTIPLE LANGUAGES DETECTED. CONTINUE?

I typed “yes,” and hit “enter.” The red light went off. Two strings of text appeared.

One, labeled “Yonder,” read, “They are asking us to relieve their unending misery. They have asked repeatedly. We must grant them our aid.”

The other, labeled “Multiple,” read, “They are asking us to hello. They have asked repeatedly. We must grant them our aid.”

I stared at the two lines of text. One made sense as read. The other…

My chair fell when I launched myself out of it and ran to find someone who could check my work. It made a clattering sound when it hit the ground. I didn’t look back. As far as I know, it may still be there.

“When people talk, we’re talking for this air,” I say, and the words don’t make any sense, and the words make all the sense there is; the words are everything, they define the future that we’ve made for ourselves, one careless choice at a time. “We’re making our words for this atmospheric density. We’re measuring their sounds and their stops and their distortion for this atmospheric density.”

I still don’t open my eyes. I don’t want to see what’s become of Nate, who hasn’t spoken since he started to crumble, and I don’t want to see if Angie has started to go clear around the edges. The part of me that’s still a scientist wonders idly how they did this to us, wishes that we’d had the time to pick their pathogens apart and understand them, even if it had been too late to cure them. It would be nice to know. I’ve spent my life knowing, and now I’m going to die not knowing.

“What does that mean?” asks Angie.

“It means that when the aliens heard us speaking, they didn’t hear us there the way we hear ourselves here. The air on Yonder has a different composition. It’s not as dense. We couldn’t breathe there even if we had reached the point where we could make the crossing, because the air isn’t right. And when humans speak there, the words sound funny. Some of them sound a lot like words the people on Yonder have in their own language. Some of them sound so familiar that the people on Yonder never figured out that we might mean something else.”

“So?”

“So do you remember the song I used to sing to you when it was time for bed? About the Earl of Moray?”

“Yes.”

“There are people who hear the lyrics wrong.” Were people, by now, because we had gone out into the cosmos looking for friends, and when we found them, we had asked them to kill us all. We had repeated the request over and over again, sticking to it stubbornly even in the face of their consistently anxious requests for clarification. We had told them exactly what we wanted them to do. And because they had wanted to be our friends, they had done it, no matter how much it hurt them.

They had crossed the cosmos to end our pain.

It’s getting harder to breathe. If I opened my eyes, if I looked at my hands, I would see crystal lines streaking across my skin. The alien pathogens work more slowly on a secondary exposure, but they still work. They still infect. There’s a certain beauty to that. I wonder why they had this disease. Is it natural, something that haunts their world? Or did they create it for situations like this one, times when they needed to cleanse a planet?

Does it matter?

“They heard the lyrics wrong,” I whisper, and Angie says nothing, and things have consequences. Things have consequences.

My eyes won’t open. My body feels like it’s getting thinner and thinner, fading away into the air. My children are with me, and things have consequences, and we made history.

I take a breath. My lungs refuse to fill. As the world fades, in a voice like a whisper, I sing, “Oh ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, oh where have you been…”

We made history.

Things have consequences.

Hello.

Seanan McGuire lives, works, and watches way too many horror movies in the Pacific Northwest, where she shares her home with her two enormous blue cats, a ridiculous number of books, and a large collection of creepy dolls.

McGuire does not sleep much, publishing an average of four books a year under both her own name and the pen name “Mira Grant.” Her first book, Rosemary and Rue, was released in September 2009, and she hasn’t stopped running since. When not writing, she enjoys Disney Parks, horror movies, and looking winsomely at Marvel editorial as she tries to convince them to let her write for the X-Men. Keep up with McGuire at www.seananmcguire.com, on Twitter as @seananmcguire, or by walking into a cornfield at night and calling the secret, hidden name of the Great Pumpkin to the moon. When you turn, she will be there. She will always have been there.

Things With Beards
By Sam J. Miller

“Heard you died, man,” comes a sweet rough voice, and MacReady stands up to submit to the fierce hug that never fails to make him almost cry from how safe it makes him feel. But when he steps back to look Hugh in the eye, something is different. Something has changed. While he was away, Hugh became someone else.

“You don’t look so hot yourself,” he says, and they sit, and Hugh takes the coffee that has been waiting for him.

“Past few weeks I haven’t felt well,” Hugh says, which seems an understatement. Even after MacReady’s many months in Antarctica, how could so many lines have sprung up in his friend’s black skin? When had his hair and beard become so heavily peppered with salt? “It’s nothing. It’s going around.”

Their hands clasp under the table.

“You’re still fine as hell,” MacReady whispers.

“You stop,” Hugh said. “I know you had a piece down there.”

MacReady remembers Childs, the mechanic’s strong hands still greasy from the Ski-dozer, leaving prints on his back and hips. His teeth on the back of MacReady’s neck.

“Course I did,” MacReady says. “But that’s over now.”

“You still wearing that damn fool cowboy hat,” Hugh says, scoldingly. “Had those stupid centerfolds hung up all over your room I bet.”

MacReady releases his hands. “So? We all pretend to be what we need to be.”

“Not true. Not everybody has the luxury of passing.” One finger traces a circle on the black skin of his forearm.

They sip coffee. McDonald’s coffee is not good but it is real. Honest.

Childs and him; him and Childs. He remembers almost nothing about the final days at McMurdo. He remembers taking the helicopter up, with a storm coming, something about a dog…. and then nothing. Waking up on board a U.S. supply and survey ship, staring at two baffled crewmen. Shredded clothing all around them. A metal desk bent almost in half and pushed halfway across the room. Broken glass and burned paper and none of them had even the faintest memory of what had just happened. Later, reviewing case files, he learned how the supply run that came in springtime found the whole camp burned down, mostly everyone dead and blown to bizarre bits, except for two handsome corpses frozen untouched at the edge of camp; how the corpses were brought back, identified, the condolence letters sent home, the bodies, probably by accident, thawed… but that couldn’t be real. That frozen corpse couldn’t have been him.

“Your people still need me?” MacReady asks.

“More than ever. Cops been wilding out on folks left and right. Past six months, eight people got killed by police. Not a single officer indicted. You still up for it?”

“Course I am.”

“Meeting in two weeks. Not afraid to mess with the Man? Because what we’ve got planned… they ain’t gonna like it. And they’re gonna hit back, hard.”

MacReady nods. He smiles. He is home; he is needed. He is a rebel. “Let’s go back to your place.”

• • • •

When MacReady is not MacReady, or when MacReady is simply not, he never remembers it after. The gaps in his memory are not mistakes, not accidents. The thing that wears his clothes, his body, his cowboy hat, it doesn’t want him to know it is there. So the moment when the supply ship crewman walked in and found formerly-frozen MacReady sitting up—and watched MacReady’s face split down the middle, saw a writhing nest of spaghetti tentacles explode in his direction, screamed as they enveloped him and swiftly started digesting—all of that is gone from MacReady’s mind.

But when it is being MacReady, it is MacReady. Every opinion and memory and passion is intact.

• • • •

“The fuck just happened?” Hugh asks, after, holding up a shredded sheet.

“That good, I guess,” MacReady says, laughing, naked.

“I honestly have no memory of us tearing this place up like that.”

“Me either.”

There is no blood, no tissue of any kind. Not-MacReady sucks all that up. Absorbs it, transforms it. As it transformed the meat that used to be Hugh, as soon as they were alone in his room and it perceived no threat, knew it was safe to come out. The struggle was short. In nineteen minutes the transformation was complete, and MacReady and Hugh were themselves again, as far as they knew, and they fell into each other’s arms, into the ravaged bed, out of their clothes.

“What’s that,” MacReady says, two worried fingers tracing down Hugh’s side. Purple blotches mar his lovely torso.

“Comes with this weird new pneumonia thing that’s going around,” he says. “This year’s junky flu.”

“But you’re not a junky.”

“I’ve fucked a couple, lately.”

MacReady laughs. “You have a thing for lost causes.”

“The cause I’m fighting for isn’t lost,” Hugh says, frowning.

“Course not. I didn’t mean that—”

But Hugh has gone silent, vanishing into the ancient trauma MacReady has always known was there, and tried to ignore, ever since Hugh took him under his wing at the age of nineteen. Impossible to deny it, now, with their bare legs twined together, his skin corpse-pale beside Hugh’s rich dark brown. How different their lives had been, by virtue of the bodies they wore. How wide the gulf that lay between them, that love was powerless to bridge.

• • • •

So many of the men at McMurdo wore beards. Winter, he thought, at first—for keeping our faces warm in Antarctica’s forever winter. But warmth at McMurdo was rarely an issue. Their warren of rectangular huts was kept at a balmy seventy-eight degrees. Massive stockpiles of gasoline specifically for that purpose. Aside from the occasional trip outside for research—and MacReady never had more than a hazy understanding of what, exactly, those scientists were sciencing down there, but they seemed to do precious little of it—the men of McMurdo stayed the hell inside.

So. Not warmth.

Beards were camouflage. A costume. Only Blair and Garry lacked one, both being too old to need to appear as anything other than what they were, and Childs, who never wanted to.

He shivered. Remembering. The tough-guy act, the cowboy he became in uncertain situations. Same way in juvie; in lock-up. Same way in Vietnam. Hard, mean, masculine. Hard drinking; woman hating. Queer? Psssh. He hid so many things, buried them deep, because if men knew what he really was, he’d be in danger. When they learned he wasn’t one of them, they would want to destroy him.

They all had their reasons, for choosing McMurdo. For choosing a life where there were no women. Supper time MacReady would look from face to bearded face and wonder how many were like him, under the all-man exterior they projected, but too afraid, like him, to let their true self show.

Childs hadn’t been afraid. And Childs had seen what he was.

MacReady shut his eyes against the McMurdo memories, bit his lip. Anything to keep from thinking about what went down, down there. Because how was it possible that he had absolutely no memory of any of it? Soviet attack, was the best theory he could come up with. Psychoactive gas leaked into the ventilation system by a double agent (Nauls, definitely), which caused catastrophic freak outs and homicidal arson rage, leaving only he and Childs unscathed, whereupon they promptly sat down in the snow to die… and this, of course, only made him more afraid, because if this insanity was the only narrative he could construct that made any sense at all, he whose imagination had never been his strong suit, then the real narrative was probably equally, differently, insane.

• • • •

Not-MacReady has an exceptional knack for assessing external threats. It stays hidden when MacReady is alone, and when he is in a crowd, and even when he is alone but still potentially vulnerable. Once, past four in the morning, when a drunken MacReady had the 145th Street bus all to himself, alone with the small woman behind the wheel, Not-MacReady could easily have emerged. Claimed her. But it knew, somehow, gauging who knew what quirk of pheromones or optic nerve signals, the risk of exposure, the chance someone might see through the tinted windows, or the driver’s foot, in the spasms of dying, slam down hard on the brake and bring the bus crashing into something.

If confronted, if threatened, it might risk emerging. But no one is there to confront it. No one suspects it is there. Not even MacReady, who has nothing but the barest, most irrational anxieties. Protean fragments; nightmare glitch glimpses and snatches of horrific sound. Feedback, bleedthrough from the thing that hides inside him.

• • • •

“Fifth building burned down this week,” said the Black man with the Spanish accent. MacReady sees his hands, sees how hard he’s working to keep them from shaking. His anger is intoxicating. “Twenty families, out on the street. Cops don’t care. They know it was the landlord. It’s always the landlord. Insurance company might kick up a stink, but worst thing that happens is dude catches a civil suit. Pays a fine. That shit is terrorism, and they oughtta give those motherfuckers the chair.”

Everyone agrees. Eleven people in the circle; all of them Black except for MacReady and an older white lady. All of them men except for her, and a stout Black woman with an Afro of astonishing proportions.

“It’s not terrorism when they do it to us,” she said. “It’s just the way things are supposed to be.”

The meeting is over. Coffee is sipped; cigarettes are lit. No one is in a hurry to go back outside. An affinity group, mostly Black Panthers who somehow survived a couple decades of attempts by the FBI to exterminate every last one of them, but older folks too, trade unionists, commies, a minister who came up from the South back when it looked like the Movement was going to spread everywhere, change everything.

MacReady wonders how many of them are cops. Three, he guesses, though not because any of them make him suspicious. Just because he knows what they’re up against, what staggering resources the government has invested in destroying this work over the past forty years. Infiltrators tended to be isolated, immersed in the lie they were living, reporting only to one person, whom they might never meet.

Hugh comes over, hands him two cookies.

“You sure this is such a good idea?” MacReady says. “They’ll hit back hard, for this. Things will get a whole lot worse.”

“Help us or don’t,” Hugh said, frowning. “That’s your decision. But you don’t set the agenda here. We know what we’re up against, way better than you do. We know the consequences.”

MacReady ate one cookie, and held the other up for inspection. Oreo knock-offs, though he’d never have guessed from the taste. The pattern was different, the seal on the chocolate exterior distinctly stamped.

“I understand if you’re scared,” Hugh says, gentler now.

“Shit yes I’m scared,” MacReady says, and laughs. “Anybody who’s not scared of what we’re about to do is probably… well, I don’t know, crazy or stupid or a fucking pod person.”

Hugh laughs. His laugh becomes a cough. His cough goes on for a long time.

Would he or she know it, if one of the undercovers made eye contact with another? Would they look across the circle and see something, recognize some deeply-hidden kinship? And if they were all cops, all deep undercover, each one simply impersonating an activist so as to target actual activists, what would happen then? Would they be able to see that, and set the ruse aside, step into the light, reveal what they really were? Or would they persist in the imitation game, awaiting instructions from above? Undercovers didn’t make decisions, MacReady knew; they didn’t even do things. They fed information upstairs, and upstairs did with it what they would. So if a whole bunch of undercovers were operating on their own, how would they ever know when to stop?

• • • •

MacReady knows that something is wrong. He keeps seeing it out of the corner of his mind’s eye, hearing its echoes in the distance. Lost time, random wreckage.

MacReady suspects he is criminally, monstrously insane. That during his black-outs he carries out horrific crimes, and then hides all the evidence. This would explain what went down at McMurdo. In a terrifying way, the explanation is appealing. He could deal with knowing that he murdered all his friends and then blew up the building. It would frighten him less than the yawning gulf of empty time, the barely-remembered slither and scuttle of something inhuman, the flashes of blood and screaming that leak into his daylight hours now.

MacReady rents a cabin. Upstate: uninsulated and inexpensive. Ten miles from the nearest neighbor. The hard-faced old woman who he rents from picks him up at the train station. Her truck is full of grocery bags, all the things he requested.

“No car out here,” she says, driving through town. “Not even a bicycle. No phone, either. You get yourself into trouble and there’ll be way of getting out of here in a hurry.”

He wonders what they use it for, the people she normally rents to, and decides he doesn’t want to know.

“Let me out up here,” he says, when they approach the edge of town.

“You crazy?” she asks. “It’d take you two hours to walk the rest of the way. Maybe more.”

“I said pull over,” he says, hardening his voice, because if she goes much further, out of sight of prying protective eyes, around the next bend, maybe, or even before that, the thing inside him may emerge. It knows these things, somehow.

“Have fun carrying those two big bags of groceries all that way,” she says, when he gets out. “Asshole.”

“Meet me here in a week,” he says. “Same time.”

“You must be a Jehovah’s Witness or something,” she says, and he is relieved when she is gone.

The first two days pass in a pleasant enough blur. He reads books, engages in desultory masturbation to a cheaply-printed paperback of gay erotic stories Hugh had lent him. Only one symptom: hunger. Low and rumbling, and not sated no matter how much he eats.

And then: lost time. He comes to on his knees, in the cool midnight dirt behind a bar.

“Thanks, man,” says the sturdy bearded trucker type standing over him, pulling back on a shirt. Puzzled by how it suddenly sports a spray of holes, each fringed with what look like chemical burns. “I needed that.”

He strides off. MacReady settles back into a squat. Leans against the building.

What do I do to him? He seems unharmed. But I’ve done something. Something terrible.

He wonders how he got into town. Walked? Hitchhiked? And how the hell he’ll get back.

• • • •

The phone rings, his first night back. He’d been sitting on his fire escape, looking down at the city, debating jumping, though not particularly seriously. Hugh’s words echoing in his head. Help us or don’t. He is still not sure which one he’ll choose.

He picks up the phone.

“Mac,” says the voice, rich and deep and unmistakeable.

“Childs.”

“Been trying to call you.” Cars honk, through the wire. Childs is from Detroit, he dimly remembers, or maybe Minneapolis.

“I was away. Had to get out of town, clear my head.”

“You too, huh?”

MacReady lets out his breath, once he realizes he’s been holding it. “You?”

“Yup.”

“What the hell, man? What the fuck is going on?”

Childs chuckles. “Was hoping you’d have all the answers. Don’t know why. I already knew what a dumbass you are.”

A lump of longing forms in MacReady’s throat. But his body fits him wrong, suddenly. Whatever crazy mental illness he was imagining he had, Childs sharing it was inconceivable. Something else is wrong, something his mind rejects but his body already knows. “Have you been to a doctor?”

“Tried,” Childs says. “I remember driving halfway there, and the next thing I knew I was home again.” A siren rises then slowly fades, in Detroit or Minneapolis.

MacReady inspects his own reflection in the window, where the lights of his bedroom bounce back against the darkness. “What are we?” he whispers.

“Hellbound,” Childs says, “but we knew that already.”

• • • •

The duffel bag says Astoria Little League. Two crossed baseball bats emblazoned on the outside. Dirty bright-blue blazer sleeves reaching out. A flawless facsimile of something harmless, wholesome. No one would see it and suspect. The explosives are well-hidden, small, sewn into a pair of sweat pants, the timer already ticking down to some unknown hour, some unforeseeable fallout.

• • • •

“Jimmy,” his father says, hugging him, hard. His beard brushes MacReady’s neck, abrasive and unyielding as his love.

The man is immense, dwarfing the cluttered kitchen table. Uncles lurk in the background. Cigars and scotch sour the air. Where are the aunts and wives? MacReady has always wondered, these manly Sundays.

“They told me this fucker died,” his father says to someone.

“Can’t kill one of ours that easy,” someone says. Eleven men in the little house, which has never failed to feel massive.

Here his father pauses. Frowns. No one but MacReady sees. No one here but MacReady knows the man well enough to suspect that the frown means he knows something new on the subject of MacReady mortality. Something that frightens him. Something he feels he has to shelter his family from.

“Fucking madness, going down there,” his father says, snapping back with the unstoppable positivity MacReady lacks, and envies. “I’d lose my mind inside of five minutes out in Alaska.”

“Antarctica,” he chuckles.

“That too!”

Here, home, safe, among friends, the immigrant in his father emerges. Born here to brand-new arrivals from Ireland, never saw the place but it’s branded on his speech, the slight Gaelic curling of his consonants he keeps hidden when he’s driving the subway car but lets rip on weekends. His father’s father is who MacReady hears now, the big glorious drunk they brought over as soon as they got themselves settled, the immense shadow over MacReady’s own early years, and who, when he died, took some crucial piece of his son away with him. MacReady wonders how his own father has marked him, how much of him he carries around, and what kind of new terrible creature he will be when his father dies.

An uncle is in another room, complaining about an impending Congressional hearing into police brutality against Blacks; the flood of reporters bothering his beat cops. The uncle uses ugly words to describe the people he polices out in Brooklyn; the whole room laughs. His father laughs. MacReady slips upstairs unnoticed. Laments, in silence, the horror of human hatred—how such marvelous people, whom he loves so dearly, contain such monstrosity inside of them.

In the bathroom, standing before the toilet where he first learned to pee, MacReady sees smooth purple lesions across his stomach.

• • • •

Midnight, and MacReady stands at the center of the George Washington Bridge. The monstrous creature groans and whines with the wind, with the heavy traffic that never stops. New York City’s most popular suicide spot. He can’t remember where he heard that, but he’s grateful that he did. Astride the safety railing, looking down at deep black water, he stops to breathe.

Once, MacReady was angry. He is not angry anymore. This disturbs him. The things that angered him are still true, are still out there; are, in most cases, even worse.

His childhood best friend, shot by cops at fourteen for “matching a description” of someone Black. His mother’s hands, at the end of a fourteen hour laundry shift. Hugh, and Childs, and every other man he’s loved, and the burning glorious joy he had to smother and hide and keep secret. He presses against these memories, traces along his torso where they’ve marked him, much like the cutaneous lesions along Hugh’s sides. And yet, like those purple blotches, they cause no pain. Not anymore.

A train’s whistle blows, far beneath him. Wind stings his eyes when he tries to look. He can see the warm dim lights of the passenger cars; imagines the seats where late-night travelers doze or read or stare up in awe at the lights of the bridge. At him.

Something is missing, inside of MacReady. He can’t figure out what. He wonders when it started. McMurdo? Maybe. But probably not. Something drew him to McMurdo, after all. The money, but not just the money. He wanted to flee from the human world. He was tired of fighting it and wanted to take himself out. Whatever was in him, changing, already, McMurdo fed it.

He tries to put his finger on it, the thing that is gone, and the best he can do is a feeling he once felt, often, and feels no longer. Trying to recall the last time he felt it he fails, though he can remember plenty of times before that. Leaving his first concert; gulping down cold November night air and knowing every star overhead belonged to him. Bus rides back from away baseball games, back when the Majors still felt possible. The first time he followed a boy onto the West Side Piers. A feeling at once frenzied and calm, energetic yet restive. Like he had saddled himself, however briefly, onto something impossibly powerful, and primal, sacred, almost, connected to the flow of things, moving along the path meant only for him. They had always been rare, those moments—life worked so hard to come between him and his path—but lately they did not happen at all.

He is a monster. He knows this now. So is Childs. So are countless others, people like Hugh who he did something terrible to, however unintentionally it was. He doesn’t know the details, what he is or how it works, or why, but he knows it.

Maybe he’d have been strong enough, before. Maybe that other MacReady would have been brave enough to jump. But that MacReady had no reason to. This MacReady climbs back to the safe side of the guardrail, and walks back to solid ground.

• • • •

MacReady strides up the precinct steps, trying not to cry. Smiling, wide-eyed, white and harmless.

When Hugh handed off the duffel bag, something was clearly wrong. He’d lost fifty pounds, looked like. All his hair. Half of the light in his eyes. By then MacReady’d been hearing the rumors, seeing the stories. Gay cancer, said the Times. Dudes dropping like mayflies.

And that morning: the call. Hugh in Harlem Hospital. From Hugh’s mother, whose remembered Christmas ham had no equal on this earth. When she said everything was going to be fine, MacReady knew she was lying. Not to spare his feelings, but to protect her own. To keep from having a conversation she couldn’t have.

He pauses, one hand on the precinct door. Panic rises.

• • • •

Blair built a space ship.

The image comes back to him suddenly, complete with the smell of burning petrol. Something he saw, in real life? Or a photo he was shown, from the wreckage? A cavern dug into the snow and ice under McMurdo. Scavenged pieces of the helicopter and the snowmobiles and the Ski-dozer assembled into… a space ship. How did he know that’s what it was? Because it was round, yes, and nothing any human knew how to make, but there’s more information here, something he’s missing, something he knew once but doesn’t know now. But where did it come from, this memory?

Panic. Being threatened, trapped. Having no way out. It triggers something inside of him. Like it did in Blair, which is how an assistant biologist could assemble a spacefaring vessel. Suddenly MacReady can tap into so much more. He sees things. Stars, streaking past him, somehow. Shapes he can take. Things he can be. Repulsive, fascinating. Beings without immune systems to attack; creatures whose core body temperatures are so low any virus or other invading organism would die.

A cuttlefish contains so many colors, even when it isn’t wearing them.

His hands and neck feel tight. Like they’re trying to break free from the rest of him. Had someone been able to see under his clothes, just then, they’d have seen mouths opening and closing all up and down his torso.

“Help you?” a policewoman asks, opening the door for him, and this is bad, super bad, because he—like all the other smiling white harmless allies who are at this exact moment sauntering into every one of the NYPD’s 150 precincts and command centers—is supposed to not be noticed.

“Thank you,” he says, smiling the Fearless Man Smile, powering through the panic. She smiles back, reassured by what she sees, but what she sees isn’t what he is. He doffs the cowboy hat and steps inside.

He can’t do anything about what he is. All he can do is try to minimize the harm, and do his best to counterbalance it.

• • • •

What’s the endgame here, he wonders, waiting at the desk. What next? A brilliant assault, assuming all goes well—simultaneous attacks on every NYPD precinct, chaos without bloodshed, but what victory scenario are his handlers aiming for? What is the plan? Is there a plan? Does someone, upstairs, at Black Liberation Secret Headquarters, have it all mapped out? There will be a backlash, and it will be bloody, for all the effort they put into a casualty-free military strike. They will continue to make progress, person by person, heart by heart and mind by mind, but what then? How will they know they have reached the end of their work? Changing minds means nothing if those changed minds don’t then change actual things. It’s not enough for everyone to carry justice inside their hearts like a secret. Justice must be spoken. Must be embodied.

“Sound permit for a block party?” he asks the clerk, who slides him a form without even looking up. All over the city, sound permits for block parties that will never come to pass are being slid across ancient well-worn soon-to-be-incinerated desks.

Walking out, he hears the precinct phone ring. Knows it’s The Call. The same one every other precinct is getting. Encouraging everyone to evacuate in the next five minutes if they’d rather not die screaming; flagging that the bomb is set to detonate immediately if tampered with, or moved (this is a bluff, but one the organizers felt fairly certain hardly anyone would feel like calling, and, in fact, no one does).

• • • •

And that night, in a city at war, he stands on the subway platform. Drunk, exhilarated, frightened. A train pulls in. He stands too close to the door, steps forward as it swings open, walks right into a woman getting off. Her eyes go wide and she makes a terrified sound. “Sorry,” he mumbles, cupping his beard and feeling bad for looking like the kind of man who frightens women, but she is already sprinting away. He frowns, and then sits, and then smiles. A smile of shame, at frightening someone, but also of something else, of a hard-earned, impossible-to-communicate knowledge. MacReady knows, in that moment, that maturity means making peace with how we are monsters.

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His debut novel The Art of Starving is out now from HarperTeen, to be followed by Blackfish City in April 2018. He lives in New York City, and at www.samjmiller.com

The Venus Effect
By Violet Allen

Apollo Allen and The Girl from Venus

This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina is throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside. It is a good party, and the surrounding night is beautiful, warm and soft and speckled with stars. A phone is hooked up to a portable sound system, and the speakers are kicking out rapture. It is 2009 again, the last year that music was any good, preserved in digital amber and reanimated via computer magic.

Apollo boogies on the margins, between the edge of the party and the edge of the roof, surrounded by revelers but basically alone. Naomi is on the other side of the crowd, grinding against her new boyfriend, Marcus, a musclebound meat-man stuffed into a spectacularly tacky t-shirt. Apollo finds this an entirely unappealing sight. That she and Apollo once shared an intimate relationship has nothing to do with this judgment. Not at all.

Speaking merely as an observer, a man with a love of Beauty and Dance in his heart, Apollo judges their performance unconvincing. It is the worst sort of kitsch. The meat-man against whom Naomi vibrates has no rhythm, no soul; he is as unfunky as the bad guys on Parliament-Funkadelic albums. He stutters from side to side with little regard for the twos and fours, and the occasional thrusts of his crotch are little more than burlesque, without the slightest suggestion of genuine eroticism. He is doing it just to do it. Pure kitsch. Appalling. Naomi is doing a better job, undulating her buttocks with a certain aplomb, a captivating bootyliciousness that might stir jiggly bedroom memories in the heart of the lay observer. But still. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart; But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old, “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”

Apollo cannot bear to watch this any longer. He desperately wants to point the terribleness of this scene out to someone, to say, “Hey, look at them. They look like dumbs. Are they not dumbs?” But Naomi was always the person to whom he pointed these sorts of things out. That’s why they got along, at least in the beginning, a shared appreciation for the twin pleasures of pointing at a fool and laughing at a fool. Without her, he is vestigial, useless, alone.

He turns away from the ghastly scene, just in time to notice a young woman dancing nearby. She is alone, like him, and she is, unlike him, utterly, utterly turnt. Look at her, spinning like a politician, bouncing like a bad check, bopping to the beat like the beat is all there is. She is not a talented dancer by any stretch of the imagination, and her gracelessness is unable to keep up with her abandon. She is embraced of the moment, full with the spirit, completely ungenerous with fucks and possibly bordering on the near side of alcohol poisoning. Just look at her. Apollo, in a state of terrible cliché, is unable to take his eyes off her.

There is a problem, however.

Her heels, while fabulous, were not made for rocking so hard. They are beautiful shoes, certainly, vibrant and sleek, canary yellow, bold as love. Perhaps they are a bit too matchy-matchy with regard to the rest of her outfit, the canary-yellow dress and the canary-yellow necklace and the canary-yellow bow atop her head, but the matchy-matchy look is good for people who are forces of nature, invoking four-color heroism and supernatural panache. Yet however lovely and amazing and charming and expensive these shoes might be, they cannot be everything.

The center cannot hold; things fall apart.

Her left heel snaps. Her balance is lost. Her momentum and her tipsiness send her stumbling, and no one is paying enough attention to catch her. The building is not so high up that a fall would definitely kill her, but death could be very easily found on the sidewalk below. Apollo rushes forward, reaches out to grab her, but he is too late. She goes over the edge. Apollo cannot look away. She falls for what feels like forever.

And then, she stops. She doesn’t hit the ground. She just stops and hangs in the air. Apollo stares frozen, on the one hand relieved not to witness a death, on the other hand filled with ontological dread as his understanding of the laws of gravitation unravel before his eyes, on a third hypothetical hand filled with wonder and awe at this flagrant violation of consensus reality. The young woman looks up at Apollo with her face stuck in a frightened grimace as she slowly, slowly descends, like a feather in the breeze. She takes off as soon as she hits the ground, stumble-running as fast as one can on non-functional shoes.

Apollo does not know what has just happened, but he knows that he wants to know. He does not say goodbye to the hostess or his friends or Naomi. He just ghosts, flying down the ladder and down the hall and down the stairs and out the door. He can just make out a blur in the direction she ran off, and he chases after it.

There is a man in a police uniform standing at the corner. Apollo does not see him in the darkness, does not know that he is running toward him. The man in the police uniform draws his weapon and yells for Apollo to stop. Inertia and confusion do not allow Apollo to stop quickly enough. Fearing for his life, the man in the police uniform pulls the trigger of his weapon several times, and the bullets strike Apollo in his chest, doing critical damage to his heart and lungs. He flops to the ground. He is dead now.

• • • •

Uh, what? That was not supposed to happen. Apollo was supposed to chase the girl alien, then have some romantically-charged adventures fighting evil aliens, then at the end she was going to go back to her home planet and it was going to be sad. Who was that guy? That’s weird, right? That’s not supposed to happen, right? Dudes aren’t supposed to just pop off and end stories out of nowhere.

I guess to be fair, brother was running around in the middle of the night, acting a fool. That’s just asking for trouble. He was a pretty unlikeable protagonist, anyway, a petty, horny, pretentious idiot with an almost palpable stink of author surrogacy on him. I think there was a Kipling quote in there. Who’s that for? You don’t want to read some lame indie romance bullshit, right? Sadboy meets manic pixie dream alien? I’m already bored. Let’s start over. This time, we’ll go classic. We’ll have a real hero you can look up to, and cool action-adventure shit will go down. You ready? Here we go.

Apollo Rocket vs. The Space Barons from Beyond Pluto

There are fifteen seconds left on the clock, and the green jerseys have possession. The score is 99-98, green jerseys. The red jerseys have been plagued by injuries, infighting, and unfortunate calls on the part of the ref, who, despite his profession’s reputed impartiality, is clearly a supporter of the green jerseys. The green jerseys themselves are playing as though this is the very last time they will ever play a basketball game. They are tall and white and aggressively Midwestern, and this gives them something to prove. Sketch in your mind the Boston Celtics of another time. Picture the Washington Generals on one of the rare, rumored nights when they were actually able to defeat their perennial adversaries, mortal men who somehow found themselves snatching victory from the god-clowns of Harlem.

Fourteen.

One of the green jerseys is preparing to throw the ball toward the hoop. If the ball were to go into the hoop, the green jerseys would have two points added to their score, and it would become impossible for the red jerseys to throw enough balls into the other hoop before time runs out. The green jerseys are already preparing for their win, running over in their minds talking points for their post-game interviews, making sure the sports drink dispenser is full and ready to be poured upon the coach, and wondering how the word “champions” might feel on their lips.

Eleven.

But this will not happen. Apollo is in position. He reaches out with his mighty arm and strips the ball from the green jersey before he can throw it.

Ten.

Apollo runs as fast as he can with the ball, so fast that every atom of his body feels as if it is igniting. He looks for an open teammate, for he is no ball hog, our Apollo, but there are no teammates to be found between himself and the hoop. So he runs alone. He is lightning. There are green jersey players in his way, but he spins and jukes around them before they can react, as if they are sloths suspended in aspic. Do his feet even touch the floor? Is it the shoes?

He’s on fire.

Three.

He leaps high into the air and dunks the ball so hard that the backboard shatters into a thousand glittering shards of victory. The buzzer goes off just as he hits the ground. The final score is 100-99, red jerseys. Apollo Triumphant is leapt upon by his teammates. Hugs and pats on the back are distributed freely and with great relish. The crowd erupts into wild celebration. Apollo, Apollo, they chant.

Patrick, the captain of the opposing team, approaches Apollo as confetti falls from above. There is a sour look on the man’s face, an expression of constipated rage at its most pure. He balls his fingers into a fist and raises it level with Apollo’s midsection. It rears back and trembles as an arrow notched in a bow, ready to be fired.

“Good job, bro,” he says.

“You too,” says Apollo.

They bump fists. It is so dope.

A small child limps onto the basketball court. He smiles so hard that it must be painful for his face. Apollo kneels and gives him a high-five, then a low-five, then a deep hug.

“You did it, Apollo,” says the child.

“No. We did it,” says Apollo. “They’ll never be able to demolish the youth center now.”

“My new mommy and daddy said they could never have adopted me without your help.”

Apollo puts a finger to his own lips. “Shhhhh.”

“I love you, Apollo,” says the child, its face wet with tears. “You’re the best man alive.”

Apollo drives home with his trophy and game ball in the back seat of his sports car, a candy apple convertible that gleams like justice. He blasts Rick Ross a positive, socially conscious rap song about working hard and pulling up one’s pants on his stereo. The road is his tonight. There are no other cars to be seen, no other people for miles. For all his successes as balla par excellence, Apollo still appreciates the beauty and quiet of the country.

Suddenly, a sonorous roar pours out from the edge of the sky, so powerful that it shakes the car. Before Apollo can react, a yellow-silver-blue ball of fire shoots across the sky and explodes on the horizon, for a moment blotting out the darkness with pure white light before retreating into smoke and darkness. Apollo jams his foot on the pedal proceeds in the direction of the mysterious explosion while obeying all traffic laws and keeping his vehicle within the legal speed limits.

“Holy shit Golly,” he says.

Apollo finds a field strewn with flaming debris, shattered crystals, and shards of brightly colored metals. He hops out of his car to take a closer look. Based on his astro-engineering courses, which he gets top marks in, he surmises that these materials could have only come from some kind of spaceship. He is fascinated, to say the least.

He hears movement from under a sheet of opaque glass. He pushes it away and sees that there is a woman lying prone underneath. At least, Apollo thinks she is a woman. She is shaped like a woman, but her skin is blue, and she has gills, and she has a second mouth on her forehead. Woman or not, she is beautiful, with delicate, alien features and C-cup breasts.

“Oh my God,” says Apollo. He kneels down next to the alien woman and cradles her in his arms. “Are you okay?”

She sputters. “. . . Listen . . . ship . . . crashed . . . There isn’t much . . . time . . . You must stop . . . Lord Tklox . . . He is coming to . . . answer the . . . Omega Question . . . He will stop at nothing . . . please . . . stop him . . . Save . . . civilization . . . Leave me . . .”

Apollo notices a growing purple stain on the woman’s diaphanous yellow robes. Based on his Theoretical Xenobiology class, he hypothesizes that this is blood. He shakes his head at her, unwilling to accept the false choice she has presented him with. “I’ll do whatever I can to stop him, but first I have to help you.”

She reaches up to gently stroke his hand with her three-fingered hand. “. . . So kind . . . I . . . chose well . . .”

With his incredible basketballer’s strength, it is nothing for Apollo to lift the woman. He may as well be carrying a large sack of feathers. He places her in the passenger seat of his car and gets back on the road lickety split.

“You’ll be okay. I just need some supplies.”

He stops at the nearest gas station. He races around inside to get what he needs: bandages, ice, sports drink, needle, thread, protein bar. With these items in hand, he rushes towards the register, which is next to the exit. He is stopped by a man in a police uniform. The man in the police uniform asks him about his car.

“It’s mine,” Apollo says.

The man in the police uniform does not believe Apollo.

“You have to come help me! There’s a woman in trouble!”

The man in the police uniform does not believe Apollo and is concerned that he is shouting.

“This is ridiculous! Sorry sir. I am sure you are just doing your job. Let me show you my ID and insurance information so we can clear all of this up,” says Apollo.

Apollo goes to fish his wallet from his pocket. His naked hostility, volatile tone, and the act of reaching for what very well could be a weapon are clear signs of aggressive intent, and the man in the police uniform has no choice but to withdraw his own weapon and fire several shots. Apollo is struck first in the stomach, then the shoulder. He does not immediately die. Instead, he spends several moments on the floor of the convenience store, struggling to breathe as his consciousness fades into nothing. Then, he dies.

• • • •

What the fuck is happening? Seriously. Where is this dude coming from? I haven’t written that many stories, but I really don’t think that’s how these things are supposed to go. The way I was taught, you establish character and setting, introduce conflict, develop themes, then end on an emotional climax. That’s it. Nobody said anything about killers popping up out of nowhere. Not in this genre, anyway.

So hear me out. I think we may be dealing some kind of metafictional entity, a living concept, an ideo-linguistic infection. I don’t know how he got in here, but he should be easy enough to deal with. I think we just need to reason with him. He’s probably a nice guy. Just doing his job, trying to keep the story safe. He was probably genuinely afraid that Apollo was reaching for a gun. You never know with people these days. Life is scary.

Besides, that story wasn’t working either. That Apollo was a big phony, totally unbelievable. Guys like that went out of style with Flash Gordon and bell-bottoms. It’s not just about liking the protagonist. You have to be able to relate to them, right? I think that’s how it works. That’s what everybody says, anyway. To be honest, I don’t really get the whole “relatability” thing. Isn’t the point of reading to subsume one’s own experience for the experience of another, to crawl out of one’s body and into a stranger’s thoughts? Why would you want to read about someone just like you? Stories are windows, not mirrors. Everybody’s human. Shouldn’t that make them relatable enough? I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing. I thought smoking was a weird thing to do, too, but then I tried smoking and was addicted forever. Maybe I’ve just never come across a good mirror.

So let’s do a child. Everybody loves children, and everybody was one. Plus, it’s really easy to make them super-relatable. Just throw some social anxiety disorder and a pair of glasses on some little fucking weirdo and boom: You got a movie deal. It’ll be a coming-of-age hero’s journey sort of thing, adolescence viewed through a gossamer haze of nostalgia.

Bully Brawl: An Apollo Kidd Adventure

This is 1995. A group of young people sit on the stoop of a decaying brownstone just off the L. The topic is television. Some show or another. Who can remember? Broadcast television in the year 1995 is terrible all around, hugs and catchphrases and phantasmal laughter suspended in analog fuzz. Is Full House on in 1995? Is Urkel? They don’t know how bad they have it. Naomi leads the conversation. A skinny, toothy girl with a voice like a preacher. You can almost hear the organ chords rumbling in your chest whenever she opens her mouth. She jokes about what she would do if her own hypothetical future husband were to comically declare himself the man of the house, with the punchlines mainly revolving around the speed and vigor with which she would slap the black off him. She is sort of funny, but only because the television shows she is describing are not.

Apollo does not make any jokes. He is sort of funny himself (people laugh at him, at least), but he does not know how to make funny words happen. He is mostly quiet, only chiming in with the factual, offering airtimes and channels and dropping the names of actors when they get stuck on the tips of tongues. Six or seven of them are gathered, and Apollo believes himself to definitely be the or-seventh. He is wearing a t-shirt with a superhero on it. Not Superman. Superman gear can be forgiven as a harmless eccentricity if you’re otherwise down. But Apollo’s rocking some kind of deep-cut clown in a neon gimp suit on his chest. Remember, this is 1995, and this man is thirteen years old. Unforgivable. He’s not just the or-seventh, he is the physical manifestation of all the or-seventhness that has ever existed in the world.

The new girl is sitting next to him. She might have been the or-seventh were she not new. Check that sweater. Yellow? Polyester? Sequin pineapples? In this heat? Worse than unforgivable. But who knows what lies under it? A butterfly? A swan? Any and all manner of transformative symbology could be hiding, waiting, growing. There’s still hope for her. She may be four-eyed and flat-butted and double-handed and generally Oreoish, but there is hope. She can at least drop into the conversation sometimes, in the empty spaces after the punchlines. She has that power. For instance, after Naomi does a long routine on what she would do if she ever found a wallet lying on the sidewalk like on TV (in brief: cop that shit), the new girl says something about losing her own money and getting punished harshly by her mother. It is not a funny thing to say, but memories of belts and switches and tears are still fresh in their adolescent minds, and it is comforting to laugh it out. Apollo laughs the hardest, and he does not know why.

The sun is gone. Just a little light left. The new girl can’t go home alone. Not in the almost-dark. This is 1995, not 1948. Apollo volunteers to walk with her.

“He like you,” says Marcus, Naomi’s not-quite-but-basically-boyfriend, by way of explaining why Apollo is the best one for the job.

Apollo denies this so fervently that he has to go through with it, lest she think he truly hates her. The walk is quiet for the first few blocks. Apollo is not a big talker, and the new girl has been here for two weeks, and no one, except maybe the ultragregarious Naomi, has had a real conversation with her. Still, Apollo finds himself feeling strangely comfortable. Maybe it is the sweater. Perhaps the fact that it should be embarrassing her is preventing him from being embarrassed himself. Perhaps it is the sartorial equivalent of imagining one’s audience naked. Perhaps she’s just sort of great.

Apollo stops short just before they reach the corner. He holds out his arm so that the girl will stop, too. There’s danger up ahead. A gang of street toughs. Six of them. One of those multicultural, gender-integrated ’90s gangs, a Benetton ad with knives. Red jackets, gold sneakers. One of them has a boombox. KRS-ONE maybe? Early KRS-ONE. Stuff about listening to people’s guns as they shoot you with them. Their victim is an old, grey-haired man. His hands are up. There is a briefcase at his feet. The gangsters taunt him stereotypically.

“Give us ya money, pops!”

“Don’t make me cut you!”

“Nice and easy!”

“Don’t be a hero!”

“I need to regulate!”

Apollo takes a slow step back. He means for Shayla to step with him, but she does not. He pulls on her arm, but she is still. She has a look on her face like she wants to fight motherfuckers. This is the most frightening expression that can appear on a human face.

“We have to go,” he says.

“No,” she says. “We have to help him.”

“C’mon.”

He pulls on her arm again, hard this time, but she slips his grasp. She runs at the gang, leaps into the air, and tackles the nearest one. The gangsters are surprised at first, to see this little girl brazenly attacking one of their own, but they quickly pull her off him and throw her to the ground.

“What’s your malfunction?!” one of them screeches.

The girl stands and pulls out, seemingly from nowhere, a fantastic-looking gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon. “Stand down, jerks.”

“Oh dag! She got a gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon! Kick rocks, guys!”

The gangsters run off into the night. Apollo runs over to the girl.

“What’s going on? What’s that thing?”

“Don’t worry about it. Forget you saw anything,” says the girl.

“Exactly,” says the old man. He begins to laugh, first a low, soft chuckle, then an increasingly maniacal cackle that echos in the night. “You have fallen for my trap, Princess Amarillia! I knew you could not resist helping a stranger in need.”

The girl gasps. “Lord Tklox!”

“What?” says Apollo.

Smiling, the old man reaches up and grabs his face, pulling it off to reveal pale skin, elegant features, and hair the color of starlight. His body begins to bulge and swell as he grows larger, eventually doubling in height. He laughs as a shining sword appears in his hands.

“Run!” shouts the girl.

“What is happening?!”

“No time to explain. Take this.” She hands him her fantastic-looking gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon. “I’ll hold him off with my Venusian jiu-jitsu. Just go! Don’t stop. Please. Don’t stop. Just run. Don’t let him get you like he got the others.”

The girl takes a martial arts stance and nods. Apollo does not need further explanations. He runs in the opposite direction. He runs as fast as he can, until his lungs burn and he cannot feel his legs. Stopping to catch his breath, he holds the gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon up to the light. He does not even know how to use it, how it could possibly help him in this strange battle.

So wrapped up in thought, Apollo does not even see the man in the police uniform. He does not hear him telling him to drop his weapon. He only hears the gun go bang. Later, his body is found by his mother, who cries and cries and cries.

• • • •

Did you ever read “Lost in the Funhouse”? I just re-read it as research on solving metafictional problems. Not super helpful. We get it; fiction is made up. Cool story, bro. But you know the flashback to the kids playing Niggers and Masters? Is that a real thing? Or is it just a sadomasochistic parody of Cowboys and Indians? I can’t find any information on it online, but I’m sure somebody somewhere has played it. If something as cruel as Cowboys and Indians exists, why not Niggers and Masters? There is no way a game like that is only theoretical. It’s too rich, too delicious. The role of Master is an obvious power fantasy, presenting one with the authority to command and punish as an adult might, without any of the responsibility. The role of Nigger is just a different kind of power fantasy, power expressed as counterfactual. In playing the Nigger, one can experience subjugation on one’s own terms. There is no real danger, no real pain. You can leave at any time, go home and watch cartoons and forget about it. Or you can indulge fully, giving oneself up to the game, allowing oneself to experience a beautiful simulacrum of suffering. It is perfect pretend. There are probably worse ways of spending a suburban afternoon, and there is something slightly sublime about it, baby’s first ego death. Sure, it’s profoundly offensive, but who’s going to stop you? But whatever. I’m probably reading too much into it. It’s probably a made-up, postmodern joke. When I was a kid, we just played Cops and Robbers, and it was fine.

Anyway, that was a digression. I admit that it’s difficult to defend the actions of certain uniformed narrative devices, but I’m sure there were good reasons for them. After all, there were gangsters with actual knives in that one, and Apollo was holding something that maybe sort of looked like a weapon in the dark. How are we supposed to tell the good ones from the bad ones? Can you tell the difference? I don’t think so. Besides, this was to be expected. Children’s literature is sad as fuck. It’s all about dead moms and dead dogs and cancer and loneliness. You can’t expect everyone to come out alive from that. But you know what isn’t sad? Fucking superheroes.

Go Go Justice Gang! ft. Apollo Young

Oh no.

Downtown Clash City has been beset by a hypnagogic Leviathan, a terrifying kludge of symbology and violence, an impossible horror from beyond the ontological wasteland. Citizens flee, police stand by impotently, soldiers fire from tanks and helicopters without success, their bullets finding no purchase, their fear finding no relief.

It is a bubblegum machine gone horribly, horribly awry, a clear plastic sphere with a red body and a bellhopian cap, except there is a tree growing inside it, and also it is a several hundred feet tall. The tree is maybe a willow or a dying spruce or something like that. It is definitely a sad tree, the kind of tree that grows on the edges of graveyards in children’s books or in the tattoos of young people with too many feelings, when not growing on the inside of giant animated bubblegum machines.

It trudges along Washington Avenue on its root system, which emerges from the slot where the bubblegum ought to come out, and inflicts hazardous onomatopoesis upon people and property alike with its terrible branches.

Bang. Crack. Boom. Splat. Crunch.

Splat is the worst of them, if you think about the implications.

Various material reminders of American imperialist power under late capitalism, the bank and the television station and the army surplus store, are made naught but memory and masonry in its wake. The ground shakes like butts in music videos, and buildings fall like teenagers in love. Destruction. Carnage. Rage. Can nothing be done to stop this creature? Can the city be saved from certain destruction?

Yes!

Already, Apollo Young, a.k.a. Black Justice, is on his way to the Justice Gang Headquarters. Even as his fellow citizens panic, he keeps a cool head as he drives his Justice Vehicle headlong into danger. When his wrist communicator begins to buzz and play the Justice Gang theme song, he pulls over to the curb, in full accordance with the law.

“Black Justice! Come in! This is Red Justice!” says the wrist communicator.

“I read you, Patrick! What’s the haps?!”

“The city is in danger! We need your help! To defeat this evil, We, the Justice Gang, need to combine our powers to form White Justice!”

“Yes. Only White Justice can save the city this time!”

“Also, can you please pick up Pink Justice? She is grounded from driving because she went to the mall instead of babysitting her little brother.”

“What an airhead!”

“I know. But she is also a valuable member of the Justice Gang. Only when Pink Justice, Blue Justice, Black Justice, and Mauve Justice combine with me, the leader, Red Justice, can our ultimate power, White Justice be formed!”

“As I know.”

“Yes. All thanks to Princess Amarillia, who gave us our prismatic justice powers in order to prevent the evil Lord Tklox from answering the Omega Question and destroying civilization!”

“Righteous!”

“Just as white light is composed of all colors of light, so White Justice will be formed from our multicultural, gender-inclusive commitment to Good and Right.”

“Okay! Bye.”

Apollo hangs up and gets back on the road. He picks up Pink Justice on the way. She is a stereotypical valley girl, but that is okay, since the Justice Gang accepts all types of people, as long as they love justice, are between fifteen and seventeen, and present as heterosexual. They ride together in silence, as they are the two members of the Justice Gang least likely to be paired up for storylines, owing to the potentially provocative implications of a black man and a white woman interacting together, even platonically.

“Do you ever think that we’re just going in circles?” asks Pink Justice, staring idly out the window.

“What do you mean?” asks Apollo.

“A monster appears, we kill it, another monster appears, we kill it again. We feel good about getting the bad guy in the moment, but it just keeps happening. Week after week, it’s the same thing. Another monster. More dead people. We never actually fight evil. We just kill monsters. Evil is always still there.”

“But what about justice?”

“What is justice? People are dying. I just don’t know what we’re fighting for sometimes, why we keep fighting. It’s the same every time. It’s just tiring, I guess.”

“I think we have to fight. Even if nobody gets saved, we are better for having done it. Maybe the world isn’t better, but it’s different, and I think that difference is beautiful.”

“Like, for sure!” says Pink Justice.

A police car flashes its lights at Apollo. He pulls over. The man in the police uniform walks to the passenger side and asks Pink Justice if she is okay.

“I’m fine. There’s no problem,” she says.

The man in the police uniform tells Pink Justice that he can help her if something is wrong.

“Everything is fine. Nothing is wrong.”

The man in the police uniform tells Apollo to get out of the car.

“What is this about? What’s your probable cause? Yes sir, officer,” says Apollo, getting out of the car.

The man in the police uniform slams Apollo into the side of the car and pats him down. Pink Justice gets out and begins to yell that they have done nothing wrong, that he has to let them go. This obviously agitates the man in the police uniform.

Apollo’s wrist communicator goes off, and without thinking, he moves to answer it. The man in the police uniform tackles him to the ground, sits on his chest, and begins to hit him with a flashlight. Apollo’s windpipe is blocked. It continues to be blocked for a long time. He dies.

• • • •

Come on. Really? That one was really good. The white guy was in charge and everything! This sucks. I’m trying to do something here. The point of adventure fiction is to connect moral idealism with the human experience. The good guys fight the bad guys, just as we struggle against the infelicities of the material world. That’s the point of heroes. They journey into the wilderness, struggle against the unknown, and make liminal spaces safe for the people. That’s how it works, from Hercules to Captain Kirk. It’s really hard to create ontological safety when people keep dying all the time. Barth was right; literature is exhausting.

So I guess Apollo shouldn’t have been in a car with a white lady? That’s scary, I guess. He didn’t do anything, but he was probably no angel. He was a teen. Teens get into all kinds of shit. When I was in school, I knew so, so many kids who shoplifted and smoked drugs. They were mostly white, but still. Teens are shitty. The man in the police uniform probably had good intentions. Like, he wanted to make sure the girl wasn’t being kidnapped or anything. Why else would they be together? I still think he only wants to keep people safe, especially potentially vulnerable people.

I’ve fucking got it. This is 2016, right? Sisters are doing it for themselves. Why not a lady-protagonist? Women are empathetic and non-threatening and totally cool. Everyone is chill with ladies. That’s why phone robots all have feminine voices. True story. Why would you just kill a woman for no reason? She’s not going to hurt you. This time, no one is going to hurt anybody.

Apollonia Williams-Carter and the Venus Sanction

Naomi walks into Apollonia’s private office just before 5:00. It is a cramped and dingy room, lit by a single fluorescent bulb and smelling strongly of mildew. Without greeting or warning, she drops a thick, yellow binder down on Apollonia’s desk.

“Read this,” she says.

The binder is marked A.M.A.R.I.L.L.I.A. Project. It is filled with photographs, exotic diagrams, and pages and pages of exhaustively researched reports. Apollonia proceeds slowly, taking in each and every fact printed on the pages, running them over in her mind and allowing them settle. She feels a sinking sensation in her stomach as she journeys deeper and deeper into the text.

“Dear God,” she whispers. “Can this be true?”

“Yes,” says Naomi.

“This is absolutely disgusting. How could they do something like this? How could they sell us out to aliens?”

“They don’t care about our world. Not anymore.”

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I brought this to you.”

Apollonia opens one of her drawers, retrieving two shot glasses and a bottle of whiskey. She pours a double and pushes it toward Naomi.

“Have some. It will calm your nerves.”

Naomi throws the glass to the ground, shattering it.

“This is no time to drink! We’ve got to do something!”

Apollonia takes her shot. “We can’t do anything if we can’t keep our cool.”

“You want me to be cool? The department will have my head if they even knew I am talking to you.”

“My head’s on the line, too. I might be a vice-president here, but they’d kill me as quickly as a break-room cockroach.”

“So what do we do? I came to you because I have the utmost respect for your work with the company.”

“We go to the press. It might cost us our lives, but at least the truth will be out there.”

“Should we try to rescue the girl?”

“No. First, we get the truth out. I’ll handle this. Delete any digital copies of these files and meet me tonight at the Port Royale.”

“Fine.”

“Remember. Anyone you know could be one of them. Use caution.”

Naomi nods and exits.

Apollonia takes another double shot of whiskey as she continues to read the binder. How could this happen? She had never trusted the powers that be, but how could they be doing this? How could they be killing people with impunity? The notes on the files indicate that it is in the name of safety and the greater good, but whose safety are they really talking about? Man or monster?

Apollonia leaves at 7:00, as she does every evening. She hides the pages of the binder in her purse. She puts on a cheerful face, smiling at coworkers and greeting the support staff as she passes. She takes the elevator down from her floor to the lobby, then the stairs to the parking garage. She makes sure no one is following her as she walks down the corridors of the unlit parking garage, turning her head every few moments to get a full view of her surroundings. She sees her car and breathes a sigh of relief. She is almost out.

“Hey there.”

She turns to see a young man in a suit. He is at least six feet tall and aggressively muscled. He smiles brightly and broadly at Apollonia, as if trying to hide something.

“Hello Patrick,” she says.

“Where ya headed in such a hurry?”

“Just going home.”

“Home, huh? I remember home.”

He laughs. She joins him.

“Long hours, huh? I feel for you.”

He sticks out his finger at her purse. She clutches it closer.

“Hey. Is that new? I think my girlfriend pointed that purse out at the store. I’m sure it was that one.”

“I’ve had this thing forever.”

“Do you mind if I see it? I just want to know if it’s well made.”

Apollonia swallows. “I’d really prefer it if you didn’t.”

The smile leaves his face, and his eyes begin to narrow. Apollonia takes a step back. She has been trained in self-defense, but this man has at least one hundred pounds on her and also might be an alien. She begins to slowly, subtly shift into a combat stance. If she times it right, she might be able to stun him long enough for her to escape. She just has to find the right moment. She waits. And waits. And waits.

Finally, he chuckles. “You’re right. That was a weird question. I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately. Sorry. I’ll see you later.”

Apollonia gets into her car. On the way to the Port Royale, she is pulled over by the man in the police uniform. While patting her down for drugs, he slips his fingers into her underwear. She tries to pull his hands away, prompting him to use force to stop her from resisting arrest. Her head is slammed many times against the sidewalk. She dies.

• • • •

She. Didn’t. Do. Anything. And even if she did do something, killing is not the answer. That’s it. I’m not playing anymore. I can quit at any time. No one can stop me. Look, I’ll do it now. Boom. I just quit for two days. Boom. That was two weeks. Boom. Now I have to change all the dates to 2016. What’s the point of writing this thing? What’s the point of writing anything? I just wanted to tell a cool story. That’s it. No murders. No deaths. Remember? It was just a love story.

I once read that people get more into love stories and poems in times of political strife and violence. What better way to assert meaning in the face of meaninglessness than by celebrating the connection between human beings? Our relationship with the state, the culture, the world, these are just petals in the winds compared to the love that flows between us. Fuck politics. I set out to do a love story, so I’m doing a love story. Plus, I’ve got a plan. So far, the Apollos have all died while messing around outside. The solution isn’t relatability at all. It’s so much simpler than that: transit. It doesn’t matter if the guy can’t sympathize with Apollo if he can’t find him. There are tons of great stories set in one place. I’ll just do one of those.

Apollo Right and the Architectural-Organic Wormhole

Apollo and Naomi sit alone on the couch by the window, the dusty brown one held together with tape and band-aids, quiet, listening to the rain and the night, watching the play of wind and glow on the raindrops outside, refracted lamplight and neon diffusing into glitter in the dark. His head rests on her lap, which is soft and warm and comfortingly “lap-like,” which is to say that it possesses the qualities of the Platonic lap in quantities nearing excess, qualities which are difficult to articulate, neotenous comforts and chthonic ecstasies of a sublime/cliché nature, intimacy rendered in thigh meat and belly warmth. Her left hand is on his shoulder, just so, and her right is on his chest, and he takes note of the sensation of her fingers as his chest expands and contracts, and it is pleasant. He takes a breath, sweet and slow. There is a little sadness, because this moment will wilt and wither like all moments, and he does not want it to, more than anything.

“Remember this,” he says.

“What?”

“I would like it if you would remember this. Tonight. Or at least this part.”

“Why wouldn’t I remember tonight?

“You never remember any of the good parts.”

“You say that.”

“It’s true. You only remember the bad parts. The before and after. Anxiety and regret. Never the moment.”

“Who says this is a good part?”

“That’s a cutting remark.”

“I just think we have different definitions of the good and bad when it comes to certain things.”

“So this is a bad part?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Which is it, then?”

“It’s good to see you.”

“You know what my favorite memory of us is?”

“Leon.”

“I’m sure you don’t remember it.”

“Don’t.”

“It’s not weird or anything. One time I came over to your place, and you smiled that smile you have—not the usual one, the good one—and you gave me a hug. Just a long, deep hug, like you were just really happy to see me. Genuinely happy. Not angry or annoyed at all. Just cruisin’, y’know. Just cruisin’. We made out afterwards, and maybe had sex? I don’t remember that super great.”

“The fact that you don’t see anything weird about that is why we had to break up.”

“Whatever, lady.”

The door flies open. The man in the police uniform shouts for everyone to get down. A flashbang grenade is thrown inside. Apollo pushes Naomi away but is unable to get away. He suffers critical burns to his head and chest. After being denied medical treatment on the scene, he dies weeks later in the hospital from opportunistic infections. Ironically, the man in the police uniform was actually meant to go to the next apartment over, where a minor marijuana dealer lives.

• • • •

They didn’t even get to the cool part. There was going to be a living wormhole in the closet, and all kinds of space shit was going to come out, and in the process of dealing with it they were going to rekindle their love. It was going to be awesome. We can’t even have love stories anymore? What do we have if we can’t have love stories?

Okay. Now I’m thinking that the issue is with the milieu. 2015 is a weird time. Shit is going down. It’s politicizing this story. I’m not into it. What we need is a rip-roaring space adventure in the far future. That’ll be cool. All this shit will be sorted out by then, and we can all focus on what really matters: space shit.

Apollo _____ vs. the Vita-Ray Miracle

The crystal spires of New Virtua throw tangles of intersecting rainbows onto the silver-lined streets below, such that a Citizen going about his daily duties cannot help but be enmeshed in a transpicuous net of light and color. A Good Citizen knows that this is Good, that beauty is a gift of Science, and he wears his smile the way men of lesser worlds might wear a coat and hat to ward off the cold damp of an unregulated atmosphere.

Lord Tklox is not a Good Citizen, and he rarely smiles at all. On those occasions when he does experience something akin to happiness (when his plans are coming to fruition, when he imagines the bloody corpses of his enemies, when he thinks of new ways to crush the Good Citizens of New Virtua under his foot), his smile is not so much worn as wielded, as one might wield the glowing spiral of a raymatic cannon.

“Soon, my vita-ray projector will be complete, and all New Virtua will tremble as I unleash the Omega Question!” he exclaims to no one, alone in his subterranean laboratory two thousand miles below the surface.

Cackling to himself, Lord Tklox waits in his lair for those who would challenge his incredible genius.

He waits.

He keeps waiting.

Lord Tklox coughs, perhaps getting the attention of any heroes listening on nearby crime-detecting audioscopes. “First New Virtua, then the universe! All will be destroyed by the radical subjectivity of the Omega Question!”

Waiting continues to happen.

More waiting.

Still more.

Uh, I guess nobody comes. Everybody dies, I guess.

• • • •

So I checked, and it turns out there are no black people in the far future. That’s my bad. I really didn’t do my research on that one. I don’t know where we end up going. Maybe we all just cram into the Parliament-Funkadelic discography at some point between Star Trek and Foundation? Whatever. That’s an issue for tomorrow. Today, we’ve got bigger problems.

It’s time we faced this head on. Borges teaches us that every story is a labyrinth, and within every labyrinth is a minotaur. I’ve been trying to avoid the minotaur, but instead I need to slay it. I have my sword, and I know where the monster lurks. It is time to blaxploit this problem.

Apollo Jones In: The Final Showdown

Who’s the plainclothes police detective who leaves all the criminals dejected?
[Apollo!]
Who stops crime in the nick of time and dazzles the ladies with feminine rhymes?
[Apollo!]
Can you dig it?

Apollo’s cruiser screeches to a halt at the entrance to the abandoned warehouse. He leaps out the door and pulls his gun, a custom gold Beretta with his name engraved on the handle.

“Hot gazpacho!” he says. “This is it.”

Patrick pops out of the passenger seat. “We’ve got him now.”

They have been chasing their suspect for weeks now, some sicko responsible for a string of murders. In a surprising third act twist, they discovered that the one responsible is one of their own, a bad apple who gets his kicks from harming the innocent.

“We’ve got him pinned down inside,” says Apollo.

“He won’t escape this time.”

“Let’s do this, brother.”

They skip the middle part of the story, since that has been where we’ve been getting into trouble. They rush right to the end, where the man in the police uniform is waiting for them.

“Congratulations on solving my riddles, gentlemen. I’m impressed.”

“You’re going down, punk,” says Apollo.

“Yeah!” says Patrick.

“I doubt that very much.”

The man in the police uniform pulls his weapon and fires three shots, all hitting Apollo in the torso. He crumples to the ground. Patrick aims his own weapon, but the man in the police uniform is able to quickly shoot him in the shoulder, sending Patrick’s pistol to the ground.

“You thought you could defeat me so easily? How foolish. We’re not so different, you and I. You wanted a story about good aliens and bad aliens? Well, so did I.”

“How’s this for foolish?” says Apollo, pulling up his shirt to reveal he was wearing a bulletproof vest all along. Then, he unloads a clip from his legendary golden Beretta at him. The man in the police uniform falls to the ground, bleeding.

Patrick clutches his shoulder. “We got him.”

“We’re not quite done yet,” says Apollo.

He walks over to the body of the man in the police uniform. He tugs on the man’s face, pulling it off completely. It is the face of Lord Tklox.

“This was his plan all along,” says Apollo. “By murdering all those innocent people, he was turning us against each other, thereby making it easier for his invasion plans to succeed. All he had left to do was answer the Omega Question and boom, no more civilization. Good thing we stopped him in time.”

“I knew it,” says Patrick. “He was never one of us. He was just a bad guy the whole time. It is in no way necessary for me to consider the ideological mechanisms by which my community and society determine who benefits from and participates in civil society, thus freeing me from cognitive dissonance stemming from the ethical compromises that maintain my lifestyle.”

“Hot gazpacho!” says Apollo.

They share a manly handshake like Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers in Predator. It is so dope.

“I’ll go call dispatch,” says Patrick. “Tell them that we won’t be needing backup. Or that we will be needing backup to get the body and investigate the scene? I don’t really know how this works. The movie usually ends at this point.”

Patrick leaves, and Apollo guards the body. Suddenly, the warehouse door bursts open. Seeing him standing over the dead body, a man in a police uniform yells for Apollo to drop his weapon. Apollo shouts that he is a cop and moves to gingerly put his golden gun on the ground, but he is too slow. Bulletproof vests do not cover the head. He is very, very dead.

• • • •

I wasn’t trying to do apologetics for him. Before, I mean. I wasn’t saying it’s okay to kill people because they aren’t perfect or do things that are vaguely threatening. I was just trying to find some meaning, the moral of the story. All I ever wanted to do was write a good story. But murder is inherently meaningless. The experience of living is a creative act, the personal construction of meaning for the individual, and death is the final return to meaninglessness. Thus, the act of killing is the ultimate abnegation of the human experience, a submission to the chaos and violence of the natural world. To kill, we must either admit the futility of our own life or deny the significance of the victim’s.

This isn’t right.

It’s not supposed to happen like this.

Why does this keep happening?

It’s the same story every time. Again and again and again.

I can’t fight the man in the police uniform. He’s real, and I’m an authorial construct, just words on a page, pure pretend. But you know who isn’t pretend? You. We have to save Apollo. We’re both responsible for him. We created him together. Death of the Author, you know? It’s just you and me now. I’ve got one last trick. I didn’t mention this in the interest of pace and narrative cohesion, but I lifted the Omega Question off Lord Tklox before he died. I don’t have the answer, but I know the question. You’ve got to go in. I can keep the man in the police uniform at bay as long as I can, but you have to save Apollo. We’re going full Morrison.

Engage second-person present.

God forgive us.

• • • •

You wake up. It is still dark out. You reach out to take hold of your spouse. Your fingers intertwine, and it is difficult to tell where you stop and they begin. You love them so much. After a kiss and a cuddle, you get out of bed. You go to the bathroom and perform your morning toilette. When you are finished, you go to kitchen and help your spouse with breakfast for the kids.

They give you a hug when they see you. You hug back, and you never want to let go. They are getting so big now, and you do everything you can to be a good parent to them. You know they love you, but you also want to make sure they have the best life possible.

You work hard every single day to make that happen. Your boss is hard on you, but he’s a good guy, and you know you can rely on him when it counts. You trust all your coworkers with your life. You have to. There’s no other option in your line of work.

After some paperwork, you and your partner go out on patrol. You’ve lived in this neighborhood your entire life. Everything about it is great, the food, the sights, the people. There are a few bad elements, but it’s your job to stop them and keep everybody safe.

It’s mostly nickel and dime stuff today, citations and warnings. The grocery store reports a shoplifter. An older woman reports some kids loitering near her house. Your partner notices a man urinating on the street while you’re driving past. That kind of thing.

As you are on your way back to the station, you notice a man walking alone on the sidewalk. It’s late, and it doesn’t look like this is his part of town. His head is held down, like he’s trying to hide his face from you. This is suspicious. Your partner says he recognizes him, that he fits the description of a mugger who has been plaguing the area for weeks. You pull up to him. Ask him what he is doing. He doesn’t give you a straight answer. You ask him for some identification. He refuses to give it to you. You don’t want to arrest this guy for nothing, but he’s not giving you much choice.

Suddenly, his hand moves towards a bulge in his pocket. It’s a gun. You know it’s a gun. You draw your weapon. You just want to scare him, show him that you’re serious, stop him from drawing on you. But is he even scared? Is that fear on his face or rage? How can you even tell? He’s bigger than you, and he is angry, and he probably has a gun. You do not know this person. You cannot imagine what is going through his mind. You have seen this scenario a million times before in movies and TV shows.

You might die.

You might die.

You might die.

The Omega Question is activated:

Who matters?

Violet Allen is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against, A People’s Future of the United States, and elsewhere. She is currently working very hard every day on her debut novel and definitely has more than ten pages written, is not lying to her agent about having more than ten pages written and does not spend most of her time listening to podcasts, and everything is totally cool, I promise. She can be reached on Twitter at @blipstress.

The Visitor From Taured
By Ian R. MacLeod

1.

There was always something other-wordly about Rob Holm. Not that he wasn’t charming and clever and good-looking. Driven, as well. Even during that first week when we’d arrived at university and waved goodbye to our parents and our childhoods, and were busy doing all the usual fresher things, which still involved getting dangerously drunk and pretending not to be homesick and otherwise behaving like the prim, arrogant, cocky and immature young assholes we undoubtedly were, Rob was chatting with research fellows and quietly getting to know the best virtuals to hang out in.

Even back then, us young undergrads were an endangered breed. Many universities had gone bankrupt, become commercial research utilities, or transformed themselves into the academic theme-parks of those so-called “Third Age Academies”. But still, here we all were at the traditional redbrick campus of Leeds University, which still offered a broad-ish range of courses to those with families rich enough to support them, or at least tolerant enough not to warn them against such folly. My own choice of degree, just to show how incredibly supportive my parents were, being Analogue Literature.

As a subject, it already belonged with Alchemy and Marxism in the dustbin of history, but books — and I really do mean those peculiar, old, paper, physical objects — had always been my thing. Even when I was far too young to understand what they were, and by rights should have been attracted by the bright, interactive, virtual gewgaws buzzing all around me, I’d managed to burrow into the bottom of an old box, down past the stickle bricks and My Little Ponies, to these broad, cardboardy things that fell open and had these flat, two-dee shapes and images that didn’t move or respond in any normal way when I waved my podgy fingers in their direction. All you could do was simply look at them. That, and chew their corners, and maybe scribble over their pages with some of the dried-up crayons which were also to be found amid those predigital layers.

My parents had always been loving and tolerant of their daughter. They even encouraged little Lita’s interest in these ancient artefacts. I remember my mother’s finger moving slow and patient across the creased and yellowed pages as she traced the pictures and her lips breathed the magical words that somehow arose from those flat lines. She wouldn’t have assimilated data this way herself in years, if ever, so in a sense we were both learning.

The Hungry Caterpillar. The Mister Men series. Where The Wild Things Are. Frodo’s adventures. Slowly, like some archaeologist discovering the world by deciphering the cartouches of the tombs in Ancient Egypt, I learned how to perceive and interact through this antique medium. It was, well, the thingness of books. The exact way they didn’t leap about or start giving off sounds, smells and textures. That, and how they didn’t ask you which character you’d like to be, or what level you wanted to go to next, but simply took you by the hand and lead you where they wanted you to go.

Of course, I became a confirmed bibliophile, but I do still wonder how my life would have progressed if my parents had seen odd behaviour differently, and taken me to some paediatric specialist. Almost certainly, I wouldn’t be the Lita Ortiz who’s writing these words for whoever might still be able to comprehend them. Nor the one who was lucky enough to meet Rob Holm all those years ago in the teenage fug of those student halls back at Leeds University.

2.

So. Rob. First thing to say is the obvious fact that most of us fancied him. It wasn’t just the grey eyes, or the courtly elegance, or that soft Scottish accent, or even the way he somehow appeared mature and accomplished. It was, essentially, a kind of mystery. But he wasn’t remotely stand-offish. He went along with the fancy dress pub crawls. He drank. He fucked about. He took the odd tab.

One of my earliest memories of Rob was finding him at some club, cool as you like amid all the noise, flash and flesh. And dragging him out onto the pulsing dance floor. One minute we were hovering above the skyscrapers of Beijing and the next a shipwreck storm was billowing about us. Rob, though, was simply there. Taking it all in, laughing, responding, but somehow detached. Then, helping me down and out, past clanging temple bells and through prismatic sandstorms to the entirely non-virtual hell of the toilets. His cool hands holding back my hair as I vomited.

I never ever actually thanked Rob for this — I was too embarrassed — but the incident somehow made us more aware of each other. That, and maybe we shared a sense of otherness. He, after all, was studying astrophysics, and none of the rest of us even knew what that was, and had all that strange stuff going on across the walls of his room. Not flashing posters of the latest virtual boy band or porn empress, but slow-turning gas clouds, strange planets, distant stars and galaxies. That, and long runs of mek, whole arching rainbows of the stuff, endlessly twisting and turning. My room, on the other hand, was piled with the precious torn and foxed paperbacks I’d scoured from junksites during my teenage years. Not, of course, that they were actually needed. Even if you were studying something as arcane as narrative fiction, you were still expected to download and virtualise all your resources.

The Analogue Literature Faculty at Leeds University had once taken up a labyrinthine space in a redbrick terrace at the east edge of the campus. But now it had been invaded by dozens of more modern disciplines. Anything from speculative mek to non-concrete design to holo-pornography had taken bites out of it. I was already aware — how couldn’t I be? — that no significant novel or short story had been written in decades, but I was shocked to discover that only five other students in my year had elected for An Lit as their main subject, and one of those still resided in Seoul, and another was a post-centarian on clicking steel legs. Most of the other students who showed up were dipping into the subject in the hope that it might add something useful to their main discipline. Invariably, they were disappointed. It wasn’t just the difficulty of ploughing through page after page of non-interactive text. It was linear fiction’s sheer lack of options, settings, choices. Why the hell, I remember some kid shouting in a seminar, should I accept all the miserable shit that this Hardy guy rains down his characters? Give me the base program for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and I’ll hack you fifteen better endings.

I pushed my weak mek to limit during that first term as I tried to formulate a tri-dee excursus on Tender Is The Night, but the whole piece was reconfigured out of existence once the faculty ais got hold of it. Meanwhile, Rob Holm was clearly doing far better. I could hear him singing in the showers along from my room, and admired the way he didn’t get involved in all the usual peeves and arguments. The physical sciences had a huge, brand new faculty at the west end of campus called the Clearbrite Building. Half church, half-pagoda and maybe half spaceship in the fizzing, shifting, headachy way of modern architecture, there was no real way of telling how much of it was actually made of brick, concrete and glass, and how much consisted of virtual artefacts and energy fields. You could get seriously lost just staring at it.

My first year went by, and I fought hard against crawling home, and had a few unromantic flings, and made vegetable bolognaise my signature dish, and somehow managed to get version 4.04 of my second term excursus on Howard’s End accepted. Rob and I didn’t become close, but I liked his singing, and the cinnamon scent he left hanging behind in the steam of the showers, and it was good to know that someone else was making a better hash of this whole undergraduate business than I was.

“Hey, Lita?”

We were deep into the summer term and exams were looming. Half the undergrads were back at home, and the other half were jacked up on learning streams, or busy having breakdowns.

I leaned in on Rob’s doorway. “Yeah?”

“Fancy sharing a house next year?”

“Next year?” Almost effortlessly casual, I pretended to consider this. “I really hadn’t thought. It all depends — “

“Not a problem.” He shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll find someone else.”

“No, no. That’s fine. I mean, yeah, I’m in. I’m interested.”

“Great. I’ll show you what I’ve got from the letting agencies.” He smiled a warm smile, then returned to whatever wondrous creations were spinning above his desk.

3.

We settled on a narrow house with bad drains just off the Otley Road in Headingley, and I’m not sure whether I was relieved or disappointed when I discovered that his plan was that we share the place with some others. I roped in a couple of girls, Rob found a couple of guys, and we all got on pretty well. I had a proper boyfriend by then, a self-regarding jock called Torsten, and every now and then a different woman would emerge from Rob’s room. Nothing serious ever seemed to come of this, but they were equally gorgeous, clever and out of my league.

A bunch of us used to head out to the moors for midnight bonfires during that second winter. I remember the smoke and the sparks spinning into the deep black as we sang and drank and arsed around. Once, and with the help of a few tabs and cans, I asked Rob to name some constellations for me, and he put an arm around my waist and led me further into the dark.

Over there, Lita, up to the left and far away from the light of this city, is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, which is always a good place to start when you’re stargazing. And there, see close as twins at the central bend of the Plough’s handle, are Mizar and Alcor. They’re not a true binary, but if we had decent binoculars, we could see that Mizar really does have a close companion. And there, that way, up and left — his breath on my face, his hands on my arms — maybe you can just see there’s this fuzzy speck at the Bear’s shoulder? Now, that’s an entire, separate galaxy from our own filled with billions of stars, and its light has taken about twelve million years to reach the two of us here, tonight. Then Andromeda and Cassiopeia and Canus Major and Minor… Distant, storybook names for distant worlds. I even wondered aloud about the possibility of other lives, existences, hardly expecting Rob to agree with me. But he did. And then he said something which struck me as strange.

“Not just out there, either, Lita. There are other worlds all around us. It’s just that we can’t see them.”

“You’re talking in some metaphorical sense, right?”

“Not at all. It’s part of what I’m trying to understand in my studies.”

“To be honest, I’ve got no real idea what astrophysics even means. Maybe you could tell me.”

“I’d love to. And you know, Lita, I’m a complete dunce when it comes to, what do you call it — two-dee fiction, flat narrative? So I want you to tell me about that as well. Deal?”

We wandered back toward the fire, and I didn’t expect anything else to come of our promise until Rob called to me when I was wandering past his room one wet, grey afternoon a week or so later. It was deadline day, my hair was a greasy mess, I was heading for the shower, and had an excursus on John Updike to finish.

“You did say you wanted to know more about what I study?”

“I was just…” I scratched my head. “Curious. All I do know that astrophysics is about more than simply looking up at the night sky and giving names to things. That isn’t even astronomy, is it?”

“You’re not just being polite?” His soft, granite-grey eyes remained fixed on me.

“No. I’m not — absolutely.”

“I could show you something here.” He waved at the stars on his walls, the stuff spinning on his desk. “But maybe we could go out. To be honest, Lita, I could do with a break, and there’s an experiment I could show you up at the Clearbrite that might help explain what I mean about other worlds… But I understand if you’re busy. I could get my avatar to talk to your avatar and — “

“No, no. You’re right, Rob. I could do with a break as well. Let’s go out. Seize the day. Or at least, what’s left of it. Just give me…” I waved a finger toward the bathroom. “…five minutes.”

Then we were outside in the sideways-blowing drizzle, and it was freezing cold, and I was still wet from my hurried shower, as Rob slipped a companionable arm around mine as we climbed the hill toward the Otley Road tram stop.

Kids and commuters got on and off as we jolted toward the strung lights of the city, their lips moving and their hands stirring to things only they could feel and see. The Clearbrite looked more than ever like some recently arrived spaceship as it glowed out through the gloom, but inside the place was just like any other campus building, with clamouring posters offering to restructure your loan, find you temporary work, or get you laid and hammered. Constant reminders, too, that Clearbrite was the only smartjuice to communicate in realtime to your fingerjewel, toejamb or wristbracelet. This souk-like aspect of modern unis not being something that Sebastian Flyte, or even Harry Potter in those disappointing sequels, ever had to contend with.

We got a fair few hellos, a couple of tenured types stopped to talk to Rob in a corridor, and I saw how people paused to listen to what he was saying. More than ever, I had him down as someone who was bound to succeed. Still, I was expecting to be shown moon rocks, lightning bolts or at least some clever virtual planetarium, but instead he took me into what looked like the kind of laboratory I’d been forced to waste many hours in at school, even if the equipment did seem a littler fancier.

“This is the physics part of the astro,” Rob explained, perhaps sensing my disappointment. “But you did ask about other worlds, right, and this is pretty much the only way I can show them to you.”

I won’t go too far into the details, because I’d probably get them wrong, but what Rob proceeded to demonstrate was a version of what I now know to be the famous, or infamous, Double Slit Experiment. There was a long black tube on a workbench, and at one end of it was a laser, and at the other was a display screen attached to a device called a photo multiplier — a kind of sensor. In the middle he placed a barrier with two narrow slits. It wasn’t a great surprise even to me that the pulses of light caused a pretty dark-light pattern of stripes to appear on the display at the far end. These, Rob said, were ripples of the interference pattern caused by the waves of light passing through the two slits, much as you’d get if you were pouring water. But light, Lita, is made up individual packets of energy called photons. So what would happen if, instead of sending tens of thousands of them down the tube at once, we turned the laser down so far that it only emitted one photon at a time? Then, surely, each individual photon could only go through one or the other of the slits, there would be no ripples, and two simple stripes would emerge at the far end. But, hey, as he slowed the beep of the signal counter until it was registering single digits, the dark-light bars, like a shimmering neon forest, remained. As if, although each photon was a single particle, it somehow became a blur of all its possibilities as it passed through both slits at once. Which, as far as anyone knew, was pretty much what happened.

“I’m sorry,” Rob said afterwards when we were chatting over a second or third pint of beer in the fug of an old student bar called the Eldon which lay down the road from the university, “I should have shown you something less boring.”

“It wasn’t boring. The implications are pretty strange, aren’t they.”

“More than strange. It goes against almost everything else we know about physics and the world around us — us sitting here in this pub, for instance. Things exist, right? They’re either here or not. They don’t flicker in and out of existence like ghosts. This whole particles-blurring into wave business was one of the things that bugged me most when I was a kid finding out about science. It was even partly why I chose to study astrophysics — I thought there’d be answers I’d understand when someone finally explained them to me. But there aren’t.” He sipped his beer. “All you get is something called the Copenhagen Interpretation, Which is basically a shoulder shrug that says, hey, these things happen at the sub-atomic level, but it doesn’t really have to bother us or make sense in the world we know about and live in. That, and then there’s something else called the many worlds theory…” He trailed off. Stifled a burp. Seemed almost embarrassed.

“Which is what you believe in?”

“Believe isn’t the right word. Things either are or they aren’t in science. But, yeah, I do. And the maths supports it. Simply put, Lita, it says that all the possible states and positions that every particle could exist in are real — that they’re endlessly spinning off into other universes.”

“You mean, as if every choice you could make in a virtual was instantly mapped out in its entirety?”

“Exactly. But this is real. The worlds are all around us — right here.”

The drink, and the conversation moved on, and now it was my turn to apologise to Rob, and his to say no, I wasn’t boring him. Because books, novels, stories, they were my other worlds, the thing I believed in even if no one else cared about them. That single, magical word, Fog, which Dickens uses as he begins to conjure London. And Frederic Henry walking away from the hospital in the rain. And Rose of Sharon offering the starving man her breast after the Joab’s long journey across dustbowl America, and Candide eating fruit, and Bertie Wooster bumbling back across Mayfair…

Rob listened and seemed genuinely interested, even though he confessed he’d never read a single non-interactive story or novel. But, unlike most people, he said this as if he realised he was actually missing out on something. So we agreed I’d lend him some of my old paperbacks, and this, and what he’d shown me at the Clearbrite, signalled a new phase in our relationship.

4.

It seems to me now that some of the best hours of my life were spent not in reading books, but in sitting with Rob Holm in my cramped room in that house we shared back in Leeds, and talking about them.

What to read and admire, but also — and this was just as important — what not to. The Catcher in the Rye being overrated, and James Joyce a literary show-off, and Moby Dick really wasn’t about much more than whales. Alarmingly, Rob was often ahead of me. He discovered a copy of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges in a garage sale, which he gave to me as a gift, and then kept borrowing back. But he was Rob Holm. He could solve the riddles of the cosmos, and meanwhile explore literature as nothing but a hobby, and also help me out with my mek, so that I was finally able produce the kind of arguments, links and algorithms for my piece on Madame Bovary that the ais at An Eng actually wanted.

Meanwhile, I also found out about the kind of life Rob had come from. Both his parents were engineers, and he’d spent his early years in Aberdeen, but they’d moved to the Isle of Harris after his mother was diagnosed with a brain-damaging prion infection, probably been caused by her liking for fresh salmon. Most of the fish were then factory-farmed in crowded pens in the Scottish lochs, where the creatures were dosed with antibiotics and fed on pellets of processed meat, often recycled from the remains of their own breed. Which, just as with cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease a century earlier, had resulted in a small but significant species leap. Rob’s parents wanted to make the best of the years Alice Holm had left, and set up an ethical marine farm — although they preferred to call it a ranch — harvesting scallops on the Isle of Harris.

Rob’s father was still there at Creagach, and the business, which not only produced some of the best scallops in the Hebrides, but also benefited other marine life along the coastal shelf, was still going. Rob portrayed his childhood there as a happy time, with his mother still doing well despite the warnings of the scans, and regaling him with bedtime tales of Celtic myths, which was probably his only experience before meeting me of linear fictional narrative.

There were the kelpies, who lived in lochs and were like fine horses, and then there were the Blue Men of the Minch, who dwelt between Harris and the mainland, and sung up storms and summoned the waves with their voices. Then, one night when Rob was eleven, his mother waited until he and his father were asleep, then walked out across the shore and into the sea, and swam, and kept on swimming. No one could last long out there, the sea being so cold, and the strong currents, or perhaps the Blue Men of the Minch, bore her body back to a stretch of shore around the headland from Creagach, where she was found next morning.

Rob told his story without any obvious angst. But it certainly helped explain the sense of difference and distance he seemed to carry with him. That, and why he didn’t fit. Not here in Leeds, amid the fun, mess and heartbreak of student life, nor even, as I slowly came to realise, in the subject he was studying.

He showed me the virtual planetarium at the Clearbrite, and the signals from a probe passing through the Oort Cloud, and even took me down to the tunnels of a mine where a huge tank of cryogenically cooled fluid had been set up in the hope of detecting the dark matter of which it had once been believed most of our universe was made. It was an old thing now, creaking and leaking, and Rob was part of the small team of volunteers who kept it going. We stood close together in the dripping near-dark, clicking hardhats and sharing each other’s breath, and of course I was thinking of other possibilities - those fractional moments when things could go one of many ways. Our lips pressing. Our bodies joining. But something, maybe a fear of losing him entirely, held me back.

“It’s another thing that science has given up on,” he said later when we were sitting at our table in the Eldon. “Just like that ridiculous Copenhagen shoulder-shrug. Without dark matter, and dark energy, the way the galaxies rotate and recede from each other simply doesn’t make mathematical sense. You know what the so-called smart money is on these days? Something called topographical deformity, which means that the basic laws of physics don’t apply in the same way across this entire universe. That it’s pock-marked with flaws.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

“Of course I don’t! It’s fundamentally unscientific.”

“But you get glitches in even the most cleverly conceived virtuals, don’t you? Even in novels, sometimes things don’t always entirely add up.”

“Yeah. Like who killed the gardener in The Big Sleep, or the season suddenly changing from autumn to spring in that Sherlock Holmes story. But this isn’t like that, Lita. This isn’t…” For once, he was in danger of sounding bitter and contemptuous. But he held himself back.

“And you’re not going to give up?”

He smiled. Swirled his beer. “No, Lita. I’m definitely not.”

5.

Perhaps inevitably, Rob’s and my taste in books had started to drift apart. He’d discovered an antique genre called Science Fiction, something which the ais at An Lit were particularly sniffy about. And even as he tried to lead me with him, I could see their point. Much of the prose was less than luminous, the characterisation was sketchy, and, although a great deal of it was supposedly about the future, the predictions were laughably wrong.

But Rob insisted that that wasn’t the point, that SF was essentially a literature of ideas. That, and a sense of wonder. To him, wonder was particularly important. I could sometimes — maybe as that lonely astronaut passed through the stargate, or with those huge worms in that book about a desert world — see his point. But most of it simply left me cold.

Rob went off on secondment the following year to something called the Large Millimetre Array on the Atacama Plateau in Chile, and I, for want of anything better, kept the lease on our house in Headingley and got some new people in, and did a masters on gender roles in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Of course, I paid him virtual visits, and we talked of the problems of altitude sickness and the changed asshole our old uni friends were becoming as he put me on a camera on a Jeep, and bounced me across the dark-skied desert.

Another year went — they were already picking up speed — and Rob found the time for a drink before he headed off to some untenured post, part research, part teaching, in Heidelberg that he didn’t seem particularly satisfied with. He was still reading - apparently there hadn’t been much else to do in Chile - but I realised our days of talking about Proust or Henry James had gone.

He’d settled into, you might almost say retreated, a sub-genre of SF known as alternate history, where all the stuff he’d been telling me about our world continually branching off into all its possibilities was dramatised on a big scale. Hitler had won World War Two - a great many times, it seemed - and the South was triumphant in the American Civil War. That, and the Spanish Armada had succeeded, and Europe remained under the thrall of medieval Roman Catholicism, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had grazed past President Kennedy’s head. I didn’t take this odd obsession as a particularly good sign as we exchanged chaste hugs and kisses in the street outside the Eldon, and went our separate ways.

I had a job of sorts, thanks to Sun-Mi. my fellow An Lit student from Korea, teaching English to the kids of rich families in Seoul, and for a while it was fun, and the people were incredibly friendly, but then I grew bored, and managed to wrangle an interview with one of the media conglomerates which had switched physical base to Korea in the wake of the California Earthquake. I was hired for considerably less than I was getting paid teaching English, and took the crowded commute every morning to a vast half-real, semi-ziggurat high-rise mistily floating above the Mapo District, where I studied high res worlds filled with headache-inducing marvels, and was invited to come up with ideas in equally headache-inducing meetings.

I, an Alice in these many virtual wonderlands, brought a kind of puzzled innocence to my role. Two, maybe three, decades earlier, the other developers might still have known enough to recognise my plagiarisms, if only from old movies their parents had once talked about, but now what I was saying seemed new, fresh and quirky. I was a thieving literary magpie, and became the go-to girl for unexpected turns and twists. The real murderer of Roger Ackroyd, and the dog collar in The Great Gatsby. Not to mention what Little Father Time does in Jude the Obscure, and the horror of Sophie’s choice. I pillaged them all, and many others. Even the strange idea that the Victorians had developed steam-powered computers, thanks to my continued conversations with Rob.

Wherever we actually were, we got into the habit of meeting up at a virtual recreation of the bar of Eldon which, either as some show-off feat of virtual engineering, or a post-post-modern art project, some student had created. The pub had been mapped in realtime down to the atom and the pixel, and the ghosts of our avatars often got strange looks from real undergrads bunking off from afternoon seminars. We could actually order a drink, and even taste the beer, although of course we couldn’t ingest it. Probably no bad thing, in view of the state of the Eldon’s toilets. But somehow, that five-pints-and-still-clear-headed feeling only added to the slightly illicit pleasure of our meetings. At least, at first.

It was becoming apparent that, as he switched from city to city, campus to campus, project to project, Rob was in danger of turning into one of those ageing, permanent students, clinging to short-term contracts, temporary relationships and get-me-by loans, and the worst thing was that, with typical unflinching clarity, he knew it.

“I reckon I was either born too early, or too late, Lita,” he said as he sipped his virtual beer. “That was even what one of the assessors actually said to me a year or so ago when I tried to persuade her to back my project.”

“So you scientists have to pitch ideas as well?”

He laughed, but that warm, Hebridean sound was turning bitter. “How else does this world work? But maths doesn’t change even if fashions do. The many worlds theory is the only way that the behaviour of subatomic particles can be reconciled with everything else we know. Just because something’s hard to prove doesn’t mean it should be ignored.”

By this time I was busier than ever. Instead of providing ideas other people could profit from, I’d set up my own consultancy, which had thrived, and made me a great deal of money. By now, in fact, I had more of the stuff than most people would have known what to do with. But I did. I’d reserved a new apartment in swish high-res, high-rise development going up overlooking the Han River, and was struggling to get the builders to understand that I wanted the main interior space to be turned into something called a library. I showed them old walk-throughs of the Bodleian in Oxford, and the reading room of the British Museum, and the Brotherton in Leeds, and many other lost places of learning. Of course I already had a substantial collection of books in a secure, fireproofed, climate-controlled warehouse, but now I began to acquire more.

The once-great public collections were either in storage or scattered to the winds. But there were still enough people as rich and crazy as I was to ensure that the really rare stuff — first folios, early editions, hand-typed versions of great works — remained expensive and sought-after, and I surprised even myself with the determination and ruthlessness of my pursuits. After all, what else was I going to spend my time and money on?

There was no grand opening of my library. In fact, I was anxious to get all the builders and conservators, both human and otherwise, out of the way so I could have the place entirely to myself. Then I just stood there. Breathing in the air, with its savour of lost forests and the dreams.

There were first editions of great novels by Nabokov, Dos Passos, Stendhal, Calvino and Wells, and an early translation of Cervantes, and a fine collection of Swift’s works. Even, in a small nod to Rob, a long shelf of pulp magazines with titles like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, although their lurid covers of busty maidens being engulfed by intergalactic centipedes were generally faded and torn. Not that I cared about the pristine state of my whispering pages. Author’s signatures, yes — the thrill of knowing Hemingway’s hands had once briefly grasped this edition, but the rest didn’t matter. At least, apart from the thrill of beating others in my quest. Books, after all, were old by definition. Squashed moths. Old bus tickets. Coffee cup circles. Exclamations in the margin. I treasured the evidence of their long lives.

After an hour or two of shameless gloating and browsing, I decided to call Rob. My avatar had been busy as me with the finishing touches to my library, and now it struggled to find him. What it did eventually unearth was a short report stating that Callum Holm, a fish-farmer on the Isle of Harris, had been drowned in a boating accident a week earlier.

Of course, Rob would be there now. Should I contact him? Should I leave him to mourn undisturbed? What kind of friend was I, anyway, not to have even picked up on this news until now? I turned around the vast, domed space I’d created in confusion and distress.

“Hey.”

I span back. The Rob Holm who stood before me looked tired, but composed. He’d grown a beard, and there were a few flecks of silver now in it and his hair. I could taste the sea air around him. Hear the cry of gulls.

“Rob!” I’d have hugged him, if the energy field permissions I’d set up in this library had allowed. “I’m so, so sorry. I should have found out, I should have — “

“You shouldn’t have done anything, Lita. Why do you think I kept this quiet? I wanted to be alone up here in Harris to sort things out. But…” He looked up, around. “What a fabulous place you’ve created!”

As I showed him around my shelves and acquisitions, and his ghost fingers briefly passed through the pages of my first edition Gatsby, and the adverts for X-Ray specs in an edition of Science Wonder Stories, he told me how his father had gone out in his launch to deal with some broken tethers on one of the kelp beds, and been caught by a sudden squall. His body, of course, had been washed up, borne to the same stretch of shore where Rob’s mother had been found.

“It wasn’t intentional,” Rob said. “I’m absolutely sure of that. Dad was still in his prime, and proud of what he was doing, and there was no way he was ever going to give up. He just misjudged a coming storm. I’m the same, of course. You know that, Lita, better than anyone.”

“So what happens next? With a business, there must be a lot to tie up.”

“I’m not tying up anything.”

“You’re going to stay there?” I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

“Why not? To be honest, my so-called scientific career has been running on empty for years. What I’d like to prove is never going to get backing. I’m not like you. I mean…” He gestured at the tiered shelves. “You can make anything you want become real.”

6.

Rob wasn’t the sort to put on an act. If he said he was happy ditching research and filling his father’s role as a marine farmer on some remote island, that was because he was. I never quite did find the time to physically visit him in Harris — it was, after all, on the other side of the globe — and he, with the daily commitments of the family business, didn’t get to Seoul. But I came to appreciate my glimpses of the island’s strange beauty. That, and the regular arrival of chilled, vacuum-packed boxes of fresh scallops. But was this really enough for Rob Helm? Somehow, despite his evident pride at what he was doing, and the funny stories he told of the island’s other inhabitants, and even the occasional mention of some woman he’d met at a cleigh, I didn’t think it was. After all, Creagach was his mother and father’s vision, not his.

Although he remained coy about the details, I knew he still longed to bring his many worlds experiment to life. That, and that it would be complicated, controversial and costly to do so. I’d have been more than happy to offer financial help, but I knew he’d refuse. So what else could I do? My media company had grown. I had mentors, advisors and consultants, both human and ai, and Rob would have been genuinely useful, but he had too many issues with the lack of rigour and logic in this world to put up with all glitches, fudges and contradictions of virtual ones. Then I had a better idea.

“You know why nothing ever changes here, don’t you?” he asked me as our avatars sat together in the Eldon late one afternoon. “Not the smell from the toilets or the unfestive Christmas decorations or that dusty Pernod optic behind the bar. This isn’t a feed from the real pub any longer. The old Eldon was demolished years ago. All we’ve been sitting in ever since is just a clever formation of what the place would be like if it still existed. Bar staff, students, us, and all.”

“That’s…” Although nothing changed, the whole place seemed to shimmer. “How things are these days. The real and the unreal get so blurry you can’t tell which is which. But you know,” I added, as if the thought had just occurred to me, “there’s a project that’s been going the rounds of the studios here in Seoul. It’s a series about the wonders of science, one of those proper, realtime factual things, but we keep stumbling over finding the right presenter. Someone fresh, but with the background and the personality to carry the whole thing along.”

“You don’t mean me?”

“Why not? It’d only be part time. Might even help you promote what you’re doing at Creagach.”

“A scientific populariser?”

“Yes. Like Karl Sagan, for example, or maybe Stephen Jay Gould.”

I had him, and the series — which, of course, had been years in development purgatory — came about. I’d thought of it as little more than a way of getting Rob some decent money, but, from the first live-streamed episode, it was a success. After all, he was still charming and persuasive, and his salt-and-pepper beard gave him gravitas — and made him, if anything, even better looking. He used the Giant’s Causeway to demonstrate the physics of fractures. He made this weird kind of pendulum to show why we could never predict the weather for more than a few days ahead. He swam with the whales off Tierra del Fuego. The only thing he didn’t seem to want to explain was the odd way that photons behaved when you shot them down a double-slotted tube. That, and the inconsistencies between how galaxies revolved and Newton’s and Einstein’s laws.

In the matter of a very few years, Rob Holm was rich. And of course, and although he never actively courted it, he grew famous. He stood on podiums and looked fetchingly puzzled. He shook a dubious hand with gurning politicians. He even turned down offers to appear at music festivals, and had to take regular legal steps to protect the pirating of his virtual identity. He even finally visited me in Seoul, and experienced the wonders of my library at first hand.

At last, Rob had out-achieved me. Then, just when I and most of the rest of the world had him pigeon-holed as that handsome, softly accented guy who did those popular science things, his avatar returned the contract for his upcoming series unsigned. I might have forgotten that getting rich was supposed to be the means to an end. But he, of course, hadn’t.

“So,” I said as we sat together for what turned out to be the last time in our shared illusion of the Eldon. “You succeed with this project. You get a positive result and prove the many worlds theory is true. What happens after that?”

“I publish, of course. The data’ll be public, peer-reviewed, and - “

“Since when has being right ever been enough?”

“That’s…” He brushed a speck of virtual beer foam from his grey beard. “…how science works.”

“And no one ever had to sell themselves to gain attention? Even Galileo had to do that stunt with the cannonballs.”

“As I explained in my last series, that story of the Tower of Pisa was an invention of his early biographers.”

“Come on, Rob. You know what I mean.”

He looked uncomfortable. But, of course, he already had the fame. All he had to do was stop all this Greta Garbo shit, and milk it.

So, effectively I became PR agent for Rob’s long-planned experiment. There was, after all, a lot for the educated layman, let alone the general public, or us so-called media professionals, to absorb. What was needed was a handle, a simple selling point. And, after a little research, I found one.

A man in a business suit had arrived at Tokyo airport in the summer of 1954. He was Caucasian, but spoke reasonable Japanese, and everything about him seemed normal apart from his passport. It looked genuine, but was from somewhere called Taured, which the officials couldn’t find in any of their directories. The visitor was as baffled as they were. When a map was produced, he pointed to Andorra, a tiny but ancient republic between France and Spain, which he insisted was Taured. The humane and sensible course was to find him somewhere to sleep while further enquiries were made. Guards were posted outside the door of a secure hotel room high in a tower block, but the mysterious man had vanished without trace in the morning, and the Visitor from Taured was never seen again.

Rob was dubious, then grew uncharacteristically cross when he learned that the publicity meme had already been released. To him, and despite the fact that I thought he’d been reading this kind of thing for years, the story was just another urban legend, and would further alienate the scientific establishment when he desperately needed their help. In effect, what he had to obtain was time and bandwidth from every available gravitational observatory, both here on earth and up in orbit, during a crucial observational window, and time was already short.

It was as the final hours ticked down in a fervid air of stop-go technical problems, last minute doubts, and sudden demands for more money, that I finally took the sub-orbital from Seoul to Frankfurt, then the skytrain on to Glasgow, and some thrumming, windy thing of string and carbon fibre along the Scottish west coast, and across the shining Minch. The craft landed in Stornoway harbour in Isle of Lewis — the northern part of the long landmass of which Harris forms the south — where I was rowed ashore, and eventually found a bubblebus to take me across purple moorland and past scattered white bungalows, then up amid ancient peaks.

Rob stood waiting on the far side of the road at the final stop, and we were both shivering as we hugged in the cold spring sunlight. But I was here, and so was he, and he’d done a great job at keeping back the rest of the world, and even I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It seemed as if most of the niggles and issues had finally been sorted. Even if a few of his planned sources had pulled out, he’d still have all the data he needed. Come tomorrow, Rob Holm would either be a prophet or a pariah.

7.

He still slept in the same narrow bed he’d had as a child in the rusty-roofed cottage down by the shore at Creagach, while his parents’ bedroom was now filled with expensive processing and monitoring equipment, along with a high-band, multiple-redundancy satellite feed. Downstairs, there was a parlour where Rob kept his small book collection in an alcove by the fire — I was surprised to see that it was almost entirely poetry; a scatter of Larkin, Eliot, Frost, Dickinson, Pope, Yeats and Donne and standard collections amid a few Asimovs, Clarkes and Le Guins — with a low tartan divan where he sat to read these works. Which, I supposed, might also serve as a second bed, although he hadn’t yet made it up.

He took me out on his launch. Showed me his scallop beds, and the glorious views of this ragged land with its impossibly wide and empty beaches, and there, just around the headland, was the stretch of bay where both Rob’s parents had been found, and I almost hear the Blue Men of the Minch calling to us over the sigh of the sea. There were standing stones on the horizon, and an old whaling station at the head of a loch, and hill topped by a medieval church filled with the bodies of the chieftains who had given these islands such a savage reputation through their bloody feuds. And meanwhile, the vast cosmic shudder of the collision of two black holes was travelling toward us at lightspeed.

There were scallops, of course, for dinner. Mixed in with some fried dab and chopped mushroom, bacon and a few leaves of wild garlic, all washed down with malt whisky, and with whey-buttered soda bread on the side, which was the Highland way. Then, up in the humming shrine of his parents’ old bedroom, Rob checked on the status of his precious sources again.

The black hole binaries had been spiralling toward each other for tens of thousands of years, and observed here on earth for decades. In many ways, and despite their supposed mystery, black holes were apparently simple objects — nothing but sheer mass — and even though their collision was so far off it had actually happened when we humans were still learning how to use tools, it was possible to predict within hours, if not minutes, when the effects of this event would finally reach Earth.

There were gravitational observatories, vast-array laser interferometers, in deep space, and underground in terrestrial sites, all waiting to record this moment, and Rob was tapping into them. All everyone else expected to see — in fact, all the various institutes and faculties had tuned their devices to look for — was this… Leaning over me, Rob called up a display to show a sharp spike, a huge peak in the data, as the black holes swallowed each other and the shock of their collision flooded out in the asymmetrical pulse of a gravitational wave.

“But this isn’t what I want, Lita. Incredibly faint though that signal is — a mere ripple deep in the fabric of the cosmos — I’m looking to combine and filter all those results, and find something even fainter.

“This…” He dragged up another screen. “Is what I expect to see.” There was the same central peak, but this time it was surrounded by a fan of smaller, ever-decreasing, ripples eerily reminiscent of the display Rob had once shown me of the ghost-flicker of those photons all those years ago in Leeds. “These are echoes of the black hole collision in other universes.”

I reached out to touch the floating screen. Felt the incredible presence of the dark matter of other worlds.

“And all of this will happen tonight?”

He smiled.

8.

There was nothing else left to be done — the observatories Rob was tapping into were all remote, independent, autonomous devices — so we took out chairs into the dark, and drank some more whisky, and collected driftwood, and lit a fire on the shore.

We talked about books. Nothing new, but some shared favourites. Poe and Pasternak and Fitzgerald. And Rob confessed that he hadn’t got on anything like as well as he’d pretended with his first forays into literature. How he’d found the antique language and odd punctuation got in the way. It was even a while before he understood the obvious need for a physical bookmark. He’d have given up with the whole concept if it hadn’t been for my shining, evident faith.

“You know, it was Gulliver’s Travels that finally really turned it around for me. Swift was so clever and rude and funny and angry, yet he could also tell a great story. That bit about those Laputan astronomers studying the stars from down in their cave, and trying to harvest sunbeams from marrows. Well, that’s us right here, isn’t it?”

The fire settled. We poured ourselves some more whisky. And Rob recited a poem by Li Po about drinking with the Moon’s shadow, and then we remembered those days back in Leeds when we’d gone out onto the moors, and drank and ingested far more than was good for us, and danced like savages and, yes, there had even been that time he and I had gazed up at the stars.

We stood up now, and Rob led me away from the settling fire. The stars were so bright here, and the night sky was so black, that it felt like falling merely to look up. Over there in the west, Lita, is the Taurus Constellation. It’s where the Crab Nebula lies, the remains of a supernova the Chinese recorded back in 1054, and it’s in part of the Milky Way known as the Perseus Arm, which is where our dark binaries will soon end their fatal dance. I was leaning into him as he held his arms around me, and perhaps both of us were breathing a little faster than was entirely due to the wonders of the cosmos.

“What time is it now, Rob?”

“It’s…” He checked his watch. “Just after midnight.”

“So there’s still time.”

“Time for what?”

We kissed, then crossed the shore and climbed the stairs to Rob’s single bed. It was sweet, and somewhat drunken, and quickly over. The earth, the universe, didn’t exactly move. But it felt far more like making love than merely having sex, and I curled up against Rob afterwards, and breathed his cinnamon scent, and fell into a well of star-seeing contentment.

“Rob?”

The sky beyond the window was already showing the first traces of dawn as I got up, telling myself that he’d be next door in his parents’ old room, or walking the shore as he and his avatar strove to deal with a torrent of interview requests. But I sensed that something was wrong.

It wasn’t hard for me to pull up the right screen amid the humming machines in his parents’ room, proficient at mek as I now was. The event, the collision, had definitely occurred. The spike of its gravitational wave had been recorded by every observatory. But the next screen, the one where Rob had combined, filtered and refined all the data, displayed no ripples, echoes, from other worlds.

I ran outside shouting Rob’s name. I checked the house feeds. I paced back and forth. I got my avatar to contact the authorities. I did all the things you do when someone you love suddenly goes missing, but a large part of me already knew it was far too late.

Helicopter arrived. Drones circled. Locals gathered. Fishermen arrived in trawlers and skiffs. Then came the bother of newsfeeds, all the publicity I could ever have wished for. But not like this.

I ended up sitting on the rocks of that bay around the headland from Creagach as the day progressed, waiting for the currents to bear Rob’s body to this place, where he could join his parents.

I’m still waiting.

9.

Few people actually remember Rob Holm these days, and if they do, it’s as that good-looking guy who used to present those slightly weird nature — or was it science? — feeds, and didn’t he die in some odd, sad kind of way? But I still remember him, and I still miss him, and I still often wonder what really happened on that night when he left the bed we briefly shared. The explanation given by the authorities, that he’d seen his theory dashed and then walked out into the freezing waters of the Minch, still isn’t something I can bring myself to accept. So maybe he really was like the Visitor from Taured, and simply vanished from a universe which couldn’t support what he believed.

I read few novels or short stories now. The plots, the pages, seem over-involved. Murals rather than elegant miniatures. Rough-hewn rocks instead of jewels. But the funny thing is that, as my interest in them has dwindled, books have become popular again. There are new publishers, even new writers, and you’ll find pop up bookstores in every city. Thousands now flock to my library in Seoul every year, and I upset the conservators by allowing them to take my precious volumes down from their shelves. After all, isn’t that exactly what books are for? But I rarely go there myself. In fact, I hardly ever leave the Isle of Harris, or even Creagach, which Rob, with typical consideration and foresight, left me in his will. I do my best with the scallop farm going, pottering about in the launch and trying to keep the crabs and the starfish at bay, although the business barely turns a profit, and probably never did.

What I do keep returning to is Rob’s small collection of poetry. I have lingered with Eliot’s Prufrock amid the chains of the sea, wondered with Hardy what might have happened if he and that woman had sheltered from the rain a minute more, and watched as Silvia Plath’s children burst those final balloons. I just wish that Rob was here to share these precious words and moments with me. But all there is is you and I, dear, faithful reader, and the Blue Men of the Minch calling to the waves.

Ian R MacLeod has been writing and selling speculative and fantastic fiction for more than 30 years. He is the author of seven novels and over fifty novellas and short stories. His works have been published in many languages, and have received many major awards. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley in England, where he divides his time between writing, trying to write, and not writing.

Blood Grains Speak Through Memories
By Jason Sanford

Morning’s song of light and warmth glowed on the horizon as the land’s anchor, Frere-Jones Roeder, stepped from her front door. The red-burn dots of fairies swirled in the river mists flowing over her recently plowed sunflower fields. Cows mooed in the barn, eager to be milked. Chickens flapped their wings as they stirred from roosts on her home’s sod-grass roof.

Even though the chilled spring day promised nothing but beauty, the grains in Frere-Jones’s body shivered to her sadness as she looked at the nearby dirt road. The day-fellows along the road were packing their caravan. Evidently her promises of safety weren’t enough for them to chance staying even a few more hours.

Frere-Jones tapped the message pad by the door, pinging her fellow anchors on other lands so they knew the caravan was departing. She then picked up her gift sack and hurried outside to say goodbye.

As Frere-Jones closed the door, a red fairy wearing her dead lifemate’s face flittered before her eyes. A flash of memory jumped into her from the fairy’s grain-created body. One of Haoquin’s memories, from a time right after they’d wed. They’d argued over something silly—like newlyweds always did—and Haoquin had grown irritated at Frere-Jones’s intransigence.

But that was all the fairy shared. The taste of Haoquin’s memory didn’t show Frere-Jones and Haoquin making up. The memory didn’t show the two of them ending the day by walking hand-in-hand along her land’s forest trails.

Frere-Jones slapped the fairy away, not caring if the land and its damned grains were irritated at her sadness. She liked the day-fellows. She’d choose them any day over the grains.

The fairy spun into an angry buzzing and flew over the sunflower fields to join the others.

Frere-Jones walked up to the caravan’s wagons to find the day-fellows detaching their power systems from her farm’s solar and wind grid. The caravan leader nodded to Frere-Jones as he harnessed a team of four horses to the lead wagon.

“We appreciate you letting us plug in,” the man said. “Our solar collectors weaken something awful when it’s overcast.”

“Anytime,” Frere-Jones said. “Pass the word to other caravans that I’m happy to help. Power or water or food, I’ll always share.”

Pleasantries done, Frere-Jones hurried down the line of wagons.

The first five wagons she passed were large multi-generational affairs with massive ceramic wheels standing as tall as she. Pasted-on red ribbons outlined the wagons’ scars from old battles. Day-fellows believed any battle they survived was a battle worth honoring.

Adults and teenagers and kids smiled at Frere-Jones as she passed, everyone hurrying to harness horses and stow baggage and deploy their solar arrays.

Frere-Jones waved at the Kameron twins, who were only seven years old and packing up their family’s honey and craft goods. Frere-Jones reached into her pocket and handed the twins tiny firefly pebbles. When thrown, the pebbles would burst into mechanical fireflies which flew in streaks of rainbow colors for a few seconds. The girls giggled—firefly pebbles were a great prank. Kids loved to toss them when adults were sitting around campfires at night, releasing bursts of fireflies to startle everyone.

Frere-Jones hugged the twins and walked on, finally stopping before the caravan’s very last wagon.

The wagon stood small, barely containing the single family inside, built not of ceramic but of a reinforced lattice of ancient metal armor. Instead of bright ribbons to honor old battles, a faded maroon paint flaked and peeled from the walls. Large impact craters shown on one side of the wagon. Long scratches surrounded the back door from superhard claws assaulting the wagon’s armored shutters.

An ugly, ugly wagon. Still, it had bent under its last attack instead of breaking. The caravan’s leader had told Frere-Jones that this family’s previous caravan had been attacked a few months ago. All that caravan’s ceramic wagons shattered, but this wagon survived.

Frere-Jones fed her final sugar cubes to the wagon’s horses, a strong pair who nickered in pleasure as the grains within their bodies pulsed in sync to her own. Horses adapted so perfectly to each land’s grains as they fed on grasses and hay. That flexibility was why horses usually survived attacks even when their caravan did not.

“Morning, Master-Anchor Frere-Jones,” a teenage girl, Alexnya, said as she curtsied, holding the sides of her leather vest out like a fancy dress. Most kids in the caravan wore flowing cotton clothes, but Alexnya preferred leather shirts and vests and pants.

“Master-Anchor Frere-Jones, you honor us with your presence,” Alexnya’s mother, Jun, said in an overly formal manner. Her husband, Takeshi, stood behind her, holding back their younger daughter and son as if Frere-Jones was someone to fear.

They’re skittish from that attack, Frere-Jones thought. A fresh scar ran the left side of Jun’s thin face while Takeshi still wore a healing pad around his neck. Their two young kids, Miya and Tufte, seemed almost in tears at being near an anchor. When Frere-Jones smiled at them, both kids bolted to hide in the wagon.

Only Alexnya stood unafraid, staring into Frere-Jones’s eyes as if confident this land’s anchor wouldn’t dare harm her.

“I’ve brought your family gifts,” Frere-Jones said.

“Why?” Jun asked, suspicious.

Frere-Jones paused, unused to explaining. “I give gifts to all families who camp on my land.”

“A land which you protect,” Jun said, scratching the scar on her face. As if to remind Frere-Jones what the anchors who’d attacked their last caravan had done.

Frere-Jones nodded sadly. “I am my land’s anchor,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t so. If I could leave I would… my son…”

Frere-Jones turned to walk back to her farm to milk the cows. Work distracted her from memories. But Alexnya jumped forward and grabbed her hand.

“I’ve heard of your son,” Alexnya said. “He’s a day-fellow now, isn’t he?”

Frere-Jones grinned. “He is indeed. Travels the eastern roads in a caravan with his own lifemate and kids. I see him once every four years when the land permits his caravan to return.” Frere-Jones held the gift bag out to Alexnya. “Please take this. I admit it’s a selfish gift. I want day-fellows to watch out for my son and his family. Lend a hand when needed.”

“Day-fellows protect our own,” Jun stated in a flat voice. “No need to bribe us to do what we already do.”

Alexnya, despite her mother’s words, took the canvas gift bag and opened it, pulling out a large spool of thread and several short knives.

“The thread is reinforced with nano-armor,” Frere-Jones said, “the strongest you can find. You can weave it into the kids’ clothes. The short knives were made by a day-fellow biosmith and are supposedly unbreakable…”

Frere-Jones paused, not knowing what else to say. She thought it silly that day-fellows were prohibited from possessing more modern weapons than swords and knives to protect themselves, even if she knew why the grains demanded this.

“Thank you, Frere-Jones,” Alexnya said as she curtsied again. “My family appreciates your gifts, which will come in handy on the road.”

Unsure what else to say, Frere-Jones bowed back before walking away, refusing to dwell on the fact that she was the reason this day-fellow caravan was fleeing her land.

• • • •

That night Frere-Jones lit the glow-stones in the fireplace and sat down on her favorite sofa. The stones’ flickering flames licked the weariness from her body. A few more weeks and the chilled nights would vanish as spring fully erupted across her land.

Frere-Jones didn’t embrace spring as she once had. Throughout the valley her fellow anchors celebrated the growing season with dances, feasts, and lush night-time visits to the forest with their lifemates and friends.

Frere-Jones no longer joined such festivities. Through the grains she tasted the land’s excitement—the mating urge of the animals, the budding of the trees, the growth of the new-planted seeds in her fields. She felt the cows in the fields nuzzling each other’s necks and instinctively touched her own neck in response. She sensed several does hiding in the nearby forests and touched her stomach as the fawns in their wombs kicked. She even felt the grass growing on her home’s sod-roof and walls, the roots reaching slowly down as water flowed by capillary action into the fresh-green blades.

The grains allowed Frere-Jones, as this land’s anchor, to feel everything growing and living and dying for two leagues around her. She even dimly felt the anchors on nearby lands—Jeroboam and his family ate dinner in their anchordom while Chakatie hunted deer in a forest glen on her land. Chakatie was probably gearing up for one of her family’s bloody ritualized feasts to welcome spring.

Frere-Jones sipped her warm mulled wine before glancing at her home’s message pad. Was it too soon to call her son again? She’d tried messaging Colton a few hours ago, but the connection failed. She was used to this—day-fellow caravans did slip in and out of the communication grid—but that didn’t make it any less painful. At least he was speaking to her again.

Frere-Jones downed the rest of her drink. As she heated a new mug of wine over the stove she took care to ignore the fairies dancing outside her kitchen window. Usually the fairies responded to the land’s needs and rules, but these fairies appeared to have been created by the grains merely to annoy her. The grains were well aware that Frere-Jones hated her part in the order and maintenance of this land.

Two fairies with her parents’ faces glared in the window. Other fairies stared with the faces of even more distant ancestors. Several fairies mouthed Frere-Jones’s name, as if reminding her of an anchor’s duty, while others spoke in bursts of memories copied by the grains from her ancestors’ lives.

Fuck duty, she thought as she swallowed half a mug of wine. Fuck you for what you did to Haoquin.

Thankfully her lifemate’s face wasn’t among those worn by these fairies. While the grains had no problem creating fairies with Haoquin’s face, they knew not to push Frere-Jones when she was drunk.

As Frere-Jones left the kitchen she paused before the home altar. In the stone pedestal’s basin stood three carved stone figurines—herself, her son, and Haoquin. The hand-sized statues rested on the red-glowing sand filling the basin.

In the flickering light of the glow stones the figures seemed to twitch as if alive, shadow faces accusing Frere-Jones of unknown misdeeds. Frere-Jones touched Haoquin’s face—felt his sharp cheekbones and mischievous smirk—causing the basin’s red sands to rise up, the individual grains climbing the statues until her family glowed a faint speckled red over the darker sands below.

The red grains burned her fingers where she touched Haoquin, connecting her to what remained of her lifemate. She felt his bones in the family graveyard on the edge of the forest. Felt the insects and microbes which had fed on his remains and absorbed his grains before dying and fertilizing the ground and the trees and the other plants throughout the land, where the grains had then been eaten by deer and cows and rabbits. If Frere-Jones closed her eyes she could almost feel Haoquin’s grains pulsing throughout the land. Could almost imagine him returning to her and hugging her tired body.

Except he couldn’t. He was gone. Only the echo of him lived on in the microscopic grains which had occupied his body and were now dispersed again to her land.

And her son was even farther beyond the grains’ reach, forced to forsake both the grains and her land when he turned day-fellow.

Frere-Jones sat down hard on the tile floor and cried, cradling her empty wine mug.

She was lying on the floor, passed out from the wine, when a banging woke her.

“Frere-Jones, you must help us!” a woman’s voice called. She recognized the voice—Jun, from the day-fellow family which left that morning.

Frere-Jones’s hands shook, curling like claws. The grains in her body screamed against the day-fellows for staying on her land.

No, she ordered, commanding the grains to stand down. It’s too soon. There are a few more days before they wear out this land’s welcome.

The grains rattled irritably in her body like pebbles in an empty water gourd. While they should obey her, to be safe Frere-Jones stepped across the den and lifted several ceramic tiles from the floor. She pulled Haoquin’s handmade laser pistol from the hiding spot and slid it behind her back, held by her belt. She was now ready to shoot herself in the head if need be.

Satisfied that she was ready, Frere-Jones opened the door. Jun and Takeshi stood there supporting Alexnya, who leaned on them as if drunk but stared with eyes far too awake and aware. Alexnya shook and spasmed, her muscles clenching as she moaned a low, painful hiss, unable to fully scream.

Frere-Jones looked behind the family. She reached out to the grains in the land’s animals and plants and soils. She didn’t feel any other anchors on her land. If any of them found the day-fellows here ….

“Bring her inside,” she told Jun. “Takeshi, hide your wagon and horses in the barn.”

“Not until later,” Takeshi said, wanting to stay with his daughter.

Jun snapped at him. “Don’t be a fool, Tak. We can’t be seen. Not after everyone knows our caravan left.”

Frere-Jones took Alexnya in her arms, the grains powering up her strength so the teenage girl seemed to weigh no more than a baby. Takeshi hurried back to the wagon, where the family’s two youngest kids stared in fright from the open door.

Frere-Jones carried Alexnya to Colton’s old room and placed her on the bed. Alexnya continued to spasm, her muscles clenching and shivering under her drained-pale skin.

“Please,” Alexnya whimpered. “Please…”

As Jun held her daughter’s hand, Frere-Jones leaned closer to the girl. The grains jumped madly in Frere-Jones’s blood, erupting her fangs like razors ready to rip into these day-fellows’ throats. Frere-Jones breathed deep to calm herself and gagged on Alexnya’s sweaty scent. It carried the faintest glimmer of grains inside Alexnya’s body.

“She’s infected,” Frere-Jones said in shock. “With grains. My grains.”

Jun nodded, an angry look on her face as if Frere-Jones had personally caused this abomination. “The further we travelled from your land, the more pain she experienced. She didn’t stop screaming until we left the caravan and began making our way back here.”

Frere-Jones growled softly. “This is unheard of,” she said. “Grains shouldn’t infect day-fellows.”

“Day-fellow lore says it happens on rare occasions. Our lore also says each land’s anchor has medicine to cure an infection.”

Frere-Jones understood. She ran to the kitchen and grabbed her emergency bag. Inside was a glass vial half-full of powder glowing a faint red.

She hadn’t used the powder since Colton became a day-fellow. The powder’s nearly dim glow meant it had weakened severely over the years. Chakatie had taken most of her remaining medicine after Colton left, worried about Frere-Jones killing herself with an overdose. Now all that was left was a half-vial of nearly worthless medicine.

But she had nothing else to give. She held the vial over her altar—letting it sync again with the coding from her land’s grains—then mixed the powder in a mug of water and hurried back to Alexnya.

“Drink this,” she said, holding the mug to Alexnya’s lips. The girl gasped and turned her head as if being near the liquid hurt her.

“Why is it hurting her?” Jun asked, blocking Alexnya’s mouth with her hand so Frere-Jones couldn’t try again. “I thought the medicine helped.”

“It does, but the grains always resist at first,” Frere-Jones said. “When I gave it to my own son years ago he… went through some initial pain. We usually only give small doses to new anchors at puberty to calm the explosive growth of the grains in their bodies. But if we give Alexnya a full dose for the next few days, it should kill the grains.”

Jun frowned. “How much pain?”

“I… don’t know. But if we don’t do something soon there will be too many grains in her body to remove.”

Frere-Jones didn’t need to tell Jun what would happen if Alexnya became anchored to this land. The anchors from the lands surrounding Frere-Jones’s wouldn’t take kindly to a day-fellow girl becoming one of them.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” Jun said, standing up. “Maybe if we take Alexnya away from here before the grains establish themselves…”

“Taking her from the land will definitely kill her—the grains have already anchored. We need to remove them from her body. There’s no other way.”

“I’ll drink it,” Alexnya whispered in a weak voice. She glared at Frere-Jones in fury. Frere-Jones prayed the grains weren’t already sharing the land’s stored memories with this day-fellow girl. Showing Alexnya what Frere-Jones had done. Revealing secrets known by no one else except her son and Chakatie.

Despite her hesitation, Jun nodded agreement. She held her daughter’s spasming body as Frere-Jones poured the liquid through the girl’s lips. Alexnya swallowed half the medicine before screaming. Splashes and dribbles on her leather shirt and pants glowed bright red as she thrashed in the bed for a moment before passing out.

Frere-Jones and Jun tucked Alexnya under the covers and stepped into the den. Takeshi stood by the fireplace holding their youngest son and daughter.

“Will she make it?” Jun asked.

“I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “She’ll need another dose before the medicine wears off or she’ll be as bad as ever. And that was all I had in the house.”

Frere-Jones glanced at the altar, where the red sands squirmed in a frenzied rush, climbing over the figurines as if outraged they couldn’t eat stone. She noticed Jun staring at her back and realized the woman had seen the laser pistol she carried.

Frere-Jones handed the pistol to Jun. “Use this if needed,” she said. “Make sure none of you touch the grains in the altar—if you do, every anchor for a hundred leagues will know there’s a day-fellow family here.”

Jun nodded as Frere-Jones pulled on her leather running duster. “When will you be back?”

“I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “I have to find more medicine. I’ll… think of something.”

With that Frere-Jones ordered the grains to power up her legs and, for the first time in years, she ran across her land. She ran faster than any horse, faster than any deer, until even the fairies which flew after her could barely keep up.

• • • •

At the land’s boundary Frere-Jones paused.

She stood by Sandy Creek, the cold waters bubbling under the overhanging oaks and willows. Fairies flew red tracers over the creek, flying as far across as they dared without crossing into the bordering land. On the other bank a handful of blue fairies hovered in the air, staring back at Frere-Jones and the red fairies.

Usually boundaries between lands were more subtle, the grains that were tied to one anchor mixing a bit with the next land’s grains in the normal back and forth of life. But with Sandy Creek as a natural land divide—combined with Frere-Jones’s isolation from the other anchors—the boundary between her and Chakatie’s lands had grown abrupt, stark.

One of Chakatie’s blue fairies stared intensely at her. Chakatie knew she was coming. Frere-Jones wished there was a caravan nearby to trade for the medicine. Day-fellow pharmacists were very discreet.

Still, of all the nearby anchors Chakatie was the only one who might still give her medicine. Chakatie was also technically family, even if her son Haoquin was now dead. And she had a large extended family. Meaning a number of kids. Meaning stocks of medicine on hand to ensure the grains didn’t overwhelm and kill those kids when they transitioned to becoming anchors.

Still, no matter how much Frere-Jones had once loved Chakatie she wouldn’t go in unprepared. She was, after all, her land’s anchor. She stripped off her clothes and stepped into the cold creek, rubbing mud and water over her skin and hair to remove the day-fellow scent. She activated the grains inside her, increasing her muscle size and bone density. Finally, for good measure, she grabbed a red fairy buzzing next to her and smashed it between her now-giant hands. She smeared the fairy’s glowing red grains in two lines down both sides of her face and body.

Battle lines. As befitted an anchor going into another’s land in the heart of the night.

Satisfied, she walked naked onto Chakatie’s anchordom.

• • • •

Frere-Jones hated memories. She hated how the grains spoke to her in brief snatches of memories copied from Haoquin and her parents and grandparents and on back to the land’s very first anchor.

But despite this distaste at memories, they still swarmed her. As Frere-Jones crossed the dark forest of trees and brambles on Chakatie’s land, she wondered why the grains were showing her these memories. The grains never revealed memories randomly.

In particular, why show her Haoquin’s memories, which the grains had so rarely shared up to now? Memories from the day she met him. Memories from their selecting ceremony.

Frere-Jones tried to stop them, but the memories slipped into her as if they’d always existed within her.

Frere-Jones’s parents had died when the grains determined it was time for their child to take over. Like most anchors they’d gone happily. First they drank medicine to dull the grains’ power to rebuild their bodies. Then they slit each other’s throat in the land’s graveyard, holding hands as they bled out and their grain-copied memories flowed into the land they’d protected.

At first Frere-Jones had accepted her role in protecting the land. She safeguarded the land from those who might harm it and carefully managed the ecosystem’s plants and animals so the land was in continual balance.

But a few years after becoming anchor a small day-fellow caravan defiled her land by cutting down trees. Frere-Jones eagerly allowed the grains to seize control of her body. She called other anchors to her side and led an attack on the caravan. Memories of the pains her land had suffered before the grains had arrived flowed through her—images of clear-cut forests and poisoned soil and all the other evils of the ancient world. In her mind she became a noble warrior preventing humans from creating ecological hell just as her family had done for a hundred generations.

Only after the caravan was wiped out did she learn that a day-fellow child, gifted with a new hatchet and told to gather dead branches for a fire, had instead cut down a single pine sapling.

Outraged at what she’d done, Frere-Jones attacked the other anchors who’d helped savage the caravan. The anchors fought back, slashing at her with claw and fang until a respected older anchor, Chakatie, arrived, her three-yard-tall body powered to a mass of muscle and bone and claw.

Chakatie’s land neighbored Frere-Jones’s land, but Chakatie hadn’t aided in the attack on the caravan. Now this powerful woman had stepped among the fighting anchors, a mere glance all that was needed to stop the other anchors from attacking each other. A few even powered down their bodies.

Chakatie had paused before the remains of the caravan and breathed deeply. As the other anchors watched nervously, Chakatie leaned over and tapped the tiny child-size hatchet and examined the cut sapling. She sniffed each day-fellow body.

With a roar, Chakatie told everyone but this land’s anchor to leave. The others fled.

Once everyone was gone Chakatie bent over the dead bodies and cried.

After Chakatie finished, she stood and wiped her tears. Frere-Jones forced herself to stand still, willing to take whatever punishment Chakatie might give for this evil deed. But the older woman didn’t attack. Instead, she stepped forward until her hot breath licked Frere-Jones’s face and her fangs clicked beside her ear like knives stripping flesh from bone.

“The grains speak only in memories,” Chakatie said. “But memories only speak to the grains’ programmed goals. A good anchor never lets memory overwhelm what is right and what is wrong.”

With that Chakatie walked away, leaving Frere-Jones to bury the caravan’s dead.

Ashamed, Frere-Jones had locked herself in her home and refused to listen to the grains’ excuses. The grains tried to please her with swirls of memories from her parents and others. Memories of people apologizing and explaining and rationalizing what she’d done.

But she no longer cared. She was this land’s anchor and she’d decide what was right. Not the grains.

A few years later the grains gave her an ultimatum: marry another anchor to help manage this land, or the other anchors would kill Frere-Jones and select a new anchor to take her place.

The selecting ceremony took place on the summer solstice. Hundreds of her fellow anchors came to her home, setting up feasting tents along the dirt road and in fallow fields. Frere-Jones walked from tent to tent, meeting young anchors who spoke eagerly of duty and helping protect her land. She listened politely. Nodded to words like “ecological balance” and “heritage.” Then she walked to the next tent to hear more of the same.

Frere-Jones grew more and more depressed as she went from tent to tent. If she didn’t choose a mate before the end of the day all the celebrating anchors would rip her to pieces and choose a new anchor to protect her land. She wondered if day-fellows felt this fear around anchors. The fear of knowing people who were so warm and friendly one moment might be your death in the next.

Frere-Jones was preparing for her death when she spotted a ragged tent beside her barn. The tent was almost an afterthought, a few poles stuck in the ground holding up several old and torn cotton blankets.

Frere-Jones stepped inside to see Chakatie sitting beside a young man.

“Join us in a drink?” Chakatie asked, holding a jug of what smelled like moonshine. Chakatie’s body when powered down was tiny, barely reaching Frere-Jones’s shoulder.

“Do I look like I need a drink?” Frere-Jones asked.

“Any young woman about to be slaughtered for defying the grains needs a drink,” Chakatie said.

Frere-Jones sat down hard on the ground and drank a big swallow of moonshine. “Maybe I deserve to be killed,” she thought, remembering what she’d done to that day-fellow caravan.

“Maybe,” the young man sitting next to Chakatie said. “Or maybe you deserve a chance to change things.”

Chakatie introduced the man as her son Haoquin. He leaned over and shook Frere-Jones’s hand.

“How can I change anything?” Frere-Jones asked. “The grains will force me to do what they want or they’ll order the other anchors to kill me.”

Instead of answering, Haoquin leaned over so he could see outside the tiny tent. He was a skinny man and wore a giant wool coat even in summer, as if easily chilled. Or that’s what Frere-Jones thought until he opened the coat and pulled out a small laser pistol.

Frere-Jones froze at the sight of the forbidden technology, but Chakatie merely laughed. Haoquin aimed the pistol at a nearby tent—the Jeroboam family tent, among the loudest and most rambunctious groups at the selection ceremony. Haoquin pulled the trigger and a slight buzzing like angry bees filled the tent. He shoved the pistol back in his coat as the roof of the Jeroboam tent burst into flames.

Drunken anchors, including Jeroboam himself, fled from the tent, tearing holes in the fabric walls in their panic. Other anchors howled with laughter while Jeroboam and his lifemate and kids demanded to know who had insulted their family and land with this prank.

Haoquin grinned as he patted his coat covering the hidden pistol. “A little something I made,” he said. “I’m hoping it’ll come in handy when I eventually spit at the grains’ memories.”

Frere-Jones felt a flash of memory—her parents warning her as a kid to behave. To be a good girl. She shook off the grains’ warning as she stared into Haoquin’s mischievous eyes.

Maybe Haoquin was right. Maybe there was a way to change things.

• • • •

Frere-Jones leaned against a large oak tree, her powered body shaking as red and blue fairies buzzed around her. The grains had never shared such a deep stretch of Haoquin’s memories with her. The memories had been so intense and long they’d merged with her own memories of that day into something more. Almost as if Haoquin was alive once again inside her.

Frere-Jones wiped at her glowing eyes with the back of her clawed right hand. Why had the grains shared such a memory with her? What were they saying?

She pushed the memories from her thoughts as she ran on through the forest.

Frere-Jones found Chakatie in an isolated forest glen. Countless fairies rose into the dark skies from the tiny field of grass, stirring up a whirlwind of blue grains in their wake. Naked anchors jumped and howled among the blue light, their bodies powered up far beyond Frere-Jones’s own. Massive claws dug into tree trunks and soil. Bloody lips and razor fangs kissed and nipped each other. Throats howled to the stars and the night clouds above.

And throughout this orgy of light and scent swirled the memories of this land’s previous anchors. Memories of laughing and crying and killing and dying and a thousand other moments of life, all preserved by the blue grains which coursed through these trees and animals and enhanced people.

Frere-Jones stepped through the frenzied dance, daring anyone to attack her. The red lines on her face burned bright, causing the dancers to leap from her like she might scorch them. As the anchors noticed her the dance died down. They muttered and growled, shocked by Frere-Jones’s interruption.

In the middle of the glen sat two granite boulders. On the lower boulder lay a dead stag, its guts ripped out like party streamers of red meat. On the higher rock sat Chakatie, her body and muscles enlarged to the full extent of the grains’ powers, her clawed fingers digging into the dead stag beneath her. She sat naked except for a bloody stag-head and antlers draped over her head, the fresh blood dribbling down her shoulders and muscular chest.

“Welcome, my daughter!” Chakatie boomed as she jumped down and hugged Frere-Jones. “Welcome indeed. Have you come to join our festivities?”

Frere-Jones stared at the silent anchors around her. Several of them twitched their claws and fangs. But none dared attack her, remembering that she’d once been married to their blood.

“I won’t join in,” she said, the grains deepening her voice so she sounded more intimidating. “But I need speak with you. It’s urgent.”

Chakatie waved her family and relatives away.

“I need medicine,” Frere-Jones said. “Five doses.”

Chakatie glared at Frere-Jones, her happiness at seeing her vanishing as fast as a gutted deer bleeding out. “I will not have you killing yourself. If you’re seeking a painful death for what you did to my grandson, there are far better ways than overdosing on medicine.”

Chakatie raised one bloody claw as if offering to slash Frere-Jones to pieces.

Frere-Jones glared back at her mother-in-law. “It’s not for me. My land infected a new anchor.”

Chakatie lowered her claws and stared at Frere-Jones in puzzlement before a grin slowly emerged around her fangs. “I guess that’s… good news. Who is it?”

“I’d prefer to see if she survives before naming her,” Frere-Jones said, bluffing. Chakatie’s blood-and-musk scent was stomach-gagging strong in her nostrils.

“Of course.” Chakatie powered down her body slightly. “I apologize for saying that about Colton. If my land had betrayed me like yours did with Haoquin, I may have done as you.”

This was the closest Chakatie had ever come to saying she agreed with Colton becoming a day-fellow. Frere-Jones thanked her.

“Don’t thank me yet. The senior anchors have been saying you’ve lost your ability to protect your land. A few even suggest we… select a new anchor.”

Frere-Jones snarled. “And I’m sure you didn’t have someone in mind? Perhaps one of your other sons or daughters?”

Chakatie tensed at the insult before smirking with a knowing nod. “You know I want nothing but love and happiness for you. But if the other anchors become intent on killing you, I’d prefer my own benefit.”

Frere-Jones sighed at her mother-in-law’s logic. There was a reason no one ever challenged Chakatie. She was likely the mightiest anchor in this part of the world.

Chakatie waved for her oldest son, Malachi, who trotted over. “Run home and bring six vials of medicine to Frere-Jones.” She nodded to Frere-Jones. “One extra in case it’s needed.”

Frere-Jones thanked Chakatie and turned to go, but Chakatie dared to place one of her giant clawed hands on her shoulder.

“Two warnings,” Chakatie whispered. “First, don’t be lying about what the medicine is for. If you try overdosing on it, I’ll make sure the grains keep you alive long enough for me to kill you.”

Frere-Jones nodded. “And?”

“The grains on your land have become increasingly agitated since Haoquin died. I fear they’re building to something which will harm you.”

“If they do, wouldn’t that be your fault? After all, you introduced me to Haoquin.”

Even as Frere-Jones said this she regretted the words. If she’d never met Haoquin her life would have been far poorer, assuming she’d even lived past her selecting ceremony. But Chakatie had avoided Frere-Jones ever since Colton become a day-fellow. Frere-Jones still loved Chakatie but also wanted to rip the woman apart for abandoning her, a feeling influenced no doubt by her grain-powered body’s fury.

Chakatie nodded sadly. “I think every day about the paths of Haoquin’s life. Still, what else can we do? We are ingrained in the land…” she said, beginning the most sacred oath of anchors.

“…and the grains are our land,” Frere-Jones finished.

Yet afterwards as Frere-Jones ran back to her land she wanted to claw her own tongue out for uttering such a lie. If it was within her power, she’d destroy every grain in both her land and body.

Not that such dreams mattered in the real world. And if Chakatie and the other anchors learned she was sheltering a day-fellow family, her dreams—and Haoquin’s—would never have a chance to come true.

• • • •

“Don’t trust my mother,” Haoquin had said one morning a few weeks after they were married. He’d been bedridden that day as the grains from his old land deactivated and Frere-Jones’s grains established themselves. She’d given him several doses of medicine, which helped, and stayed by his side the entire time.

Since they couldn’t do much else, they lay in bed and talked. Frere-Jones had forgotten the joys of hearing someone talking to her in words instead of memories.

“I like your mom,” Frere-Jones said. “I mean, she did bring us together.”

“Oh, I like her. Hell, I love her. She’s the one who taught me to be wary of the grains. But she’s also not afraid to work the grains and the other anchors to her own advantage. Never forget that.”

Frere-Jones snuggled closer to Haoquin, who hugged her back. She remembered how Chakatie had been disgusted by Frere-Jones killing the day-fellows. Which had pushed Frere-Jones into a new attitude toward the grains. Which had eventually resulted in her marrying Haoquin.

No, she thought, pushing those memories from her mind. She refused to believe her life was merely a plaything of either Chakatie or the grains.

“You okay?” Haoquin asked.

“Just thinking about memories.” Frere-Jones ran her fingers across Haoquin’s bare stomach, causing him to shiver. “Like the memory of my fingers on you. The touch of my skin on yours. Someday all that will remain of these moments are the copies of our memories stored in the grains’ matrix.”

“I can live with that, Fre,” Haoquin said, calling her by that nickname for the first time. “Can you?”

Instead of answering Frere-Jones kissed him, her lips touching lips before fading into memory.

• • • •

Frere-Jones gasped as she paused outside her house with the vials of medicine in her pocket.

She could hear Alexnya screaming inside. The last dose of medicine must be wearing off.

But why were the grains still showing her all these memories from Haoquin? They’d never done that before. In fact, the grains had taken care to lock away most of Haoquin’s memories for fear that they’d influence Frere-Jones in the wrong ways. So why were the grains now sharing them?

Frere-Jones shrugged off the question and opened the door to her house. She had to focus on saving the day-fellow girl.

Remember that, she thought. Remember what’s important.

• • • •

After the next dose of medicine, Alexnya slept in fits for the day, waking every few hours to drink more. But when Frere-Jones stepped into the bedroom with a new dose the following evening, she found Alexnya sitting up in bed reading an old-fashioned paper book with her mother. Alexnya looked far better, no longer shaking or in pain. Frere-Jones tasted only the barest touch of the grains still inside the girl’s body.

“Hello Fre,” Alexnya said.

Frere-Jones nearly dropped the mug of medicine. The only one who’d ever called her Fre had been Haoquin.

“Alexnya, be polite,” Jun snapped. “Call her Master-Anchor Frere-Jones.”

“But she likes being called Fre…”

Frere-Jones sat on the bed beside Alexnya. “It’s not her fault. The grains communicate using snippets of memories from previous anchors. ‘Fre’ is what my lifemate used to call me.”

Jun paled but didn’t say anything. Alexnya frowned. “I’m sorry, Fre… Master-Anchor Frere-Jones,” the girl said. “I just want you to love me again. You used to love me.”

Frere-Jones ignored the girl’s obvious confusion at having her memories mix with the memories stored within the grains’ matrix. She handed Alexnya the mug of medicine. “Drink this,” she said.

The girl swallowed half the medicine. “The grains are angry,” Alexnya whispered as she wiped the red glow from her lips. “The grains don’t like you removing them from my body. They don’t like my family overstaying our welcome.”

“They won’t hurt your family without my approval.”

Alexnya didn’t appear convinced. “They’re also angry at you,” she said as she yawned. “Why are they angry at you?”

“Let me worry about my land’s grains. You need to sleep.”

Alexnya nodded and closed her eyes. Jun and Frere-Jones shut the door and walked over to the dinner table, where Jun stared at the remaining dregs of medicine in the mug.

“She’s taken enough medicine,” Frere-Jones said. “By tomorrow her connection to the land will be weak enough to leave. She’ll have to continue taking the medicine for another few days to remove the remaining grains, but you can give it to her on the road.”

Jun glanced with relief at the den, where Takeshi lay sleeping on a sofa with Miya and Tufte.

“What memories are the grains showing Alexnya?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” Frere-Jones asked with a growl. “Any memories she’s experienced are hers now.”

As Frere-Jones said this she shook with anger at the thought of Alexnya experiencing even a taste of Haoquin’s life. She didn’t care about the stored memories of her parents and ancestors, but Haoquin… those memories were special. Damn the grains. Damn these day-fellows for intruding on the most intimate parts of her life.

Frere-Jones’s right hand spasmed as claws grew from her fingertips. She dug into the wooden table, imagining the need to go into her son’s bedroom and rip Alexnya to pieces.

“Master-Anchor Frere-Jones!” Jun shouted in a loud voice. Frere-Jones snapped back to herself and looked up to see Jun aiming the laser pistol at her head. She took a deep breath and forced her body to reabsorb the claws.

The grains were pushing her, like they had as a young anchor when she’d attacked that day-fellow caravan.

“I will sleep outside tonight,” Frere-Jones said as she stood. “Bar the door. And windows. Don’t let me in.” She grinned at Jun, who kept the pistol aimed at her. “If I do break in, make sure you end me before I do anything we’d all regret.”

Jun chuckled once but kept the pistol aimed at Frere-Jones until she walked outside and the door slammed shut.

• • • •

Frere-Jones didn’t sleep that night, instead patrolling the land to ensure no one came near her house. This also kept her further away from the day-fellows. Despite the distance the grains inside her shrieked at her land being defiled by the day-fellow presence. And Alexnya was right—the grains were also furious at Frere-Jones. They knew what she’d done to her son. The grains knew she hated them and that she would destroy every trace of their existence if it was within her power.

But despite this anger the grains also continued to share Haoquin’s memories with her. She saw the birth of their son through Haoquin’s eyes. Saw Haoquin and Colton playing chase in the fields. Saw the three of them going for picnics in the deep woods.

All memories from Haoquin’s life.

“What the hell are you telling me?” Frere-Jones yelled. But the grains didn’t respond.

When Jun unbolted the sod-house’s door in the morning, Frere-Jones was meditating under the oak tree in the front yard. Her body was coated in red smears from the countless fairies she’d killed during the night as she ripped apart every one of the red-glowing, grain-infused monstrosities she encountered.

Several chickens pecked at the fairies’ remaining grains in the dirt around her.

Jun stepped toward Frere-Jones with the laser pistol in her right hand.

“You okay?” Jun asked.

“Must be. You’re still alive.”

Jun shivered. Frere-Jones licked her lips before biting her tongue to silence the grains. They were easier to control during the daytime, but the longer the day-fellows stayed on the land the more demanding they would become.

“Are you safe to be around?”

“I can maintain control until you leave,” Frere-Jones said. “We’ll give Alexnya another dose of medicine after breakfast. That should be enough to enable your family to leave. You can travel well beyond this land before night falls.”

“Tak is cooking breakfast,” Jun said, gesturing to the sod-house. “Will you join us?”

Frere-Jones snorted at being invited into her own house but nodded and followed Jun in. She was pleased to see Alexnya looking even better than yesterday and sitting at the dinner table eating oatmeal.

“I missed you, Fre,” Alexnya said. Frere-Jones suppressed her irritation at the nickname and sat down in the chair next to her family altar.

The stone altar bubbled and snapped, the red sands swarming angrily over the statues of her family. Miya and Tufte stared at the flowing sands as if mesmerized until Takeshi tapped the table beside them so they returned to eating their oatmeal.

“We have to keep an eye on them constantly so they don’t touch the altar,” Takeshi said. “Did your son try to play with it all the time?”

“Yes,” Frere-Jones snapped. “But he was the child of an anchor—touching the altar wouldn’t bring death on his family.”

Jun and Takeshi stared in shock at Frere-Jones, and Jun’s hand edged toward the laser pistol before Frere-Jones sighed. “I apologize. The grains are pushing me even now. It’s… hard, being around you with them screaming in my mind.”

“That’s the price of protecting our sacred land,” Alexnya said.

Frere-Jones tapped the vials of glowing medicine on the table before her. She knew Alexnya wasn’t trying to deliberately provoke her. She remembered how confused she’d felt when she’d come of age and the grains had activated within her, and how a similar confusion almost overwhelmed Haoquin when he’d married into her anchordom. The sooner Alexnya and her family returned to the road the better.

“It must have been difficult when your son became a day-fellow,” Jun said, trying to change the subject. “You’re fortunate one of our caravans was nearby to take him in before…” Jun paused.

“You can say it,” Frere-Jones muttered. “The grains would have forced me to kill my son if he’d stayed more than a few days after becoming a day-fellow. But luck had nothing to do with it. I timed Colton’s change so a caravan was here for him.”

Jun and Takeshi stared at Frere-Jones, who shrugged. She knew she shouldn’t tell such truths to people outside her family, but she no longer cared. The grains pounded inside her at the admitted heresy. She wanted to slam her head into the table to silence them.

“Haoquin died when Colton was only twelve,” Frere-Jones whispered. “My lifemate had grown up on another land. When he married into my anchordom and accepted my grains, the grains from that other land deactivated. But my grains eventually tired of the… unsettling thoughts Haoquin expressed. His ideas for changing the world. So they reactivated his original grains, causing him to need to live on two separate lands to stay healthy. His body almost tore itself apart. There was nothing I could do.”

Frere-Jones reached out and rubbed Haoquin’s statue on the altar. The grains felt her hate and slid away from her touch. “Haoquin dreamed of a world without grains. He knew that was merely a pipe dream—we both knew it—but the grains decided even a dream without their existence was too much to tolerate.”

Frere-Jones flicked at the red grains in the altar’s basin, wishing she could throw them all away where they’d never harm another person.

“The grains calculated they didn’t need Haoquin anymore since we’d already created a son,” Frere-Jones continued. “But I refused to let them have Colton too. I waited until a caravan was on my land then gave Colton a massive overdose of the medicine, almost more than his body could handle. He turned day-fellow and had to leave.

“The anchor system is evil. To decide that a select few can live in one place while everyone else is forced to continually move from land to land… death for any unlinked human who stays too long on a land or pollutes or harms that land… to force me to enact the grains’ arbitrary needs and desires… that’s nothing but evil.”

“But the grains saved the planet,” Alexnya said. “I can see some of the old anchors’ memories. How the land was nearly destroyed and overrun with people. I can taste the chemicals and hormones and technology. Trees cut down. People dying of blight. There were so many people. Too many for the land to support. Destroying everything they touched…”

Alexnya gasped and pushed away from the table, her chair falling backward as she tumbled across the ceramic tiles. She jumped up and ran for the bathroom, where she slammed the door shut.

Frere-Jones sighed as she stared into the shocked faces of the girl’s family. “She’ll be better once you’re on the road,” Frere-Jones said. “Keep giving her the medicine twice a day and the grains will soon be completely gone.”

“But the memories…” Jun began.

“So she’ll know why anchors protect their lands. Why those without grains are forced to continually move around.”

Takeshi hugged Miya and Tufte, who had jumped into his lap because of the tension in the room. “It’s different to be on the receiving end,” Takeshi said. “Do you know why our last caravan was destroyed? We were leaving a land a hundred leagues from here when the caravan master’s wagon broke an axle. Normally not a problem—most caravans leave early in case of issues like this. But it turned out our caravan master also was smuggling forbidden chemicals and hormones. When the axle broke it stabbed into one of his smuggling tanks and contaminated the land for ten yards on either side of the road.

“We tried cleaning the land. Our caravan master even took responsibility and offered his death for everyone else’s lives. But the grains didn’t care. You could feel their anger. The ground was almost shaking, the trees and plants whipping madly as if blown by an unknown wind. Then the anchors came—dozens of them, from lands all across the region. They attacked us all night before the grains finally allowed them to calm down. Our wagon was the only one they didn’t break into and massacre everyone.”

Frere-Jones nodded. If her land became even a slightly bit contaminated the grains would force her to do the same. She picked up the remaining vials of medicine. She held the vials over the altar to encode them with her grain’s programming before handing them to Takashi.

“Have her drink another dose then take the remaining vials with you,” she told him. “Jun and I will prepare your wagon. You’ll leave by noon.”

• • • •

Frere-Jones had spent decades watching day-fellow caravans, but she’d never prepared one of their wagons for travel. Harnessing the horses and securing the wagon’s cargo stirred memories of both her own life and those of the anchors who preceded her. How all of them had watched passing day-fellow caravans across thousands of years.

As a child she’d desperately wished she could travel like a day-fellow. See other lands beyond her own.

“Take the northern road through the forest,” Frere-Jones told Jun when the wagon and horses were ready. “That’s the safest route to avoid irritating the anchors on neighboring lands. Go north and you’ll be several lands away before dark.”

Jun nodded a silent thanks.

They were still waiting a half-hour later, with Frere-Jones growing increasingly irritated from the grains’ demands. “Come on Takashi,” she yelled.

“I’ll go get him,” Jun said, hurrying to the house.

When the family didn’t emerge a few minutes later, Frere-Jones cursed and smashed a powered hand into the side of the barn, breaking the inch-thick boards. She stomped into her own house—her house, on her land!—to discover glowing red medicine flowing among broken glass vials on her tile floor. Jun and Takashi stood beside the dinner table pleading with Alexnya but wouldn’t go near their daughter.

“Land’s shit!” Frere-Jones bellowed. Alexnya stood beside the stone altar, her hands immersed in the flowing red grains.

“She won’t let go of the altar,” Takashi said. “Should we yank her away?”

“No! Don’t touch the grains!” Frere-Jones accessed the grains inside her body, connecting through them with the grains in the altar and across her land. She prayed that Alexnya touching the altar hadn’t alerted any nearby anchors. She tasted the forests and plants and animals on her land, felt the nearby anchors going about their duties and work.

But no alarm. There had been no alarm raised. Which was impossible. That could only mean…

Frere-Jones screamed as she jumped forward and grabbed Alexnya. She threw the girl across the room, only at the last moment aiming for the sofa so she wouldn’t be hurt. Alexnya smashed into the cushions as Jun and Takashi grabbed their youngest kids and ran for the door, Jun again aimed the pistol at Frere-Jones.

Frere-Jones raised her hands as she bent over, panting and trying to stay in control. “Don’t shoot,” she yelled. “Kill me and your daughter will be stuck here.”

“What do you mean?” Jun asked.

“Your daughter should have set off the grains’ alarms, especially after taking that much medicine. But she didn’t. Why didn’t you, Alexnya?”

Alexnya stood up from the sofa, her eyes sparking red light, a growl escaping her snarling lips. For a moment Frere-Jones remembered herself at that age when the grains had first activated in her body. “The grains don’t like you,” Alexnya whispered. “They changed the altar’s coding so the medicine wouldn’t remove all of the grains from my body. They promised that if I didn’t tell you they’d let my family stay.”

“You can’t trust the grains,” Frere-Jones said. “No day-fellow is ever allowed to stay on a land for more than a few days. That won’t change no matter what the grains promise.”

Frere-Jones started to say more, but fell silent as she tasted an unsettling tinge in the grains. She felt Alexnya’s frustration at travelling from place to place, never settling down long enough to have a home. Frere-Jones also saw the attack which destroyed Alexnya’s last caravan. As the anchors shrieked and smashed on the outside of her family’s wagon, Alexnya swore she’d never go through this again. That one day she’d find a place to call home.

The grains, Frere-Jones realized, had found a willing partner in this young girl.

“I’m sorry,” Alexnya whispered, looking at her parents. “I want to live somewhere. I want a home. The grains said we could all stay.”

“The other anchors won’t let you be one of us,” Frere-Jones stated. “And even if they did, the grains will never let your family stay.”

“They promised.”

“They lied. The grains only want a new anchor to take my place. They’re incapable of caring for your family. They are programmed to protect this land, not to protect unlinked day-fellows without a grain in their bodies.”

Frere-Jones glanced again at the altar. She was missing something. If the grains hadn’t told her they’d changed the altar’s programming to negate the effects of Alexnya’s medicine, what else weren’t they telling her?

She heard a slight rapping on the kitchen window. Dozens of fairies buzzed outside the glass, their tiny hands tap tapping against the panes like angry snowflakes blowing on the wind.

Framed in the glass, surrounded by the fairies, was a red-tinted face.

Malachi, Chakatie’s oldest son.

Frere-Jones ran for the front door, but by the time she opened it Malachi was already running away, nearly gone from sight. She reached out to the grains, trying to power up her body so she could catch the boy, but the grains resisted her, not giving her anywhere near enough to catch him.

Instead, the grains rebutted her in flicks of angry memories. They had a new anchor. They didn’t have to obey her any more.

• • • •

A few weeks after their son had been born, Frere-Jones had woken to find Haoquin standing by the altar, rocking Colton back and forth in his arms in the grains’ red-haze light.

“You okay?” she asked sleepily.

“I was thinking about all the previous anchors who raised their kids in this house,” Haoquin said. “I bet many of them stood in this very spot and let the grains’ glow soothe their babies to sleep.”

Frere smiled. “You could ask the grains to share those memories. Sometimes they’ll do that, if you ask nicely.”

Haoquin snorted. “When I first became an anchor, that’s what scared me the most—that the grains spoke to us using memories. I mean, after I’m dead is that what they’ll do with my memory of this moment? Use everything I’m experiencing now—love, exhaustion, tenderness, caring—to tell some future anchor that this is how you calm a crying baby? Is that all my memories are good for?”

Frere-Jones hugged her lifemate. “Your memories mean more to me than that. Perhaps they’ll mean more to any future anchor who experiences them.”

“Maybe,” Haoquin said as he and Frere-Jones stared down at their son. “Maybe.”

But neither one of them had sounded convinced.

• • • •

The anchors came for Frere-Jones and the day-fellow family at midnight.

Frere-Jones had finally been able to power up her body after Alexnya ordered the grains to do so. The girl had still been torn, wanting to believe the grains would protect her family, but in the end her parents convinced her the grains would never protect day-fellows. “Have the grains shown you a memory,” Jun had said, “any memory across the land’s thousands of years where they protected a single day-fellow? If they do that, you can believe them. If not…”

When the grains hadn’t been able show such a memory, Alexnya broke down and cried. She ordered the grains to obey Frere-Jones.

Yet Frere-Jones knew even with her body completely powered up she couldn’t fight so many other anchors. She messaged them, saying the day-fellows would leave. The only response was laughter. She said she’d allow another anchor to be selected, if only the day-fellows were allowed to leave safely.

Again, more laughter.

Now, at midnight, the anchors were coming. They ran through the river mists. They ran across her new-plowed sunflower fields, their massive bodies and claws destroying the furrows and scattering soil and seed to the winds. They came from the road, giant feet pounding on the dirt packed by centuries of wagons. They came from the forests, knocking down trees and scattering deer and coyotes before them.

Frere-Jones sat on the sod roof of her home, the laser pistol in her hands. The grains showed her Haoquin’s memory of building the illegal weapon with parts acquired from day-fellow smugglers. How proud he’d been. His mother had said the grains wouldn’t like the pistol, but Haoquin merely laughed and said if he ever was forced to use the laser the displeasure of the grains would be the least of their worries.

As usual, Haoquin had been correct. Maybe that was why the grains had killed him.

“Here they come,” Frere-Jones yelled down the air vent into the house. Jun and Takeshi and Alexnya were inside, Jun holding the knives Frere-Jones had gifted them in case a final defense was needed.

Frere-Jones looked around her. She knew she should give the anchors a warning. She’d known these people all her life. They’d worked together. Had bonds stretching back a hundred generations.

Her land’s red fairies buzzed around her, the faces of her ancestors silently pleading with her not to do this. As long as she remained anchor the grains couldn’t warn the other anchors. But the grains were outraged at what she planned. A fairy with Haoquin’s face flew in front of her eyes, the tiny red body shaking side to side in a silent scream of “No!”

But she knew what the real Haoquin would want. On his last day, as he lay in their bed while the competing grains destroyed each other and his body, he’d told her not to be angry. “Life here was worth it,” he’d whispered in her ear as she leaned over him. “Too short, yes. But knowing you made it worthwhile.”

Why had the grains waited so long to share his memories with her? If they’d done so years before, maybe she wouldn’t have been so angry. Maybe she wouldn’t have forced her son into exile from the only land and family he’d known.

Frere-Jones tapped the cord connecting the pistol to her farm’s power grid. She aimed at the anchors running toward her. She hated the grains. Hated every memory they spoke.

Burn them all.

The laser lit the land green, the light dazzling through the river mists. The first row of anchors in the sunflower fields flashed and burned, bodies screaming and stenching like spoiled meat over bad flames. Howls of outrage rose from the remaining anchors, who split up to make less obvious targets, but they all still burned bright in Frere-Jones’s enhanced vision. She shot two next to the barn, where she heard the day-fellows’ horses whinnying in fright. She shot three others on the dirt road. She split one massive anchor in two right before the oak tree in front of her house, the laser also severing the tree’s trunk.

She shot every anchor who came near her home. And when the remaining anchors broke ranks and fled, she detached the laser from her power grid and chased after them, using the remaining charge to sear every one of them into char for the coyotes and wolves to feast on.

“Share this memory with the land’s future anchors,” she told the red fairies as they stared at her in shock. “Share this memory with the whole damn world.”

• • • •

“The laser is potential,” Haoquin had told Frere-Jones the night they were married. They lay in bed after making love awkwardly, then excitedly. Afterward, Frere-Jones couldn’t help looking at the pistol on the bedside table.

“Potential for what?” she asked.

“To upset the grains. To force them to experience something they’ve never before considered.”

“So you’d burn the land?”

“That would merely set off the grains’ anger. No, I’d burn any anchor who tried to harm you or me.”

“Then you’d have even more anchors attacking.” Frere-Jones had heard stories of day-fellows who’d tried defending themselves with lasers. Eventually the anchors overwhelmed them through sheer numbers.

“Yes, we can’t defeat the anchors. There are too many of them, tied to millions of lands around the world. But what if we could use the threat of killing so many anchors to make the grains change?”

“We can’t change the grains’ programming,” Frere-Jones whispered. “That’s beyond us.”

“But what if we could change the memories they spoke with?”

“What good would that do?”

“If this land only spoke through certain memories—say yours and mine—the grains would be forced to say very different things than if they spoke through the memories of anchors who’d supported their damn work. Over time, it might change everything.”

Frere-Jones smiled at that possibility. “So you’d really kill, or threaten to kill, hundreds of anchors merely to force the grains to delete the memories they’ve stored over the centuries?”

Haoquin sighed. “You’re right. I couldn’t do that. I guess it’s a bad idea.”

Frere-Jones had kissed Haoquin, glad he wasn’t someone who would do such evil in a silly, misguided attempt to change the world.

• • • •

An hour before morning’s song of light and warmth, Chakatie arrived. Frere-Jones sat on the sod roof of her home, the laser pistol in her lap, the smoldering corpses of the other anchors glowing in her land’s fields and forests.

She scented Chakatie ten minutes before her mother-in-law walked up to the house. Chakatie had deliberately come from upwind so Frere-Jones would catch the scent. She wasn’t surprised by Chakatie’s arrival. After killing the anchors Frere-Jones realized she hadn’t seen or scented any member of Chakatie’s family during the attack.

Chakatie looked nothing like the powerful being she’d been the other night in the forest. She was powered down and tiny and wore a neatly pressed three-piece suit and bowler hat. Instead of claws her hands were manicured and folded over themselves at her waist, as if to show she meant no harm.

Frere-Jones snorted and patted the grass on the roof. “You’re welcome to join me, but that suit doesn’t look like it’s made for sitting on a sod roof.”

“It’s not.” Chakatie jumped up to the other side of the roof. She grinned nervously as Frere-Jones shifted the pistol slightly so it pointed at Chakatie’s chest. “My children made me wear this. Said it’d show you I meant no harm since no one in their right mind would fight while wearing such fancy clothes.” Chakatie laughed softly. “I think they’re worried about you killing me.”

Frere-Jones wanted to laugh, which was likely Chakatie’s other intent in wearing the suit. Perhaps to catch her off-guard. “And did Malachi also suggest you wear it? Perhaps after he spied on me?”

Chakatie spat. “Malachi did that on his own. I sincerely apologize. To spy on another anchor… any punishment you wish against him will be given.”

Frere-Jones didn’t believe her mother-in-law but accepted the lie as Chakatie’s round-about means of apology. “And my punishment for killing dozens of anchors?”

“Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?”

Chakatie sat down on the roof, running her fingers through the grass. “Is the girl in the house?” she asked. “The day-fellow anchor?”

“Yes. The grains lied to her. Said her family would be able to stay if she became the new anchor.”

“That’s why it’s difficult for someone who grew up without the grains to become an anchor. You and I, we know the grains’ memories don’t always tell us the truth. We sort the memories the grains show us. Sift the wheat from the chaff. Your day-fellow girl doesn’t know this.”

“She will after today. I doubt she’ll ever again trust the grains after witnessing this massacre.”

“Then she might end up making a good anchor.”

Chakatie stretched out on the sod roof, laying on her back as she looked across the sunflower fields. “No anchor with any sense loves the grains. But most anchors also have the sense not to challenge them directly.”

“Too late for that. Now what?”

“The grains demand vengeance. You’ve upset their programmed order.”

“How about I simply burn you first?” Frere-Jones said.

“Your choice. My family would, of course, attack. And can you sense the other anchors on their way here from distant lands? The more you kill the more who will come.”

Frere-Jones sighed and pointed the laser pistol at the grass. “Funny how your family didn’t join in the attack.”

“Nothing funny about it. I raised my son, after all. He told me all about his little plans when he was younger. I knew he’d never carry out such evil. That’s why I let him build the laser pistol—it satisfied him, and I knew he’d never use it. But you… I suppose I should have seen this coming.”

Frere-Jones shrugged.

“You know, the grains wanted me to kill Haoquin when he was young, because of his dangerous ideas,” Chakatie said. “But I refused to do it. Despite what you may believe, we anchors can still ignore some of the grains’ programmed demands.”

Frere-Jones knew Chakatie was playing her. Her mother-in-law had probably known exactly what she was doing when she gave Frere-Jones the medicine for Alexnya. With so many anchors killed, Chakatie’s children would be able to go to those lands and become master-anchors in their own right.

“I can still kill a lot more anchors, including you, before I’m taken down,” Frere-Jones said. “What do you propose to avoid that?”

“Right now you have leverage with the grains,” Chakatie said. “They don’t want you to kill hundreds of new anchors when they arrive here. So offer them a bargain. Let the day-fellow girl become this land’s new anchor. The remaining anchors in the area—meaning my family—won’t oppose her.”

Frere-Jones looked at her hands. The pistol could easily cut Chakatie in two, but she really didn’t want to kill her mother-in-law. “What do I get out of that?”

“Haoquin had some interesting ideas about the grains’ use of memories. This might be your only chance to see if what he said could come true.”

• • • •

The day Haoquin died, Frere-Jones and Colton had stood side by side in the cemetery as Chakatie and the other anchors shoveled dirt onto her lifemate’s body.

Frere-Jones could still feel the grains in Haoquin’s body. Worse, she could feel them already working to isolate many of Haoquin’s memories. The grains didn’t want his heretical beliefs contaminating the land, so they were locking those memories away. They would never share those memories with anyone, most of all her.

Frere-Jones hugged her son tight. She knew the grains would do the same to her memories when she died. But if she had her way, they’d not be able to use her son. She’d free him one way or another.

And then, maybe, she’d see if Haoquin’s plan could work. The plan he’d been too kindly to actually put into action.

• • • •

They stood in the cemetery where Haoquin and the other anchors of this land were buried. Alexnya and her family stood on one side of the graves while Chakatie stood on the other. The rest of Chakatie’s family patrolled the boundaries of Frere-Jones’s land, keeping away the other anchors until this ceremony was completed.

Frere-Jones reached out to her land’s grains, the laser pistol still in her right hand. The grains shivered and shook, resonating in shock at both what Frere-Jones had done and the dead anchors she’d killed.

Frere-Jones, detaching herself from the grains, walked over to Alexnya and her family. “Good luck to you,” she told Alexnya. “You can trust Chakatie’s advice. I suggest you listen to her.”

Alexnya looked overwhelmed, as if just realizing the life she’d stumbled into. Her family could stay only a few more days before they’d have to travel on. But aside from suggesting Alexnya trust Chakatie, there was no other advice Frere-Jones could give. Alexnya would have to sort through the lands’ memories on her own and determine which, if any, could be trusted.

Frere-Jones laughed to herself, knowing whose memories Alexnya would soon be experiencing.

“How can you say our daughter should trust that… woman?” Jun asked, outrage almost pouring out of her lips as she glared at Chakatie. “From what you’ve told me, she caused all this.”

“Chakatie didn’t trap your daughter,” Frere-Jones said. “If anyone did, it was me, by being so stubborn that the grains sought out a new anchor.”

“But she took advantage of all this. She played everyone. She…”

“Must I really listen to this right before I die?” Frere-Jones asked.

Jun fell silent. She bowed slightly in a mix of respect and mocking.

After speaking with Chakatie and asking her mother-in-law to pass a final message to Colton, Frere-Jones reached out to hold Alexnya’s hand. Together they accessed the grains.

“Do as we’ve agreed,” Frere-Jones told the grains. “Chakatie will ensure I hold up my end.”

“Do it,” Alexnya ordered, added her voice as the land’s new anchor.

The grains screamed but, unable to see any other option, complied. Across the land they deleted the memories of every anchor who’d lived before Frere-Jones. The memories flared and shrieked, as if begging Frere-Jones and Alexnya to save them. Then they were gone.

Except for Haoquin’s. Frere-Jones dropped the laser pistol and fell to her knees as Haoquin’s memories flooded into her. All the memories the grains had copied from his life. All of him.

So many memories. Memories of everything Haoquin had felt and seen and thought and experienced worked their way into Frere-Jones’s being. Her mind could barely contain all of him.

As Frere-Jones shook and spasmed on the cold ground, she looked across the new-spring grass. She could taste the grass. Could feel it growing and reaching for the sun.

Haoquin was within her. They now shared one life.

“I missed you Fre,” Haoquin whispered. Or maybe Frere-Jones said it to herself. Either way, she smiled.

“Life here was worth it,” they whispered to each other. “Too short, yes. But knowing you made it worthwhile.”

Frere-Jones and Haoquin saw Chakatie walk up to their body and pick up the laser pistol. Chakatie wiped at her eyes as she nodded, then she shot them in the head.

• • • •

Alexnya stands silently over Frere-Jones’s burned body. The grains are still convulsing, still in chaos, but Frere-Jones’s death has calmed them.

Chakatie holds the laser pistol in both hands. Alexnya feels Chakatie’s grains powering up her body. A moment later powerful claws rip apart the pistol.

Chakatie throws the broken technology to the ground in disgust. “Your mother is right, you know,” she says. “I did manipulate all this. I knew Frere-Jones and my son would cause sparks. But I didn’t know all this would happen. I swear on the grains I didn’t know.”

Alexnya isn’t sure if she can trust Chakatie. Frere-Jones said to trust the anchor, but how can she truly know?

Yet Alexnya also understands that once her parents are forced to resume their travels, Chakatie and her family will be the only one for hundreds of leagues around who might support her.

Alexnya wants to scream at this situation. To curse at not knowing what to do. But before she does, she feels a gentle caress in her mind. She tastes memories—memories from Frere-Jones and Haoquin. She sees all the good things Chakatie has done. How Chakatie once cried over a family like hers.

“I think I’ll trust you,” Alexnya finally says. “Did you really… cry over a day-fellow family once?”

Chakatie nods, then waves for Alexnya’s parents to follow her to the sod-house to prepare an evening meal for everyone.

Alexnya stays behind and digs the grave for Frere-Jones’s body, the grains powering up her body so the shovel digs faster and deeper than she ever could have done before. She places Frere-Jones in the hole and covers her with fresh soil.

As Alexnya stands over the grave, she feels the grains churning in Frere-Jones’s body. Feels the grains already beginning to spread the memories of Frere-Jones and Haoquin across the land.

“Thank you, Fre,” Alexnya says, bowing to the grave. She then runs to the sod-house to spend time with her family before they’re forced to flee.

Jason Sanford is a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award and has published more than a dozen stories in the British SF magazine Interzone, which also devoted a special issue to his fiction. In addition he has published numerous stories in magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other places, along with appearances in multiple “year’s best” anthologies and other collections. His fiction has been translated into nearly a dozen languages including Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, and Czech. Jason’s website is www.jasonsanford.com.

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea
By Sarah Pinsker

The rock star washed ashore at high tide. Earlier in the day, Bay had seen something bobbing far out in the water. Remnant of a rowboat, perhaps, or something better. She waited until the tide ebbed, checked her traps and tidal pools among the rocks before walking toward the inlet where debris usually beached.

All kinds of things washed up if Bay waited long enough: not just glass and plastic, but personal trainers and croupiers, entertainment directors and dance teachers. This was the first time Bay recognized the face of the new arrival. She always checked the face first if there was one, just in case, hoping it wasn’t Deb.

The rock star had an entire lifeboat to herself, complete with motor, though she’d used up the gas. She’d made it in better shape than many; certainly in better shape than those with flotation vests but no boats. They arrived in tatters of uniform. Armless, legless, sometimes headless; ragged shark refuse.

“What was that one?” Deb would have asked, if she were there. She’d never paid attention to physical details, wouldn’t have recognized a dancer’s legs, a chef’s scarred hands and arms.

“Nothing anymore,” Bay would say of a bad one, putting it on her sled.

The rock star still had all her limbs. She had stayed in the boat. She’d found the stashed water and nutrition bars, easy to tell by the wrappers and bottles strewn around her. From her bloated belly and cracked lips, Bay guessed she had run out a day or two before, maybe tried drinking ocean water. Sunburn glowed through her dark skin. She was still alive.

Deb wasn’t there; she couldn’t ask questions. If she had been, Bay would have shown her the calloused fingers of the woman’s left hand and the thumb of her right.

“How do you know she came off the ships?” Deb would have asked. She’d been skeptical that the ships even existed, couldn’t believe that so many people would just pack up and leave their lives. The only proof Bay could have given was these derelict bodies.

• • • •

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: A scavenger woman dragged me from the ocean, pumped water from my lungs, spoke air into me. The old films they show on the ships would call that moment romantic, but it wasn’t. I gagged. Only barely managed to roll over to retch in the sand.

She didn’t know what a rock star was. It was only when I washed in half-dead, choking seawater that she learned there were such things in the world. Our first attempts at conversation didn’t go well. We had no language in common. But I warmed my hands by her fire, and when I saw an instrument hanging on its peg, I tuned it and began to play. That was the first language we spoke between us.

• • • •

A truth: I don’t remember anything between falling off the ship and washing up in this place.

There’s a lie embedded in that truth.

Maybe a couple of them.

Another lie I’ve already told: We did have language in common, the scavenger woman and me.

She did put me on her sled, did take me back to her stone-walled cottage on the cliff above the beach. I warmed myself by her woodstove. She didn’t offer me a blanket or anything to replace the thin stage clothes I still wore, so I wrapped my own arms around me and drew my knees in tight, and sat close enough to the stove’s open belly that sparks hit me when the logs collapsed inward.

She heated a small pot of soup on the stovetop and poured it into a single bowl without laying a second one out for me. My stomach growled. I didn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I eyed her, eyed the bowl, eyed the pot.

“If you’re thinking about whether you could knock me out with the pot and take my food, it’s a bad idea. You’re taller than me, but you’re weaker than you think, and I’m stronger than I look.”

“I wouldn’t! I was just wondering if maybe you’d let me scrape whatever’s left from the pot. Please.”

She nodded after a moment. I stood over the stove and ate the few mouthfuls she had left me from the wooden stirring spoon. I tasted potatoes and seaweed, salt and land and ocean. It burned my throat going down; heated from the inside, I felt almost warm.

I looked around the room for the first time. An oar with “Home Sweet Home” burnt into it adorned the wall behind the stove. Some chipped dishes on an upturned plastic milk crate, a wall stacked high with home-canned food, clothing on pegs. A slightly warped-looking classical guitar hung on another peg by a leather strap; if I’d had any strength I’d have gone to investigate it. A double bed piled with blankets. Beside the bed, a nightstand with a framed photo of two women on a hiking trail, and a tall stack of paperback books. I had an urge to walk over and read the titles; my father used to say you could judge a person by the books on their shelves. A stronger urge to dive under the covers on the bed, but I resisted and settled back onto the ground near the stove. My energy went into shivering.

I kept my eyes on the stove, as if I could direct more heat to me with enough concentration. The woman puttered around her cabin. She might have been any age between forty and sixty; her movement was easy, but her skin was weathered and lined, her black hair streaked with gray. After a while, she climbed into bed and turned her back to me. Another moment passed before I realized she intended to leave me there for the night.

“Please, before you go to sleep. Don’t let it go out,” I said. “The fire.”

She didn’t turn. “Can’t keep it going forever. Fuel has to last all winter.”

“It’s winter?” I’d lost track of seasons on the ship. The scavenger woman wore two layers, a ragged jeans jacket over a hooded sweatshirt.

“Will be soon enough.”

“I’ll freeze to death without a fire. Can I pay you to keep it going?”

“What do you have to pay me with?”

“I have an account on the Hollywood Line. A big one.” As I said that, I realized I shouldn’t have. On multiple levels. Didn’t matter if it sounded like a brag or desperation. I was at her mercy, and it wasn’t in my interest to come across as if I thought I was any better than her.

She rolled over. “Your money doesn’t count for anything off your ships and islands. Nor credit. If you’ve got paper money, I’m happy to throw it in to keep the fire going a little longer.”

I didn’t. “I can work it off.”

“There’s nothing you can work off. Fuel is in finite supply. I use it now, I don’t get more, I freeze two months down the line.”

“Why did you save me if you’re going to let me die?”

“Pulling you from the water made sense. It’s your business now whether you live or not.”

“Can I borrow something warmer to wear at least? Or a blanket?” I sounded whiny even to my own ears.

She sighed, climbed out of bed, rummaged in a corner, and pulled out a down vest. It had a tear in the back where some stuffing had spilled out, and smelled like brine. I put it on, trying not to scream when the fabric touched my sunburned arms.

“Thank you. I’m truly grateful.”

She grunted a response and retreated to her bed again. I tucked my elbows into the vest, my hands into my armpits. It helped a little, though I still shivered. I waited a few minutes, then spoke again. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but it kept me warm. Reassured me that I was still here. Awake, alive.

“If I didn’t say so already, thank you for pulling me out of the water. My name is Gabby.”

“Fitting.”

“Are you going to ask me how I ended up in the water?”

“None of my business.”

Just as well. Anything I told her would’ve been made up.

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“I do, but I don’t see much point in sharing it with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m going to kill you if you don’t shut up and let me sleep.”

I shut up.

• • • •

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: I remember getting drunk during a set on the Elizabeth Taylor. Making out with a bartender in the lifeboat, since neither of us had private bunks. I must have passed out there. I don’t know how it ended up adrift.

• • • •

I survived the night on the floor but woke with a cough building deep in my chest. At least I didn’t have to sing. I followed the scavenger as she went about her morning, like a dog hoping for scraps. Outside, a large picked-over garden spread around two sides of the cottage. The few green plants grew low and ragged. Root vegetables, maybe.

“If you have to piss, there’s an outhouse over there,” she said, motioning toward a stand of twisted trees.

We made our way down the footpath from her cottage to the beach, a series of switchbacks trod into the cliffside. I was amazed she had managed to tow me up such an incline. Then again, if I’d rolled off the sled and fallen to my death, she probably would’ve scraped me out of my clothes and left my body to be picked clean by gulls.

“Where are we?” I had managed not to say anything since waking up, not a word since her threat the night before, so I hoped the statute of limitations had expired.

“Forty kilometers from the nearest city, last I checked.”

Better than nothing. “When was that?”

“When I walked here.”

“And that was?”

“A while ago.”

It must have been, given the lived in look of her cabin and garden. “What city?”

“Portage.”

“Portage what?”

“Portage. Population I don’t know. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t make it any less a city.” She glanced back at me like I was stupid.

“I mean, what state? Or what country? I don’t even know what country this is.”

She snorted. “How long were you on that ship?”

“A long time. I didn’t really pay attention.”

“Too rich to care.”

“No! It’s not what you think.” I didn’t know why it mattered what she thought of me, but it did. “I wasn’t on the ship because I’m rich. I’m an entertainer. I share a staff bunk with five other people.”

“You told me last night you were rich.”

I paused to hack and spit over the cliff’s edge. “I have money, it’s true. But not enough to matter. I’ll never be rich enough to be a passenger instead of entertainment. I’ll never even afford a private stateroom. So I spend a little and let the rest build up in my account.”

Talking made me cough more. I was thirsty, too, but waited to be offered something to drink.

“What’s your name?” I knew I should shut up, but the more uncomfortable I am, the more I talk.

She didn’t answer for a minute, so by the time she did, I wasn’t even sure if it was the answer to my question at all. “Bay.”

“That’s your name? It’s lovely. Unusual.”

“How would you know? You don’t even know what country this is. Who are you to say what’s unusual here?”

“Good point. Sorry.”

“You’re lucky we even speak the same language.”

“Very.”

She pointed at a trickle of water that cut a small path down the cliff wall. “Cup your hands there. It’s potable.”

“A spring?”

She gave me a look.

“Sorry. Thank you.” I did as she said. The water was cold and clear. If there was some bacterium in it that was going to kill me, at least I wouldn’t die thirsty.

I showed my gratitude through silence and concentrated on the descent. The path was narrow, just wide enough for the sled she pulled, and the edge crumbled away to nothing. I put my feet where she put hers, squared my shoulders as she did. She drew her sweatshirt hood over her head, another discouragement to conversation.

We made it all the way down to the beach without another question busting through my chapped lips. She left the sled at the foot of the cliff and picked up a blue plastic cooler from behind a rock, the kind with cup holders built into the top. She looked in and frowned, then dumped the whole thing on the rocks. A cascade of water, two small dead fish. I realized those had probably been meant to be her dinner the day before; she had chosen to haul me up the cliff instead.

This section of beach was all broken rock, dotted everywhere with barnacles and snails and seashells. The rocks were wet and slick, the footing treacherous. I fell to my hands several times, slicing them on the tiny snails. Could you catch anything from a snail cut? At least the ship could still get us antibiotics.

“What are we doing?” I asked. “Surely the most interesting things wash out closer to the actual water.”

She kept walking, watching where she stepped. She didn’t fall. The rusted hull of an old ship jutted from the rocks down into the ocean; I imagined anything inside had long since been picked over. We clambered around it. I fell further behind her, trying to be more careful with my bleeding palms. All that rust, no more tetanus shots.

She slowed, squatted. Peered and poked at something by her feet. As I neared her, I understood. Tidal pools. She dipped the cooler into one, smiled to herself. I was selfishly glad to see the smile. Perhaps she’d be friendlier now.

Instead of following, I took a different path from hers. Peered into other pools. Some tiny fish in the first two, not worth catching, nothing in the third. In the fourth, I found a large crab.

“Bay,” I called.

She turned around, annoyance plain on her face. I waved the crab and her expression softened. “Good for you. You get to eat tonight too, with a nice find like that.”

She waited for me to catch up with her and put the crab in her cooler with the one decent-sized fish she had found.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A fish. What does it matter what kind?”

“I used to cook. I’m pretty good with fish, but I don’t recognize that one. Different fish taste better with different preparations.”

“You’re welcome to do the cooking if you’d like, but if you need lemon butter and capers, you may want to check the pools closer to the end of the rainbow.” She pointed down the beach, then laughed at her own joke.

“I’m only trying to be helpful. You don’t need to mock me.”

“No, I suppose I don’t. You found a crab, so you’re not entirely useless.”

That was the closest thing to a compliment I supposed I’d get. At least she was speaking to me like a person, not debris that had shown an unfortunate tendency toward speech.

That evening, I pan-fried our catch on the stovetop with a little bit of sea salt. The fish was oily and tasteless, but the crab was good. My hands smelled like fish and ocean and I wished for running water to wash them off. Tried to replace that smell with wood smoke.

After dinner, I looked over at her wall.

“May I?” I asked, pointing at the guitar.

She shrugged. “Dinner and entertainment—I fished the right person out of the sea. Be my guest.”

It was an old classical guitar, parlor sized, nylon-stringed. That was the first blessing, since steel strings would surely have corroded in this air. I had no pure pitch to tune to, so had to settle on tuning the strings relative to each other, all relative to the third string because its tuning peg was cracked and useless. Sent up a silent prayer that none of the strings broke, since I was fairly sure Bay would blame me for anything that went wrong in my presence. The result sounded sour, but passable.

“What music do you like?” I asked her.

“Now or then?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Then: anything political. Hip-hop, mostly.”

I looked down at the little guitar, wondered how to coax hip-hop out of it. “What about now?”

“Now? Anything you play will be the first music I’ve heard other than my own awful singing in half a dozen years. Play away.”

I nodded and looked at the guitar, waiting for it to tell me what it wanted. Fought back my strange sudden shyness. Funny how playing for thousands of people didn’t bother me, but I could find myself self-conscious in front of one. “Guitar isn’t my instrument, by the way.”

“Close enough. You’re a bassist.”

I looked up, surprised. “How do you know?”

“I’m not stupid. I know who you are.”

“Why did you ask my name, then?”

“I didn’t. You told it to me.”

“Oh, yeah.” I was glad I hadn’t lied about that particular detail.

“Let’s have the concert, then.”

I played her a few songs, stuff I never played on the ship.

“Where’d the guitar come from?” I asked when I was done.

An unreadable expression crossed her face. “Where else? It washed up.”

I let my fingers keep exploring the neck of the guitar, but turned to her. “So is this what you do full time? Pull stuff from the beach?”

“Pretty much.”

“Can you survive on that?”

“The bonuses for finding some stuff can be pretty substantial.”

“What stuff?”

“Foil. Plastic. People.”

“People?”

“People who’ve lost their ships.”

“You’re talking about me?”

“You, others. The ships don’t like to lose people, and the people don’t like to be separated from their ships. It’s a nice change to be able to return someone living for once. I’m sure you’ll be happy to get back to where you belong.”

“Yes, thank you. How do you alert them?”

“I’ve got call buttons for the three big shiplines. They send ’copters.”

I knew those copters. Sleek, repurposed military machines.

I played for a while longer, so stopping wouldn’t seem abrupt, then hung the guitar back on its peg. It kept falling out of tune anyway.

I waited until Bay was asleep before I left, though it took all my willpower not to take off running the second she mentioned the helicopters. I had nothing to pack, so I curled up by the cooling stove and waited for her breathing to slow. I would never have taken her food or clothing—other than the vest—but I grabbed the guitar from its peg on my way out the door. She wouldn’t miss it. The door squealed on its hinges, and I held my breath as I slipped through and closed it behind me.

The clifftop was bright with stars. I scanned the sky for helicopters. Nothing but stars and stars and stars. The ship’s lights made it so we barely saw stars at all, a reassurance for all of us from the cities.

I walked with my back to the cliff. The moon gave enough light to reassure me I wasn’t about to step off into nothingness if the coastline cut in, but I figured the farther I got from the ocean, the more likely I was to run into trees. Or maybe an abandoned house, if I got lucky. Someplace they wouldn’t spot me if they swept overland.

Any hope I had for stealth, I abandoned as I trudged onward. I found an old tar road and decided it had to lead toward something. I walked. The cough that had been building in my chest through the day racked me now.

The farther I went, the more I began to doubt Bay’s story. Would the ships bother to send anyone? I was popular enough, but was I worth the fuel it took to come get me? If they thought I had fallen, maybe. If they knew I had lowered the lifeboat deliberately, that I might do it again? Doubtful. Unless they wanted to punish me, or charge me for the boat, though if they docked my account now, I’d never know. And how would Bay have contacted them? She’d said they were in contact, but unless she had a solar charger—well, that seemed possible, actually.

Still, she obviously wanted me gone or she wouldn’t have said it. Or was she testing my reaction? Waiting to see if I cheered the news of my rescue?

I wondered what else she had lied about. I hoped I was walking toward the city she had mentioned. I was a fool to think I’d make it to safety anywhere. I had no water, no food, no money. Those words formed a marching song for my feet, syncopated by my cough. No water. No food. No money. No luck.

• • • •

Bay set out at first light, the moment she realized the guitar had left with the stupid rock star. It wasn’t hard to figure out which way she had gone. She was feverish, stupid with the stupidity of someone still used to having things appear when she wanted them. If she really expected to survive, she should have taken more from Bay. Food. A canteen. A hat. Something to trade when she got to the city. It said something good about her character, Bay supposed, down below the blind privilege of her position. If she hadn’t taken Debra’s guitar, Bay’s opinion might have been even more favorable.

• • • •

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: My last night on the ship was just like three thousand nights before, up until it wasn’t. We played two sets, mostly my stuff, with requests mixed in. Some cokehead in a Hawaiian shirt offered us a thousand credits each to play “My Heart Will Go On” for his lady.

“I’ll give you ten thousand credits myself if you don’t make us do this,” Sheila said when we all leaned in over her kit to consult on whether we could fake our way through it. “That’s the one song I promised myself I would never play here.”

“What about all the Jimmy Buffet we’ve had to play?” our guitarist, Kel, asked her. “We’ve prostituted ourselves already. What difference does it make at this point?”

Sheila ignored Kel. “Dignity, Gab. Please.”

I was tired and more than a little drunk. “What does it matter? Let’s just play the song. You can mess with the tempo if you want. Swing it, maybe? Ironic cheesy lounge style? In C, since I can’t hit those diva notes?”

Sheila looked like she was going to weep as she counted off.

I ran into Hawaiian Shirt and his lady again after the set, when I stepped out on the Oprah deck for air. They were over near the gun turrets, doing the “King of the World” thing, a move that should have been outlawed before anyone got on the ship.

“You know who that is, right?” I looked over to see JP, this bartender I liked: sexy retro-Afro, sexy swimmer’s build. It had been a while since we’d hooked up. JP held out a joint.

I took it and said he looked familiar.

“He used to have one of those talk radio shows. He was the first one to suggest the ships, only his idea was religious folks, not just general rich folks. Leave the sinners behind, he said. Founded the Ark line, where all those fundamentalists spend their savings waiting for the sinners to be washed away so they can take the land back. He spent the first two years with them, then announced he was going to go on a pilgrimage to find out what was happening everywhere else. Only, instead of traveling the land like a proper pilgrim, he came on board this ship. He’s been here ever since. First time I’ve seen him at one of your shows, though. I guess he’s throwing himself into his new lifestyle.”

“Ugh. I remember him now. He boycotted my second album. At least they look happy?”

“Yeah, except that isn’t his wife. His wife and kids are still on the Ark waiting for him. Some pilgrim.”

The King of the World and his not-wife sauntered off. When the joint was finished, JP melted away as well, leaving me alone with my thoughts until some drunk kids wandered over with a magnum of champagne. I climbed over the railing into the lifeboat to get a moment alone. I could almost pretend the voices were gulls. Listened to the engine’s thrum through the hull, the waves lapping far below.

Everyone who wasn’t a paying guest—entertainers and staff—had been trained on how to release the lifeboats, and I found myself playing with the controls. How hard would it be to drop it into the water? We couldn’t be that far from some shore somewhere. The lifeboats were all equipped with stores of food and water, enough for a handful of people for a few days.

Whatever had been in my last drink must have been some form of liquid stupid. The boat was lowered now, whacking against the side of the enormous ship, and I had to smash the last tie just to keep from being wrecked against it. And then the ship was pulling away, ridiculous and huge, a foolish attempt to save something that had never been worth saving.

I wished I had kissed JP one more time, seeing as how I was probably going to die.

• • • •

Gabby hadn’t gotten far at all. By luck, she had found the road in the dark, and by luck had walked in the right direction, but she was lying in the dirt like roadkill now. Bay checked that Deb’s guitar hadn’t been hurt, then watched for a moment to see if the woman was breathing, which she was, ragged but steady, her forehead hot enough to melt butter, some combination of sunburn and fever.

The woman stirred. “Are you real?” she asked.

“More real than you are,” Bay told her.

“I should have kissed JP.”

“Seems likely.” Bay offered a glass jar of water. “Drink this.”

Gabby drank half. “Thank you.”

Bay waved it away when the other woman tried to hand it back. “I’m not putting my lips to that again while you’re coughing your lungs out. It’s yours.”

“Thank you again.” Gabby held out the guitar. “You probably came for this?”

“You carried it this far, you can keep carrying it. Me, I would have brought the case.”

“It had a case?”

“Under the bed. I keep clothes in it.”

“I guess at least now you know I didn’t go through your things?”

Bay snorted. “Obviously. You’re a pretty terrible thief.”

“In my defense, I’m not a thief.”

“My guitar says otherwise.”

Gabby put the guitar on the ground. She struggled to her feet and stood for a wobbly moment before leaning down to pick it up. She looked one way, then the other, as if she couldn’t remember where she had come from or where she was going. Bay refrained from gesturing in the right direction. She picked the right way. Bay followed.

“Are you going to ask me why I left?” Even this sick, with all her effort going into putting one foot in front of the other, the rock star couldn’t stop talking.

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve met you before.”

“For real? Before the ships?” Gabby looked surprised.

Bay shook her head. “No. Your type. You think you’re the first one to wash ashore? To step away from that approximation of life? You’re just the first one who made it alive.”

“If you don’t like the ships, why did you call them to come get me?” Gabby paused. “Or you didn’t. You just wanted me to leave. Why?”

“I can barely feed myself. And you aren’t the type to be satisfied with that life anyhow. Might as well leave now as later.”

“Except I’m probably going to die of this fever because I walked all night in the cold, you psychopath.”

Bay shrugged. “That was your choice.”

They walked in silence for a while. The rock star was either contemplating her choices or too sick to talk.

“Why?” Bay asked, taking pity.

Gabby whipped her head around. “Why what?”

“Why did you sign up for the ship?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Sounds like an epitaph fitting for half the people in this world.”

Gabby gave a half smile, then continued. “New York was a mess, and the Gulf states had just tried to secede. The bookers for the Hollywood Line made a persuasive argument for a glamorous life at sea. Everything was so well planned, too. They bought entire island nations to provide food and fuel.”

“I’m sure the island nations appreciated that,” said Bay.

The other woman gave a wry smile. “I know, right? Fucked up. But they offered good money, and it was obvious no bands would be touring the country for a while.

“At first it was just like any other tour. We played our own stuff. There were women to sleep with, drugs if we wanted them, restaurants and clubs and gyms. All the good parts of touring without the actual travel part. Sleeping in the same bed every night, even if it was still a bunk with my band, like on the bus. But then it didn’t stop, and then they started making us take requests, and it started closing in, you know? If there was somebody you wanted to avoid, you couldn’t. It was hard to find anyplace to be alone to write or think.

“Then the internet went off completely. We didn’t get news from land at all, even when we docked on the islands. They stopped letting us off when we docked. Management said things had gotten real bad here, that there was for real nothing to come back to anymore. The passengers all walked around like they didn’t care, like a closed system, and the world was so fucking far away. How was I supposed to write anything when the world was so far away? The entire world might’ve drowned, and we’d just float around oblivious until we ran out of something that wasn’t even important to begin with. Somebody would freak out because there was no more mascara or ecstasy or rosemary, and then all those beautiful people would turn on each other.”

“So that’s why you jumped?”

Gabby rubbed her head. “Sort of. I guess that also seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“What about now?”

“I could’ve done with a massage when I woke up today, but I’m still alive.”

Bay snorted. “You wouldn’t have lasted two seconds in a massage with that sunburn.”

Gabby looked down at her forearms and winced.

They walked. Gabby was sweating, her eyes bright. Bay slowed her own pace, in an effort to slow the other woman down. “Where are you hurrying to, now that I’ve told you there’s nobody coming after you?”

“You said there was a city out here somewhere. I want to get there before I have to sleep another night on this road. And before I starve.”

Bay reached into a jacket pocket. She pulled out a protein bar and offered it to Gabby.

“Where’d you get that? It looks like the ones I ate in the lifeboat.”

“It is.”

Gabby groaned. “I didn’t have to starve those last two days? I could’ve sworn I looked every place.”

“You missed a stash inside the radio console.”

“Huh.”

They kept walking, footsteps punctuated by Gabby’s ragged breath.

“We used to drive out here to picnic on the cliff when my wife and I first got married,” Bay said. “There were always turtles trying to cross. We would stop and help them, because there were teenagers around who thought driving over them was a sport. Now if I saw a turtle I’d probably have to think about eating it.”

“I’ve never eaten a turtle.”

“Me neither. Haven’t seen one in years.”

Gabby stopped. “You know, I have no clue when I last saw a turtle. At a zoo? No clue at all. I wonder if they’re gone. Funny how you don’t realize the last time you see something is going to be the last time.”

Bay didn’t say anything.

The rock star held Deb’s guitar up to her chest, started picking out a repetitive tune as she walked. Same lick over and over, like it was keeping her going, driving her feet. “So when you said you traded things like aluminum foil and people, you were lying to me, right? You don’t trade anything.”

Bay shook her head. “Nobody to trade with.”

“So you’ve been here all alone? You said something about your wife.”

Bay kicked a stone down the road in front of her, kicked it again when she caught up with it.

The rock star handed her the guitar and dropped to the ground. She took off her left shoe, then peeled the sock off. A huge blister was rising on her big toe. “Fuck.”

Bay sighed. “You can use some of the stuffing from your vest to build some space around it.”

Gabby bent to pick a seam.

“No need. There’s a tear in the back. Anyhow, maybe it’s time to stop for the night.”

“Sorry. I saw the tear when you first gave me the vest, but I forgot about it. How far have we traveled?”

“Hard to say. We’re still on the park road.”

“Park road?”

“This is a protected wilderness area. Or it was. Once we hit asphalt, we’re halfway there. Then a little farther to a junction. Left at the T used to be vacation homes, but a hurricane took them twenty years ago. Right takes you to the city.”

Gabby groaned. She squinted at the setting sun. “Not even halfway.”

“But you’re still alive, and you’re complaining about a blister, not the cough or the sunburn.”

“I didn’t complain.”

“I don’t see you walking any farther, either.” Bay dropped her knapsack and untied a sleeping bag from the bottom.

“I don’t suppose you have two?”

Bay gave Gabby her most withering look. What kind of fool set out on this walk sick and unprepared? Then again, she had been the one who had driven the woman out, too afraid to interact with an actual person instead of the ghosts in her head.

“We’ll both fit,” she said. “Body heat’ll keep us warm, too.”

It was warmer than if they hadn’t shared, lying back to back squeezed into the sleeping bag. Not as warm as home, if she hadn’t set out to follow. The cold still seeped into her. Bay felt every inch of her left side, as if the bones themselves were in contact with the ground. Aware, too, of her back against the other woman, of the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she had come in physical contact with a living person. The heat of Gabby’s fever burned through the layers of clothing, but she still shivered.

“Why are you living out there all alone?” Gabby asked.

Bay considered pretending she was asleep, but then she wanted to answer. “I said already we used to picnic out here, my wife and I. We always said this was where we’d spend our old age. I’d get a job as a ranger, we’d live out our days in the ranger’s cabin. I pictured having electricity, mind.”

She paused. She felt the tension in the other woman’s back as she suppressed a cough. “Debra was in California on a business trip when everything started going bad at a faster rate than it’d been going bad before. We never even found out what it was that messed up the electronics. Things just stopped working. We’d been living in a high-rise. I couldn’t stay in our building with no heat or water, but we couldn’t contact each other, and I wanted to be someplace Debra would find me. So when I didn’t hear from her for three months, I packed what I thought I might need into some kid’s wagon I found in the lobby and started walking. I knew she’d know to find me out here if she could.”

“How bad was it? The cities? We were already on the ship.”

“I can only speak for the one I was living in, but it wasn’t like those scare movies where everyone turns on one another. People helped each other. We got some electricity up and running again in a couple weeks’ time, on a much smaller scale. If anything, I’d say we had more community than we’d ever had. But it didn’t feel right for me. I didn’t want other people; I wanted Deb.”

“They told us people were rioting and looting. Breaking into mansions, moving dozens of people in.”

“Would you blame them? Your passengers redirected all the gas to their ships and abandoned perfectly good houses. But again, I can only speak to what I saw, which was folks figuring out the new order and making it work as best they could.”

Gabby stayed silent for a while, and Bay started to drift. Then one more question. “Did Debra ever find you? I mean I’m guessing no, but . . .”

“No. Now let me sleep.”

• • • •

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: You know what happened. There is no you anymore. No reality television, no celebrity gossip, no music industry. Only an echo playing itself out on the ships and in the heads of those of us who can’t quite let it go.

• • • •

Bay was already out of the sleeping bag when I woke. She sat on a rock playing a simple fingerpicking pattern on her guitar.

“I thought you didn’t play,” I called to her.

“Never said that. Said I’m a lousy singer, but didn’t say anything about playing the guitar. We should get moving. I’d rather get to the city earlier than late.”

I stood up and stretched, letting the sleeping bag pool around my feet. The sun had only just risen, low and red. I could hear water lapping on both sides now, beyond a thick growth of brush. I coughed so deep it bent me in two.

“Why are you in a hurry?” I asked when I could speak.

She gave me a look that probably could have killed me at closer range. “Because I didn’t bring enough food to feed both of us for much longer, and you didn’t bring any. Because I haven’t been there in years and I don’t know if they shoot strangers who ride in at night.”

“Oh.” There wasn’t much to say to that, but I tried anyway. “So basically you’re putting yourself in danger because I put myself in danger because you made me think I was in danger.”

“You put yourself in danger in the first place by jumping off your damn boat.”

True. I sat back down on the sleeping bag and inspected my foot. The blister looked awful. I nearly wept as I packed vest-stuffing around it.

I stood again to indicate my readiness, and she walked back over. She handed me the guitar, then shook out the sleeping bag, rolled it and tied it to her pack. She produced two vaguely edible-looking sticks from somewhere on her person. I took the one offered to me.

I sniffed it. “Fish jerky?”

She nodded.

“I really would’ve starved out here on my own.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Thank you. I mean it. I’d never have guessed I’d have to walk so long without finding anything to eat.”

“There’s plenty to eat, but you don’t know where to look. You could fish if you had gear. You might find another crab. And there are bugs. Berries and plants, too, in better seasons, if you knew what to look for.”

As we walked she meandered off the road to show me what was edible. Cattail roots, watercress. Neither tasted fantastic raw, but chewing took time and gave an excuse to walk slower.

“I’m guessing you were a city kid?” she asked.

“Yeah. Grew up in Detroit. Ran away when I was sixteen to Pittsburgh because everyone else ran away to New York. Put together a decent band, got noticed. When you’re a good bass player, people take you out. I’d release an album with my band, tour that, then tour with Gaga or Trillium or some flavor of the month.”

I realized that was more than she had asked for, but she hadn’t told me to shut up yet, so I kept going. “The funny thing about being on a ship with all those celebrities and debutantes is how much attention they need. They throw parties or they stage big collapses and recoveries. They produce documentaries about themselves, upload to the ship entertainment systems. They act as audience for each other, taking turns with their dramas.

“I thought they’d treat me as a peer, but then I realized I was just a hired gun and they all thought they were bigger deals than me. There were a few other entertainers who realized the same thing and dropped down to the working decks to teach rich kids to dance or sing or whatever. I hung onto the idea longer than most that my music still meant something. I still kinda hope so.”

A coughing spell turned me inside out.

“That’s why you took my guitar?” Bay asked when I stopped gagging.

“Yeah. They must still need music out here, right?”

“I’d like to think so.”

I had something else to say, but a change in the landscape up ahead distracted me. Two white towers jutted into the sky, one vertical, the other at a deep curve. “That’s a weird looking bridge.”

Bay picked up her pace. I limped after her. As we got closer, I saw the bridge wasn’t purposefully skewed. The tower on the near end still stood, but the road between the two had crumbled into the water. Heavy cables trailed from the far tower like hair. We walked to the edge, looked down at the concrete bergs below us, then out at the long gap to the other side. Bay sat down, her feet dangling over the edge.

I tried to keep things light. “I didn’t realize we were on an island.”

“Your grasp of geography hasn’t proven to be outstanding.”

“How long do you think it’s been out?”

“How the hell should I know?” she snapped.

I left her to herself and went exploring. When I returned, the tears that smudged her face looked dry.

“It must’ve been one of the hurricanes. I haven’t been out here in years.” Her tone was dry and impersonal again. “Just goes to show, sooner or later everything falls into the sea.”

“She didn’t give up on you,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

I was quiet a minute. Tried to see it all from her eyes. “Anyway, I walked around. You can climb down the embankment. It doesn’t look like there’s much current. Maybe a mile’s swim?”

She looked up at me. “A mile’s swim, in clothes, in winter, with a guitar. Then we still have to walk the rest of the way, dripping wet. You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking. I’m only trying to help.”

“There’s no way. Not now. Maybe when the water and the air are both warmer.”

She was probably right. She’d been right about everything else. I sat down next to her and looked at the twisted tower. I tried to imagine what Detroit or Pittsburgh was like now, if they were all twisted towers and broken bridges, or if newer, better communities had grown, like the one Bay had left.

“I’ve got a boat,” I said. “There’s no fuel but you have an oar on your wall. We can line it full of snacks when the weather is better, and come around the coast instead of over land.”

“If I don’t kill you before then. You talk an awful lot.”

“But I can play decent guitar,” I said. “And I found a crab once, so I’m not entirely useless.”

“Not entirely,” she said.

• • • •

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: I was nearly lost, out on the ocean, but somebody rescued me. It’s a different life, a smaller life. I’m writing again. People seem to like my new stuff.

• • • •

Bay took a while getting to her feet. She slung her bag over her shoulder, and waited while Gabby picked up Deb’s guitar. She played as they walked back toward Bay’s cottage, some little riff Bay didn’t recognize. Bay made up her own words to it in her head, about how sooner or later everything falls into the sea, but some things crawl back out again and turn into something new.

Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind, winner of the 2014 Sturgeon Award and 2013 Nebula Award finalist, and 2014 Nebula finalist, A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide. Her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, and The Future Embodied. She is also a singer/songwriter and has toured nationally behind three albums; a fourth is forthcoming. In the best of all timelines, she lives with her wife and dog in Baltimore, Maryland. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and on Twitter @sarahpinsker.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo
by P. Djèlí Clark

Fatma el-Sha’arawi, special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, stood gazing through a pair of spectral goggles at the body slumped atop the mammoth divan.

A djinn.

An Old One, at that—near twice the size of a man, with fingers that ended in curved talons, long as knives. His skin was a sheath of aquamarine scales that shifted to turquoise beneath the glare of flickering gas lamps. He sat unclothed between tasseled cushions of lavender and burgundy, his muscular arms and legs spread wide and leaving nothing to the imagination.

“Now that’s impressive,” a voice came. Fatma glanced back at the figure hovering just over her shoulder. Two long graying whiskers fashioned in the style of some antiquated Janissary twitched on a plump face. It belonged to a man in a khaki uniform that fit his thick frame a bit too tightly, particularly around the belly. He jutted a shaved round chin at the dead djinn’s naked penis: a midnight-blue thing that hung near to the knee. “I’ve seen full-grown cobras that were smaller. A man can’t help but feel jealous, with that staring him in the face.”

Fatma returned to her work, not deigning to reply. Inspector Aasim Sharif was a member of the local constabulary who served as a police liaison with the Ministry. Not a bad sort. Just vulgar. Cairene men, despite their professed modernity, were still uncomfortable working alongside a woman. And they expressed their unease in peculiar, awkward ways. It was shocking enough to them that the Ministry had tapped some sun-dark backwater Sa’idi for a position in Cairo. But one so young, and who dressed in foreign garb—they’d never quite gotten used to her.

Today she’d chosen a light gray suit, complete with a matching vest, chartreuse tie, and a red-on-white pinstriped shirt. She had picked it up in the English District, and had it specially tailored to fit her small frame. The accompanying walking cane—a sturdy length of black steel capped by a silver pommel, a lion’s head—was admittedly a bit much. But it added a flair of extravagance to the ensemble. And her father always said if people were going to stare, you should give them a show.

“Exsanguination,” she declared. Fatma pulled off the copper-plated goggles and handed them over to a waiting boilerplate eunuch. The machine-man grasped the instrument between tactile metal fingers, folding it away with mechanical precision into a leather casing. She caught her reflection in its featureless brass countenance: dark oval eyes and a fleshy nose set against russet-brown skin on a slender face. Some might have called it boyish, if not for a set of full, bold lips passed on by her mother. As the boilerplate eunuch stepped away, she used her fingers to smooth back a mop of cropped black curls and turned to the constable. Aasim stared as if she’d just spoken Farsi.

“Those markings.” She tapped the floor with her cane, where curving white script engulfed the divan in a circle. “It’s an exsanguination spell.” Seeing Aasim’s blank look, she reached down to her waist to pull her janbiya free and placed the tip of the knife at the djinn’s thigh before sliding it beneath a scale. It came back out clean. “No blood. Not a drop. He’s been drained.”

The inspector blinked, catching on. “But where did it . . . the blood . . . go?”

Fatma fingered the dry edge of her blade. That was a good question. She slid the knife back into a silver-worked sheath fitted onto a broad leather belt. The janbiya had been given to her by a visiting Azd dignitary—a present for banishing a particularly nasty nasnas troubling his clan. It had been one of her first assignments at the Ministry. The half-blind old man had called her “pretty, for a young man, so brave to take on a half-djinn.” She hadn’t corrected him. And she’d kept the knife.

“Do you think it might have been . . .” Aasim grimaced, cupping his well-coiffed moustache before almost whispering the word: “. . . . ghuls?” The man hated talking about the undead. Then again, Fatma supposed everyone did. Ghul attacks were up in the city; three separate incidents had been reported in the past week. The Ministry suspected a radical cell of anarchist-necromancers, though no one had come up with any leads.

She crouched down to inspect the markings. “Not likely. Ghuls wouldn’t stop with feeding on just blood.” Aasim made a face. “And they don’t practice magic. This script is Old Marid. Djinn sorcery.” She frowned, pointing with her cane. “These, however, are unfamiliar.”

They were four glyphs, arranged equidistant around the circle. One looked like a set of curved horns. The second was a sickle. The third was an odd axe with a hooked blade. The fourth was larger than the rest, a half-circle like a moon, shrouded in twisting vines.

Aasim bent to look. “Never seen them before. Some sorcerer’s sigil?”

“Maybe.” She ran a finger along one of the glyphs, as if touching it might provide an answer.

Standing, she stepped back to stare up at the djinn—a giant who dwarfed them both in his considerable shadow. The eyes on that bowed head remained open, bright gold upon gold that beat down on her like molten suns. His face was almost human, if you ignored the pointed ears and cobalt-blue ram horns twisting from his head. She turned back to Aasim. “How long ago did you find the body?”

“Just past midnight. One of his regulars found him. Alarmed the neighbors.” He smirked. “She didn’t emit the usual screams, if you know what I mean.”

Fatma stared at him flatly before he continued.

“Anyway, she’s a plump little slum rat who comes into Azbakiyya for work. Greek, I think. Only got a few words in before her pezevenk lawyer arrived.” He made a disgusted sound. “The old Khedive had whores rounded up and sent south in my grandfather’s day. Now they hire Turkish pimps to read you the law.”

“It’s 1912—a new century,” Fatma reminded him. “Khedives don’t run Egypt anymore. The Ottomans are gone. We have a king now, a constitution. Everyone has rights, no matter their work.” Aasim grunted, as if that itself was a problem.

“Well, she seemed upset. Maybe it was at losing that.” He gestured again to the djinn’s exposed genitalia. “Or maybe at losing clients after this bad luck.”

Fatma could understand that. Azbakiyya was one of the more posh districts in Cairo. Having a client here was good money. Damn good. “Did she see anyone? A previous visitor, maybe?”

Aasim shook his head. “No one, she said.” He scratched the balding spot at the top of his head in thought. “There’s an Albanian gang, though, that’s been hitting the wealthier districts lately, tying their victims up before making off with valuables. Djinn blood probably sells well on the sorcerers’ black market.”

It was Fatma’s turn to shake her head, taking in the djinn’s impressive bulk—not to mention those talons. “A set of thieves would be in for a deadly surprise walking in on a Marid djinn. We know who he is?”

Aasim motioned to one of his men, a small, hawk-faced man who stared at Fatma reprovingly. She returned the stare, taking a set of papers from him before turning away. One of the papers bore a grainy black-and-white photo of a familiar face: the dead djinn. Beneath the picture was a seal, a white crescent moon and spear imposed upon a red-black-green tricolor—the flag of the Mahdist Revolutionary People’s Republic.

“Soudanese?” she asked in surprise, looking up from the passport.

“Seems so. We’ve cabled Khartoum. For all the good that’ll do. Probably a hundred djinn named Sennar.”

Probably, Fatma agreed silently. Sennar was a town, a set of mountains, and, alternately, an old sultanate in South Soudan. Djinn never gave their true names, using places instead—towns, hills, mountains, rivers. It didn’t seem to matter how many of them shared it. Somehow, they managed to tell each other apart. She returned to the passport, inspecting the signature and then glancing at the floor. She frowned, bending low and eyeing the script again.

Aasim watched her curiously. “What is it?”

“The writing.” She pointed at the script. “It’s the same.”

“What? You’re certain?”

Fatma nodded. She was positive. One may have been in Old Marid and the other in Arabic, but there was no mistaking the similarity in style. This was the djinn’s handiwork. He had performed an exsanguination spell—on himself.

“A suicide?” Aasim asked.

“A damn painful one,” she murmured. Only that didn’t make sense. Immortals didn’t just kill themselves. At least, she couldn’t recall a documented case of such a thing.

Her gaze swept the apartment, searching for any bit of understanding. It was overdone, like most of Azbakiyya, with imported Parisian furniture, a Turkish chandelier, and other bits of opulence. The djinn had added his own touch, decorating the space with swords in engraved scabbards, rounded shields of stretched hippopotamus hide, and sprawling silk carpets: the collections of a being that had lived lifetimes. Her eyes stopped on a hanging mural, large enough to take up much of a wall. It was awash in vivid colors drawn into elaborate scenery—Mughal, perhaps, by the style. It depicted giants with tusked mouths and the bodies of fierce beasts. Fire danced along their skin, and wings of flame sprouted from their backs.

“More djinn?” Aasim asked, catching her gaze.

Fatma walked toward the mural, stopping just in front of it.

“Ifrit,” she answered.

“Oh,” Aasim said. “Glad we don’t have to deal with any of them.”

No argument there. Ifrit were a volatile class of djinn that generally didn’t live among mortals. Most of their immortal cousins kept their distance, as well. It was odd to see them among the artwork of a Marid. In the mural, the ifrit knelt before a vast black lake with their arms outstretched. Two words in djinn script were etched beneath: “The Rising.”

Now what does that mean? Fatma wondered. She ran a hand across the cryptic words, once more hoping a mere touch might offer understanding. Glancing away from the painting in thought, her eyes fell upon a book sitting on an octagonal wooden side table.

The weighty tome was bound in a tan leather covering worked with a repeating geometric relief and gold print—an antique Mamluk fashion. The cover read: Kitāb al-Kīmyā. She knew the book—a ninth-century text on alchemy. She’d read copies at university, but this looked like an original. She reached down to open to where someone had left a bookmark—and froze. It was on a page she was familiar with—the search for takwin, to create life. But that wasn’t what had stilled her.

She looked closer at the object she’d mistaken for a bookmark—a length of metallic silver tinged with hints of bright mandarin. She picked it up, holding it aloft as it glinted in the gas lamps’ glare.

Aasim cursed, his voice going hoarse. “Is that what I think it is?”

Fatma nodded. It was a metallic feather, as long as her forearm. Along its surface, faint lines of fiery script moved and writhed about as if alive.

“Holy tongue,” Aasim breathed.

“Holy tongue,” she confirmed.

“But that means it belongs to . . .”

“An angel,” Fatma finished for him.

Her frown deepened. Now what in the many worlds, she wondered, would a djinn be doing with one of these?

• • • •

Fatma sat back in a red-cushioned seat as the automated wheeled carriage plowed along the narrow streets. Most of Cairo slept, except for the glow of a gaslight market or the pinprick lights of towering mooring masts where airships came and went by the hour. Her fingers played with her cane’s lion-headed pommel, watching aerial trams that moved high above the city, crackling electricity illuminating the night along their lines. Their carriage passed a lone man in a rickety donkey cart. He drove his beast at a slow trot, as if in defiance of the modernity that surrounded him.

“Another damned ghul attack!” Aasim exclaimed. He sat opposite her, reading over several cables. “That’s odd. They didn’t kill anyone—they took them. Snatched them and ran right off.”

Fatma looked up. That was odd. Ghuls fed on the living. Their victims were usually found half-devoured. They weren’t in the habit of stealing people.

“Have they been found?”

“No. It happened just before midnight.” He made a face. “You don’t suppose they’re saving them . . . for a later meal?”

Fatma didn’t want to think on that. “I’m sure the Ministry has some people on it.”

The inspector sighed, folding away the papers and leaning back into his seat. “Whole city falling apart,” he muttered. “Djinn. Ghuls. Sorcerers. Never had to worry about this in my grandfather’s day. Thank you, al-Jahiz.”

The last words were mocking, common Cairo slang uttered with praise, sarcasm, or anger. How else to remember al-Jahiz, the famed Soudanese mystic and inventor? Some named him as one and the same with the medieval thinker of Basra, reborn or traveled through time. Sufis claimed he was a herald of the Mahdi; Coptics a harbinger of the apocalypse. Whether genius, saint, or madman, no one could deny that he had shaken the world.

It was al-Jahiz who, through mysticism and machines, bore a hole to the Kaf, the other-realm of the djinn. His purpose for doing so—curiosity, mischief, or malice—remained unknown. He later disappeared, taking his incredible machines with him. Some said even now he traveled the many worlds, sowing chaos wherever he went.

That had been a little more than forty years past. Fatma was born into the world al-Jahiz left behind: a world transformed by magic and the supernatural. The djinn, especially, took to the age, their penchant for building yielding more wonders than could be counted. Egypt now sat as one of the great powers, and Cairo was its beating heart.

“How about you?” Aasim asked. “Prefer the city to that sand trap you Sa’idi call home?”

Fatma cut her eyes to the man, which only made him grin. “When I was attending the women’s college in Luxor, I dreamed of coming to Cairo—to go to the coffeehouses, visit the libraries, see people from all over.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m as cynical as every other Cairene.”

Aasim laughed. “The city will do that.” He paused before leaning forward, a gleam in his eyes and a twitch in that ridiculous moustache. That meant he was going to ask something daring, or stupid.

“Always wanted to know—why the Englishman’s suit?” He gestured at her clothing. “We kept them out, thanks to the djinn. Sent them running back to their cold, dreary little island. So why dress like them?”

Fatma flicked the rim of the black bowler she’d donned, crossing a leg to show off a pair of caramel wing tips. “Jealous I can out-dress you?”

Aasim snorted, pulling at the edges of his too-tight uniform that showed patches of a summer night’s perspiration. “I have a daughter who’s twenty-one—just three years younger than you. And still not married. The thought of her walking unveiled in these streets, like some low-class factory woman . . . The men you meet out here are filthy-minded!”

Fatma stared. He was calling other men filthy-minded?

“Had I named my daughter after the Prophet’s own, peace be upon him,” he went on, “I would want her to honor that.”

“It’s good, then, that I’m not your daughter,” she remarked dryly. Reaching into her breast pocket, she pulled out a golden pocket watch fashioned like an old asturlab. “My father is a watchsmith. He gave me this when I left home. Said Cairo was so fast I’d need it to keep time. He came here once when he was younger, and used to tell us endless stories of the mechanical wonders of the djinn. When I tested for the Ministry, he was the proudest man in our village. Now he brags to anyone who will listen about his daughter Fatma, who lives in the city he still dreams about. He sees that as bringing blessings upon the Prophet, peace be upon him.”

Aasim pursed his lips. “Fine, then. I’ll leave upholding your family’s good name to your father. You still haven’t told me about the suit.”

Fatma closed the watch, tucking it away and sitting back. “When I was in school in Luxor I would see these photographs of Englishmen and Frenchmen who visited Egypt, before the djinn came. Mostly they were in suits. But sometimes they’d put on a jellabiya and headscarf. I found out they called it ‘going native.’ To look exotic, they said.”

“Did they?” Aasim cut in.

“Did they what?”

“Look exotic.”

“No. Just ridiculous.”

Aasim snickered.

“Anyway, when I bought my first suit, the English tailor asked me why I wanted it. I told him I wanted to look exotic.”

Aasim gaped at her for a moment before erupting into barking laughter. Fatma smiled. That story worked every time.

The carriage crossed onto the bridge that led to the neighborhood of al-Gezira, where two steel lions guarded the entrance. Such decorations were affectations of the wealthy in this flourishing island district. They drove past wide streets with well-built apartments and villas, stopping at a tall U-shaped building of polished white stone surrounded by sprawling gardens—once the summer palace of an old Khedive. It had a new occupant now.

Aasim eyed the imposing building nervously. “You’re certain about arriving so late?”

Fatma stepped from the carriage to join him. “Their kind don’t sleep.” She nodded to two sleek shapes trotting toward them. They looked like jackals constructed of black and gold metal, only with wings that lay folded on their backs. The mechanical beasts walked up on slender legs to inspect the newcomers, the gears of their bodies rotating with their movements. Seeming satisfied, they turned, as if beckoning to be followed.

The small party crossed a large, well-tended garden before walking up a set of stairs and through a tall doorway. The inside of the old Khedive’s summer palace was like something from the last century, a mixture of Arabic, Turkish and Neoclassical styles brought together under one roof. The floor was made of antique marble arranged in a chessboard pattern of brown and white tiles while rectangular columns supported a golden ceiling of geometric ornamental design. Whatever furniture once decorated the interior had been replaced, by constructions of stone, wood, and iron. Inventions, Fatma could tell, from through the ages of time. She walked around a full replica of an old wooden noria water wheel, glancing at a detailed sketch of an aerial screw that took up a section of wall. This place was like a museum.

They stopped at another set of doors that opened before their mechanical guides, revealing a glass-domed room bathed in light. The air was filled with a curious blend of haunting Gregorian chants, lilting anasheed, and harmonies Fatma could not pick out, all coming from a towering tree of burnished steel. Beneath its broad canopy was a pair of bronze automata fashioned as a man and a woman. Colorful clockwork birds sat above on the tree’s outstretched branches between metallic green leaves that swayed as if in a breeze. Their open beaks poured music in time to a swirling display of light, like thousands of fireflies moving to the same rhythm.

Beneath the tree, a tall figure inspected a curious structure of overlapping gear wheels—some massive, others small and delicate as a coin. Each had been cut with precision, so that their teeth meshed seamlessly together. Their surfaces were engraved with metal script, some she knew to be numerals. At their arrival, the tall figure broke from his inspection and turned about.

With effort, Fatma suppressed a gasp similar to the one that escaped Aasim’s lips. It was always an odd thing to be in the presence of an angel—or at least the beings that claimed to be so.

They had appeared after the djinn, suddenly and without warning. Considerable debate was expended on affirming their identity. The Coptic Church argued that they could not be angels, for all such divinities resided in heaven with God. The Ulama similarly asserted that true angels had no free will, and could not have simply come here of their own volition. Both issued cautious statements naming them, at the least, “otherworldly entities.” The self-proclaimed angels were silent on the matter—validating no particulars of either faith, and remaining enigmatic regarding their motives.

Unlike djinn, their bodies were almost ephemeral, like light become flesh, and required frames to house them. This one towered at least twelve feet, his body a complex construction of iron, steel, and gears that mimicked muscles and bone. Four mechanical arms extended from his bronze armored shoulders, while brilliant platinum wings tinged in traces of crimson and gold lay flat upon his back. It was a wondrous working of machinery that seemed suited for nothing less than immortality.

“Welcome to my home, children,” the angel pronounced, his voice a melodic rumble. A translucent alabaster mask hid his face, with lips fixed into a permanent faint smirk—meant, perhaps, to put others at ease. Brilliance poured from behind oval openings that stood as eyes, as if holding back a star. “May you be found in peace and know His glory. You have come to see Maker. Reveal yourselves and your wants and Maker will aid you as he can.”

As with djinn, angels didn’t share their names. They instead took on titles that emphasized their purpose. Maker had come to monopolize the business of crafting mechanical bodies for his brethren, work not to be left for djinn hands.

Fatma stepped forward. “Peace be with you, Maker. I am Agent el-Sha’arawi with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, and this is Inspector Sharif of the Cairo Police. We don’t mean to disturb your work.” She paused, taking in the tall mechanism the angel had been busy with. “Is it . . . some kind of clock?”

Maker cocked his head at her, then nodded. “It is an instrument of time, yes. You are perceptive.” There was surprise in his voice.

“I grew up around watches and clocks,” Fatma explained. “This one looks like it’ll do more than just keep the local time.”

“Indeed,” the angel remarked, turning to look over his creation. “It will take the measure of the very transition of time. Not just here, but across space and distance, bringing together all of time in this one place. It shall be the greatest clock in this world, or perhaps any other.”

Fatma suppressed a smile at the obvious pride in his voice. First unwritten rule of investigation—when in need of information, make sure you flatter your source. In that regard, immortals were no different than anyone else. This one, in fact, seemed quite pleased with himself.

“It looks like it’ll be magnificent when finished,” she said.

Maker turned back to her and nodded. “I believe it will. And your business here Investigator?”

Fatma turned to Aasim, but the man just stared up at the angel beatifically. It seemed she would have to do the talking. Briefly, she laid out the events of the night. The angel listened in silence, no emotion on that unchanging face.

“Maker is saddened to hear of such senseless acts,” he said when she finished. “It seems, at times, as if all there is in this city of late is mayhem.”

“You mean the ghul attacks?”

“Ghuls, sorcerers, foul spirits, and other unclean things. Al-Jahiz’s touch yet marks your mortal world. Not for the better, I often fear.”

“It keeps us busy at the Ministry.”

If Maker got the joke, he didn’t show it. She wondered if there were any documented cases of an angel laughing.

“Your dead djinn,” he said instead. “They are unpredictable creatures. Lesser beings, you must understand. Only slightly above mortals. They are often consumed by their passions.”

“Right,” Fatma said, sidestepping the insult in that comment. “But suicide?”

“Djinn often make war upon their kind. Is it so hard to believe one might take his own life?”

Fatma couldn’t disagree there. She’d broken up some djinn brawls before—messy business. But there was more. She nudged Aasim, who broke from his awe long enough to unwrap a bundle tucked under his arm. The feather.

“We also found this, among the belongings of the djinn. Do you recognize it?”

The angel swept forward, gliding like air over water. He gripped the feather between mechanical fingers and brought it up for inspection. “Maker knows every gear, every wheel, every cog that is put together to form a vessel. Maker knows this feather. And it was found with the dead djinn?”

Fatma nodded. “We know your kind don’t surrender such things lightly. We thought maybe talking to the owner might give us some answers.”

Maker eyed the feather for a long while, seeming to be in thought. Angels were notoriously secretive. She wouldn’t be surprised if he simply refused to help. “Maker will give you the name of the one for whom this body was crafted,” he said finally. “May it be of help to you. He is called the Harvester. You will find him in the cemetery.”

Fatma released a gratified breath. “Thank you,” she said. Then, suddenly remembering: “One more thing. Would you happen to know what these might be?” She held up a sketch of the four mysterious glyphs from the djinn’s apartment. Those bright eyes took a glance and there was a pause.

“Glyphs,” he said plainly.

“Of course.” Disappointed, Fatma tucked away the sketch. “Well, thank you again for your help, Maker. The night’s peace be with you.”

“As with you. Walk in His grace.” With that, the angel turned his back to them and resumed the inspection of his unfinished contraption. Their cue, that this meeting was over.

As they left the palace and walked out into the night, Aasim spoke his first words. “Cemetery? Does he mean . . . ?”

“The City of the Dead,” Fatma finished. “Looks like a trip to the slums.”

By the time they reached their destination and Fatma stepped out into the dusty streets, she found herself wishing she had worn less expensive shoes. This part of Cairo seemed, at times, untouched by the wider world. The City of the Dead was a place most avoided. Mystics came seeking blessings by choice. Others were here because there was nowhere else to go. They lived in makeshift dwellings, or within the cramped spaces of tombs by now centuries old. It was an odd place for an angel to call home. But it was hard to know their reasons.

As Aasim questioned some of the locals, Fatma looked over the faces that peeked out from their crumbling homes. A small boy missing two front teeth eyed her curiously from one of them. She smiled, but that only made him disappear into the shadows. Everyone here seemed on edge. She turned back to Aasim, who listened as an old man with a thick white beard complained of fresh ghul attacks and disappearances.

“The ghuls take people!” he yelled, waving a crooked stick he appeared to use as a cane. “We report it but no one comes! We are left here to fend for ourselves!” A few more took up his cry, voicing their frustrations. A flustered Aasim assured them he would send out some men. But they scoffed, and someone made a crude joke about a policeman who somehow kept getting lost in a brothel. The crowd roared with laughter. When Aasim tried to hire a guide, however, he got no takers. Instead, they were just pointed in the right direction.

“Every Cairine is a comedian,” he grumbled as they walked away. “Never seen a slum rat turn down money.”

Fatma said nothing. Despite the jokes, the faces she saw were marked with fear. And no wonder, with stories of ghul attacks and disappearances. That would be enough to make anyone afraid.

The two passed through a secluded part of the cemetery to one of the larger mausoleums in the distance. The ground was rough and uneven here, and Aasim held up a lantern he’d bought off a local to guide their path. Like most other tombs, the mausoleum was composed of crumbling faded stone that had once been opulently decorated. A rounded dome capped its roof, still impressive even in its deteriorated state. They came to a wooden door inscribed with words in white chalk. The Harvester.

“What kind of name is that?” Aasim whispered. “Harvester of what?”

Fatma shook her head, uncertain she wanted to know. She rapped on the door. When there was no response she rapped again, calling out. Only silence. Grabbing hold of the handle, she pushed the door forward and it gave way. The scent that came from inside was jarring.

“It smells like death!” Aasim gagged.

Not just death, Fatma thought, covering her nose with a handkerchief. It smelled like the dead. Cautious, she stepped inside the dark space. Her cane she left at the door, instead gripping the small, Ministry-administered service pistol at her waist. Taking the lantern from Aasim, she swung it about and then stopped in her tracks.

Slumped against a wall was an angel. Or, rather, the body of one—a felled giant of iron and steel. The mechanical carcass lay lifeless, a great gash in its chest. The angel himself was gone.

“It looks like he was . . . ripped out,” Aasim said, shaken. He pointed to where the metal was peeled back, as if pried open with bare hands.

Fatma swung the lantern’s light across the floor, where the angel’s alabaster faceplate sat broken. There was something else. She leaned closer to look. They were glyphs, familiar glyphs, etched in white. Curving horns. A sickle. An axe with a hooked end. Even a half moon shrouded in twisting vines. The very same ones from the djinn’s apartment. She was set to point it out to Aasim when the shadows in the corner of her vision moved. It was her only warning.

Something gripped her arm, squeezing so tight she cried out in pain, dropping the lantern. An eyeless, pale-gray face came into her vision, blackened teeth snapping. A ghul.

Fatma reached for her pistol—but the creature spun her about as if she were a doll, dragging her down and slamming her hard onto the floor. She gasped for breath, both at the jarring impact and the searing burning in her shoulder. Ghuls were dead, but unnaturally strong. This one would tear out her arm if she didn’t break free. Reacting now on instinct, she reached for the first thing at her waist. Her janbiya. She drew it from its sheath, lifting it high and slicing a wide arc. The blade flashed in the dark, cutting through rotted muscle and bone. The ghul’s forearm fell away, flopping to the floor beside her with a sickening slap before turning to black ash.

Freed, she scrambled back on palms and heels for the lantern. More snarls and the sounds of struggle filled the darkened room. Aasim had his hands full. Reaching the lantern, Fatma grabbed it and lifted it high. In the light, she could see the one-armed ghul glaring at her from behind a pallid stretch of skin where its eyes should have been. Its mouth fixed into a rictus, it croaked, “The Rising!”

Then it surged forward, its remaining arm reaching with twitching fingers. This time, Fatma had her pistol at the ready and now aimed the long, thin barrel. She fired once through its head—the only way to stop a ghul. It dropped dead, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

When a hand touched her shoulder she whirled about, pistol ready. Aasim stood behind her, blood trickling from a gash on his forehead.

“Ghuls,” he said shaking. Fatma realized he wasn’t looking at her.

Turning, she lifted the lantern. The light shone across a towering wall of twisted, naked, pale-gray bodies misshapen by the sorcery that rendered their corpses into this mockery of life. The writhing mass clung to each other, barely paying the two living beings any mind. They seemed busy, sharing something between them that glowed faintly in their elongated fingers, devouring it ravenously.

“Angel flesh,” Aasim said hoarsely. “They’re eating . . .”

Fatma felt her stomach go queasy. That was enough. Lifting the pistol, she fired. Once, twice, three times. Aasim joined in. The ghuls shrieked, tumbling to the floor as they were struck. Then as one, the entire wall of ghuls crumbled and the mass surged toward them like a pale, dead sea.

Fatma backed away, readying her janbiya for a fight. But the attack never came. The ghuls streamed past, flowing around her and Aasim as if the two were islands in their path. Their bellies were distended, bulbous to bursting, but they scrambled away, at times on all fours like beasts, fleeing out the front door into the night. In moments, the mausoleum was emptied. And all that could be heard was their panting.

“Are we still alive?” Aasim whispered in the silence.

Fatma released a long-held breath. They were alive, but with more questions than they had started with.

• • • •

Fatma frowned into the cooling cup of coffee. She thought of calling for a boilerplate eunuch to heat it. But truthfully, she didn’t feel much like drinking. Her gaze turned to the window of the all-night Abyssinian coffee shop with gilded Amharic script across its front.

“So we’ve had men all over the mausoleum,” Aasim was saying, chewing noisily on some sweet stuffed baqlawa. “They’ve confirmed, this Harvester—he was our necromancer.”

Fatma didn’t need the confirmation. She’d seen the spells and alchemist instruments in the mausoleum, including a copy of Kitāb al-Kīmyā. Necromancers used a corrupted form of takwin to make ghuls, usually from corpses. But what she’d seen tonight explained the recent attacks. The Harvester was sending out his minions to steal living people, fresh bodies to make into ghuls. The place was a laboratory for creating the undead.

“A rogue angel.” Aasim shook his head. “What’s this city coming to?”

“They’re not really angels,” Fatma reminded him.

“Of course.” Aasim plucked pastry flakes from his moustache. “Well, whatever they are, they can go bad, it seems. This Harvester’s creations turned on him. Rather profound, don’t you think?”

“A pack of ghuls defeated one of them? More unlikely than profound.”

Aasim shrugged. “You saw it as well as I did. They were . . . feeding on him.” He made a face, but never lost his appetite.

“And those same ghuls just left us unharmed.”

“You’d rather they hadn’t? Maybe they were full!”

“What’s the Angelic Council saying?”

Aasim’s smirk was answer enough.

“Of course,” she muttered. “Silent, as usual.”

“As always,” he corrected. “Such higher beings don’t deign to tell us much.” He stuffed another baqlawa into his mouth, whole. “We did hear back from Khartoum about our dead djinn, Sennar. Turns out he was exiled from a lodge. The shaykh there accused him of “improper practices.”

Fatma frowned. “What does that mean?”

Aasim dusted sugary flakes from his fingers. “With revolutionary Sufists, who knows. All that mystic political talk hurts my head. You let some people read Marx . . .”

“So Sennar’s death is being ruled a suicide?”

“You said so yourself,” Aasim reminded her.

“But we didn’t learn anything. What happened to his blood? Those glyphs—they were the same ones as at the mausoleum. A dead djinn and a dead angel? That’s not coincidence. There’s some connection.”

Aasim sighed, sitting back with folded arms. “Maybe you’re right. But whatever link they shared they took with them to . . . wherever their kind go when they die. God willing, that’s the end of it.”

Fatma sat forward. “But what if it’s not?” She lowered her voice. “I told you what that ghul said to me. ‘The Rising.’ That painting with the black lake in the djinn’s apartment had the same words.”

Aasim frowned, clearly discomfited. “I didn’t hear any of that. Besides, ghuls don’t talk. They just—” He made a snarling face and crooked his fingers in pantomime. “There was a lot happening. Maybe you thought you heard it.”

Fatma scowled into her coffee. Aasim was right. Ghuls barely had sentience, much less sense. They didn’t talk. They never talked. Only this one did. Had she just been hearing things?

“What about those ghuls that got away?”

“We have men out hunting. They’ll be found soon enough. Always ghuls about. Thanks, al-Jahiz.” Aasim wiped his hands clean, standing to go. “The Cairo police, however, consider this case closed. And a necromancer was stopped in the process. Not a bad night’s work.”

Fatma frowned deeper into her coffee. “Ministry’s wired me the same.”

“Then do what I’m going to do. Head home. Get some sleep. There’ll be more than enough paperwork to do in the morning. The modern world loves paperwork. Another thing my grandfather didn’t have to worry over.” He sighed. “God protect you, Investigator.”

“God protect you, Inspector.”

When he had gone, Fatma sat alone, trying to put together the pieces from the night. But they just wouldn’t fit. She was working on a puzzle without knowing the whole, and it was going nowhere. Reaching beneath her bowler she ran a hand through her hair in frustration, and then resignation. She placed a few notes on the table and left the coffee shop, walking into the night. Perhaps she would take Aasim’s advice.

Pulling out her pocket watch, she flipped it open. A faint ticking sounded as a crescent moon moved slowly on spinning gears. Still a few hours till dawn, though this part of downtown Cairo never seemed to sleep. She replaced the watch, trying to decide whether to take a carriage or an aerial tram, when someone collided with her. A man, clad in black. The exchange only took moments before he was gone, without so much as an apology, leaving her to scowl at his rudeness. Sometimes this city—

Fatma stopped as her hand fell on an empty space in her breast pocket. Her watch was gone. A pickpocket! She’d fallen for a damn pickpocket!

Cursing, she spun about and scanned the night for him. Something lesser she might let go, but not her watch! Small groups of patrons moved between nighttime hookah cafes, or to the gaslight markets. She found her accoster easily enough, though—at the other end of the street. He stopped, dangling her watch teasingly by its chain before dashing away.

Fatma growled and gave chase. Could this night possibly get any worse? The man was fast, but so was she—even in these shoes. She kept up easily, pushing past startled passersby. When he disappeared abruptly around a corner, she followed, finding herself in an alley. It led to a wall, the length of it covered in shadows. Fatma drew her pistol, remembering that worse than thieves lurked in Cairo at night.

“I only want my watch back!” she called out. And to deliver a few good kicks. “Just hand it over. I’m armed!”

She walked into the alley. The only sound that came back was her shoes on the paved stone. And faint breathing. Not her own. She whirled about as the black-clad figure stepped out of the shadows. How had he gotten behind her? His face was hidden in a wrap of black cloth, revealing nothing but eyes that stared daggers.

“Stop right there!” she ordered, lifting the pistol.

She blinked. And then he was on her. So fast! The pistol was swatted away by something sharp, sending it clattering uselessly across the stone. A steely glint caught her eyes. The man’s fingers were capped by curled points of sharp silver. Were those claws? She had little time to think before he came at her again, arms swinging wide and slashing a tear in the fabric across her torso. She gasped at that. Not her suit!

With a determined grunt, Fatma went on the attack, wielding her cane as a weapon—feigning, cutting, jabbing, thrusting. The damned thing wasn’t just for show! Her opponent parried with those claws, throwing off fresh sparks each time they met the metal cane. Despite the risk, Fatma kept the fight close, looking for an opening to deliver a well-placed jab.

She never saw the sweep that took her from her feet. She came down hard and her combatant pounced, knocking her flat and pressing her down with his weight—putting a black dagger to her neck. Fatma stopped struggling at that, staring up at dark, reflective eyes. When the man lowered his face to hers she tensed, expecting a blow. But instead there was a purr, like a cat.

“Impressive,” a sultry voice came. Decidedly not a man. A woman, then. Stupid mistake. “Didn’t expect you to last so long. Pretty little boy.” She traced a sharp talon across Fatma’s jugular. “I’ll let you tussle with me again, if you promise to wear one of these nice suits.” Her eyes narrowed. “We have something you might want.”

We? “You mean my watch?” Fatma asked angrily.

The woman dropped the golden timepiece on her chest. “Something else. Something you and the inspector missed.” Her voice went to a whisper. “The Rising!”

Fatma’s eyes rounded now. But before she could ask more, something was pressed into her hand. “Come to the House of the Lady of Stars,” the woman said. “And browse our wares.”

She bounded up then, and with a terrific leap, she vaulted to a wall and began to climb—clinging to its surface. Fatma scrambled to her feet, watching the woman’s impossible ascent. When she reached the top, she gave a heave and flipped onto the roof, stopping to give a teasing glance before speeding away.

Fatma strained her neck, staring. Magic. No one could move like that otherwise. She looked at the object in her hand. A bronze coin. On one side was an engraving of a cow, while a woman was inscribed on the other. Her face bore a pleasant smile; two curving horns with a disc between them sprouted from her head. Fatma recognized it well enough. And it meant that sleep would have to wait. She was off to see a fortune-teller.

• • • •

Fatma shouldered her way through the throngs at Khan el-Khalili market. A pair of women in long Parisian dresses and veils of pure white glided by, both surrounded by a troop of guards. Late-night jaunts by the wealthy to more common areas had become fashionable of late. And Khan el-Khalili was the place to be. One of the oldest bazaars in Cairo, the coming of gas lighting now meant the place never had to close—and it rarely did.

Day merchants left in the evenings, and by the glow of gas lamps night vendors kept the market going through dawn. In shops or simple wooden stalls, goods filled shelves, sprawled along tables, or gathered in heaps in every available space—from gilded brass lamps that dangled on strings to barometric pressure gauges for dirigible engines. Even at this hour, the open-air bazaar was a cacophony of dickering and haggling, amid the aroma of peppery spices, baked breads, and sweet oils. It was enough to overwhelm the senses.

Fatma left it all, turning down a narrow passageway that diverged from the main market. The House of the Lady of Stars shared its front with an apothecary. One entrance led to a space filled with bushels of pungent herbs while the other displayed a fortune-teller’s door. It was marked with a great eye of celestial blue surrounded by gold stars and red candles.

Stepping inside, Fatma found an old woman seated at a table with a small girl—strangely still awake in the predawn hours. Both were engrossed with a rectangular board, atop which sat variously-shaped pieces along a grid of squares. Senet. The game hadn’t been played regularly in Egypt for some two thousand years. But she was not surprised to see it here.

The old woman looked up, her dark skin creasing as she smiled. “Peace be with you, daughter, and welcome to the House of the Lady of Stars. How may I—”

Fatma held up the bronze coin, cutting her off. “Merira,” she demanded.

The old woman’s smile vanished with her creases, and her gaze sharpened. “Have the young today lost all manners in speaking to one my age?” she rasped.

Fatma felt her face heat and she shook her head, abashed. “Apologies, Auntie. Peace be upon you. I’ve come to speak to the mistress of the house, Merira.”

The old woman gave an accepting nod. “Very well, daughter. You may come. Merira expects you.” She turned, beckoning for Fatma to follow. The small girl watched them go, her young eyes outlined in black kohl. They walked through a long curtain of blue and gold beads that led to a narrow hallway and then to a door. The old woman gave a series of patterned knocks before it opened.

Fatma stepped into the hidden room, illuminated by bright burning lamps. The space was richly decorated, with mahogany tables and cushioned chairs. Colorful symbols that had not been used for centuries adorned the walls, alongside murals of ancient kings and queens lost to time.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the room, all women, all dressed in diaphanous white garments. Some sat in small groups, conversing in hushed tones. Others appeared to be practicing a ritual, ringing a bell and burning bitter-smelling incense while they chanted. The most arresting sight was the tall, black granite statue of a seated woman, the very one on the coin. Her head was adorned with curving cow horns, a disc in the center. Hathor. The Lady of Stars.

If the arrival of djinn, alleged angels, and magic into the world had made many more faithful, it had led to a questioning of faith for others. Adherents to alternative philosophies had appeared, as well—esoteric mystics and spiritualists. It wasn’t long before some turned to Egypt’s most ancient religions. Denounced as idolaters, they were forced to move underground, where they could meet without persecution. Because of their secrecy, their numbers were unknown. But the Ministry suspected their ranks to be in the thousands—and growing.

Fatma was led to a broad divan, where a matronly woman in a gold pleated dress waited. A black braided wig fell over her shoulders as she sat arranging a set of rectangular cards on a table with fingers adorned in henna. A black cat lounged in her lap; bits of gold piercing its nose and ears while a collar of lapis lazuli circled its neck.

To her right stood a strikingly tall woman with marbled aquamarine skin and jade eyes, whose body seemed as ephemeral as her sheer white dress that billowed from an unseen wind. A djinn. A jann, to be exact, one of the elementals. Not too surprising. Djinn could be of any faith, and more than a few now numbered among the adherents of the old religions.

A younger woman in a form-fitting crimson dress stood to their left, her hair forming a curly mane about her shoulders. Tall, with a slender, muscular frame, she leaned idly against a wall, twirling a familiar black dagger. Fatma met her reflective gaze: almost as dark as her skin. Very familiar. A faint smile played on her lips.

“May you be at peace, Investigator,” the seated woman called, catching her attention. “Please, sit.”

Fatma did so reluctantly. “Merira,” she greeted tightly, skipping the normal courtesies. Merira was a priestess of the local Cult of Hathor, with whom she had dealt before. Her eyes held a doting look and her round cheeks appeared always on the verge of smiling. But Fatma wasn’t fooled. Behind that motherly face was a steel mind that worked like a fine-tuned mechanism.

“You’re upset,” she noted, staring at Fatma with brown eyes lined in blue kohl.

“Next time you want me, Merira, you can just send a note.” She glanced at the woman with the dagger, who only winked.

The older woman put on an apologetic look. “Forgive us. Siti was only sent as a messenger. But she has more of Sekhmet in her than most, and can be . . . overzealous.” The priestess gave the younger woman a remonstrative glare, which finally erased her smile.

Siti, was it? Fatma thought. “What’s this all about, Merira? Thought your kind kept a low profile. Not running around accosting Ministry agents!”

“We near the end of worlds,” the jann put in with an echoing voice. “And the hour is late.” Fatma frowned at her, then turned back to Merira questioningly.

“You’ve seen many things this night,” the priestess said. She flipped over the cards on the table, revealing the image each bore: a pair of curving horns, a sickle, an axe with a hooked end, and a half moon shrouded in twisting vines.

Fatma stared, unable to hold back at the sight of the familiar glyphs. She leaned forward, gripping the table.

“Enough of the games, Merira! How do you know about any of this?”

The woman’s cheeks dimpled with a slight smile. “We may be forced into the shadows, but the Eye of Ra pierces all.” She motioned and someone stepped unexpectedly from around a corner. Like the other women, she wore a diaphanous gown that hugged her plump curves well. She sat beside the priestess, staring apprehensively at Fatma with large green eyes set in a round, olive-skinned face.

“Rika came to us seeking sanctuary,” Merira said. “She had business with a certain djinn.”

Fatma’s eyebrows rose. The dead djinn’s Greek lover? It had to be. The woman fit Aasim’s description perfectly. “What do you have to do with any of this?”

The woman glanced to the priestess, who nodded with approval.

“I met Sennar at a brothel house,” she said in a thick accent, definitely Greek. “He picked me out. Said he liked my eyes.” She shrugged. “I play a role, he pays. But he became obsessed with me, starting to asking that he be my only customer. I didn’t mind, so long as he paid for my time. Then he started talking to me about other things.” She paused, looking again to Merira, who nodded. “He would tell me about other worlds,” she continued. “He claimed there were places beyond where he came from, where gods lived. Gods that could curse you with madness, if you dared speak their name.”

Fatma shook her head. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

The jann glided forward, pointing an ephemeral finger at the card with the half moon shrouded in twisted vines. “Djinn once worshipped their own gods, Investigator, old beings that dwelled beyond the Kaf in cold and dark worlds. Do you not see them here? Rising from that darkness?”

Fatma looked down at the half moon, for the first time realizing it looked like something emerging, the way the sun rose on the horizon.

“The Rising,” she breathed aloud.

“Sennar bragged that these old gods would soon make this world their own,” Rika went on. “He said he would be able to die and live again. He promised me I could remain with him when everyone else perished. I could be his . . . pet.” Her eyes flashed with anger at the word. “He bragged about powerful friends. I asked him for proof and he showed me a feather. Did you find it, Investigator? Where I left it?”

Fatma nodded in astonishment, looking at the woman with new eyes. Aasim had underestimated this one. “Why didn’t you go to the police with this? To the Ministry?”

The woman’s plump face went pale. “Me? Speak against a Marid djinn? And his powerful friends? What would have happened then? No dark gods were going to make me live again. When I found Sennar tonight, like that, I knew it had begun. I ran. Siti is a friend. She brought me here to hide. I told the holy mother . . . the priestess . . . everything I knew.”

“And now we’re telling you,” Merira finished.

“Telling me what, exactly?”

“Of an old djinn prophecy,” the jann said. “A prophecy being performed on this very night. It is claimed that three are needed, who must offer themselves willingly.” She pointed to the horns on the card. “The Ram. Old and powerful. His blood was given first.”

Fatma looked down, catching on. “Sennar. The exsanguination spell.”

The jann nodded. “The second reaped the dead, much as a farmer reaps wheat.” She pointed to the sickle.

“The Harvester,” Fatma breathed. “And the axe with the hook? Who is that?”

“Not an axe,” Merira corrected. “An adze. An ancient instrument. The tool of the last of the three. The Builder. His face, we do not know.”

“Many believe al-Jahiz tore a hole to the Kaf,” the Jann said. “It’s better stated by saying that he unlocked a door by finding a particular moment in space and time unique to the Kaf. That, in turn, weakened the barriers of other worlds, allowing magic and beings beyond the djinn to find their way into this one. There are worlds upon worlds that exist. Finding their locks requires knowing their unique places in the pattern.”

“The system of overlapping spheres,” Fatma recited. “Every second-year in Theoretical Alchemy learns that. Al-Jahiz’s grand formula. But no one’s been able to replicate it. Not even the djinn.”

“This Builder found a way,” the jann said.

“How?” Fatma asked. Merira nodded to Rika.

The woman licked her lips nervously. “I don’t understand it, really. Sennar called it the Clock of Worlds. Some kind of machine, he said, that would open the doorway to their dark gods. This was the work of the Builder.”

Fatma went silent. Space and time, she repeated in her head. A machine that brought together all of time, in one space. And just like that, the last piece of the puzzle fit into place. Or, perhaps, the last cog. She had seen this Clock of Worlds. She had stood before it and not recognized it.

“I know who the Builder is,” she whispered. “And we’re in trouble.”

• • • •

Fatma held fast to her bowler, clenching her teeth at every jolt of the two-seater glider that raced high above Cairo. Beside her, Siti laughed, piloting the craft in sharp turns that made its wing flaps ripple in the wind.

“Don’t like to fly, pretty little boy?” the woman shouted above the ruckus of the rattling engines, eyeing Fatma from beneath bulbous goggles.

Fatma didn’t reply, focusing instead on keeping down her last meal. She had been prepared to catch a carriage, but Siti insisted on a faster way. And time was not on their side. As they passed into the island district of al-Gezira, she pointed to their destination and the glider dived. The drop was fast, and Fatma could feel her stomach in her throat. Beside her, Siti just laughed. Was this the woman’s idea of a good time? Just when she thought she might finally be sick, they landed. Or rather, they took several rough bounces that jarred Fatma deep in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t breathe until they’d come to a stop.

“On the front doorstep?” she asked, jumping to the ground on shaky legs.

“I like to be direct,” Siti replied. She had changed into a pair of snug-fitting tan breeches that tucked into sturdy brown leather boots. A red, quilted Mamluk kaftan served as a top, tied together at the waist by a broad sash.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Fatma said, drawing her pistol. “The police are on their way.”

Siti gave her a wry look, pulling out a long rifle fitted with rounded lenses from her flying craft. “Merira sent me to help. This land has enough gods as it is. Don’t need these dark upstarts. Besides, Inspector Sharif and his men won’t get here until it’s too late.” She flashed a smile. “Can’t be too particular for a partner at the end of the world.”

Fatma had to admit that the woman had a point. “Come on, then.” She glanced to the long rifle. “And keep that thing ready.”

For the second time this night, she walked toward the summer palace of the old Khedive. As they approached, the mechanical jackals appeared again from the garden, moving toward them. Only this time they did not trot—they ran, sleek and with intent.

When one of them spread golden wings and took flight, a shot from Siti’s rifle quickly brought it down in a crashing heap of twisted metal. Fatma waited until the second one came close before shooting it through a glass eye, then running its mechanical body through with her cane.

Siti kicked at the iron carcass. “Looks like we’re not welcome. Two angels gone bad in one night. That has to be some kind of record.”

“They’re not really angels,” Fatma replied.

The two broke into a run, weapons at the ready, as they cleared the garden and reached the front doors of the palace. Fatma glanced up for the first hints of dawn. The jann had made it clear. The Clock of Worlds had to be opened in time to the rising sun. And that couldn’t be allowed to happen. At the end of a hallway, they came to the set of large mahogany doors. With Siti at the ready, Fatma pulled them open. A grisly scene greeted them.

The Clock of Worlds stood where she had last seen it—a towering contraption of plates and wheels. Only now they moved with harmonious ticks of precision, and the numerals on those large plates glowed bright. A deep blue liquid had been poured in a circle around the machine. The djinn’s missing blood, she surmised. In a larger circle sat the bodies of ghuls in a pile of twisted limbs. Their heads had been removed and their stomachs slit to reveal the devoured flesh of an angel. Here was what remained of the Ram and the Harvester, who had offered themselves up as sacrifices.

In the midst of this horror stood the Builder—Maker.

The angel was terrifying to behold. Three of his hands held long curved knives, all smeared in gore. In the fourth hand hung the limp body of a headless ghul. As they watched, he gutted the creature, spilling out the glowing contents of its belly.

“Maker!” Fatma shouted. The angel turned, his alabaster mask as calm as ever. He dropped the ghul in place and glided toward the two mortals, his metallic wings spread wide and tinged with blood.

“Stop!” Fatma warned, aiming her pistol. To her relief, he did, staring down with those brilliant eyes.

“The very perceptive investigator,” he remarked in his melodious voice.

“I know what you’re up to! The Clock of Worlds. “

“You know nothing.”

Fatma gestured toward the clock. “Shut that thing off! Or we will!”

Maker cocked his head curiously. “You have come here to stop me? When I do this all for Him?”

“This has nothing to do with God. We know about the things you worship! Your hope for rebirth!”

“No.” Maker seemed offended at the charge. “I serve only Him!”

“The djinn, Sennar. He said—”

“Djinn are superstitious and easily fooled,” Maker cut in. “Their dark gods have no power of granting life. Only destruction.”

Fatma stared, now confused. “Then why?”

“Because He wants me to,” Maker replied plainly. He extended his arms. “Look upon your world. So despoiled, so wanting. You are disobedient. Arrogant. You squabble. You war. This is not what He wanted. This is not what He created. He is perfect, and could not have made such imperfection. This is your doing. Your corruption.

“I dwelled long on this, until I understood my place in His plan. I am Maker. It is my essence. I am in that way like Him. What I create is also perfect.” He gestured to the mechanical tree, with its two human automatons standing beneath. “This world can be remade, perfect again. Your kind can be remade. And I will help Him do so. But to fix an imperfection, the first creation must be cast aside. These dark gods of the djinn will do that. They will cleanse this world so that He and I can begin anew.”

Fatma stood numbed at the perverse logic. “These beings you plan to unleash, they’ll kill thousands!”

“Millions,” Maker corrected. There was no anger or emotion, just a calculation. “The Harvester was eager to help reap such death, even knowing he would not see it. A loyal servant.”

“You ever spoken to Him?” someone asked. Both Fatma and Maker turned to Siti, who still held her rifle trained.

“I know His heart,” the angel replied.

Siti snorted. “That’s a no, then. What I thought. You made Him up.”

Maker paused. “How do you mean—?”

Siti shrugged. “You angels. You made this God up. Maybe only a few higher-ups did at first. Then the rest of you believed it. But I think He’s made up all the same.”

Maker glared, seeming at a loss for words. So was Fatma. That had to be the most sacrilegious thing she’d ever heard. Siti merely shrugged again.

“I have seen the bones of your dead gods, child,” Maker rasped. He was certainly angry now. “They rot in the earth, their magic gone and bodies devoured by worms.” He inhaled deeply, becoming calm again, and turning back to the clock. “I only wish to make you worthy of Him. When they come from their dark realm, you will see. You will pluck out your mortal eyes to look upon them, but you will see.”

His gaze tilted to the domed glass ceiling as the first rays of dawn pierced the sky. “It begins.” He lifted his three blades high and Fatma braced for attack. Where was Aasim? She and Siti alone wouldn’t last long against an angel. But Maker didn’t move toward them, instead looking down with those bright eyes and releasing a piteous sigh.

“Even now, you fail to grasp the strength of my conviction.” And with those last words, he plunged the three blades through his body—one stabbing into his chest, a second ripping apart the armor surrounding his heart, and a third sliding through the metallic links of his neck. Bright fluid like the blood of a star poured from the wounds. He swayed, then toppled to crash upon the ground and was still.

“Well, that was unexpected,” Siti remarked.

Fatma said nothing. Her eyes were pinned to an area in front of the clock. A hole had appeared. It sat there in the air, impossible yet all too real—like someone had bored into reality and found only black nothingness on the other end. Wisps of ephemeral vapor lifted from the dead offerings on the floor, all drawn into that nothingness to be devoured by oblivion. And as she watched, the hole grew.

Fatma recounted the prophecy related by the jann. The Ram, the Harvester, the Builder. Their lives given willingly. Her eyes shifted to the dead angel, now shrouded in that ephemeral vapor. Given willingly.

“Maker was the last,” she said aloud. “He was the last sacrifice. He intended to die all along. To fulfill the prophecy.” The image of the final glyph came to her, a half moon shrouded in vines. “To open the door.” She had barely spoken the words before the surface of the hole rippled like water, and then the tendrils poured out.

They were a translucent gray, long fleshy tentacles that emerged from that fathomless black sea. Some were thin as hair, others thicker than a man, spilling onto the ground in a twisting mass and spreading around. They wrapped about the ghul carcasses, which blackened and shriveled under their touch, decaying in moments. The same became of the angel, the light of his body fading until he was left a dried and desiccated husk.

“That’s. Disgusting.” Siti grimaced behind clenched teeth.

There was a sudden bellowing from within the hole, a harsh, guttural mashing of tongues that rose as many and fell as one. The force of it was deafening, trembling the palace and sending terror through Fatma that staggered her under its weight. She remembered now the black lake in the mural in Sennar’s apartment, of the ifrit summoning their dark gods. This was the Rising. Whatever thing—things—lived in that primordial darkness were now trying to come through. When they did, these terrible gods would demand no less than death. They nourished themselves on it. They would demand the death of a whole world.

“We have to close it!” Fatma said, finding her voice.

Siti nodded stiffly, staring wide-eyed at the groping tendrils that continued to emerge from the hole. “I’m open to any ideas.”

Fatma’s mind raced, trying to recall her readings in second-year alchemy. Al-Jahiz. The Theory of Overlapping Spheres. This Clock of Worlds worked on his grand formula. What had that jann said? Space and time. She looked at the clock, at its gears that ground inexorably forward like some inevitable countdown. That was it! Time.

She turned to Siti. “I have to get to the clock!”

Siti gave a curt nod, readying her long rifle. And Fatma ran.

Behind her, she could hear the other woman firing off rounds. Bullets streaked by, hitting tendrils, cutting through gray translucent flesh in spurts of black fetid blood that made her want to gag. Another stomach-turning bellow came from inside the portal, this time a howl of pain and anger. Fatma wondered if what she looked upon now were many beings, or merely the appendage of one dipping into their world. She shook off the terrifying thought, concentrating instead on reaching the clock. When a tendril lashed toward her, she pulled her janbiya from its belt and slashed through the tip, which fell squirming to the floor.

A shout from Siti made Fatma look up in time to see a massive tentacle rushing her way. She went flat, covering her head as it snaked its way over and above, seeking the source of the biting bullets. She turned to see Siti leaping beyond the lashing limb, landing nimbly on top of a table like a cat. The woman had slung the long rifle over her back, and donned those silver talon claws on each hand. Roaring, she slashed at the thick tentacle, raking deep gashes in its flesh. Not a cat, Fatma thought. A lioness! The other tendrils quickly joined the fray, tearing apart the room and flinging furniture in their frustration as the small figure remained just out of their reach.

Fatma looked ahead, found the path clear, and almost shouted in relief. She pushed herself up, and ran again for the clock. When she reached it she stared up at the complex design of machinery, where iron wheels and pinions all turned in a harmonious union. A loud ticking emanated from within the structure, like the beating heart of some metronomic being. Space and time, the jann had said. That’s how the doorway was opened. This clock was too big to move, but maybe she could do something about time.

Fatma lifted her cane, searching for a spot between the spinning plates—finding one, she rammed the cane in all the way to the silver lion-headed pommel. The clock groaned with a metal whine, shuddering as the wheels’ teeth ground around the cane. The two gears slowed and for a heartbeat she dared to hope. Then, with a forceful crunch, the iron teeth bit through the cane, pressing forward and crushing it to bits. Fatma’s heart faltered.

Not enough. Maker had outdone himself. This was a machine created by a being driven to achieve perfection. Every wheel had been cut specifically, each one put in place by exacting hands, with extreme care and an unfaltering will. This wasn’t just a clock, it was a masterpiece of perfect precision. It wouldn’t be stopped so easily.

Perfect precision. The thought played in Fatma’s head as that rhythmic ticking resonated. Putting a hand to a space in the clock, she hoisted herself up and climbed. This had indeed been Maker’s handiwork. A being not just driven by, but obsessed with perfection. A being that would make certain each piece of his masterful design performed in absolute precision—or not at all. And every clock had a means to keep it precise. She climbed until she reached a place where she could peer inside the clock’s ironwork chassis, past the plates and wheels, searching for that means of precision until she found it. The pendulum—a thick metal bar cut sharp on either end. It swung back and forth to that metronomic rhythm, allowing each tooth of a large central spinning gear to escape in precise timing. The thing was too big to pry it loose. But if she could find something to upset that tempo . . .

Without another thought, Fatma reached into her breast pocket and pulled out a round bit of gold. Her father’s watch. Praise be to God! She reached her arm inside the clock, lodging the watch between the pendulum and the gear. It ceased swinging abruptly, caught on the small piece of metal. Fatma held her breath, praying that this would work. There was a strained groaning as a terrific tremor ran along the length of the clock. Everywhere, gear wheels skipped or seized, losing their perfect precision. That harmonious movement was replaced by a growing discord as time itself lost precision. Fatma looked to see the gaping hole in the air waver —and slowly begin to close.

She might have cried out in triumph, but that terrible bellowing came again, this time in fitful snarls. For one heart-stopping moment the hole suddenly expanded. Gazing into that darkness spread out before her, Fatma caught the outline of a monstrous shape she could not begin to describe. And every fear, every nightmare she’d ever had seized within her chest. Then, like a band stretched to its limit, the hole contracted, collapsing in on itself, as reality crashed back together with the thunderous handclap of a god.

Fatma was thrown from the clock as a concussive roar swept the room. For a moment she was flying, then she struck the ground hard. Air was pushed from her lungs in a gasp, and agony flared where her shoulder impacted with stone. She rolled several times over before her back slammed against something, stopping her momentum. She lay there for a long moment through a haze of dizzying pain, as a ringing sounded in her ears.

Then someone was there, lifting debris from atop her. Siti. The woman was covered in dust, and blood flowed from more than a few cuts—including a gash that left her hair slick with crimson on the right side of her head. She extended a hand and Fatma was sure to offer the good arm. Standing, the two surveyed the room, now barely recognizable, with splintered furniture and shattered contraptions. A wall had collapsed and the air was filled with thick, billowing dust. Only parts of the clock were left, a few stubborn wheels somehow still spinning. The doorway itself was gone.

“Looks like you’ll need a new suit,” Siti wheezed between coughs. Fatma looked down. Her pants were torn and her jacket was little better. There was a pang of loss as she remembered the fate of her cane. And what had become of her bowler?

“Think this is yours,” Siti offered, holding a bit of gold that dangled from a chain. Fatma took her watch and flipped it open, smiling at the familiar ticking. Scratched and worse for wear, but the damn thing still worked. Closing it, she slipped it back into her breast pocket.

Slowly, the two women began to make their way through the wreckage. Fatma stopped at sight of gray flesh in their path. One of the tendrils. It had been sheared clean at the base, cut off from the thing—or things—now trapped back in that dark realm. She kicked it. Dead.

“What do you think that belonged to?” Siti asked.

Fatma grimaced, remembering her glimpse through the doorway. “We don’t want to know.” Both women looked up at sounds from the distance. Voices. Shouts. One was Aasim.

“You’ll excuse me,” Siti said. “But Merira prefers we keep our distance from the local constabulary.”

Fatma caught her meaning. “Don’t worry. As far as they’re concerned, I never spoke to any of you. You were never here.” She paused. “Thank you, Siti.”

The taller woman beamed, a mischievous look in her eyes. “You can thank me over a nice meal.”

Fatma raised an eyebrow. “The two of us? Share a meal?”

“And why not?”

“You’re an infidel. And maybe a little insane.”

Siti grinned, not denying either charge. She reached up with dexterous fingers to adjust the loosed knot on Fatma’s tie. “My family owns a restaurant downtown. You’ve never had better Nubian food. I have an aunt who will make us the best fatta if asked, no matter the time of year. And wait till you taste her mulukhiya.” Finishing the knot, she played with the length of the tie. “Just make sure you wear one of these nice little suits.” There was a wink before the woman turned and was gone, disappearing into the dust with that rifle slung over her back.

Fatma shook her head, turning in time to see three men in khaki uniforms scrambling over wreckage to enter the room—a dumbfounded Aasim in their lead. Holding her injured shoulder, she hobbled over toward the inspector. He was going to hate the paperwork on this one.

Phenderson Djéli Clark’s published works have appeared in such online venues as Daily Science Fiction, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Fantasy Magazine and several print anthologies including Griots I & II, Myriad Lands and Hidden Youth. His stories were included in the 2016 Locus Recommended Reading List and among the Notable Stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2017. His novelette “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” was originally published on Tor.com in 2016. He blogs on SFF, diversity and more at his blog The Disgruntled Haradrim (pdjeliclark.com). He also tweets stuff: @pdjeliclark.

Red as Blood and White as Bone
By Theodora Goss

I am an orphan. I was born among these mountains, to a woodcutter and his wife. My mother died in childbirth, and my infant sister died with her. My father felt that he could not keep me, so he sent me to the sisters of St. Margarete, who had a convent farther down the mountain on which we lived, the Karhegy. I was raised by the sisters on brown bread, water, and prayer.

This is a good way to start a fairy tale, is it not?

When I was twelve years old, I was sent to the household of Baron Orso Kalman, whose son was later executed for treason, to train as a servant. I started in the kitchen, scrubbing the pots and pans with a brush, scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees with an even bigger brush. Greta, the German cook, was bad-tempered, as was the first kitchen maid, Agneta. She had come from Karberg, the big city at the bottom of the Karhegy—at least it seemed big, to such a country bumpkin as I was then. I was the second kitchen maid and slept in a small room that was probably a pantry, with a small window high up, on a mattress filled with straw. I bathed twice a week, after Agneta in her bathwater, which had already grown cold. In addition to the plain food we received as servants, I was given the leftovers from the baron’s table after Greta and Agneta had picked over them. That is how I first tasted chocolate cake, and sausage, and beer. And I was given two dresses of my very own. Does this not seem like much? It was more than I had received at the convent. I thought I was a lucky girl!

I had been taught to read by the nuns, and my favorite thing to read was a book of fairy tales. Of course the nuns had not given me such a thing. A young man who had once stayed in the convent’s guesthouse had given it to me, as a gift. I was ten years old, then. One of my duties was herding the goats. The nuns were famous for a goat’s milk cheese, and so many of our chores had to do with the goats, their care and feeding. Several times, I met this man up in the mountain pastures. (I say man, but he must have been quite young still, just out of university. To me he seemed dreadfully old.) I was with the goats, he was striding on long legs, with a walking stick in his hand and a straw hat on his head. He always stopped and talked to me, very politely, as he might talk to a young lady of quality.

One day, he said, “You remind me of a princess in disguise, Klara, here among your goats.” When I told him that I did not know what he meant, he looked at me in astonishment. “Have you never read any fairy tales?” Of course not. I had read only the Bible and my primer. Before he left the convent, he gave me a book of fairy tales, small but beautifully illustrated. “This is small enough to hide under your mattress,” he said. “Do not let the nuns see it, or they will take it from you, thinking it will corrupt you. But it will not. Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.”

Years later, I saw his name again in a bookstore window and realized he had become a poet, a famous one. But by then he was dead. He had died in the war, like so many of our young men.

I followed his instructions, hiding the book under my mattress and taking it out only when there was no one to see me. That was difficult at the convent, where I slept in a room with three other girls. It was easier in the baron’s house, where I slept alone in a room no one else wanted, not even to store turnips. And the book did indeed become a Bible to me, a surer guide than that other Bible written by God himself, as the nuns had taught. For I knew nothing of Israelites or the building of pyramids or the parting of seas. But I knew about girls who scrubbed floors and grew sooty sleeping near the hearth, and fish who gave you wishes (although I had never been given one), and was not Greta, our cook, an ogress? I’m sure she was. I regarded fairy tales as infallible guides to life, so I did not complain at the hard work I was given, because perhaps someday I would meet an old woman in the forest, and she would tell me that I was a princess in disguise. Perhaps.

The day on which she came was a cold, dark day. It had been raining for a week. Water poured down from the sky, as though to drown us all, and it simply did not stop. I was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. Greta and Agneta were meeting with the housekeeper, Frau Hoffman, about a ball that was to take place in three days’ time. It would celebrate the engagement of the baron’s son, Vadek, to the daughter of a famous general, who had fought for the Austro-Hungarian emperor in the last war. Prince Radomir himself was staying at the castle. He had been hunting with Vadek Kalman in the forest that covered the Karhegy until what Greta called this unholy rain began. They had been at school together, Agneta told me. I found it hard to believe that a prince would go to school, for they never did in my tales. What need had a prince for schooling, when his purpose in life was to rescue fair maidens from the dragons that guarded them, and fight ogres, and ride on carpets that flew through the air like aeroplanes? I had never in my life seen either a flying carpet or an aeroplane: to me, they were equally mythical modes of transportation.

I had caught a glimpse of the general’s daughter when she first arrived the day before, with her father and lady’s maid. She was golden-haired, and looked like a porcelain doll under her hat, which Agneta later told me was from Paris. The lady’s maid had told Frau Hoffman, who had told Greta, and the news had filtered down even to me. But I thought a Paris hat looked much like any other hat, and I had no interest in a general’s daughter. She did not have glass slippers, and I was quite certain she could not spin straw into gold. So what good was she?

I was sitting, as I have said, in the kitchen beside the great stone hearth, peeling potatoes by a fire I was supposed to keep burning so it could later be used for roasting meat. The kitchen was dark, because of the storm outside. I could hear the steady beating of rain on the windows, the crackling of wood in the fire. Suddenly, I heard a thump, thump, thump against the door that led out to the kitchen garden. What could it be? For a moment, my mind conjured images out of my book: a witch with a poisoned apple, or Death himself. But then I realized it must be Josef, the under-gardener. He often knocked on that door when he brought peas or asparagus from the garden and made cow-eyes at Agneta.

“A moment,” I cried, putting aside the potatoes I had been peeling, leaving the knife in a potato near the top of the basket so I could find it again easily. Then I went to the door.

When I pulled it open, something that had been leaning against it fell inside. At first I could not tell what it was, but it moaned and turned, and I saw that it was a woman in a long black cloak. She lay crumpled on the kitchen floor. Beneath her cloak she was naked: her white legs gleamed in the firelight. Fallen on the ground beside her was a bundle, and I thought: Beggar woman. She must be sick from hunger.

Greta, despite her harshness toward me, was often compassionate to the beggar women who came to our door—war widows, most of them. She would give them a hunk of bread or a bowl of soup, perhaps even a scrap of meat. But Greta was not here. I had no authority to feed myself, much less a woman who had wandered here in the cold and wet.

Yet there she lay, and I had to do something.

I leaned down and shook her by the shoulders. She fell back so that her head rolled around, and I could see her face for the first time. That was no cloak she wore, but her own black hair, covering her down to her knees, leaving her white arms exposed. And her white face . . . well. This was a different situation entirely. It was, after all, within my area of expertise, for although I knew nothing at all about war widows, I knew a great deal about lost princesses, and here at last was one. At last something extraordinary was happening in my life. I had waited a long time for this—an acknowledgment that I was part of the story. Not one of the main characters of course, but perhaps one of the supporting characters: the squire who holds the prince’s horse, the maid who brushes the princess’s hair a hundred times each night. And now story had landed with a thump on the kitchen floor.

But what does one do with a lost princess when she is lying on the kitchen floor? I could not lift her—I was still a child, and she was a grown woman, although not a large one. She had a delicacy that I thought appropriate to princesses. I could not throw water on her—she was already soaking wet. And any moment Greta or Agneta would return to take charge of my princess, for so I already thought of her. Finally, I resorted to slapping her cheeks until she opened her eyes—they were as deep and dark as forest pools.

“Come with me, Your Highness,” I said. “I’ll help you hide.” She stood, stumbling a few times so that I thought she might fall. But she followed me to the only place I knew to hide her—my own small room.

“Where is . . .” she said. They were the first words she had said to me. She looked around as though searching: frightened, apprehensive. I went back to the kitchen and fetched her bundle, which was also soaked. When I handed it to her, she clutched it to her chest.

“I know what you are,” I said.

“What . . . I am? And what is that?” Her voice was low, with an accent. She was not German, like Frau Hoffman, nor French, like Madame Francine, who did the baroness’s hair. It was not any accent I had heard in my short life.

“You are a princess in disguise,” I said. Her delicate pale face, her large, dark eyes, her graceful movements proclaimed who she was, despite her nakedness. I, who had read the tales, could see the signs. “Have you come for the ball?” What country did you come from? I wanted to ask. Where does your father rule? But perhaps that would have been rude. Perhaps one did not ask such questions of a princess.

“Yes . . . Yes, of course,” she said. “What else would I have come for?”

I gave her my nightgown. It came only to her shins, but otherwise fitted her well enough, she was so slender. I brought her supper—my own supper, it was, but I was too excited to be hungry. She ate chicken off the bone, daintily, as I imagined a princess would. She did not eat the potatoes or cabbage—I supposed they were too common for her. So I finished them myself.

I could hear Greta and Agneta in the kitchen, so I went out to finish peeling the potatoes. Agneta scolded me for allowing the fire to get low. There was still meat to roast for the baron’s supper, while Greta made a cream soup and Agneta dressed the cucumber salad. Then there were pots and pans to clean, and the black range to scrub. All the while, I smiled to myself, for I had a princess in my room.

I finished sweeping the ancient stone floor, which dated back to Roman times, while Greta went on about what we would need to prepare for the ball, how many village women she would hire to help with the cooking and baking for that night. And I smiled because I had a secret: My princess was going to the ball, and neither Greta nor Agneta would know.

When I returned to my room, the princess was fast asleep on my bed, under my old wool blanket that was ragged at the edges. I prepared to sleep on the floor, but she opened her eyes and said, “Come, little one,” holding the blanket open for me. I crawled in and lay next to her. She was warm, and she curled up around me with her chin against my shoulder. It was the warmest and most comfortable I had ever been. I slept soundly that night.

The next day, I woke to find that she was already up and wearing my other dress.

“Today, you must show me around the castle, Klara,” she said. Had she heard Greta or Agneta using my name the night before? The door was not particularly thick. She had not told me her name, and I did not have the temerity to ask for it.

“But if we are caught,” I said, “we will be in a great deal of trouble!”

“Then we must not be caught,” she said, and smiled. It was a kind smile, but there was also something shy and wild in it that I did not understand. As though the moon had smiled, or a flower.

“All right,” I said. I opened the door of my room carefully. It was dawn, and light was just beginning to fall over the stones of the kitchen, the floor and great hearth. Miraculously, the rain had stopped overnight. Greta and Agneta were—where? Greta was probably still snoring in her nightcap, for she did not rise until an hour after me, to prepare breakfast. And Agneta, who also rose at dawn, was probably out fetching eggs and vegetables from Josef. She liked to take her time and smoke a cigarette in the garden. None of the female servants were allowed to smoke in the castle. I had morning chores to do, for there were more potatoes to peel for breakfast, and as soon as Agneta returned, I would need to help her make the mayonnaise.

But when would I find such a good opportunity? The baron and his guests would not be rising for hours, and most of the house servants were not yet awake. Only the lowest of us, the kitchen maids and bootblack, were required to be up at dawn.

“This way,” I said to my princess, and I led her out of the kitchen, into the hallways of the castle, like a great labyrinth. Frightened that I might be caught, and yet thrilled at the risk we were taking, I showed her the front hall, with the Kalman coat of arms hanging from the ceiling, and then the reception room, where paintings of the Kalmans and their horses stared down at us with disapproval. The horses were as disapproving as their masters. I opened the doors to the library, to me the most magical room in the house—two floors of books I would never be allowed to read, with a spiral staircase going up to a balcony that ran around the second floor. We looked out the windows at the garden arranged in parterres, with regular paths and precisely clipped hedges, in the French style.

“Is it not very grand?” I asked.

“Not as grand as my house,” she replied. And then I remembered that she was a princess and likely had her own castle, much grander than a baron’s.

Finally, I showed her the ballroom, with its ceiling painted like the sky and heathen gods and goddesses in various states of undress looking down at the dancers below.

“This is where you will dance with Prince Radomir,” I said.

“Indeed,” she replied. “I have seen enough, Klara. Let us return to the kitchen before you get into trouble.”

As we scurried back toward the kitchen, down a long hallway, we heard voices coming from one of the rooms. As soon as she heard them, the princess put out her hand so I would stop. Softly, she stepped closer to the door, which was partly open.

Through the opening, I could see what looked like a comfortable parlor. There was a low fire in the hearth, and a man was sprawled on the sofa, with his feet up. I moved a few inches so I could see his face—it was Vadek Kalman.

“We’ll miss you in Karelstad,” said another man, sitting beyond where I could see him. “I suppose you won’t be returning after the wedding?”

Had they gotten up so early? But no, the baron’s son was still in evening dress. They had stayed up all night. Drinking, by the smell. Drinking quite a lot.

“And why should I not?” asked Vadek. “I’m going to be married, not into a monastery. I intend to maintain a social life. Can you imagine staying here, in this godforsaken place, while the rest of you are living it up without me? I would die of boredom, Radomir.” So he was talking to the prince. I shifted a little, trying to see the prince, for I had not yet managed to catch a glimpse of him. After all, I was only a kitchen maid. What did he look like?

“And if your wife objects? You don’t know yet—she might have a temper.”

“I don’t know a damn thing about her. She hasn’t said two words to me since she arrived. She’s like a frightened mouse, doing whatever her father the general tells her. Just the same as in Vienna. I tell you, the whole thing was put together by her father and mine. It’s supposed to be a grand alliance. Grandalliance. A damn ridiculous word . . .”

I heard the sound of glass breaking, the words “God damn it all,” and then laughter. The princess stood perfectly still beside me. She was barely breathing.

“So he thinks there’s going to be another war?”

“Well, don’t you? It’s going to be Germany this time, and Father wants to make sure we have contacts on the right side. The winning side.”

“The Reich side, eh?” said the prince. I heard laughter again, and did not understand what was so funny. “I wish my father understood that. He doesn’t want to do business with the Germans. Karel agrees with him—you know what a sanctimonious ass my brother can be. You have to, I told him. Or they’ll do business with you. And to you.”

“Well, if you’re going to talk politics, I’m going to bed,” said Vadek. “I get enough of it from my father. Looks like the rain’s finally stopped. Shall we go for a walk through the woods later today? That other wolf is still out there.”

“Are you sure you saw it?”

“Of course I’m sure. It was under the trees, in the shadows. I could swear it was watching you. Anyway, the mayor said two wolves had been spotted in the forest, a hunting pair. They’re keeping the children in at night in case it comes close to the village. You know what he said to me when I told him you had shot one of them? It’s bad luck to kill the black wolves of the Karhegy, he said. I told him he should be grateful, that you had probably saved the life of some miserable village brat. But he just shook his head. Superstitious peasant.”

“Next time, remind him that he could be put in prison for criticizing the crown prince. Things will be different in this country when I am king, Vadek. That I can tell you.”

I heard appreciative laughter.

“And what will you do with the pelt? It’s a particularly fine one—the tanner said as much, when he delivered it.”

“It will go on the floor of my study, on one side of my desk. Now I need another, for the other side. Yes, let’s go after the other wolf—if it exists, as you say.”

The princess pulled me away.

I did not like this prince, who joked about killing the black wolves. I was a child of the Karhegy, and had grown up on stories of the wolves, as black as night, that lived nowhere else in Europe. The nuns had told me they belonged to the Devil, who would come after any man that harmed them. But my friend the poet had told me they were an ancient breed, and had lived on the mountain long before the Romans had come or Morek had driven them out, leading his tribesmen on their small, fierce ponies and claiming Sylvania for his own.

Why would my princess want to marry him? But that was the logic of fairy tales: The princess married the prince. Perhaps I should not question it, any more than I would question the will of God.

She led me back down the halls—evidently, she had learned the way better than I knew it myself. I followed her into the kitchen, hoping Greta would still be asleep—but no, there she stood, having gotten up early to prepare a particularly fine breakfast for the future baroness. She was holding a rolling pin in her hand.

“Where in the world have you been, Klara?” she said, frowning. “And who gave you permission to wander away? Look, the potatoes are not yet peeled. I need them to make pancakes, and they still need to be boiled and mashed. Who the devil is this with you?”

I looked over at my princess, frightened and uncertain what to say. But as neatly as you please, she curtsied and said, “I’ve come from the village, ma’am. Father Ilvan told me you need help in the kitchen, to prepare for the ball.”

Greta looked at her skeptically. I could tell what she was thinking—this small woman with her long, dark hair and accented voice. Was she a Slav? A gypsy? The village priest was known equally for his piety and propensity to trust the most inappropriate people. He was generous to peddlers and thieves alike.

But she nodded and said, “All right, then. Four hands are faster than two. Get those potatoes peeled.”

That morning we peeled and boiled and mashed, and whisked eggs until our arms were sore, and blanched almonds. While Greta was busy with Frau Hoffman and Agneta was gossiping with Josef, I asked my princess about her country. Where had she come from? What was it like? She said it was not far, and as beautiful as Sylvania, and yes, they spoke a different language there.

“It is difficult for me to speak your language, little one,” she said. We were pounding the almonds for marzipan.

“Do you tell stories there?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said. “Stories are everywhere, and everyone tells them. But our stories may be different from yours. About the Old Woman of the Forest, who grants your heart’s desire if you ask her right, and the Fair Ladies who live in trees, and the White Stag, who can lead you astray or lead you home . . .”

I wanted to hear these stories, but then Agneta came in, and we could not talk again about the things that interested me without her or Greta overhearing. By the time our work was done, long after supper, I was so tired that I simply fell into bed with my clothes on. Trying to stay awake although my eyes kept trying to close, I watched my princess draw the bundle she had brought with her out from the corner where I had put it. She untied it, and down came spilling a long black . . . was it a dress? Yes, a dress as black as night, floor-length, obviously a ball gown. It had been tied with its own sleeves. Something that glittered and sparkled fell out of it, onto the floor. I sat up, awake now, wanting to see more clearly.

She turned and showed me what had fallen—a necklace of red beads, each faceted and reflecting the light from the single bare bulb in my room.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“They are . . . what are they?” I had never seen such jewels, although I had read about fabulous gems in my fairy tale book. The beads were each the size of a hummingbird’s egg, and as red as blood. Each looked as though it had a star at its center. She laid the dress on my bed—I reached over and felt it, surreptitiously. It was the softest velvet imaginable. Then she clasped the necklace around her neck. It looked incongruous against the patched dress she was wearing—my second best one.

“Wait, where is . . .” She looked at the floor where the necklace had fallen, then got down on her knees and looked under the bed, then searched again frantically in the folds of the dress. “Ah, there! It was caught in a buttonhole.” She held up a large comb, the kind women used to put their hair up in the last century.

“Will you dress my hair, Klara?” she asked. I nodded. While she sat on the edge of my bed, I put her hair up, a little clumsily but the way I had seen the baroness dress her hair, which was also long, not bobbed or shingled. Finally, I put in the comb—it was as white as bone, indeed probably made of bone, ornately carved and with long teeth to catch the hair securely.

“There,” I said. “Would you like to look in a mirror?” I held up a discarded shaving glass I had found one morning on the trash heap at the bottom of the garden. I used it sometimes to search my face for any signs of beauty, but I had found none yet. I was always disappointed to find myself an ordinary girl.

She looked at herself from one side, then the other. “Such a strange face,” she said. “I cannot get used to it.”

“You’re very beautiful,” I said. And she was, despite the patched dress. Princesses are, even in disguise. That’s how you know.

“Thank you, little one. I hope I am beautiful enough,” she said, and smiled.

That night, she once again slept curled around me, with her chin on my shoulder. I dreamed that I was wandering through the forest, in the darkness under the trees. I crossed a stream over mossy stones, felt the ferns brushing against my shins and wetting my socks with dew. I found the little red mushrooms that are poisonous to eat, saw the shy, wild deer of the Karhegy, with their spotted fawns. When I woke, my princess was already up and dressed.

“Potatoes,” she said. “Your life is an endless field of potatoes, Klara.” I nodded and laughed, because it was true.

That day, we helped prepare for the ball. We were joined by Marta, the daughter of the village baker, and Anna, the groom’s wife, who had been taking odd jobs since her husband was kicked by one of the baron’s horses. He was bedridden until his leg was fully healed, and on half-salary. We candied orange and lemon peels, and pulled pastry until it was as thin as a bedsheet, then folded it so that it lay in leaves, like a book. We soaked cherries in rum, and glazed almonds and walnuts with honey. I licked some off my fingers. Marta showed us how to boil fondant, and even I was permitted to pipe a single icing rose.

All the while, we washed dishes and swept the floor, which quickly became covered with flour. My princess never complained, not once, even though she was obviously not used to such work. She was clumsier at it than I was, and if we had not needed the help, I think Greta would have dismissed her. As it was, she looked at her several times, suspiciously. How could any woman not know how to pull pastry? Unless she was a gypsy and spent her life telling fortunes, traveling in a caravan . . .

There was no time to talk that day, so I could not ask how she would get to the ball. And that night, I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

The next day, the day of the ball, we were joined by the two upstairs maids: Katrina, who was from Karberg like Agneta, and her cousin, whose name I have forgotten. They were most superior young women, and would not have set foot in the kitchen except for such a grand occasion. What a bustle there was that day in the normally quiet kitchen! Greta barking orders and Agneta barking them after her, and the chatter of women working, although my princess did not chatter of course, but did her work in silence. We made everything that could not have been made ahead of time, whisking the béchamel, poaching fish, and roasting the pig that would preside in state over the supper room, with a clove-studded orange in its mouth. We sieved broth until it was perfectly clear, molded liver dumplings into various shapes, and blanched asparagus.

Nightfall found us prepared but exhausted. Greta, who had been meeting one last time with Frau Hoffman, scurried in to tell us that the motorcars had started to arrive. I caught a glimpse of them when I went out to ask Josef for some sprigs of mint. Such motorcars! Large and black and growling like dragons as they circled around the stone courtyard, dropping off guests. The men in black tails or military uniforms, the women in evening gowns, glittering, iridescent. How would my princess look among them, in her simple black dress?

At last all the food on the long kitchen table—the aspics and clear soup, the whole trout poached with lemons, the asparagus with its accompanying hollandaise—was borne up to the supper room by footmen. It took two of them to carry the suckling pig. Later would go the cakes and pastries, the chocolates and candied fruit.

“Klara, I need your help,” the princess whispered to me. No one was paying attention—Katrina and her cousin had already gone upstairs to help the female guests with their wraps. Marta, Anna, and Agneta were laughing and gossiping among themselves. Greta was off doing something important with Frau Hoffman. “I need to wash and dress,” she said. And indeed, she had a smear of buttery flour across one cheek. She looked as much like a kitchen maid as a princess can look, when she has a pale, serious face and eyes as deep as forest pools, and long black hair that kept escaping the braid into which she had put it.

“Of course,” I said. “There is a bathroom down the hall, beyond the water closet. No one will be using it tonight.”

No one noticed as we slipped out of the kitchen. My princess fetched her dress, and then I showed her the way to the ancient bathroom shared by the female servants, with its metal tub.

“I have no way of heating the water,” I said. “Usually Agneta boils a kettle, and I take my bath after her.”

“That’s all right,” she said, smiling. “I have never taken a bath in hot water all my life.”

What a strict regimen princesses followed! Never to have taken a bath in hot water . . . not that I had either, strictly speaking. But after Agneta had finished with it, the bathwater was usually still lukewarm.

I gave her one of the thin towels kept in the cupboard, then sat on a stool with my back to the tub, to give her as much privacy as I could while she splashed and bathed.

“I’m finished,” she said finally. “How do I look, little one?”

I turned around. She was wearing the black dress, as black as night, out of which her shoulders and neck rose as though she were the moon emerging from a cloud. Her black hair hung down to her waist.

“I’ll put it up for you,” I said. She sat on the stool, and I recreated the intricate arrangement of the other night, with the white comb to hold it together. She clasped the necklace of red beads around her neck and stood.

There was my princess, as I had always imagined her: as graceful and elegant as a black swan. Suddenly, tears came to my eyes.

“Why are you crying, Klara?” she asked, brushing a tear from my cheek with her thumb.

“Because it’s all true,” I said.

She kissed me on the forehead, solemnly as though performing a ritual. Then she smiled and said, “Come, let us go to the ballroom.”

“I can’t go,” I said. “I’m just the second kitchen maid, remember? You go . . . you’re supposed to go.”

She smiled, touched my cheek again, and nodded. I watched as she walked away from me, down the long hallway that led to other parts of the castle, the parts I was not supposed to enter. The white comb gleamed against her black hair.

And then there was washing-up to do.

It was not until several hours later that I could go to my room, lie on my bed exhausted, and think about my princess, dancing with Prince Radomir. I wished I could see her . . . and then I thought, Wait, what about the gallery? From the upstairs gallery one could look down through a series of five roundels into the ballroom. I could get up to the second floor using the back stairs. But then I would have to walk along several hallways, where I might meet guests of the baron. I might be caught. I might be sent back to the nuns—in disgrace.

But I wanted to see her dancing with the prince. To see the culmination of the fairy tale in which I had participated.

Before I could take too long to think about it, I sneaked through the kitchen and along the back hallway, to the staircase. Luckily, the second-floor hallways were empty. All the guests seemed to be down below—as I scurried along the gallery, keeping to the walls, I could hear the music and their chatter floating upward. On one side of the gallery were portraits of the Kalmans not important enough to hang in the main rooms. They looked at me as though wondering what in the world I was doing there. Halfway down the other side were the roundels, circular windows through which light shone on the portraits. I looked through the first one. Yes, there she was—easy to pick out, a spot of black in the middle of the room, like the center of a Queen Anne’s lace. She was dancing with a man in a military uniform. Was he . . . I would be able to see better from the second window. Yes, the prince, for all the other dancers were giving them space. My princess was dancing with the prince—a waltz, judging by the music. Even I recognized that three-four time. They were turning round and round, with her hand on his shoulder and her red necklace flashing in the light of the chandeliers.

Were those footsteps I heard? I looked down the hall, but they passed—they were headed elsewhere. I put my hand to my heart, which was beating too fast, and took a long breath in relief. I looked back through the window.

My princess and Prince Radomir were gone. The Queen Anne’s lace had lost its center.

Perhaps they had gone into the supper room? I waited, but they did not return. And for the first time, I worried about my princess. How would her story end? Surely she would get her happily ever after. I wanted, so much, for the stories to be true.

I waited a little longer, but finally I trudged back along the gallery, tired and despondent. It must have been near midnight, and I had been up since dawn. I was so tired that I must have taken a wrong turn, because suddenly I did not know where I was. I kept walking, knowing that if I just kept walking long enough through the castle hallways, I would eventually end up somewhere familiar. Then, I heard her voice. A door was open—the same door, I suddenly realized, where we had listened two days ago.

She was in that room—why? The door was open several inches. I looked in, carefully. She stood next to the fireplace. Beside her, holding one of her hands, was the prince. She was turned toward him, the red necklace muted in the dim light of a single lamp.

“Closer, and farther, than you can guess,” she said, looking at him, with her chin raised proudly.

“Budapest? Perhaps you come from Budapest. Or Prague? Do you come from Prague? Tell me your name. If you tell me your name, I’ll wager you I can guess where you come from in three tries. If I do, will I get a kiss?”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then you’ll get a kiss. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

He drew her to him, circling her waist with his arm. She put her arm around his neck, so that they stood clasped together. He still held one of her hands. It was a private moment, and I felt that I should go—but I could not. In my short life, I had never been to a play, but I felt as audience members feel, having come to a climactic moment. I held my breath.

“My name is meaningless in your language,” she said. He laughed, then leaned down and kissed her on the lips. They stood there by the fireplace, his lips on hers, and I thought, Yes, this is how a fairy tale should end.

I sighed, although without making a noise that might disturb them. Then with the arm that had been around his neck, she reached back and took the intricately carved comb out of her hair, so that it tumbled down like nightfall. With a swift motion, she thrust the sharp teeth of the comb into the side of his neck.

The prince threw back his head and screamed, like an animal in the forest. He stumbled back, limbs flailing. There was blood down his uniform, almost black against the red of his jacket. I was so startled that for a moment I did nothing, but then I screamed as well, and those screams—his maddened with pain, mine with fear—echoed down the halls.

In a moment, a footman came running. “Shut up, you,” he said when he saw me. But as soon as he looked into the room, his face grew pale, and he began shouting. Soon there were more footmen, and the baron, and the general, and then Father Ilvan. Through it all, my princess stood perfectly still by the fireplace, with the bloody comb in her hand.

When they brought the prince out on a stretcher, I crouched by the wall, but no one was paying attention to me. His head was turned toward me, and I saw his eyes, pale blue. Father Ilvan had not yet closed them.

They led her out, one footman on each side, holding her by the upper arms. She was clutching something. It looked like part of her dress, just as black, but bulkier. She did not look at me, but she was close enough that I could see how calm she was. Like a forest pool—deep and mysterious.

Slowly, I walked back to the kitchen. In my room, I drew up my knees and hugged them, then put my chin on my knees. The images played in my head, over and over, like a broken reel at the cinema: him bending down to kiss her, her hand drawing the comb out of her hair, the sharp, quick thrust. I had no way of understanding them. I had no stories to explain what had happened.

At last I fell asleep, and dreamed those images over and over, all night long.

In the morning, there was breakfast to prepare. As I fried sausages and potatoes, I heard Greta tell Agneta what had happened. She had heard it from Frau Hoffman herself: A foreign spy had infiltrated the castle. At least, she was presumed to be a foreign spy, although no one knew where she came from. Was she Slovakian? Yugoslavian? Bulgarian? Why had she wanted the prince dead?

She would not speak, although she would be made to speak. The baron had already telephoned the Royal Palace, and guards had been dispatched to take her, and the body of the prince, to Karelstad. They would arrive sometime that afternoon. In the meantime, she was locked in the dungeon, which had not held prisoners for a hundred years.

After breakfast, the baron himself came down to question us. The servants had been shown a sketch of a small, pale woman with long black hair, made by Father Ilvan. Katrina had identified her as one of the village women who had helped in the kitchen, in preparation for the ball. Why had she been engaged?

Because Father Ilvan had sent her, said Greta. But Father Ilvan had no knowledge of such a woman. Greta and Agneta were told to pack their bags. What had they been thinking, allowing a strange woman to work in the castle, particularly when the crown prince was present? If they did not leave that day, they would be put in the dungeon as well. And no, they would not be given references. I was too frightened to speak, to tell the baron that I had been the one to let her in. No one paid attention to me—I was too lowly even to blame.

By that afternoon, Marta, the baker’s daughter, was the new cook, and I was her kitchen maid. In two days, I had caused the death of the prince and gotten promoted.

“Klara,” she said to me, “I have no idea how we are to feed so many people, just the two of us. And Frau Hoffman says the royal guards will be here by dinnertime! Can you imagine?”

Then it was now or never. In an hour or two, I would be too busy preparing dinner, and by nightfall my princess—my spy?—would be gone, taken back to the capital for trial. I was frightened of what I was about to do, but felt that I must do it. In my life, I have often remembered that moment of fear and courage, when I took off my apron and sneaked out the door into the kitchen garden. It was the first moment I chose courage over fear, and I have always made the same choice since.

The castle had, of course, been built in the days before electric lights. Even the dungeon had windows. Once, Josef had shown them to me, when I was picking raspberries for a charlotte russe. Holding back the raspberry canes, he had said, “There, you see, little mouse, is the deep dark dungeon of the castle!” Although as far as I could tell it was just a bare stone room, with metal staples in the walls for chains. From the outside, the windows were set low into the castle wall, but from the inside they were high up in the wall of the dungeon—high enough that a tall man could not reach them. And they were barred.

It was late afternoon. Josef and the gardener’s boy who helped him were nowhere in sight. I crawled behind the raspberry canes, getting scratched in the process, and looked through one of the barred windows.

She was there, my princess. Sitting on the stone floor, her black dress pooled around her, black hair hanging down, still clutching something black in her arms. She was staring straight ahead of her, as though simply waiting.

“Princess!” I said, low in case anyone should hear. There must be guards? But I could not see them. The dungeon door was barred as well. There was no way out.

She looked around, then up. “Klara,” she said, and smiled. It was a strange, sad smile. She rose and walked over to the window, then stood beneath it, looking up at me, her face pale and tired in the dim light. Then I could see what she had been clutching: a wolf pelt, with the four paws and eyeless head hanging down.

“Why?” I asked. And then, for the first time, I began to cry. Not for Prince Radomir, but for the story. Because it had not been true, because she had allowed me to believe a lie. Because when Greta said she was a foreign spy, suddenly I had seen life as uglier and more ordinary than I had imagined, and the realization had made me sick inside.

“Klara,” she said, putting one hand on the wall, as far up as she could reach. It was still several feet below the window. “Little one, don’t cry. Listen, I’m going to tell you a story. Once upon a time—that’s how your stories start, isn’t it? Quietly, so the guards won’t hear. They are around the corner, having their dinners. I can smell the meat. Once upon a time, there were two wolves who lived on the Karhegy. They were black wolves, of the tribe that has lived on the mountain since time out of mind. The forest was their home, dark and peaceful and secure. There they lived, there they hoped to someday raise their children. But one day, a prince came with his gun, and he shot one of the wolves, who was carried away by the prince’s men for his fine pelt. The other wolf, who was his mate, swore that she would kill the prince.”

I listened intently, drying my face with the hem of my skirt.

“So she went to the Old Woman of the Forest and said, ‘Grandmother, you make bargains that are hard but fair. I will give you anything for my revenge.’ And the Old Woman said, ‘You shall have it. But you must give me your beautiful black pelt, and your dangerous white teeth, and the blood that runs in your body. For such a revenge, you must give up everything.’ And the wolf agreed. All these things she gave the Old Woman, who fashioned out of them a dress as black as night, and a necklace as red as blood, and a comb as white as bone. The old woman gave them to the wolf and said, ‘Now our bargain is complete.’ The wolf took the bundle the Old Woman had given her and stumbled out of the forest, for it was difficult walking on only two legs. On a rainy night, she made her way to the castle where the prince was staying. And the rest of the story, you know.”

I stared down at her, not knowing what to say. Should I believe it? Or her? Common sense told me that she was lying, that she was a foreign spy and I was a fool. But then, I have never had much common sense. And that, too, has stood me in good stead.

“Klara, put your hand through the bars,” she said.

I hesitated, then did as I was told.

She put the pelt down on the floor beside her, carefully as though it were a child, then unclasped the necklace of red beads. “Catch!” she said, and threw it up to me. I caught it—and then I heard boots echoing down the corridor. “Go now!” she said. “They’re coming for me.” I drew back my hand with the necklace in it and crawled away from the window. The sun was setting. It was time for me to return to the kitchen and prepare dinner. No doubt Marta was already wondering where I was.

When I got back to the kitchen, I learned that the royal guards had arrived. But they were too late—using the metal staples on the walls, my princess had hanged herself by her long black hair.

When I was sixteen, I left the baron’s household. By that time, I was as good a cook as Marta could teach me to be. I knew how to prepare the seven courses of a formal dinner, and I was particularly skilled in what Marta did best: pastry. I think my pâte à choux was as good as hers.

In a small suitcase, I packed my clothes, and my fairy tale book, and the necklace that my wolf-princess had given me, which I had kept under my mattress for many years.

Perhaps it was not wise, moving to Karelstad in the middle of the German occupation. But as I have said, I am deficient in common sense—the sense that keeps most people safe and out of trouble. I let bedraggled princesses in out of the rain. I pack my suitcase and move to the capital with only a fortnight’s wages and a reference from the baroness. I join the Resistance.

Although I did not know it, the café where I worked was a meeting-place for the Resistance. One of the young men who would come to the café, to drink coffee and read the newspapers, was a member. He had long hair that he did not wash often enough, and eyes of a startling blue, like evening in the mountains. His name was Antal Odon, and he was a descendent of the nineteenth-century poet Amadeo Odon. He would flirt with me, until we became friends. Then he did not flirt with me any longer, but spoke with me solemnly, about Sylvanian poetry and politics. He had been at the university until the Germans came. Then, it no longer seemed worthwhile becoming a literature professor, so he had left. What was he doing with himself now, I asked him?

It was he who first brought me to a meeting of the Resistance, in the cellar of the café where I worked. The owner, a motherly woman named Malina who had given me both a job and a room above the café, told us about Sylvanians who had been taken that week—both Jews and political prisoners. The next day, I went to a jeweler on Morek Stras, with my necklace as red as blood. How much for this? I asked him. Are these beads worth anything?

He looked at them through a small glass, then told me they would be worth more individually. Indeed, in these times, he did not know if he could find a purchaser for the entire necklace. He had never seen such fine rubies in his life.

One by one, he sold them off for me, often to the wives of German officers. Little did they know that they were funding the Resistance. I kept only one of the beads for myself, the smallest. I wear it now on a chain around my neck. So you can see, Grandmother, that my story is true.

As a member of the Resistance, I traveled to France and Belgium and Denmark. I carried messages sewn into my brassiere. No one suspects a young girl, if she wears high heels and red lipstick, and laughs with the German officers, and looks down modestly when they light her cigarette. Once, I even carried a message to a small town in the Swiss mountains, to a man who was introduced to me as Monsieur Reynard. He looked like his father, as far as one can tell from official portraits—one had hung in the nunnery schoolroom. I was told not to curtsy, simply to shake his hand as though he were an ordinary Sylvanian. I did not tell him, I saw your older brother die. I hope that someday you will once again return to Sylvania, as its king.

With my friend Antal, I smuggled political refugees out of the country. By then, we were more than friends . . . We hoped someday to be married, when the war was over. But he was caught and tortured. He never revealed names, so you see he died a hero. The man I loved died a hero.

When the war ended and the Russian occupation began, I did not know what to do with myself. I had imagined a life with Antal, and he was dead. But there were free classes at the university, for those who had been peasants, if you could pass the exams. I was no longer a peasant exactly, but I told the examiners that my father had been a woodcutter on the Karhegy, and I passed with high marks, so I was admitted. I threw myself into work and took my degree in three years—in Sylvanian literature, as Antal would have, if he had lived. I thought I would find work in the capital, but the Ministry of Education said that teachers were needed in Karberg and the surrounding area, so I was sent here, to a school in the village of Orsolavilag, high in the mountains. There I teach students whose parents work in the lumber industry, or at one of the hotels for Russian and Austrian tourists.

When I first returned, I tried to find my father. But I learned that he had died long ago. He had been cutting wood while drunk, and had struck his own leg with an axe. The wound had become infected, and so he had died. A simple, brutal story. So I have no one left in the world. All I have left is my work.

I teach literature and history to the children of Orsolavilag . . . or such literature and history as I am allowed. We do not teach fairy tales, which the Ministry of Education thinks are decadent. We teach stories of good Sylvanian boys and girls who learn to serve the state. In them, there are no frogs who turn into princes, no princesses going to balls in dresses like the sun, moon, and stars. No firebirds. There are no black wolves of the Karhegy, or Fair Ladies who live in trees, or White Stag that will, if you are lost, lead you home. There is no mention even of you, Grandmother. Can you imagine? No stories about the Old Woman of the Forest, from whom all the stories come.

Within a generation, those stories will be lost.

So I have come to you, whose bargains are hard but fair. Give me stories. Give me all the stories of Sylvania, so I can write them down, and so our underground press in Karberg, for which we could all be sent to a prison camp, can publish them. We will pass them from hand to hand, household to household. For this, Grandmother, I will give you what my princess gave so long ago: whatever you ask. I have little left, anyhow. My only possession of value is a single red bead on a chain, like a drop of blood.

I am a daughter of these mountains, and of the tales. Once, I wanted to be in the tales themselves. When I was young, I had my part in one—a small part, but important. When I grew older, I had my part in another kind of story. But now I want to become a teller of tales. So I will sit here, in your hut on goose legs, which sways a bit like a boat on the water. Tell me your stories, Grandmother. I am listening . . .

Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of many publications, including the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014); and debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her work has been translated into eleven languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at TheodoraGoss.com.

Foxfire, Foxfire
By Yoon Ha Lee

If I’d listened to the tiger-sage’s warning all those years ago, I wouldn’t be trapped in the city of Samdae during the evacuation. Old buildings and new had suffered during the artillery battle, and I could hear the occasional wailing of sirens. Even at this hour, families led hunched grandmothers and grandfathers away from their old homes, or searched abandoned homes in the hopes of finding small treasures: salt, rags, dried peppers. As I picked my way through the streets tonight, I saw the flower-shaped roof tiles for which Samdae was known, broken and scattered beneath my feet. Faraway, blued by distance, lights guttered from those skyscrapers still standing, dating to the peninsula’s push to modernization. It had not done anything to prevent the civil war.

I had weighed the merits of tonight’s hunt. Better to return to fox-form, surely, and slip back to the countryside; abandon the purpose that had brought me to Samdae all those years ago. But I only needed one more kill to become fully human. And I didn’t want to off some struggling shopkeeper or midwife. For one thing, I had no grudge against them. For another, I had no need of their particular skills.

No; I wandered the Lantern District in search of a soldier. Soldiers were easy enough to find, but I wanted a nice strapping specimen. At the moment I was posing as a prostitute, the only part of this whole affair my mother would have approved of. Certain human professions were better-suited to foxes than others, she had liked to say. My mother had always been an old-fashioned fox.

“Baekdo,” she had said when I was young, “why can’t you be satisfied with chickens and mice? You think you’ll be able to stop with sweet bean cakes, but the next thing you know, it will be shrimp crackers and chocolate-dipped biscuits, and after that you’ll take off your beautiful fur to walk around in things with buttons and pockets and rubber soles. And then one of the humans will fall in love with you and discover your secret, and you’ll end up like your Great-Aunt Seonghwa, as a bunch of oracle bones in some shaman’s purse.”

Foxes are just as bad at listening to their mothers as humans are. My mother had died before the war broke out. I had brought her no funeral-offerings. My relatives would have been shocked by that idea, and my mother, a traditionalist, would have wanted to be left to the carrion-eaters.

I had loved the Lantern District for a long time. I had taken my first kill there, a lucky one really. I’d crept into a courtesan’s apartment, half-drunk on the smells of quince tea and lilac perfume. At the time I had no way of telling a beautiful human from an ugly one—I later learned that she had been a celebrated beauty—but her layered red and orange silks had reminded me of autumn in the forest.

Tonight I wore that courtesan’s visage. Samdae’s remaining soldiers grew bolder and bolder with the breakdown in local government, so only those very desperate or stubborn continued to ply their trade. I wasn’t worried on my own behalf, of course. After ninety-nine kills, I knew how to take care of myself.

There. I spotted a promising prospect lingering at the corner, chatting up a cigarette-seller. He was tall, not too old, with a good physique. He was in uniform, with the red armband that indicated that he supported the revolutionaries. Small surprise; everyone who remained in Samdae made a show of supporting the revolutionaries. Many of the loyalists had fled overseas, hoping to raise support from the foreign powers. I wished them luck. The loyalists were themselves divided between those who supported the queen’s old line and those who wished to install a parliament in place of the Abalone Throne. Fascinating, but not my concern tonight.

I was sauntering toward the delicious-looking soldier when I heard the cataphract’s footsteps. A Jangmi 2-7, judging from the characteristic whine of the servos. Even if I hadn’t heard it coming—and who couldn’t?—the stirring of the small gods of earth and stone would have alerted me to its approach. They muttered distractingly. My ears would have flattened against my skull if they could have.

Superstitious people called the cataphracts ogres, because of their enormous bipedal frames. Some patriots disliked them because they had to be imported from overseas. Our nation didn’t have the ability to manufacture them, a secret that the foreigners guarded jealously.

This one was crashing through the street. People fled. No one wanted to be around if a firefight broke out, especially with the armaments a typical cataphract was equipped with. It was five times taller than a human, with a stride that would have cratered the street with every step, all that mass crashing down onto surprisingly little feet if not for the bargains the manufacturers had made with the small gods of earth and stone.

What was a lone cataphract doing in this part of the city? A scout? A deserter? But what deserter in their right mind would bring something as easy to track as a cataphract with them?

Not my business. Alas, my delicious-looking soldier had vanished along with everyone else. And my bones were starting to hurt in the particular way that indicated that I had sustained human-shape too long.

On the other hand, while the cataphract’s great strides made it faster than I was in this shape, distances had a way of accommodating themselves to a fox’s desires. A dangerous idea took shape in my head. Why settle for a common soldier when I could have a cataphract pilot, one of the elites?

I ducked around a corner into the mouth of an alley, then kicked off my slippers, the only part of my dress that weren’t spun from fox-magic. (Magical garments never lasted beyond a seduction. My mother had remarked that this was the fate of all human clothes anyway.) I loved those slippers, which I had purloined from a rich merchant’s daughter, and it pained me to leave them behind. But I could get another pair of slippers later.

Anyone watching the transformation would only have seen a blaze of coalescing red, like fire and frost swirled together, before my bones resettled into their native shape. Their ache eased. The night-smells of the city sharpened: alcohol, smoke, piss, the occasional odd whiff of stew. I turned around nine times—nine is a number sacred to foxes—and ran through the city’s mazed streets.

The Lantern District receded behind me. I emerged amid rubble and the stink of explosive residue. The riots earlier in the year had not treated the Butterfly District kindly. The wealthier families had lived here. Looters had made short work of their possessions. I had taken advantage of the chaos as well, squirreling away everything from medicines to salt in small caches; after all, once I became human, I would need provisions for the journey to one of the safer cities to the south.

It didn’t take long to locate the cataphract. Its pilot had parked it next to a statue, hunched down as if that would make it less conspicuous. Up close, I now saw why the pilot had fled—whatever it was they were fleeing. Despite the cataphract’s menacing form, its left arm dangled oddly. It looked like someone had shot up the autocannon, and the cataphract’s armor was decorated by blast marks. While I was no expert, I was amazed the thing still functioned.

The statue, one of the few treasures of the district to escape damage, depicted a courtesan who had killed an invading general a few centuries ago by clasping her arms around him and jumping off a cliff with him. My mother had remarked that if the courtesan had had proper teeth, she could have torn out the general’s throat and lived for her trouble. Fox patriotism was not much impressed by martyrs. I liked the story, though.

I crouched in the shadows, sniffing the air. The metal reek of the cataphract overpowered everything. The small gods of earth and stone shifted and rumbled. Still, I detected blood, and sweat, as well as the particular unappetizing smell of what the humans called Brick Rations, because they were about as digestible. Human blood, human sweat, human food.

A smarter fox would have left the situation alone. While dodging the cataphract would be easy, cataphract pilots carried sidearms. For all I knew, this one would welcome fox soup as an alternative to Brick Rations.

While cataphract-piloting didn’t strike me as a particularly useful skill, the pilots were all trained in the more ordinary arts of soldiering. Good enough for me.

I drew in my breath and took on human-shape. The small gods hissed their laughter. This time, when the pain receded, I was wrapped in a dress of green silk and a lavender sash embroidered with peonies. My hair was piled atop my head and held in place by heavy hairpins. The whole getup would have looked fashionable four generations ago, which I knew not because I had been alive then (although foxes could be long-lived when they chose) but because I used to amuse myself looking through Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s collection of books on the history of fashion.

I’d hoped for something more practical, but my control of the magic had slipped. I would have to make the best of it. A pity the magic had not provided me with shoes, even ugly ones. I thought of the slippers I had discarded, and I sighed.

Carefully, I stepped through the street, pulse beating more rapidly as I contemplated my prey. A pebble dug into my foot, but I paid it no heed. I had endured worse, and my blood was up.

Even in human-shape, I had an excellent sense of smell. I had no difficulty tracking the pilot. Only one; I wondered what had happened to her copilot. The pilot lay on her side in the lee of a chunk of rubble, apparently asleep. The remains of a Brick Ration’s wrapper had been tossed to the side. She had downed all of it, which impressed me. But then, I’d heard that piloting was hungry work.

I crouched and contemplated the pilot, taut with anticipation. At this distance, she reeked worse than her machine. She had taken off her helmet, which she hugged to her chest. Her black hair, cropped close, was mussed and stringy, and the bones of her face stood out too prominently beneath the sweat-streaked, dirty skin.

She’d also taken off her suit, for which I didn’t blame her. Cataphracts built up heat—the gods of fire, being fickle, did an indifferent job of masking their infrared signatures—and the suits were designed to cool the pilot, not to act as armor or protect them against the chilly autumn winds. She’d wrapped a thermal blanket around herself. I eyed it critically: effective, but ugly.

No matter what shape I took, I had a weapon; there is no such thing as an unarmed fox. I wondered what the magic had provided me with today. I could feel the weight of a knife hanging from my inner sash, and I reached in to draw it out. The elaborate gilt handle and the tassel hanging from the pommel pleased me, although what really mattered was the blade.

I leaned down to slit the pilot’s throat—except her eyes opened and she rolled, casting the helmet aside. I scrambled backwards, but her reflexes were faster, a novelty. She grabbed my wrist, knocking the knife out of my hand with a clatter, and forced me down.

“Well-dressed for a looter,” the pilot said into my ear. “But then, I suppose that goes with the territory.”

I had no interest in being lectured before my inevitable addition to a makeshift stewpot. I released human-shape in a flutter of evanescent silks, hoping to wriggle out of her grip.

No such luck. Almost as if she’d anticipated the change, she closed her hands around my neck. I snapped and clawed, to no effect. I had to get free before she choked the life out of me.

“Gumiho,” the pilot breathed. Nine-tailed fox. “I thought all your kind were gone.”

My attempt at a growl came out as a sad wheeze.

“Sorry, fox,” the pilot said, not sounding sorry in the least.

I scrabbled wildly at the air, only half paying attention to her words.

“But I bet you can speak,” she went on as I choked out a whine. “Which means you’re just as likely to snitch to my pursuers as something fully human.”

She was saying something more about her pursuers, still in that cheerful conversational voice, when I finally passed out.

• • • •

I woke trussed up as neatly as a rabbit for the pot. The air was full of the strange curdled-sweet smell of coolant, the metal reek of cataphract, the pilot’s particular stink. My throat hurt and my legs ached, but at least I wasn’t dead.

I opened my eyes and looked around at the inside of the cockpit. The blinking lights and hectic status graphs meant nothing to me. I wished I’d eaten an engineer along the way, even though the control systems were undoubtedly different for different cataphract models. I’d been tied to the copilot’s seat. Cataphracts could be piloted solo if necessary, but I still wondered if the copilot had died in battle, or deserted, or something else entirely.

The cockpit was uncomfortably warm. I worked my jaw but couldn’t get a good purchase on the bindings. Worse, I’d lost the knife. If I couldn’t use my teeth to get out of this fix—

“Awake?” the pilot said. “Sorry about that, but I’ve heard stories of your kind.”

Great, I had to get a victim who had paid attention to grandmothers’-tales of fox spirits. Except now, I supposed, I was the victim. I stared into the pilot’s dark eyes.

“Don’t give me that,” the pilot said. “I know you understand me, and I know you can speak.”

Not with my muzzle tied shut, I can’t, I thought.

As if she’d heard me, she leaned over and sawed through the bonds on my muzzle with a combat knife. I snapped at the knife, which was stupid of me. It sliced my gums. The familiar tang of blood filled my mouth.

“You may as well call me Jong,” the pilot said. “It’s not my real name, but my mother used to call me that, after the child and the bell in the old story. What shall I call you?”

I had no idea what story she was talking about. However, given the number of folktales living in small crannies of the peninsula, this wasn’t surprising. “I’m a fox,” I said. “Do you need a name for me beyond that?” It wasn’t as though we planned on becoming friends.

Jong strapped herself in properly. “Well, you should be grateful you’re tied in good and tight,” she said as she manipulated the controls: here a lever, there a button, provoking balletic changes in the lights. “The straps weren’t designed with a fox in mind. I’d hate for you to get splattered all over the cockpit when we make a run for it.”

“So kind of you,” I said dryly. Sorry, I thought to my mother’s ghost. I should have listened to you all those years ago. Still, Jong hadn’t eaten me yet, so there was hope.

“Oh, kindness has nothing to do with it.” The cataphract straightened with a hiss of servos. “I can’t talk to the gods of mountain and forest, but I bet you can. It’s in all the stories. And the mountains are where I have to go if I’m going to escape.”

Silly me. I would have assumed that a cataphract pilot would be some technocrat who’d disdain the old folktales. I had to go after one who knew enough of the lore to be dangerous. “Something could be arranged, yes,” I said. Even as a kit my mother had warned me against trusting too much in gods of any kind, but Jong didn’t need to know that.

“We’ll work it out as we go,” she said distantly. She wasn’t looking at me anymore.

I considered worrying at the bonds with my teeth, even though the synthetic fibers would taste foul, but just then the cataphract shuddered awake and took a step. I choked back a yip. Jong’s eyes had an eerie golden sheen that lit up their normal brown; side-effect of the neural interface, I’d heard, but I’d never seen the effect up close before. If I disrupted the connection now, who knew what would happen? I wasn’t so desperate that I wanted the cataphract to crash into uselessness, leaving me tied up inside it while unknown hostiles hunted us. Inwardly, I cursed Jong for getting me involved; cursed myself for getting too ambitious. But recriminations wouldn’t help now.

For the first hour, I stayed silent, observing Jong in the hopes of learning the secrets of the cataphract’s operation the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, the closest thing to a cataphract pilot I’d ever eaten had been a radio operator. Not good enough. No wonder Great-Aunt Seonghwa had emphasized the value of a proper education, even if I had dismissed her words at the time. (One of her first victims had been a university student, albeit one studying classical literature rather than engineering. Back then, you could get a comfortable government post by reciting maxims from The Twenty-Three Principles of Virtuous Administration and tossing off the occasional moon-poem.) The ability to instantly absorb someone’s skills by ingesting their liver had made me lazy.

“Why are they after you?” I asked, on the grounds that the more information I could extract from Jong, the better. “And who are they, anyway?”

She adjusted a dial; one of the monitors showed a mass of shapes like tangled thread. “Why are they after anyone?”

Not stupid enough to tell a stranger, then. I couldn’t fault her. “How do I know you won’t use me, then shoot me?”

“You don’t. But I’ll let you go after I get away.”

Unsatisfying, as responses went. “Assuming you get away.”

“I have to.” For the first time, Jong’s cheerfulness faltered.

“Maybe we can bargain,” I said.

Jong didn’t respond for a while, but we’d entered a defile and she was presumably caught up making sure we didn’t tumble over some ledge and into the stony depths. I had difficulty interpreting what I saw. For one thing, I wasn’t used to a vantage point this high up. For another, I couldn’t navigate by scent from within the cockpit, although I was already starting to become inured to the mixed smells of grubby human and metal.

“What bargain can you offer?” Jong said when she’d parked us in a cranny just deep enough in the defile that the cataphract wouldn’t be obvious except from straight above.

I wondered if we had aerial pursuit to worry about as well. Surely I’d hear any helicopters, now that the cataphract had powered down? I knew better than to rely on the small gods of wind and storm for warning; they were almost as fickle as fire.

Jong’s breathing became unsteady as she squinted at a scatterfall of glowing dots. She swore under her breath in one of the country dialects that I could understand only with difficulty. “We’ll have to hope that they’re spreading themselves too thin to figure out which way we’ve gone,” she said in a low voice, as though people could hear her from inside the cockpit. “We’ll continue once I’m sure I can move without lighting up their scanners.”

Carefully, I said, “What if I swear on the spirits of my ancestors to lead you where you need to go, with the aid of the small gods to mask your infrared signature?” This was a guess on my part, but she didn’t correct me, so I assumed it was close enough. “Will you unbind me, at least?”

“I didn’t think foxes worshiped ancestors,” Jong said, eyeing me skeptically. She fished a Brick Ration out of a compartment and unwrapped it with quick, efficient motions.

My mouth watered despite the awful smell. I hadn’t eaten in a while. “Foxes are foxes, not gods,” I said. “What good is worship to a fox? But I remember how my mother cared for me, and my other relatives. Their memory means a lot to me.”

Jong was already shaking her head. A crumb of the Brick Ration fell onto her knee. She picked it up, regarded it contemplatively, then popped it into her mouth.

A ration only questionably formulated to sustain humans probably wouldn’t do me much good in fox-form, but it was difficult not to resent my captor for not sharing, irrational as the sentiment was.

“I need a real guarantee that you’ll be helpful, not a fox-guarantee,” Jong said.

“That’s difficult, considering that I’m a fox.”

“I don’t think so.” Jong smiled, teeth gleaming oddly in the cockpit’s deadened lights. Her face resembled a war-mask from the old days of the Abalone Throne. “Swear on the blood of the tiger-sages.”

My heart stuttered within me. “There are no tiger-sages left,” I said. It might even have been true.

Jong’s smile widened. “I’ll take that chance.”

• • • •

When I was a young fox, almost adult, and therefore old enough to get into the bad kind of trouble, my mother took me to visit a tiger-sage.

Until then, I had thought all the tiger-sages had left the peninsula. Sometimes the humans had hunted them, and more rarely they sought the tigers’ advice, although a tiger’s advice always has a bite in it. I’d once heard of hunters bringing down an older tiger in a nearby village, and I’d asked my mother if that had been a sage. She had only snorted and said that a real sage wouldn’t go down so easily.

Tiger-sages could die. That much I knew. But their deaths had nothing to do with shotguns or nets or poisoned ox carcasses. A tiger-sage had to be slain with a sword set with mirror-jewels or arrows fletched with feathers stolen from nesting firebirds. A tiger-sage had to be sung to death in a game of riddles during typhoon season, or tricked into sleep after a long game of baduk—the famously subtle strategy game played upon a board of nineteen-by-nineteen intersecting lines, with black stones and white. A tiger-sage had to consent to perish.

We traveled for days, because even a fox’s ability to slice through distance dwindled before a tiger-sage’s defenses. My mother was nervous than I’d ever seen her. I, too stupid to know better, was excited by the excursion.

At last we approached the tiger-sage’s cave, high upon a mountain, where the trees grew sideways and small bright flowers flourished in the thin soil. Everything smelled hard and sharp, as though we lingered dangerously close to the boundary between always and never. The cave had once served as a shrine for some human sage. A gilded statue dominated the mouth of the cave, lovingly polished. It depicted a woman sitting cross-legged, one palm held out and cupping a massive pearl, the other resting on her knee. The skull of some massive tusked beast rested next to the statue. The yellowing bone had been scored by claw-marks.

The tiger-sage emerged from the cave slowly, sinuously, like smoke from a hidden fire. Her fur was chilly white except for the night-black stripes. She was supposed to be the last of the tiger-sages. One by one they had departed for other lands, or so the fox-stories went. Whether this one remained out of stubbornness, or amusement at human antics, or sheer apathy, my mother hadn’t been able to say. It didn’t matter. It was not for a fox to understand the motivations of a sage.

“Foxes,” the tiger rumbled, her amber eyes regarding us with disinterest. “It is too bad you are no good for oracle bones. Fox bones always lie. The least you could have done was bring some incense. I ran out of the good stuff two months ago.”

My mother’s ears twitched, but she said only, “Venerable sage, I am here to beg your counsel on my son’s behalf.”

I crouched and tried to look appropriately humble, having never heard my mother speak like this before.

The tiger yawned hugely. “You’ve been spending too much time with humans if you’re trying to fit all those flowery words in your mouth. Just say it straight out.”

Normally my mother would have said something deprecating—I’d grown up listening to her arguing with Great-Aunt Seonghwa about the benefits of human culture—but she had other things on her mind. That, or the tiger’s impressive display of sharp teeth reminded her that to a tiger, everything is prey. “My son hungers after human-shape,” my mother said. “I have tried to persuade him otherwise, but a mother’s words only go so far. Perhaps you would be willing to give him some guidance?”

The tiger caught my eye and smiled tiger-fashion. I had a moment to wonder how many bites it would take for me to end up in her belly. She reared up, or perhaps it was that she straightened. For several stinging moments, I could not focus my vision on her, as though her entire outline was evanescing.

Then a woman stood where the tiger had been, or something like a woman, except for the amber eyes and the sharp-toothed smile. Her hair was black frosted with white and silver. Robes of silk flowed from her shoulders, layered in mountain colors: dawn-pink and ice-white and pale-gray with a sash of deepest green. At the time I did not yet understand beauty. Years later, remembering, I would realize that she had mimicked the form of the last legitimate queen. (Tigers have never been known for modesty.)

“How much do you know of the traditional bargain, little fox?” the tiger-woman asked. Her voice was very little changed.

I did not like being called little, but I had enough sense not to pick a fight with a tiger over one petty adjective. Especially since the tiger was, in any shape, larger than I was. “I have to kill one hundred humans to become human,” I said. “I understand the risk.”

The tiger-woman made an impatient noise. “I should have known better than to expect enlightenment from a fox.”

My mother held her peace.

“People say I am the last of the tiger-sages,” the tiger-woman said. “Do you know why?”

“I had thought you were all gone,” I said, since I saw no reason not to be honest. “Are you the last one?”

The tiger-woman laughed. “Almost the last one, perhaps.” The silk robes blurred, and then she coiled before us in her native shape again. “I killed more than a hundred humans, in my time. Never do anything by halves, if you’re going to do it. But human-shape bored me after a while, and I yearned for my old clothing of stripes and teeth and claws.”

“So?” I said, whiskers twitching.

“So I killed and ate a hundred tiger-sages from my own lineage, to become a tiger again.”

My mother was tense, silent. My eyes had gone wide.

The tiger looked at me intently. “If the kit is serious about this—and I can smell it on him, that taint is unmistakable—I have some words for him.”

I stared at the tiger, transfixed. It could have pounced on me in that moment and I wouldn’t have moved. My mother made a low half-growl in the back of her throat.

“Becoming human has nothing to do with flat faces and weak noses and walking on two legs,” the tiger said. “That’s what your people always get wrong. It’s the hunger for gossip and bedroom entanglements and un-fox-ish loyalties; it’s about having a human heart. I, of course, don’t care one whit about such matters, so I will never be trapped in human-shape. But for reasons I have never fathomed, foxes always lose themselves in their new faces.”

“We appreciate the advice,” my mother said, tail thumping against the ground. “I will steal you some incense.” I could tell she was desperate to leave.

The tiger waved a paw, not entirely benevolently. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account, little vixen. And tell your aunt I warned her, assuming you get the chance.”

Two weeks after that visit, I heard of Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s unfortunate demise. It was not enough to deter me from the path I had chosen.

• • • •

“Come on, fox,” Jong said. “If your offer is sincere, you have nothing to fear from a mythical tiger.”

I refrained from snapping that ‘mythical’ tigers were the most frightening of all. Ordinary tigers were bad enough. Now that I was old enough to appreciate how dangerous tiger-sages were, I preferred not to bring myself to one’s attention. But remaining tied up like this wasn’t appealing, either. And who knew how much time I had to extract myself from this situation?

“I swear on the blood of the tiger-sages,” I said, “that I will keep my bargain with you. No fox tricks.” I could almost hear the tiger-sage’s cynical laughter in my head, but I hoped it was my imagination.

Jong didn’t waste time making additional threats. She unbuckled herself and leaned over me to undo my bonds. I admired her deft hands. Those could have been mine, I thought hungrily; but I had promised. While a fox’s word might not be worth much, I had no desire to become the prey of an offended tiger. Tiger-sages took oaths quite seriously when they cared to.

My limbs ached, and it still hurt when I swallowed or talked. Small pains, however, and the pleasure of being able to move again made up for them. “Thank you,” I said.

“I advise being human if you can manage it,” Jong said. I choked back a snort. “The seat will be more comfortable for you.”

I couldn’t argue the point. Despite the pain, I was able to focus enough to summon the change-magic. Magic had its own sense of humor, as always. Instead of outdated court dress, it presented me in street-sweeper’s clothes, right down to the hat. As if a hat did anything but make me look ridiculous, especially inside a cataphract.

To her credit, Jong didn’t burst out laughing. I might have tried for her throat if she had, short-tempered as I was. “We need to”—yawn—“keep moving. But the pursuers are too close. Convince the small gods to conceal us from their scan, and we’ll keep going until we find shelter enough to rest for real.”

Jong’s faith in my ability to convince the small gods to do me favors was very touching. I had promised, however, which meant I had to do my best. “You’re in luck,” I said; if she heard the irony in my voice, she didn’t react to it. “The small gods are hungry tonight.”

Feeding gods was tricky business. I had learned most of what I knew from Great-Aunt Seonghwa. My mother had disdained such magic herself, saying that she would trust her own fine coat for camouflage instead of relying on gods, to say nothing of all the mundane stratagems she had learned from her own mother. For my part, I was not too proud to do what I had to in order to survive.

The large gods of the Celestial Order, who guided the procession of stars, responded to human blandishments: incense (I often wondered if the tiger I had met lit incense to the golden statue, or if it was for her own pleasure), or offerings of roast duck and tangerines, or bolts of silk embroidered with gold thread. The most powerful of the large gods demanded rituals and chants. Having never been bold enough to eat a shaman or magician, I didn’t know how that worked. (I remained mindful of Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s fate.) Fortunately, the small gods did not require such sophistication.

“Can you spare any part of this machine?” I asked Jong.

Her mouth compressed. Still, she didn’t argue. She retrieved a screwdriver and undid one of the panels, joystick and all, although she pocketed the screws. “It’s not like the busted arm’s good for anything anymore,” she said. The exposed wires and pipes of coolant looked like exposed veins. She grimaced, then fiddled with the wires’ connectors until they had all been undone. “Will this do?”

I doubted the small gods knew more about cataphract engineering than I did. “Yes,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, and took the panel from her. I pressed my right hand against the underside of the panel, flinching in spite of myself from the metal’s unfriendly warmth.

This is my offering, I said in the language of forest and mountain, which even city foxes spoke; and my mother, as a very proper fox, had raised me in the forest. Earth and stone and—

Jong’s curse broke my concentration, although the singing tension in the air told me that the small gods already pressed close to us, reaching, reaching.

“What is it?” I said.

“We’ll have to fight,” Jong said. “Buckle in.”

I had to let go of the panel to do so. I had just figured out the straps—the cataphract’s were more complicated than the safety restraints found in automobiles—and the panel clanked onto the cockpit’s floor as the cataphract rumbled awake. The small gods skittered and howled, demanding their tribute. I was fox enough to hear them, even if Jong showed no sign of noticing anything.

The lights in the cockpit blazed up in a glory of colors. The glow sheened in Jong’s tousled hair and reflected in her eyes, etched deep shadows around her mouth. The servos whirred; I could have sworn the entire cataphract creaked and moaned as it woke.

I scooped up the panel. Its edges bit into my palms. “How many?” I asked, then wondered if I should be distracting Jong when we were entering combat.

“Five,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, finish it fast.”

The machine lurched out of the crevice where we’d been hiding, then broke into its version of a run. My stomach dropped. Worse than the jolting gait was the fact that I kept bracing for the impact of those heavy metal feet against the earth. I kept expecting the cataphract to sink hip-deep. Even though the gods of earth and stone cushioned each stride, acting as shock-absorbers, the discrepancy between what I expected and what happened upset my sense of the world’s equilibrium.

The control systems made noises that had only shrillness to recommend them. I left their interpretation to Jong and returned my attention to the small gods. From the way the air in the cockpit eddied and swirled, I could tell they were growing impatient. Earth and stone were allied to metal, after all, and metal, especially when summoned on behalf of a weapon, had its volatile side.

The magic had provided me not with a knife this time but with a hat pin. I retrieved it and jabbed my palm with the pointy end. Blood welled up. I smeared it onto the cataphract’s joystick. Get us out of here, I said to the small gods. Not eloquent, but I didn’t have time to come up with anything better.

The world tilted askew, pale and dark and fractured. Jong might have said something. I couldn’t understand any of it. Then everything righted itself again.

More, the small gods said in voices like shuddering bone.

I whispered stories to them, still speaking in the language of forest and mountain, which had no words except the evocation of the smell of fallen pine needles on an autumn morning, or loam worked over by the worms, or rain filling paw prints left in the mud. I was still fox enough for this to suffice.

“What in the name of the blistering gods?” Jong demanded. Now even she could hear the clanging of distant bells. Music was one of the human innovations that the small gods had grown fond of.

“They’re building mazes,” I said. “They’ll mask our path. Go!”

Her eyes met mine for a moment, hot and incredulous. Then she nodded and jerked a lever forward, activating the walk cycle. The cataphract juddered. The targeting screen flashed red as it locked on an erratically moving figure: another cataphract. She pressed a trigger.

I hunched down in my seat at the racket the autocannon made as it fired four shots in rapid succession, like a damned smith’s hammer upon the world’s last anvil. The small gods rumbled their approval. I forced myself to watch the targeting screen. For a moment I thought Jong had missed. Then the figure toppled sideways.

“Legged them,” Jong said with vicious satisfaction. “Don’t care about honor or kill counts, it’s good enough to cripple them so we can keep running.”

We endured several hits ourselves. While the small gods could confuse the enemies’ sensors, the fact remained that the cataphract relied on its metal armor to protect its inner mechanisms. The impacts rattled me from teeth to marrow. I was impressed that we hadn’t gone tumbling down.

And when had I started thinking of us as “we,” anyway?

“We’re doomed,” I said involuntarily when something hit the cataphract’s upper left torso—by then I’d figured out the basics of a few of the status readouts—and the whole cockpit trembled.

Jong’s grin flickered sideways at me. “Don’t be a pessimist, fox,” she said, breathless. “You ever hear of damage distribution?”

“Damage what?”

“I’ll explain it to you if we—” A shrill beep captured her attention. “Whoops, better deal with this first.”

“How many are left?”

“Three.”

There had been five to begin with. I hadn’t even noticed the second one going down.

“If only I weren’t out of coolant, I’d—” Jong muttered some other incomprehensible thing after that.

In the helter-skelter swirl of blinking lights and god-whispers, Jong herself was transfigured. Not beautiful in the way of a court blossom but in the way of a gun: honed toward a single purpose. I knew then that I was doomed in another manner entirely. No romance between a fox and a human ever ended well. What could I do, after all? Persuade her to abandon her cataphract and run away with me into the forest, where I would feed her rabbits and squirrels? No; I would help her escape, then go my separate way.

Every time an alert sounded, every time a vibration thundered through the cataphract’s frame, I shivered. My tongue was bitten almost to bleeding. I could not remember the last time I had been this frightened.

You were right, Mother, I wanted to say. Better a small life in the woods, diminished though they were from the days before the great cities with their ugly high-rises, than the gnawing hunger that had driven me toward the humans and their beautiful clothes, their delicious shrimp crackers, their games of dice and yut and baduk. For the first time I understood that, as tempting as these things were, they came with a price: I could not obtain them without also entangling myself with human hearts, human quarrels, human loyalties.

A flicker at the edge of one of the screens caught my eye. “Behind us, to the right!” I said.

Jong made a complicated hooking motion with the joystick and the cataphract bent low. My vision swam. “Thank you,” she said.

“Tell me you have some plan beyond ‘keep running until everyone runs out of fuel,’” I said.

She chuckled. “You don’t know thing one about how a cataphract works, do you? Nuclear core. Fuel isn’t the issue.”

I ignored that. Nuclear physics was not typically a fox specialty, although my mother had allowed that astrology was all right. “Why do they want you so badly?”

I had not expected Jong to answer me. But she said, “There’s no more point keeping it a secret. I deserted.”

“Why?” A boom just ahead of us made me clutch the armrests as we tilted dangerously.

“I had a falling out with my commander,” Jong said. Her voice was so tranquil that we might have been sitting side by side on a porch, sipping rice wine. Her hands moved; moved again. A roaring of fire, far off. “Just two left. In any case, my commander liked power. Our squad was sworn to protect the interim government, not—not to play games with the nation’s politics.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t suppose any of this makes sense to you.”

“Why are you telling me now?” I said.

“Because you might die here with me, and it’s not as if you can give away our location any more. They know who I am. It only seems fair.”

Typically human reasoning, but I appreciated the sentiment. “What good does deserting do you?” I supposed she might know state secrets, at that. But who was she deserting to?

“I just need to get to—” She shook her head. “If I can get to refuge, especially with this machine more or less intact, I have information the loyalists can make use of.” She was scrutinizing the infrared scan as she spoke.

“The Abalone Throne means that much to you?”

Another alert went off. Jong shut it down. “I’m going to bust a limb at this rate,” she said. “The Throne? No. It’s outlived its usefulness.”

“You’re a parliamentarian, then.”

“Yes.”

This matter of monarchies and parliaments and factions was properly none of my business. All I had to do was keep my end of the bargain, and I could leave behind this vexing, heartbreaking woman and her passion for something as abstract as government.

Jong was about to add something to that when it happened. Afterwards I was only able to piece together fragments that didn’t fit together, like shards of a mirror dropped into a lake. A concussive blast. Being flung backwards, then sideways. A sudden, sharp pain in my side. (I’d broken a couple ribs, in spite of the restraints. But without them, the injuries would have been worse.) Jong’s sharp cry, truncated. The stink of panic.

The cataphract had stopped moving. The small gods roared. I moved my head; pain stabbed all the way through the back of my skull. “Jong?” I croaked.

Jong was breathing shallowly. Blood poured thickly from the cut on her face. I saw what had happened: the panel had flown out of my hands and struck her edge-on. The small gods had taken their payment, all right; mine hadn’t been enough. If only I had foreseen this—

“Fox,” Jong said in a weak voice.

Lights blinked on-off, on-off, in a crazed quilt. The cockpit looked like someone had upended a bucket full of unlucky constellations into it. “Jong,” I said. “Jong, are you all right?”

“My mission,” she said. Her eyes were too wide, shocky, the red-and-amber of the status lights pooling in the enormous pupils. I could smell the death on her, hear the frantic pounding of her heart as her body destroyed itself. Internal bleeding, and a lot of it. “Fox, you have to finish my mission. Unless you’re also a physician?”

“Shh,” I said. “Shh.” I had avoided eating people in the medical professions not out of a sense of ethics but because, in the older days, physicians tended to have a solid grounding in the kinds of magics that threatened shape-changing foxes.

“I got one of them,” she said. Her voice sounded more and more thready. “That leaves one, and of course they’ll have called for reinforcements. If they have anyone else to spare. You have to—”

I could have howled my frustration. “I’ll carry you.”

Under other circumstances, that grimace would have been a laugh. “I’m dying, fox, do you think I can’t tell?”

“I don’t know the things you know,” I said desperately. “Even if this metal monstrosity of yours can still run, I can’t pilot it for you.” It was getting hard to breathe; a foul, stinging vapor was leaking into the cockpit. I hoped it wasn’t toxic.

“Then there’s no hope,” she whispered.

“Wait,” I said, remembering; hating myself. “There’s a way.”

The sudden flare of hope in Jong’s eyes cut me.

“I can eat you,” I said. “I can take the things you know with me, and seek your friends. But it might be better simply to die.”

“Do it,” she said. “And hurry. I assume it doesn’t do you any good to eat a corpse, or your kind would have a reputation as grave-thieves.”

I didn’t squander time on apologies. I had already unbuckled the harness, despite the pain of the broken ribs. I flowed back into fox-shape, and I tore out her throat so she wouldn’t suffer as I devoured her liver.

• • • •

The smoke in the cockpit thickened, thinned. When it was gone, a pale tiger watched me from the rear of the cockpit. It seemed impossible that she could fit; but the shadows stretched out into an infinite vast space to accommodate her, and she did. I recognized her. In a hundred stolen lifetimes I would never fail to recognize her.

Shivering, human, mouth full of blood-tang, I looked down. The magic had given me one last gift: I wore a cataphract pilot’s suit in fox colors, russet and black. Then I met the tiger’s gaze.

I had broken the oath I had sworn upon the tiger-sage’s blood. Of course she came to hunt me.

“I had to do it,” I said, and stumbled to my feet, prepared to fight. I did not expect to last long against a tiger-sage, but for Jong’s sake I had to try.

“There’s no ‘have to’ about anything,” the tiger said lazily. “Every death is a choice, little not-a-fox. At any step you could have turned aside. Now—” She fell silent.

I snatched up Jong’s knife. Now that I no longer had sharp teeth and claws, it would have to do.

“Don’t bother with that,” the tiger said. She had all her teeth, and wasn’t shy about displaying them in a ferocious grin. “No curse I could pronounce on you is more fitting than the one you have chosen for yourself.”

“It’s not a curse,” I said quietly.

“I’ll come back in nine years’ time,” the tiger said, “and we can discuss it then. Good luck with your one-person revolution.”

“I needn’t fight it alone,” I said. “This is your home, too.”

The tiger seemed to consider it. “Not a bad thought,” she said, “but maps and boundaries and nationalism are for humans, not for tigers.”

“If you change your mind,” I said, “I’m sure you can find me, in nine years’ time or otherwise.”

“Indeed,” the tiger said. “Farewell, little not-a-fox.”

“Thank you,” I said, but she was gone already.

I secured Jong’s ruined body in the copilot’s seat I had vacated, so it wouldn’t flop about during maneuvers, and strapped myself in. The cataphract was damaged, but not so badly damaged that I still couldn’t make a run for it. It was time to finish Jong’s mission.

Yoon Ha Lee’s first novel NINEFOX GAMBIT won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards. Its sequel, RAVEN STRATAGEM, came out from Solaris Books in June 2017. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Forest of Memory
By Mary Robinette Kowal

My name is Katya Gould. As you’ve requested, to guarantee this is a unique document, I’m typing it on the 1918 Corona 3 typewriter that I had in my bicycle cart when I was abducted by the man known as Johnny. You will receive both these pages and the tyepwriter.

And all of the typos that accompany this account.

The ribbon, incidentally, is a reproduction fab-matter ribbon. My habit, when I take on a new client, is to learn what I can of them, so that I can tailor my offerings to their tastes. About you, I know nothing beyond the fact that your payment cleared.

You might be a single person, or a collective artificial consciousness, or a cryptid represented by an avatar. I do not know if you have requested this document to solidify the provenance of your typewriter, or if you are interested in the possible connection between my abduction and the deer die-off, or if there is some other rationale behind your request, and so I hope you will forgive me if I do not write exactly what you have paid for. I am used to providing unique experiences or items to my clients, not to being one of those items.

On the seventh of April, I biked out to a vineyard in the Willamette Valley. In one of my standard datacrawls through public LiveConnects, Lizzie—

That’s my intelligent system. I don’t know what you call your i-Sys, but mine is named after a character in a book. I gave her the crisp diction of the long-vanished mid-Atlantic.

I’m an Authenticities dealer. This will hardly be my only eccentricity, and I will try not to digress further. So . . .

Anyway. Lizzie had flagged a possible typewriter. It was part of a display, and it was hard to tell if it was a repro printed with fab-matter or a genuine artifact. That’s why you have to go see these things in person.

I wandered into the tasiting room, and the man behind the counter gave me a smile that almost looked genuine. “I’m pouring a couple of idfferent windes today.” He set a glass on the counter. “What can I start you with?”

“Actually, I’m interested in part of your display.” I pulled out a paper busineess card. That was Lizzie’s cue to sned him my contact information. In return I got a data packet that identified him as Autrey Wesselman.

Wesselman took the business card, rubbing his thumb across the letterpress impression as he gave a low whistle. “Haven’t seen one of these since my mom was running the place.”

“Well, when you deal in Authenticities, an actual business card just seems appropriate.”

He snorted. “If someone wants an authentic crappy fork lift, I’ve got one available. Guaranteed to stall at the least convenient moment.”

“If you’re serious, I might be able to find a home for that.” I rested my elbows on the clean pine counter. Dings and scars testified to its lifteime of service in this tasting room. Too bad it was built in. “But I’m actually hoping I can take a look at your typewriter.”

His brows went up. “Typewriter?”

My heart beat a little faster at that. The surprise in his voice sounded as if he didn’t even know he had one. “There’s a display in the member barrel room”

“Huh.” Wesselman folded his bar towel. “That’s my niece’s domain. I just handle the tasting room.”

“May I speak with her, then?”

He shrugged. “She’s out of town on a sales trip. I can take you back there.” He set the towel down and put an old bell in the center of the counter.

It looked to be from the mid-twentieth century, though without picking it up or using my loupe, I couldn’t confirm that. The fine dust caked into the grooves around the base seemed real enough, though. Most people who print fakes know enough to add dust to make it seem older, but they usually put it on too thickly and without regard for the use patterns of everyday objects.

A small blackboard on a miniature wire easel went next to it. “Ring for service. Making wine.”

I raised my eyebrows. “So you’re the winemaker?”

He glanced at the sign and shook his head, wincing a little. “It’s the easiest explanation, but no—not anymore. My niece handles that now.”

“And you just do the tasting room?”

He tapped the side of his nose. “Concussion. Severed my olfactory nerves.”

“Oh. Oh, I—I am so sorry.”

“Years ago.” He turned and walked toward the glass double doors that led to the back of the winery. “Got enough back so food doesn’t taste like cardboard anymore, but not enough to make wine.”

“But enough to do the tasting room.”

“That?” He paused to hold the door open for me, and a wave of dark fruit aromas billowed into the winery. “They all taste the same now. I just rely on memory to describe them to customers.”

Memory.

It seems like such an unreliable thing. I am so used accustomed to using my i-Sys, Lizzie, to recall recorded memories for me, yet she can only do that for audio and visual memories. What I smelled, or tasted, or felt, is another story. And what I thought?

I can use the saved record to remind myself of these sensory details, but my thoughts change based on the new viewing. I re-examine and revise my perspectives.

And without a recording . . .

We live so little of our days without a LiveConnect to record it. And the three days you are asking about are among those. I wonder if, in part, what youa re intetersted in is the very fact that I have memories unemcumbered by a verified record.

The part I’m telling you now, of course, occurred while I was still on the Grid. I don’t have to remember the winemaker’s words; I can just ask just asked Lizzie to do playback for me.

As I type this, I can see the winemaker’s faded red hair catch the light in the late afternoon sun as we leave the wine room.

I can hear the sound of our footsteps tapping in and out of sync as we cross the vast space of the winery proper. The way the industrial white walls frame the rounded wood barrels and the purple stains on the cement floor are all part of the record my LiveConnect record.

We walked to a lacquered-wood door set into one wall of the winery. It was made of reclaimed barrel staves, straightened in a steamer and polished so the stain of pinot noir gleamed under the cool LED lights.

The interior of the member barrel room was dimmer than the working winery. Each barrel lay in its own cradle with a the member’s name branded into the head of the barrel. A long table and library chairs turned it inot part laboratory, part reading room.

As we entered, Lizzie spoke in my ear. “The south wall has the display.”

I turned south, and the wall matched the image she’d spotted on a member’s public LiveConnect. An alcove had been set into the wall—probably to hold an old-style television at some point in the past—and it was filled now with someon’es imagining of what an office might have looked like.

It was the sort of mishmash of eras that treated the entire twentieth century as if it was all one thing.

The typewriter (this Corona #3 from 1918) sat next to a cordless phone (Bell from the mid-eighties), and an office plaque that, by its font, probably came from the 1950s. A stack of floppy discs sat atop a Samsung printer from the late nineties. And . . . wonder of wonders—a battered paperback Webster’s Dictionary.

I do remember that my hands itched to pick it up the moment I saw it. The angle of the image Lizzie had snagged didn’t show the paperback; it was beautifully worn, as if someone had really used it.

Wesselman cocked his head and wandered over to the alcove. “Huh. That looks nice. Not that I’m surprised. Amy has good taste. Literally.”

I can hear my own laugh on the recording, and I probably smiled. “And in more than one area, apparently. May I?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

I picked up the dictionary first. The pages were yellowed with age, but not brittle. I opened the cover, taking care not to add any of my own imprints to it, and stared. Three different names had been written inside.

David Autrey

Leopold Wesselman

Amy Casteel

I had heard three of those names in conjunction with the family. “Relatives?” I tilted the book so he could see.

He cocked his head. “Yeah . . . my great-grandfather, granddad, and Mom.”

I thumbed through the pages, which carried a record of the past. “This is gorgeous.”

Wesselman’s brow crinkled. “What? Really?”

“My clients are most excited by wabi-sabi—” I paused as the confusion on his face deepened. “It’s a Japanese term. Something that witnesses and records the graceful decay of life. See? Someone underlined ‘autocratic.’ The ink is the same green as Leopold Wesselman’s name, so he probably did the underlining. It’s a tiny peek into his thoughts.”

“Huh.”

I turned to page seventy-four. “That coffee stain tells us that they were probably staying up late working.”

“Or reading it over breakfast.”

“Exactly. The question is more interesting than the answer.” I closed it and thumbed the rough punctures on the cover. “Teeth marks. Someone had a dog. The hints are what make it so intriguing. Each piece of wear shows a part of the lifecycle of the book.”

“Terroir.”

“Pardon?” I looked up and to the left. Lizzie tracked my eye motion and supplied the definition.

She whispered, “Terroir is the characteristic taste and flavor—”

Wesselman’s answer overpowered hers and she trailed off. “It’s the unique expression of the terrain on the wine. Clone a grapevine and plant it somewhere different and the grapes change. Then the weather in a particular year changes the expression still more, so every wine is unique. Well . . . without weather control.”

I laughed with delight. “Yes! We deal in very much the same concept, but different expressions of authentic experience.” I set the dictionary down and ran my finger over the platen of the typewriter. “My clients can print anything they want, so what they crave are things that are truly unique.”

“How about the typewriter?” He gestured with his chin toward the machine.

“Do you know its history?”

“I thought that was your job.”

Sighing, I picked up the typewriter without asking for permission. Even though I’ve handled them before, I remember being startled by how light the Corona 3 was compared to some of the desktop typewriters. “I can tell you if it’s a real typewriter, and make some guesses about the sort of use it saw, but that’s not the same as a full provenance.”

“Well. It’s not a family piece. It belonged to a friend of my grandfather’s, but I don’t know who owend it before that.”

“Did they werite on it?” I set it on the big library table in a puddle of golden light. The enamel on the edges of the chassis were was worn where the folding mechanism had banged into it.

“Dunno. Before my time.”

What I want, in a situation likke this, is a complete oral history of the object. If there is a receipt o f purchase, that’s even better. I rarely get that.

And I have clients who don’t need it. Some of them are interested in the machine tiself and less so in the story that comes with it.

You seem to want both.

Or perhaps something else entirely. I can offer you a time-stamped LiveConnect record of everything I experienced up until I went off the Grid. There seems to be no need to tell you about the chipped enamel on the chassis. You can see that, well enough. Do you care that the wear pattern on the percentage symbol likely means that a previous owner worked in accounting?

I think it most likely that what you want to know is how the typewriter relates to Johnny. So I am going to suit myself, since your wishes are opaque to me, and jump ahead to after I negotiated for the typewriter and dictionary, and began to ride home.

• • • •

One of the things I pick up when I’m on my shopping trips are Captures. You might have even bought one of mine. The one of the farmhouse in southern Oregon, where I found a nest of kittens in an old clothes dryer? The audio of their purring and tiny mews still gets mixed into dance scores, even after all this time. You should see what I got for the dryer itself, since after the Capture it had a popularity provenance to boot. Between Captures and Authenticities, I don’t have to turk myself out with a lot of little freelance jobs.

Sometimes that unique record is an experience, like this.

I always keep my Lens on, even when I’m just cycling from our homestead into Salem to catch the train or a blimp, and I pay for extra bandwidth for high-rez Captures.After I haggled for the typewriter, I rode my bike through the woods on the narrow road that led from the vineyard toward Salem. This first part is visible on my LiveConnect.

It starts with me on my bike. My plan was to ride up to Salem, hauling my cart of Authenticities, and hook up with the high-speed rail at the node there, then take that the rest of the way into Portland. Lizzie whispered in my earbud, “Deer crossing. Please check your progress.”

“What’s the penalty charge?” I had a meeting to get to and could NOT waste time out here. I mean, protecting species was great and all, but there were times when I wished the online community didn’t place quite so much importance on noninterference with natural habitats. Would the deer really freak out that much if I biked in front of them?

“One hundred and fifty vinos.” Anticipating my next question—I do have her well trained—the i-Sys whispered. “It is a small herd with five registered individuals in their corporate entity. Estimated wait time is three minutes.” The fine was almost as much as my co-op fees for a month, so I decided to wait. I figured I could make up the delay.

It’s important to understand, through this next bit, that I didn’t know that I was offline already or that I was talking to Lizzie’s buffer on my inboard system.

None of the warning indicators went off to indicate that I’d lost connection to the net.

I doubt my own mind, at times.

I’ll tell you that it’s strange trying to remember without being able to pull up the recording and just look at it.

I keep turning those three days over in my head so that, in some ways, they’re sharper than any other memory in my life. In other ways, I think I’m wearing the edges off the memory by looking at it so much.But perhaps that wearing away is a form of wabi-sabi.

I’ve wondered what he would have done if I hadn’t waited. It feels like he wanted me there to bear witness, but maybe it was just an opportunity that presented itself because I stopped. If I hadn’t, if I had biked on through, would I have known that this was a cusp point in my life? Probably not.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how many other cusp points you sail through in life without any awareness. Heck, maybe the decision to pay me to tell this story will be one for you. How would your life be different if you weren’t sitting where you are, reading this?

Not that I was thinking any of this at the time. I was just calculating credits and transit time. Sighing, I slowed the bike, and the quiet hum of the electric motor faded, leaving only the whisper of wind through the trees. Birdsong punctuated the stillness as I waited. A twig cracked.

Seemingly without transition, the deer was by the road ahead of me. A single doe, who turned briefly to look down the leafy corridor at me, large brown eyes staring. Then she continued without concern onto the narrow track. After a moment, another emerged from the trees, then a third. I sat on the bike as five deer languidly crossed the road, their hides rippling as they set each long leg on the pavement. The TOCK-TOCK of their hooves made a percussion track under the birdsong. It was exactly the sort of thing that some audio mixologist would love.

I subvocalized to Lizzie, “Capture last five minutes from the cache and see if there’s a buyer.”

The cloud cities were especially hot for “authentic” earthbound soundscapes.

“Confirmed. I would recommend holding still for another two minutes of buffer. I can remove the sound of your bike from the earlier track, but the manipulation will show in the file, diminishing the value.”

“Understood.” I would have to really hustle to make the train, but it seemed likely to be worth it. The tricky thing about Authentic Captures is that people can spot the manipulation of the files—or rather, intelligent systems can, which amounts to the same thing.

Just like with the Unique Objects that I acquire, people want a Capture that gives them an experience they can’t have on their own. Watching a herd of deer cross the road . . . You could have that if you were willing to wait, or if you got lucky. The quiet of this moment, the fact that you could hear the deer’s hooves on the pavement, the breeze . . . all of these were specific to that moment. With a little space, someone could loop it back so that the deer endlessly snuck out of the forest and crossed the road.

You watched that recording. You know the utter peace I am talking about.

And you also know the recording cuts off.

The way the image seems to just stop looks like a bad edit, but it’s actually the point where the local cache finally fills. Mind you, if I’d known I’d been offline for the past ten minutes, I could have recorded at a lower resolution and kept going for hours.

I could have had footage of HIM.

But I saw only the deer, crossing the road under a canopy of green leaves.

Everything from here forward . . . All of this is what I experienced, but I have no recorded memories of it. I can’t play back this episode in my life and report on what I saw. I have to try to remember . . .

Have you tried to do this? Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable.

The cloud is just there, all the time. You reach for it without thinking and assume it will be there.

I might have heard a noise first, of a branch breaking, but seeing the way he moved through the woods later, I don’t think I did. Even if it was there, it had no meaning at the time.

My first real awareness of him was the gunshot. It’s an intense memory. As fuzzy as everything else is, I very clearly remember the slap of sound, as if a firecracker had gone off next to my ear. One of the deer jerked and fell. The crack came again, and another fell, and—

In fact, let me backtrack and try to really describe this, since that’s what you’re paying me for. The first deer to fall was the lead buck. He was standing about twenty-five feet away and watching as the other deer crossed. I saw him jerk first, and I didn’t hear the sound until after that.

He staggered and took a step toward me. When he fell, he was staring straight at me, as if it were my fault. The sound of his antlers hitting the pavement filled the space between gunshots. The second one came before the other deer really had a chance to react to the leader falling. The next was a doe standing with her back to me. She had started to turn back in the direction they had come. There was that incredible blast that I felt more than heard as the sound cracked through the trees. Her hindquarters crumpled first, and she dropped to the pavement. Her head bounced. I jumped, trying to get free of the bike, absolutely sure I would be shot next. My feet tangled against the pedals, and I went down in a heap. The trailer I had hooked to the back of the bike tipped a little, but it kept the bike from going all the way over. The pedal scraped along my shin. I pushed back, away from the bike, set to run into the woods. I’d managed to get to my knees when I froze.

A man was standing in the road.

I didn’t see him walk out of the trees, but he must have been in motion after the first gunshot, while I was busy falling down. But there were two shots, so maybe he was just closer to the road than I thought. It seemed as if the gunshots should have come from far away, instead of being right there. The noise though. It’s actually hard to remember the sound exactly. I think what I have is a memory of remembering the gunshot, you know? It’s as though it were too loud and too painful to actually hold. The part of the memory that hasn’t gone is the intensity of the sound and the visceral way I felt it in my chest.

But you want to know about the man.

He was dressed in digitall camouflage and, standing in the road, looked like something out of an old video game. My first impression was of his solidity, however. He inhabited the road as if he had always been there. The deer were gone, except the two he had shot. Under one arm he carried a gun.

I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I’ve looked at a lot of pictures since. I think it was a Colt R5670 assault rifle, but my memmory might have been faulty when I was looking at images afterward. He was around six feet tall, with broad shoulders that had a slight stoop to them, as if he spent a lot of time crouching. He wore a mask.

Not like a comic book superhero’s mask. This was more like a balaclava that left only his eyes visible. Beneath the cloth, it was impossible to tell much except that his visible skin was a deep tan, and that his eyes were the same dark brown as the deer.

Not It wasn’t visible to me right then, but I eventually learned that he also wore a blocker that corrupted the smart dust as he passsed through it, so he didn’t show up. A man-shaped void passing through the world.

Again, at the time, I didn’t even know I wasn’t recording anything. I thought he was doing this entire thing in front of the world. At any moment, I fully expected Lizzie to speak in my ear and tell me the authorities were on the way. The fact that she hadn’t done so yet probablly cuased me as much panic as anything else.

I twisted free of the bike and half fell back. I think I said soemthing stupid, like “Don’t hurt me.”

He snorted, the air puffing the mask away from his face for a moment.

“You know someone is coming, right? If you hurt me, they’ll know.”

He turned his back, totally unconcerned with me, and strode to the buck. “Might want to check your connection, hon.”

THAT was the moment when I realized I was offline. I subvocalized first, the way I’ve done my entire life. “Lizzie?”

I had There was a slight ringing in my ears from the gunshots, but nothing else. Aloud, ignoring the way my voice carried, I said, “Lizzie. Lizzie, answer me.”

“You’re offline.” The man knelt by the buck and slung a bag off his shoulder. The gun He laid the gun in front of him, so it would only take one motion to pick it up and point it at me.

I pressed my hand to my earbud, as i f that would somehow, magically, make Lizzie audible. She had a ten-minute buffer that synced with my local system; this normally dealt with signal drop. The idea that I’d been out of range for that long was slowly dawning on me, but I was mostly in denial. I tried triggering a datacloud, but nothing appeared. Moving from eye gestures, I pulled out my h-stick, to see if I had maybe damaged it when I fell, but the green ready light glowed on top. I unrolled its screen, and it was 404 out of luck. “No signal,” it said.

I had been scared before, but now I could barely catch my breath. If I had been standing, I think my knees would have given out.

My throat closed, and I could hear the wheezing as I tried to draw in air. I was ALONE with this man. Have you experienced that? Even in the middle of the night, when I wake up, there’s always someone to talk to. There’s always a witness. Without someone watching, people could do anything, and I was standing ALONE in a forest with a man with a gun.

“What do you want with me?”

“Nohting. You were just here.” He pulled out a small kit from his pack. It was blue, I think. It fit in the palm of his hand, so it was maybe abuot the size of a long-term UV storage battery or one of the mass-market paperbacks that I sell. He popped it open and pulled out an injector. “Just keep quiet while I’m working. Deal?”

I nodded, but I still wanted to ask questions. I think it was because I couldn’t connect that the need to touch the web became s o desperate. I kept swiping the screen of the h-stick, trying to get it to connect. Everything else about it worked fine. I could open my gallery but not patch in from my Lens, so the problem was entirely external. The only time I use the h-stick to show images is if I’m sharing them with someone in a digitaly noisy environment. Otherwise, we’re all watching it in projected virteo.

This felt disconnected and unreal.

So I started talking, trying to fill in the missing information. “What are you doing?”

By that point, he had slid the injector into the skin at the base of the buck’s neck. He squeezed the trigger, and I flinched, but it only made a muffled click. He pulled it out, ejected the needle, and loaded another one. His movements were smooth, as if he’d done this hundreds of times before. He popped a fresh needle on. I could see it from where I was standing. It was thicker than the cannula they use for blood draws.

“You’ll have to pay a fine for killing them. There might be jail time.”

“I didn’t kill them.”

I could see now that they were only tranquilllized. Their breathing was slow and steady. The fur on the doe’s back was ruffled, but there was no blood staining her hide. At least none that I could see. “Still, interfering with a herd will have a fine atta ched.” I waited for my i-Sys to report what that was, but I only heard the wind hiss through the leaves in reply.

The injector clicked as he squeezed the trigger again. “Sweetheart, if I was worried about a fine, do you think I would be doing this?”

“I don’t even know what you’re doing.”

He pulled teh injector out and looked levelly at me. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

I stared at the gun lying in front of him and drew back. The sunlight seemed colder than it had before, and I pulled my sleeves down over my arms even though it meant covering my UV filter tattoos. Powering devices was not high on my list of concerns right then. But I did want to know what he was doing, that was the thing. I wanted to know, very badly, why he had shot two deer—

“Would you have to kill me if you told me?” I meant it as a joke, but it sure as hell didn’t sound that way. It sounded like a business question at a meeting in the middle of a path under an archway of trees.

He gathered up the discarded needles and put them back into the medkit. Quickly, he resealed it and tucked it once more into his bag. He didn’t even pretend to think about the answer. He didn’t feint toward his gun or bluster, he just packed up his supplies as if I weren’t even there. I was that little of a hassle for him.

I think it ticked me off. I’m trying to remember why I thought this was a good idea, but I mostly just remember feeling deeply annoyed.

I stood up.

He eyed me through his mask, but that was about it. If he could ignore me, then I could do the same to him. I righted my bicycle and made sure the hitch to my trailer wa s solid. The canvas solar top was still secured, but I opened it anyway to look at the items I was taking into Portland to sell.

This part I remember clearlly, and I understand EXACTLY why I remember it so well. I know what I had in the cart, because I cataloged it later as part of the ephemera associated with this experience. I’ll bet you’re wondering why I was able to keep all of these items and still vanish for a week into the woods.

I was offfline for three days, but I was gone longer.

I should get back to the deer.

He said, “May as well make yourself comfortable.” He stood up and watched me fussing with my cart.

“I thought you said I could leave.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But you—”

“I said I didn’t want you for anyhting. Didn’t say you could leave.”

“But—but—” I sputtered like an idiot, starting and discarding all manner of pleas for mercy.

He grinned. The mask hid it, but his eyes suddenly crinkled. “It’s fine. You can leave. After.”

“After what?”

“After I’m finished. I am NOT in the mood to have a visit from the authorities while I’m working.”

I shook my head, the fear still crawling up my spine. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“No?” He jerked his chin, hidden behind its mask, at my h-stick. “And you’re holding that because . . . ?”

To be honest, I had not realized that I still had it out. I was running my finger over the surface, tabbing between screens as if I would find new information. I jerked my thumb off the surface and shoved the thing into my pocket. “I was just looking to see if I had a signal.”

“You don’t.” He picked up the rifle, which was no less terrifying now that I knew it shot tranqs. They were designed to take down a deer. No telling what they would do to me. He wandered over to where I stood by my cart. “What’re you hauling?”

“I deal in Authenticities. Antiques, mostly.” It was not, I thought, the moment to mention that I dealt in Captures as well. I very much wanted to get out of this alive, and despite his assurances about the deer, I was less than confident in my survival odds.

“Let me see?” He walked over to me, and it’s hard to describe the way he seemed to get bigger as he came. This is one place where a Capture would not have shown you the emotional experience, even if you were tapping directly into my vitals. There was a power in his movement, as if he were holding the earth down as he walked, as if he were grounding the world instead of the other way around. Up close, he was older than I’d thought. Above the mask, his face was creased with wrinkles. His eyebrows had been dark once, but were bushy with wild gray hairs now. I could only see from the bridge of his nose to right above his eyes, but it was enough to tell that he was laughing at me.

“What?” I moved to stand between him and my cart, though if he had chalenged me on it, I would have let him given him the whole thing in exchange for letting me walk away. The move was the unconscious part of my brain wanting to protect its possessions, regardless of the danger. The rest of my brain was busily engaged in screaming RUN!, and the two conflicting impulses led me to just stand in front of him. Not threatening, not retreating.

“I’m curious, and we have some time before they wake up.” His eyes crinkled again. “Maybe I’ll buy something.”

“These aren’t for sale.”

“No?”

For a brief moment, my brain was actually smart. “I’m making a delivery. To Portland. My client is expecting me.”

He paused cocked his head then, and his eyes went vague, looking off to the side at a projected virteo that didn’t even show up in the daylight as a glimmer. He grunted and shook his head. “Or you’ve just purchased them yourself. Well . . . Katya Gould. We apparently have more to discuss than I thought we did.”

In any other circumstance, the fact that he knew my name would have been no big deal. Facial recognition flags people all the time, so you know who you’re talking to and how they stand in rankings compared to you. When I meet with a new client, I know their purchase history and the name of their first pet. What made this terrifying was that *I* didn’t have a connection. He did.

Something to discuss? That did NOT sound good. And what had he seen in that pause? Something about who I’d bought the typewriter from? My client list? I stalled, pretending that antiques were the only business he could possibly mean. I can’t tell you if I was doing that as a strategy—to try to seem as if I wasn’t a threat—or if it was just a panicked coping mechanism. I remember it both ways.

“You’re a collector?”

That smirk again, just peeking above the cloth. “Indirectly. “

“You make a habit of being vague, don’t you?”

“I make a habit of not answering questions I don’t need to.” He tilted his head at the deer. “Case in point. You, on the other hand, are very good at tracking down the provenance of the objects you sell and, more important, you have a client list that interests us.”

“I note you said ‘us.’”

“Yes.” He shrugged and gave me nothing past that. “So, you have a typewriter, I see.” They turned up in costume dramas often enough that I wasn’t surprised he could name it. Though I was surprised by his next sentence. “That’s the one war correspondents liked, isn’t it?”

“Hemingway had one.” I almost swung straight into the sales pitch, I but managed to hold my tongue. “You were interested in my clients. I should point out that I maintain complete confidentiality. I never discuss price or purchased items with others.”

That’s the thing about being an Authenticities dealer. People who seek my services want a unique experience, and that means they often don’t even want other people to know what they have. There are some people who won’t share their purchases with their spouses.

“Where do you get ribbons for them?”

That startled me, but not too much. “I print them.” Seeing the surprise on his face, above the mask, I felt like I had to justify it. “I include the original ribbon, but even with re-inking, most are close to two hundred years old, and too fragile to use. If someone actually wants to use the typewriter, and some people do, then I have to give them a reproduction ribbon. I label them.”

He just grunted and picked up the dictionary, which made me think he might have been a collector. Someone else would have gone for the typewriter, mistaking it as the most valuable item. But the dictionary had a solid provenance and was dripping with wabi-sabi.

He thumbed open the first few pages. “How much?”

“You can’t afford it.”

“Maybe my client can. How much?”

So I told him and watched his brows rise to vanish under the bottom edge of his hood. He rolled his eyes, and for a moment I thought he was making a face at the amount, but the telltale shimmer of a virteo projection sprang into bein g in front of him. He made a few eye gestures and then blinked twice to shut the field down. “The vinos are in your account. Not that you can check, but they are there.”

“Won’t that tell me who you are?” The words were out of my mouth before I could think them through. I mean, maybe he hadn’t killed me because he’d thought I couldn’t identify him with the mask and all. If I had just reminded him that he had made a mistake, it would be appallingly stupid.

It didn’t seem to bother him at all though. If anything, he seemed to find the question amusing. His eyes crinkled in another grin. “No.”

Which was a relief and deeply disturbing at the same time. I mean . . . being able to mask transaction identification was high-level stuff, from what I understood. I occasionally had clients try it, but . . . well. My i-Sys is very good.

The dictionary vanished into his kit. The movement, and I’m sure this was calculated, showed a handgun under his coat, and another clip for the big firearm, which almost certainly did not have tranquilizers in it. “You’ll want to cover up the cart, now. In case of rain.”

There hadn’t been any rain in the forecast when I’d left this morning, but I didn’t argue. The man had a gun, after all, even if he had just paid an ungodly sum for the dictionary. Or his clients had, whoever they were. I tugged the tarp back into place, zipping it down. When it was sealed, the cart could be submerged in water up to ten feet in depth and the seals would hold. There wasn’t any real need for that, but it had seemed like a good investment to be certain wind and rain couldn’t get in. Sometimes I dealt in paper ephemera like the dictionary. Clients wanted to see the graceful decay of age, not mishandling by their broker, which meant I had to be able to annnotate damage. Recent water damage? Didn’t sell.

I had the cart half covered before my brain processed what he’d said and the red flag it raised. I was only an hour out of Salem, and the sky through teh trees was a crystal-clear blue. “There’s no rain in the forecast today.” Here’s where Lizzie should have confirmed that for me, but my earbud remained stubbornly silent.

He stepped back, turning out a little so the deer came into his line of sight without his needing to turn his back on me. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before they wake up. Need to get the cart off the road.”

“I’m not . . . I’m not—what are you going to do with me?”

“I want you to push the bike back the way you came. I’ll be right behind you.”

I shook my head and backed away from him. This was not going anywhere good. Turn my back on him? Walk away, with him standing behind me with a gun, and push the bike off the road? I didn’t know why—or even IF—he’d paid for the fdictionary, but my brain put together this whole scenario where he was about to kill me and had framed someone else by using their account for the transfer. All he had to do was hide my body. Anyone watching my live feed would see where I disappeared from the net and would look forward for me first, along the route I’d been traveling. If I went backward, it would take them longer to find me.

And how long would it take someone to notice I was gone? Presumably, my i-Sys would be rasising flags right now, but I didn’t actually know that. I mean . . . I didn’t know anyone who’d been off the grid for more than a couple of minutes at a time, and that was always in places where the reception was known to be spotty. Spelunkers whose smart-dust trails were interrupted, things like that. Would my disappearance be remarked upon, or would it look like equipment failure? Or had he made arrangements to cover that, even?

He hadn’t. I didn’t know this then, but he was working with a ticking clock that had nothing to do with the deer. I’d been a minor bobble in his day; he’d been planning to release me, until his client changed his plans. My i-Sys WAS sending up all sorts of system flags and trying to arrange for a search-and-rescue team to look for me. All I knew at the time was panic.

I thought I would probably have better odds sprinting for the woods. At least the trees might make it harder for him to shoot me. That was why he’d waited until the deer were on the road, right?

He saw all of that and lifted the gun, just a little, so that it pointed more toward me. “Just put your hands on the handlebars and turn the bike around. Nice and slow.”

I did. What I remember most clearly is the sweat running down the backs of my knees. That’s a funny place for sweat, isn’t it? You think about fear and clammmy palms, or sweat on your forehead, but it was my knees. I thought they would crumple with each step. I THINK he helped me turn the bike, because the path was so narrow that it would have been hard to do with the cart, but I don’t remember for sure. I justr emember the backs of my knees tickling as sweat slid down from my thighs to my calves.

There wasn’t anything realistic I could do, so I walked the bike, expectings omething to hit me from behind with each step. “How far do you want me to go?”

“Just keep walking.”

“It’d be faster if I rode.”

He snorted at that. I didn’t look over my shoulder, even though he didn’t tell me to keep staringstraight ahead—or at least, I don’t think he did. All the scary movies I’d seen and the books I’d read over the years told me that looking back caused bad things to happen. After a while—I’m not sure how long, since I’ve discovered that I’m a crap judge of time without an i-Sys to remind me—he said, “Turn off here. To the right.”

He put just enough pressure on the cart that I had to slow, and I think I was in enough shock that I just followed his command. I stepped off the road and followed his instructions as we pushed the bike through the woods and around clumps of ferns. The undergrowth slapped my legs with slender branches, leaving welts on my bare calves as if I’d been beaten with tiny switches. I envied the man’s long trousers and shirt sleeves. Once he had to help me boost the bike and cart over a moss-covered log. He slung the rifle over his shoulder in order to use both hands to lift the cart.

In hindsight, I have this mental image of shoving the bike and trailer back toward him. It would have knocked him off balance. He might even have been pinned for a moment by the cart. I could have run into the woods and dropped behind one of the thickets, burrowed into the ferns and gotten away.

Instead, I thanked him for helping. I THANKED him. That still burns.

But it also snapped me out of the shock a little as I realized that I was just going along with whatever he wanted me to do. It’s easy for you to sit there and wonder why I didn’t try to escape, but by this point, maybe only ten minute s had passed. My mind was still trying to understand what had happened. I started looking for another opportunity. Started trying to think through what would happen if I ran. I kept subvocalizing questions to Lizzie, out of sheer reflex, and the continuing silence made me raelize how much I relied on her to help me make decisions. It wasn’t so much that she told me what to do as that I liked having someone to bounce ideas off of. So don’t judge me for taking ten minutes before I genuinely tried to think of ways to escape.

I’ve gotten a lot of flak for making this up, or for being a willling victim. I wasn’t. And I can’t prove that to anyone because there’s no record. This was hard for me.

We went deeper still into the woods. Underneath the wind, I could just make out the sound of water running. It was the tantalizing sound of freedom.

He stopped and pointed at a small clump of saplings.

“Here. This is good.”

He pulled the branches aside and gestured for me to push the bike and trailer back into the space. It did not take him long to drag underbrush up to mask my equipment. At first I thought it was not very well hidden, but the random branches and leaves he’d thrown over it broke the shape up enough that it was hard to spot, even knowing exactly where it was.

He told me to walk ahead of him and he tidied up the signs of our passage as we walked back returned to the road. When we got back to it, I was surprised by how far away we were from the deer.

The buck lifted his head, and the man swore.

“That took longer than I expected.”

At first I thought he meant the drug had taken longer to wear off, but then I realized he was talking about hiding the bike.

He shook his head and ran past me to the deer, slinging his gun in front of him. His feet made no sound at all on the pavement. I watched him run for a minute as I continued walking forward, as if he were behind me and forcing me. Then my brain caught up with the fact that he was completely distracted. I stopped.

I don’t remember really weighing the options. I just turned and slipped off the road back into the underbrush and headed toward the sound of the stream. I say “slipped” as if I were at all graceful, but compared to the man, I sounded like a demo team tearing up an old road. He slowed and glanced over his shoulder as I crashed through the leaves. I didn’t care. I just barreled between the trees. By this point, I was thinking at least a little clearly, and I RAN, not caring about how big a path I tore through the woods. I figured that even if he saw me go, he still had to deal with the deer, and the more distance I put between us the harder it would be for him to find me when I went to ground. More important, there was a chance that if I left the range of his damper, my i-Sys could spot me again.

I was breaking branches, and I knew I’d be easy to track, but I had the sense that he would have found me easily even if I’d demonstrated impeccable woodcraft. I strained my ears to listen fo r him, but beyond the sound of bracken crackling underfoot and my own labored breathing, I couldn’t make out the sound of anything else moving in the forest. The trickle of water came and went between my footfalls, and I just aimed toward where it was loudest.

I passed a mossy log with a gap under it that was just big enough for a person to hide in. I got this idea that I could make a false trail and double back to hide under it. So I ran on. The idea was that getting to the stream would make it harder to tell that my trail had vanished. In theory. I had read about it, and it certianly seemed to make logical sense, but I didn’t know if that was a literary convention or if streams really were good tools for throwing someone off your scent. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he were going to be smelling my trail. At least, I didn’t think he would.

The angle of the ground pitched down ahead of me, and I crested the top of a little hill. At the bottom was the stream I’d been running toward. It was narrow and had ferns crowding the sides. I slid down the bank and landed with a splash. Heart hammering, I stood in the rushing water and listened. The brook babbled around my ankles, but I heard nothing beyond the water.

“Lizzie?” I pressed my hand to my earbud. “Can you hear me?”

I didn’t really think it was likely yet, and the silence confirmed that I was still in range of whatever he had used to block me. As carefully as I could, I pulled myself up out of the stream, trying not to make it obvious that I was backtracking. I tried to be quiet as I crept back along the path I had torn through the woods. My chest hurt because I kept trying to hold my breath so it didn’t make any noise, hoping I could hear if he was coming toward me. He’d been so silent on the road. I tried to reassure myself that it had been the pavement. I’d heard him make noise as we walked in the woods with the bike, but not when he’d stepped out of the trees.

Clearly, he could be quiet when he needed to be. I tried placing my feet carefully, but even so the leaves rustled and shushed under me as if they were trying to warn me that I was too loud. I could hardly draw air. Every fiber in my body screamed at me to turn around and not walk toward him. I kept going, hoping I could convince him that I was running downstream. I heard crashing in the forest at some distance. I didn’t think it could be him, the noise was so loud. The deer, I decided, had gotten to their feet, at least one of them, and were entering the woods. Was that good or bad?

I had no idea. Wit h luck, he was going to follow them. Without luck, that meant whatever he was doing was finished and he could focus on finding me. I was drenched in sweat by this point as the thermal battery fibers in my clothes utterly failed to keep up with the excess of panicked heat I was generating. Still, I kept going, not hearing anything. It seemed as if the distance from the stream back to the moss-covered log had lengthened while I’d been walking. Any moment, I was sure he would appear in front of me. When I reached the log, I stepped carefully over it, not disturbing the moss, and pushed in from the back into the little hollow beneath it. I shoved leaves in front of me to create a small blind, masking me from view if he was following my trail.

The ground was cool, and the leaves clung to my face. I remember being surprised by how damp it was. That was a relief at first, helping me cool down after my run. The spicy, almost cinnamon, aroma of the crushed leaves was soothing as I lay there and waited. What I was hoping, desperately, was that he would either not look for me, or look and give up.

As I lay there, limbs stiffening in the embrace of the earth, I heard a low hum. The slight ticking of gears going around almost blended with the breeze. A bike was on the road. It did not slow as it went past. If I had stayed on the road, would that person have been able to save me? Just having someone else present might have been enough to get me away from him—but I had run into the woods.

The bike didn’t slow, so I assumed the deer were gone. Now I just had to figure out how long I needed to wait to be certain he was gone as well.

My right hand started to fall asleep. Pins and needles prickled in the side of my palm, and I flexed my fingers, trying to keep the circulation going without making a sound.

A twig cracked. I stopped breathing for a moment, absolutely certain I had somehow broken the stick myself. The more horrible and totally obvious idea came next. Another person had broken the stick. He was tracking me. I closed my eyes, as if that would somehow make it harder to find me. In the waiting darkness, I focused on listening for sounds of him. A rustle that wasn’t in time with the breeze. A squelch of a foot on soft leaves. Then a sigh.

It really is amazing how loud a sigh can sound in the forest.

“Come out from under the log, Katya.”

I opened my eyes. With the leaves, I was in a cool, dark shelter of filtered green and brown. A childish part of me wanted to stay still, as if pretending I wasn’t there would make him go away. It was all too clear that my flight down to the creek had not fooled him for a moment. “The cyclist will hear the rifle if you shoot me.”

“That is correct.”

And then he cocked the rifle. The sigh had been bad. The sound of that small, metallic click . . . It couldn’t have echoed—we were in the woods, for crying out loud—but it still reverberates in my mind.

Now, clearly, I’m not dead. Clearly, I came out from under the log. Leaves clung to me. Mud and scratches covered my legs and arms. He stood there, his eyes blank above the mask. The rifle was pointed at my sternum. My memory breaks here.

I don’t remember being shot.

I wish I could give you some poetic langauge about how things grew hazy or how I asked him “Why!?” in an impassioned tone, but that would be bullshit. It turns out that when you are drugged like that, there’s a jump cut in your memory. One minute I was standing in the forest; the next, I was lying on my back in a tent.

Well . . . I say I was lying in a tent. It took me a minute to sort that out. Waking up was confusing. My head was too heavy to lift, and my eye s felt as if they had been filled with sand. I stared at the dappled cloth over me and couldn’t figure out what it was. At first I thought the patterns on the ceiling were moving because I was drunk, but it was just the shadows of leaves. I don’t know how much time passed as I drifted in and out of consciousness, surprised anew each time I awoke. The remnants of the drug kept trying to pull me back down into sleep. In fact, I’m not entirely certain that I didn’t fall asleep again. I remember murmuring to ask Lizzie to keep me awake.

Her silence was baffling. Then, FINALLY, I remembered what had happened.

My eyes opened w ide at the memory of the man aiming the rifle at me. I lay there trying to listen for some sign of him and had to fight to avoid drifting off again. I pushed myself to a sitting position, the tent pitching around me. It was a small space with walls of a synthetic silk compound. He’d set it up between two trees, and the smart fabric had wraped itself around the trunks as additional supports, making something about the size of an old pup tent. The ceiling brushed my hair when I sat up. The interior was filled with the scent of my own sweat and the decay of my breath. The sides of the tent turned in spirals around me. I gripped the thin thermal blanket in both hands and held on until the space steadied.

There were so few things that made sense about the whole experience; I’m not sure why I expected events to suddenly appear orderly and rational now. Holding my head, I listened past the walls of the tent for someone else. I heard nothing, but that was proof of not a thing beyond the fact that he could be exceedingly quiet when he chose to be. For all I knew, he was standing just outside the tent and watching me.

I suppose I should backtrack here to explain that one of the things I noticed when I woke up was that someone had washed me, but that I was wearing the same clothes. The thing I didn’t know, and couldn’t know, and still don’t know was whether or not anyone he had undressed me in the process of cleaning the mud from my skin. It was a profoundly creepy thought. Really. I felt more unclean than when I’d had mud all over my body. Lizzie couldn’t tell me. The only thing I had was the report of my own sensations, and they felt profoundly unreliable in that moment. I could barely turn my head without puking from dizziness.

What had the deer felt like when it had awoken? I mean, that rack of antlers must have pulled its head back down even more than my own wanted to droop. My first instinct was to crawl out of the tent and try to stagger away into the woods, but—let’s face it—he had found me easily when I was in full possession of my senses. The smart course was to wait until the rest of the tranquilizer wore off before going out.

The tent flap opened.

I will admit: I jumped and gave a little squeal.

He was kneeling in the dried leaves outside the tent, still with that damned mask over his lower face. I hadn’t heard him AT ALL.

He paused, watching me recover from being startled, and tilted his head. “How do you feel?”

“Bastard.”

He didn’t respond, just waited. I squinted past him, but the light outside the dim interior of the tent dazzled my eyes almost to the point of pain. All I could really see was that we were still in a forest. I presumed it was the same one.

I was wrong, of course, but I wouldn’t know that until later.

I still don’t know how he moved me from a forest outside Salem to one in Washington. I mean, we must have been in a vehicle of some sort, but that’s just one more giant gaping hole in my story. I only promised to tell you what I experienced though, so the things I didn’t . . . well. You can’t blame me for not knowing them, can you?

Anyway, he knelt there, waiting, and I sat there being stubbornly righteous and feeling as if answering any questions would be giving in to my captivity. He didn’t seem particularly put out, but then it’s sort of hard to tell what someone thinks when they have a full face mask on. He passed me a water bottle.

Or rather, he held one out, but I didn’t take it. He shrugged and set it down on the floor of the tent. “You’ll be thirsty. Drink it slowly.”

Then he let the flap fall. I didn’t hear him walk away, but I hadn’t heard him approach the tent either. For all I knew he was right on the other side of the flap, waiting for me to move. It was incredibly maddening. Every breath I took seemed too loud. The air in the tent burned my throat. I put my hands to my head and bent forward, trying to get a grip on myself.

That’s when I noticed, finally, that my earbud was gone. He must have taken it off while I was unconscious.

Which meant that maybe we were somewhere with net access. That gave me a little bit of hope. Not immediately, of course. No, first came yet another sense of being violated and panic about being disconnected. I pawed aside the sleeping roll I’d been on and pushed away everything in the tent, hoping my earbud had just fallen out. As if. The thing was custom molded to my ear canal and wouldn’t even come out when I was swimming. Heck, I’d been surfing and gotten pounded by waves with it in.

No. The answer was that the man had taken it out. I sat in the mess of blankets, my head touching the ceiling of the tent, and slowly rebuilt my thoughts.

First: I wasn’t dead. He’d taken the trouble to tranquilize me and bring me to Washington—well. I mean, at the time, it was still just “somewhere,” but I wasn’t dead. That meant I had some value, some usefulness to him.

Second: He’d taken the earbud, but he hadn’t demanded it when we’d been on the road. That meant something was different about our environment. If I could get my hands on a network-enabled device, maybe I could get help.

Third: None of this was going to happen quickly, so I needed to drink the damn water.

You don’t reall y think of taking charge of your physical needs as a big heroic thing, but at the moment, anything that was under my direct control was a lifeline. The lid cracked, and I remember being relieved that it was a sealed bottle, because that meant he wasn’t trying to poison me. As if there weren’t easier ways to do me in. Trust me, once you start having paranoid thoughts, everything becomes suspicious.

And yes, he was rihgt to warn me to drink it slowly. I was thirsty. Thirstier than I expected to be, which made me wonder how long I had been asleep.

I set the bottle down with half the water still in it and stared at the flap of the tent. He hadn’t told me to stay in the tent, so I pushed the flap aside and crawled out. I had to squint my eyes nearly shut at first. I would have made a crap spy.

I stood up, staggering as my balance went all wonky. Inside the tent, my vision had stabilized, but getting to my feet brought all the symptoms of the tranquilizer back again. The trees spun around me in ways I had previously considered entirely metaphorical. Before I pitched over, he was at my side and had a hand under my elbow, another at the small of my back.

“Easy.” He steadied me, not standing closer than was necessary.

I stared at the ground, wanting to pull away, but knowing that any sudden movement would tip me over. When the ground wasn’t moving quite so much, I released my breath. “Thank you.”

With a quick squeeze of my arm, he nodded and stepped away. “Sorry about that. Sucks to wake up from.”

“Why?”

To his credit, he could have misinterpreted that as a question about the effects of the drug, but he answered the question I had meant to ask. “You ran once already. I’m on a schedule.”

“Running seemed reasonable at the time.”

“I’ll grant that it might have. Does it still?”

“It would help if I knew what you wanted with me.”

“Not me, sweetheart. My bosses.”

“The question still stands.”

He grunted and walked away from me to a small camp chair. The low angle of the light cut under the branches and shone in my eyes. My vision had cleared some, but I still was having trouble focusing, so let me tell you about where we were based on a latrer memory. This one was full of fuzz and twisting shadows from the evening sun.

The real space was a clearing about ten meters wide. Large enough for the tent, fairly level, with light filtering down from the trees overhead. A passing airplane wouldn’t spot us. He’d set up a small camp table with a chair in front of it. The table held a careful stack of supplies. It looked like a mix of electronic and medical equipment. The vaccination gun, tranquilizer darts, an external monitor, and an honest-to-god hard-body computer case.

Crouched on the ground, in deactivated mode, was a robo-mule, which must have been how he had carried all of this gear into the woods. It meant that we were probably not currently close to a road, and that a vehicle must have been used at some point to transport the robo-mule. Presumably me too.

The rifle leaned against the table.

He pulled the camp chair away from the table and set it down in the middle of the clearing. “Have a seat.”

“Where will you sit?”

“Log.” He jutted his chin toward a massive stump that was almost chair height and had the width of an ancient old-growth tree. It must have been a remnant of the old logging days. The top was a deep weathered brown and ha d a film of moss around the edges. “Hungry?”

Again, the urge to say no pressed at my lips, but really . . . was I worried it might not be safe? Or that I would betray some principle by not accepting his food? The only person I would hurt was me, and I would need my strength. So I accepted.

He nodded, pleased by my response, and that nearly made me change my mind. But it occurred to me that if he ate with me, he’d have to take the mask off. I crosssed to the camp chair, still a little unsteady on my feet, and san k onto it.

He rummaged in a pack and pulled out a foil pouch of . . . something. Beef stroganoff, I think. Maybe it was chicken stir-fry that first day. Huh . . . I don’t actually remember what I ate. I remember opening the packet and feeling it warm in my hands. I remember the steam and my stomach rumbling in response to the savory aroma, but that’s it. I guess I was so focused on him that I just didn’t register what I actually ate.

He did NOT take his mask off. He must have eaten at some point, maybe carried the food into the woods where I wouldn’t see, or waited until after I was asleep. That’s when he claimed to have eaten that first time, while I was unconscious.

“How long was that, anyway?”

“About four hours. Give or take.”

“That’s longer than the deer were asleep.”

“Yeah . . . Sorry about that.” I got the sense he was leaving something out. Like maybe that he’d hit me with a deer-sized dose and it was lucky I wasn’t dead. I figured that out later. Not that he ever said it, but I watched him recalibrate doses at th e little camp table later, so it must have been a real issue.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know he lied about how long I was unconscious. It had been about ten in the morning when I saw him. Four hours would have put it at about two in the afternoon. Maybe three. The light inditated that it was about seven in the evening. I’d actually been asleep for nearly a day and a half. It was, indeed, lucky I hadn’t been killed when he shot me. I’m still not certain why his i-Sys didn’t flag the weight differential.

If you expect me to tell you what happened during that time, I hate to break it to you, but I don’t know.

And yes, I had to pee. Forgive me for not getting into the details of that. Suffice to say that he let me go behind a bush, but he made it very clear that running would be a poor choice. The rifle by the table was an ample reminder. I might have been useful, but I was willing to bet that onlly extended so far. I mean . . . he hadn’t planned on kidnapping me in the forest when he saw me. I’d been a surprise addition to whatever he was doing with the deer—which is, I expect, what you really want to know about.

I figure the bidding on this went so high because you are trying to figure out what is causing the deer die-off and wonder if I know. Or if something I saw will make it clear.

I don’t know.

I guess I’ll just keep typing and hope you read something that makes sense to you, because it sure as hell doesn’t make sense to me. That first day, I ate my hot meal of whatever it was, drank my water, and watched him.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to work.” But as he said that, his eyes crinkled as if he was grinning under the mask. I think he was taking a certain amount of pleasure in being obstinate. In fact, I’m sure of it based on—doesn’t matter. The point is, it looked as if he was smiling, so I kept pushing.

“More things with the deer?”

He shook his head with a little eye roll. Note: That meant he was accessing a datastream..

“Does shaking your head mean ‘not things with the deer’ or that you won’t answer me?”

“Whichever you’d like.” He stared into the distance for a moment, clearly reading something off a virteo projection, then blinked it closed and picked up a card with what looked like little black seeds on it. He fed that into the hard-case computer.

“I’d prefer it to mean ‘not things with the deer, and I am willing to answer questions.’”

That got the smile again, and the cloth in front of his mask puffed away a little, as if he’d laughed.

“Do you have a name?”

“Yep.”

I waited, scratching an itch on my arm. Oh . . . but he did like playing with me. “What is it?”

“Not going to tell you.”

“Oh, come on. I have to call you something.”

“Why?” He peered over the edge of the mask at me, sort of the way you see professors look over the edge of their glasses in old movies.

“I can’t just say ‘Hey, you.’”

“There’s just two of us. It’s not like I won’t know you’re talking to me.”

“When I think about you, I don’t want to just be saying ‘the guy’ or ‘that bastard’ all the time in my own head. I mean, if you want me to pick out a name for you . . .”

He laughed outright then. It was surprisingly melodious, as if he laughed up three steps on a scale. “Fine. Call me Johnny.”

“Not your real name, I take it?”

“No, but it amuses me.” His smile peeked over the edge of the mask. “Though bastard would be fine too.”

I grinned at that, and I remembered it felt good to smile. Then I felt ill, because I’m pretty sure that’s how Stockholm syndrome starts. Your captor makes you laugh with them an d forget for a second that you’re a prisoner. My actual job was not to feel cozy, but to figure out why I was here. That meant asking questions.

“Was the deer okay, Johnny? The one you were waiting on to wake up?”

“Yes.” He hesitated and then, miracle of miracles, volunteered more. Maybe making him laugh had been useful after all. “Sometimes they try to stand too soon. I like to make sure they don’t fall and hurt themselves.”

“They let you get close enough to do that?”

“If they’re drugged and I’m there when they wake up, yes.”

“But you were away because of me.”

Johnny nodded, and his brows pinched together a little. So now I knew he’d done this thing with the deer, whatever it was, more than once. I mean, tha t was sort of clear from how practiced he was with the injector, but the fact that he talked about other times that he’d waited for the deer to awaken made it seem as if this was a regular thing. I picked ato ne of the scabs on my leg, where the bushes had scratched me.

“Was it a problem? Getting back to it?”

“Him. The buck didn’t fall, and he spooked as soon as I got close. The doe was fine. Business as usual there.”

I want to really point that out. He said, “Business as usual . . .” So here’s the question: Why was he so concerned about the health of the deer if whatever he was doing was responsible for the decline in population?

He kept working, and I started paying a little more attention to what he was actually doing.

Again, this is a composite memory. I saw him do this a couple of different times while I was in the woods. The little card with seeds was a blister pack of nanodrives. He fed them into the hard-case machine and programmed them with . . . something. What’s significant here is that the machine was NOT connected to the net in any way. I learned that later. So, he had something totally freestanding, and he was programming these little nanodrives. After he got a group of twenty done, he loaded them into the injector gun. I think, in the time I saw him, he did maybe two hundred of these drives.I imagine you have the same questions I did. Why was he injecting the deer with nanodrives? I didn’t expect him to answer that, but I was hoping I could figure it out. That evening I let him work for a while, being quiet as if I were compliant. When he stretched at one point, leaning back on the stump to crack his spine, I took a small chance.

I asked him if I could help.

He lowered his hands from his stretch and turned to look at me. His gaze, full bore, is intense and more than a little disturbing. “No.”

“I’m handy with tools . . .”

“No. I can be clearer, if you need that, but the answer is no.”

“That from your bosses?”

“That’s from me.” He turned back to the table and resumed feeding the card back into the hard-case computer. “To anticipate your next ‘why,’ it’s because you are not as sly as you think you are. I’d be an idiot to let you handle any of this.”

And THAT made it imperative for me to do just that. “Oh, come on . . . I’m an Authenticities dealer. I do restoration and repair of antiques. I don’t know squat about whatever it is you’re doing with the deer—or not with the deer—but I’m good with my hands. And if you’re planning on keeping me until you finish whatever it is you’re doing, it’s in my best interest to make sure you do it faster.”

That sounded much better in my head when I said it than it does now. Here, it’s so clearly a pose—and a stupid one at that—I’m surprised I don’t have a memory of him laughing again.

He just didn’t answer. Didn’t even acknowledge I’d said anything. Just kept doing stuff with the monitor and the cards as if I weren’t in the clearing. And that was the way we passed the rest of the evening. Eventually, it got dark. He told me to go to bed. I did.

I planned on getting up to see if I could find anything useful, but I passed out as soon as my head touched the ground. I blame the lingering drugs in my system.

• • • •

Dawn woke me.

If you haven’t spent the night in the woods, just know that little birdsa re damn noisy. I mean . . . holy shit. They are so loud. And deeply, hatefully,cheerful. Each Disney princess should have made it her mission in life to teach birds to be quiet in the morning. At no point during the three days I was in the woods did I get used to it.

The tent confused me again, but no t as long this time. On the off chance that Johnny was asleep and I could sneak away, I rolled over and pulled the flap of the tent open.

No luck. Johnny was stretched out on the ground in front of the tent. His eyes were open, and he was staring right at me. And yes, he still had that mask on. I didn’t get the sense that he’d hurriedly put it back in place either. I flinched a little, but not as badly as earlier.

“I have to pee.” My voice was shockingly loud in the clearing, even with the birds in a full frenzy of happiness.

“So do it.”

He didn’t even lift his head from the rolled-up coat he was using as a pillow. He was in a sleeping bag, but the side was unzipped and one foot hung out. He’d taken his boots off, but otherwise he seemed to be fully dressed.

“Aren’t you worried I’ll escape?”

“Nope.”

“I thought that was why you tranqed me.”

“Oh, you might run, but I’m not worried about you ESCAPING.”

The hell of it was that he didn’t have a reason to be worried about that. Shit. My earlier attempt had shown that, and, thank you, I did not want to get druggged again. I crawled out of the tent, half tempted to knee him as I did. Pretty sure I knew how that would play out, so I didn’t even try.

When I got back from peeing he was up, boots on, and rolling up his sleeping bag.

“So what’s the plan for today?”

Crouching on his haunches, he glanced up at me, continuing to roll up the sleeping bag. “I’m going out to shoot some things. You’re going to stay here.”

“That sounds like a long, boring day for me.” Though what I was actually thinking was that it would be a chance to look at the stuff he was using.

“So wander around the woods. I’ll find you when I get back.”

“You’re awfully confident in your tracking skills.”

He tossed the sleeping bag into the tent and stood. His gaze drifted over to my left, and he tilted his head, listening to something I couldn’t hear, and then he repeated someone else’s words. “Katya . . . You need to understand that we can find you anywhere now. Please do not cause difficulties. It would be unpleasant.”

I have played that over in my head so many times. “We can find you anywhere.” And then that extra word. “Now.” We can find you anywhere NOW.

They had tagged me.

While I was asleep, he’d inserted a fucking transponder into my body somewhere. Which one of teh scrapes and scratches on my legs and arms wasn’t from the woods? Somewhere on my body was an insertion wound. Just a puncture mark large enough to insert a nanodrive like the ones he’d put into the deer. And there was no way for me to know where. If he was smart, it was somewhere on my back where I wouldn’t even be able to see it.

It makes me feel sick, thinking about it. I mean, wouldn’t you, if someone had inserted something into you without your permission, without your knowledge?

And here’s the real brainfuck.

I never found it.

When I got out of the woods, I was taken straight to a hospital. There was no sign of any undocumented foreign matter in my body. My UV tattoos, sure. Dermal implants, fillings, onboard battery storage, my i-Sys connections, all the other little things we modify ourselves with—those show up just fine, but no one found anything that wasn’t already in my records. So the question I keep asking is: Was he bluffing then, and I never had a transponder? Or did he mask it with one of the otehr artifacts already in my body?

He could be watching me type this.

Creepy as hell, huh?

Try living with the idea. Yeah . . . I don’t enjoy it either.

Or maybe he really was just bluffing, and I could have walked out of that forest at any time, which is its own brand of creepy. Because that means he was using my own mind and nothing else to hold me. Either way, it’s unpleasant, and I could spend a lifetime second-guessing myself like that.

At the time, I just cursed at him. I don’t even remember what I said; I was just so sick and angry that I ranted at him and called him half a dozen names, most of them more than once. Above the mask, his eyes were impassive. He didn’t flinch; he didn’t smile. He just bore witness to my rage. And I’ll give him that. He didn’t ignore me and go back to work; he waited until I’d wound down and run out of things to call him and whoever the fuck his bosses were.

I stood there, shaking with anger, thinking again about how I’d been washed while I was asleep and imagining every possible violation. He looked down then, and I realized he was not as impassive as I’d thought. His hands were gripped into fists. He stretched the fingers out slowly, as if working the tension out of them. I am not certain—I might just be projecting this onto him—but I think he was not happy about having tagged me.

Without a word, he turned and walked across the clearing to his bag. He pulled it open and rummaged inside for a bit before pulling out a book. A paper book, mind you, not a reader. He set it on the table and all he said was, “If you get bored.”

The crazy thing—I mean the part that really makes me question my own mind—is that my first instinct was to take a Capture so that later I would have the provenance of the book, in case it was something I could put up for sale. How stupid is that?

He slung the rifle over his shoulder, strapped teh small kit to his belt, and strode off into the forest.

I spent the day trying to break into the cases where he stowed everything—and failing, because they were print-sealed and would, presumably, only open to him. Likewise, the robo-mule would not turn on—not that it would have been a terribly useful thing to have, since I could walk as fast as one of those in the woods, and they weren’t exactly stealthy. Great for packing gear though.

Periodically, the forest would echo with the sound of the rifle. Sometimes one shot, then nothing for an hour. Sometimes four or five shots, clustered together. I had walked away from the clearing, but I started to worry that a) I would wander into the range of gunfire or that b) I wouldn’t be able to find my way back before Johnny returned.

I wouldn’t want him to think I had tried to run away again, would I? I actually considered that. Can you imagine?

The book. You’ll want to know about that. I did eventually pick it up, and yes, I read it, because I was bored. It was a third edition of Bashar’s book, A SYMMETRY FRAMED, fourth printing. Coffee stain on page 218 means that its owner had probably stayed up late reading. Pencil marks under key sentences such as “True power lies in positioning the fulcrum of events, not in grasping them by the lever,” and “Western capitalism was always unable to account for either the costs or benefits of naturally occurring systems, instead treating them only as inputs to human-designed industrial and economic processes.”

The bottom of the book’s cover had been gnawed on by a puppy, much like the dictionary.

Of course, I’d need to get it into a lab and show it to an AI to be certain, but I never had that opportunity with this particular artifact. It’s too bad, really, because it was loaded with wabi-sabi.

Johnny came back in the evening, his gun slung over his shoulder. As usual, I didn’t hear him coming. One moment, I was alone in the clearing; the next, he was stepping out of the trees. Again, I jumped.

“Would you STOP doing that?”

“What?” He paused in the act of slinging the rifle off his shoulder and looked genuinely baffled.

“Most people make noise when they walk. You’re like a freaking ghost.”

“Ah.” His motion continued as if I hadn’t stopped him. “Apologies. Habits die hard, and silence is more useful in the woods than noise.”

“Well, I’m getting tired of being frightened.” And that was true in more ways than one. The book might have helped me clarify my own position. It might have been a mistake, in fact, for him to give it to me. Bashar was very good at explaining how to use what power you had to achieve your goals. I was over halfway through teh book by then, past the place where the coffee stain was.

“Again, I apologize. I’ll make noise when I come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow. We’re still going to be in these woods tomorrow?”

“Probably for the rest of the week.” He pulled the clip from the rifle and checked the chamber before he leaned the gun against the table.

“That many deer?”

“Yes.” He thumbed opened one of the cases. Inside were rows of ammunition nestled in foam. He slid the clip into its place and shut the case again. I could hear the slight SNICK as it sealed.

“Johnny, I need you to explain to me what I have to do with deer and why you are keeping me here.”

“Or?”

“Or I won’t cooperate when we get to whatever it is your bosses want me to do.”

“We don’t need you to cooperate.”

That stopped me. And chilled me.

“You were in the way when I had work to do. I need you to be quiet about what you saw until I’m finished. My choices were to bring you with me, or to kill you.” He cocked his head and glanced to the left at his bosses, whoever they were, in his virteo projection. He shook his head, I think at them. “I took responsibility for you, but this has nothing to do with you.”

“But . . . but you said we had something to discuss. My client list interested you”

He stared, and the sun seemed to drop visibly lower in the sky while he thought. Then he shook his head.

“Oh, come on.”

“Have you eaten dinner?”

“You can’t just change the subject”

“Yes I can. You know I can. Do you want something to eat?”

“Bastard.”

“See. I was right. I told you I didn’t need a name.”

I did not give him the courtesy of a laugh. I sulked, like a goddamn five-year-old. I sat down in the only chair and picked up his goddamn book and started to read. Then realized that it was HIS book, and I wanted to throw the thing across the clearing, but I didn’t because that would have done exactly no good. Nothing, in fact, that I could do would do any good at all. The utter impotence of my situation—the helplessness of knowing there were no good choices . . . The only one open to me, to wait, seemed like a surrender.

He gave me a foil pouch of some other unmemorable meal. I’d had dried fruit and a trail bar for breakfast, a different forgettable pouch for lunch. Johnny still didn’t eat in front of me. Oh, no. That would have meant removing his mask, and that might have revealed who he was.

Silent, resentful, I went to bed when full dark came. That night I didn’t sleep well at all.

• • • •

Despite that, the birds woke me again at dawn. I lay in the tent, glaring at the roof. If I could have killed them with my mind, I would have. Alas, the cheerful little bastards lived on.

The inside of my mouth tasted as if something had died in it. Modern advances are all well and good for making sure your dental hygiene is in good order, but when you go days without brushing your teeth, there’s a bit of a buildup there. My breath stank. I stank. I’d been wearing the same clothes for days now.

I crawled out of the tent hating everything and everyone.

Johnny was awake, watching me again. I didn’t jump this time.

“I need some clean clothes.”

“Good morning.” He sat up. “I haven’t got any to give you.”

I was so frustrated that the state of my clothes mattered more than it should have. “Is there a stream where I can wash them?”

“They’ll be wet all day. Not enough sun to dry.”

I asked him again. “Is there. A stream. Where I can wash them?”

He rolled his eyes, and I just barely bit back a scream of frustration—and only then because in the dawn light the glow of his virteo projection was a little more visible. “Yes. There’s a stream about a half hour walk due east. There’s a bank closer, but walking due east will make it easier to find your way back.”

“If I get lost, you can always come find me.”

He blinked the virteo off. “I can.”

“You’re shooting things again today?”

“Yes.”

“Try not to shoot me.”

He sighed and got out of the sleeping bag. “Believe it or not, Katya, that’s been the goal all along.”

I grabbed some dried fruit from his bag and stalked off toward the rising sun to wash my damn clothes.

To you, now, I will admit that this was a mistake. It left me with wet clothes in the early morning, and a walk back through the woods with the choice of either wearing said wet clothes, or adding scratches to my torso to my list of injuries. I opted to wear them. The technical fabric was good at wicking water away, though not in those volumes. Still, that was something, and they dried fast enough that by lunchtime I was only mildly damp. The gunfire that day had been mostly west of me. It stopped shortly after lunch, I think. I remember getting to the end of Bashar’s chapter on “self-actualizing interpenetrated communities” and realizing that I hadn’t heard anything for hours. Then I wenton to the next chapter.

In all other ways, the day was exactly the same as the one previous, with one exception.

I was sitting in my chair when I heard a slight rustle of leaves at the edge of the clearing. A deer stepped out of the woods. A buck. He lifted his head, under the crown of antlers, and his nostrils flared. Those delicate, velvet ears flicked back, listening to something behind him. He turned his head and regarded me. I sat, utterly frozen, in my chair. I fully expected Johnny to shoot the deer, but the woods stayed quiet around us. After a moment, evidently deciding I was not a threat, the deer crossed through the clearing. A few paces behind him, a collection of does and a younger buck trailed behind. I wondered if they had been tagged yet with Johnny’s nanodrives.

In a few breaths, they were gone again, as if they had never been. I sagged in my chair and went back to waiting. I was so tired from my anger the previous night that I half dozed. I could be poetic here and say that I dreamed of deer, since no one can contradict me, but the truth is that if I dreamed, I don’t remember it.

I awoke with a crick in my neck. I hate those.

When I heard the footsteps in the woods, even as far away as they were, I was surprised, then pleased that Johnny had remembered my request not to frighten me. He made a tremendous crashing, compared to his previous progress. I stood, rubbing the ache in my neck, and picked A SYMMETRY FRAMED up from where it had fallen. The slight brown discoloration in the corner had added my own bit of decay to the book, though I’m not sure anything about my nap was graceful.

I can’t say exactly what made me realize something was wrong. I think it was that his footsteps were so irregular. A set of five, rushed together, then a pause before another syncopated series of footsteps. There was a moment when I thought it wasn’t going to be Johnny at all, and I didn’t know if that would be good or not.When I caught sight of him, his camouflage made it difficult to make out his figure when he was at rest, but the erratic, weaving motion throu gh the trunks pulled at my eye.

And then I saw the blood.

In a forest made of browns and greens, blood is shockingly, artificially red.

There is something about the sight of blood that makes me run toward someone to help, even someone I have good reason to hate.

I ran toward Johnny. He had stopped to lean against a tree. This was what had made his progress through the forest so staggering and uneven. He was barely on his feet at all. The front of his shirt was stained a deep red, shading to brown and, in places, almost black. He had a hand pressed against his stomach, and his fingers were caked with blood.

“What happened?”

His voice was cracked and hollow. “Deer. Woke up angry.”

I slipped an arm around him, and he let me. The rifle was slung over his back, and his handgun was at his waist. I could have taken either and fled, leaving him there. But I also couldn’t have.

He let me take some of his weight, and we walked the last yards back to the camp. . I eased him down into the chair. “Do you have a first-aid kit?”

“Second trunk from the bottom.” He gestured in that general direction and beckoned. “It’s keyed to me.”

I shoved off the other trunks and picked it up. The thing weighed more than I expected, and I staggered a little as I carried it to him. At his side, I dropped it with a thump. He bent forward to reach the print reader and toppled out of the chair. I reached for him, but my hands just brushed his coat. He hit the ground.

Johnny grunted at the impact and tensed, his whole body freezing.

By that point, I had knelt next to him and had my hands on his back. “What can I do?”

He shook his head. Let his breath out. Tried to push up to his knees, but he was clearly spent. I helped him roll over instead. As he did, the damage was clearer. The deer had stabbed—no, wait. There’s a word for this, isn’t there? The deer had GORED him with its antlers. A rip in the cloth of his shirt was mirrored in his skin. I could see parts of his body you’re not supposed to see. I didn’t understand how he’d managed to walk back. Oh—and here’s the really insane thing. He still had the mask on.

I dragged the case close enough that he could thumb it open. The seal gave with a hiss, and I opened the case to root through it. There was nothing I could imagine that would be able to deal with his horrific wound. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

“Not sure that’s an option.”

He clearly couldn’t walk out of here, and there was no way I could carry him. I cut his shirt out of the way and pressed a nu-derm pad against his stomach. It sealed against the skin, controlling the bleeding, but would do little to keep him alive beyond that. I had this crazy thought about making a litter out of the sleeping bag and trying to drag him out of the forest. As I turned to look for sticks, I saw the robo-mule. “I can strap you to that.”

He stared at me and then at it. “Okay. Yes. Thank you.”

“Can you key it to me?”

“Yes.” He pointed to the cases again. “Grab the blue one and bring it to me.”

That one was where he’d put the hard-body computer the other night. I grabbed the case. He opened it. To my surprise, he didn’t do anything with the computer; instead, he pulled out my earbud. “Once you get me on the robo-mule, start walking north. You should hit a road in a couple of hours.”

Surely he didn’t have a couple of hours. “I can’t just leave you.”

“Ah . . . but you have to get out of range to call for help.”

“Out of range of what?”

“Me and the d—my damper.”

I don’t know, but I think he almost said “the deer.” I didn’t question him and probably should have, since I think his judgment was slipping. Seeing someone dying though . . .

I pointed at the hard-body computer. “Can’t I just call out on that?”

“Local network only. Gotta hoof it.” He held up his hand. “Help me up?”

I got him to his feet and over to the robo-mule. We used the straps from the tent to improvise reins that he could grip. I used the luggage tie-downs to create a harness that would hold him on if he lost consciousness. We both thought that was pretty likely, all things considered. Apparently, he’d passed out on the way back to the camp. I had no idea how he was still alive. His breathing was pretty ragged by the time I was finished with the tie-downs.

I told him he should take the mask off.

He shook his head and tugged it higher on his face. “Got an NDA, and right now I really need my employer to stay invested.”

“Surely they would understand—”

Again he shook his head, stopping my protest with a gesture. “Not the sort that understands things like breathing difficulties.”

You hear what he wasn’t saying? He couldn’t come out and say he was working for a nonhuman entity, but I think that was what he meant. Whether it was an AI or a corporation, I don’t know. But whatever he was doing with the deer, they didn’t want it traced back to them, and that meant keeping Johnny unidentifiable.

I should have thought of that, I really should have, before I left him.

We got the robo-mule going, and once it was aimed and keyed to head north, I set out. At first, I was still close enough to hear it clomping through the woods, gyros whirring; then I left them behind. He’d said a couple of hours, and I was determined to try to get out of range as fast as possible. Every few minutes, I’d query to see if Lizzie was there. Not a thing. This surprised me, because I’d thought my data connection earlier had cut off when Johnny was close to me. I didn’t realize the range. So my calves and thighs ached from the pace I was setting. The forest added a whole new set of scratches to my growing collection. Too bad I can’t sell those as a unique experience . . .

“Katya!” The call from Lizzie nearly dropped me in my tracks as all my systems came back online at once. One minute I was out of range; the next minute the full connectivity of my life slammed back into me. Messages, calendar alerts, namedrops, interest points—all of it flooding back in to demand my attention. I shook it all away and focused on Lizzie.

“Here. Do you have me? I need emergency services.”

“Yes. Yes, I have you. Where have you been? How are you injured?” The i-Sys almost sounded concerned.

“I’m not injured—well, not seriously, but someone else is.”

“Show me the injury, and I will have a medical patch assess it.”

“I’m not with him. Send the emergency team to me, and then I’ll lead them to where he is.” With that, I realized I would need to keep walking north until they got a lock on me, or Johnny would catch up and I’d get cut off again. “Please hurry. He’s lost a lot of blood and was stabbed. Sort of.”

“Complying. Emergency medical service is en route. Please be advised that this will be billed to your account if the patient is unable or unwilling to cover the charges.”

“I understand.”

They were fast. Fifteen minutes after the call, during which time I made an attempt to answer the messages that Lizzie rated as urgent priority, a medchopper disturbed the forest with its rotors.

From here, you can watch the public record of what happened, and I’m assuming you have. My cameras were working again. The medteam had their LiveConnects running the entire time.

You can see the way they reacted to me, and the blood that covered me. I hadn’t realized how stained my clothes had become with Johnny’s blood.

Once I reassured them, we retraced my steps. We got all the way back to the clearing. No Johnny. No robo-mule. The site was completely empty, and the ground had been churned by the hooves of deer. No trace of humans at all.

The only thing that makes my story at all believable is that I was offline for three days. During that time I had moved from south of Salem northward by about 400 miles, close to Lake Chelan. The bike and cart were where I had said they were hidden, but I could have done that myself. And since mine were the only footprints the investigators found . . . well. It’s easy to see how it might have been a publicity stunt designed to raise the price on my merchandise by giving it a unique provenance.

But the blood—that should be proof, shouldn’t it?

It was blood from a deer.

I REMEMBER seeing the ragged hole in his stomach and innards. I remember how gray his skin looked and how labored his breathing was. But those memories . . . they must be false, right? Something I THOUGHT I saw in the moment. Something that took advantage of the failability of memory.

And why? That’s what is hard to understand. Why would he fake an injury or a death if all he had to do was let me go? And even then, why not use human blood from a blood bank?

I have wondered . . . It has occurred to me that it might have been a message. Though that raises its own set of questions.

I looked for him.

After everyone had left, I went back into the woods. I remember standing by a stream and having Lizzie’s voice cut off. A deer stepped out of the trees and bent down to drink. Nothing else stirred except the water and the leaves. After a moment, the deer lifted its head, leaped across the stream, and faded back into the trees. A few minutes later, Lizzie’s voice came back as if we hadn’t stopped talking.

I don’t know if Johnny lived, or what exactly he was doing with the deer. I don’t know what his plans were for me. If you had been hoping that I could give you answers to the deer die-off, I’m sorry that I can’t. I don’t even know what happened to me.

I know that’s frustrating for you, so let me offer you the questions I’ve been asking myself.

Have you been in the forest? Have you seen deer corpses? Or have you relied on what the net tells you about the die-off?

Because I don’t think the deer are dying, I think they’re being taken offline, and the nanodrives they were injected with establish a nonhuman network. Changing the deer themselves wouldn’t be enough though, because the smart dust in the region would still report them, right?

Unless those nanodrives are rewriting everything the deer comes in contact with. I’ve asked about that. It’s possible, and in a lot of ways it makes the fact that Johnny needed to tranquilize them make more sense. A transmitter—he could have just injected that from a distance. But if he needed time to make sure their systems recalibrated before releasing them . . . well.

But that’s just a guess. It’s like Bashar says in A SYMMETRY FRAMED—“The land has an unwilling connection to us.”

It makes you wonder doesn’t it?

I was unconscious for over twenty-four hours, which is plenty of time to recalibrate someone’s system. With the client list I have, what would happen if I were released into the wild like the deer?

What would happen if I were made an object of curiosity to attract a specific client?

And my last question: What if they’re looking for you? Or people LIKE you?

This typewriter is covered in dust. It’s part of its wabi-sabi. If the smart dust around me is mbeing rewritten, what about the dust ont his typweriter? The dust around you?

Has your connection to the net dropped recently?

That’s got you wondering, I expect . . . Think of it as a bonus with your purchase. I’ve given you the gift of uncertainty.

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of historical fantasy novels: The Glamourist Histories series and Ghost Talkers. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo awards, the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. Her stories appear in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Mary, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), recording fiction for authors including Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit maryrobinettekowal.com

Chimera
By Gu Shi
Translated by S. Qiouyi Lu and Ken Liu

An individual, organ, or part consisting of tissues of diverse genetic constitution.

—Merriam-Webster

1. Chimera

It had the fore part of a lion, the tail of a dragon, and its third head, the middle one, was that of a goat, through which it belched fire.

It was begotten by Typhon on Echidna, as Hesiod relates.

—Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, Book 2, Chapter 3 (as translated by Sir James George Frazer)

I watch her enter.

In the six years since we parted ways, I’ve always wanted to know: exactly how cold and calculating is the machine under the soft, lustrous skin of this witch?

She sees me, her eyes filling with delight—no trace of embarrassment, nor shame.

“Evan.” She quickens her footsteps. “Darling, long time no see.”

A delicate, warm perfume wafts from her approaching figure, the same as the scent in my memory. I recall what she said as she bared her heart to me, not long after we were married:

“Lately I’ve been thinking—I could write my dissertation based on pictures of my expressions: Managing Emotions and Social Responses. What do you think? Take smiles: I know over a thousand of them, and each requires the manipulation of different muscle groups. Each one can be the response for many situations, and their combinations are infinite!

“The only difficulty is meticulous expression management. It would require massive calculations; perhaps it’s untenable—Evan, don’t look at me that way—enough. See, you musicians always misunderstand the scientific mind. I’m not a machine; a Turing machine would never be able to figure out in such a short time which smile to use in which circumstance—I’m a human being, a wonderful creation.

“This is a worthy subject for biology.”

She solemnly pointed at her head, then laughed with a snort: sweet, innocent, like she couldn’t contain herself. “Look at you. So serious! I’m just joking around.”

Now, she stands before me in a fine cashmere coat, a silk scarf snug against her throat: both wrapping her well-exercised, slim body. Nothing escapes her keen interest: she studies society, fashion, health, romance. She studies me, studies my passions, my expressions, my movements, as though I’m the most fascinating person she’s ever seen. In reality, I’m no different than the rats in her laboratory. She grants my wishes—then takes them away.

She looks at me, the joy displayed by the curved corners of her mouth calibrated perfectly. But, face-to-face with my ex-wife, I can’t call forth the happiness from when we were in love.

I’m weary of this.

“I just wanted to talk about Tony.”

No tabloid reporter would ever believe the truth: a mother abandoning her swaddled infant and guiltless husband on the same day as the child’s birth, then disappearing off the face of the Earth for six years.

“I know.”

I finally catch a flicker of weakness in her eyes, but her voice remains level.

“I was just about to come talk to you about him, too.”

• • • •

Tony is six.

If it weren’t for what happened three months ago, I would have never contacted his mother. That day, as I took Tony to the park, a maroon Honda barreled out of nowhere onto the sidewalk and pulled Tony under a tire. After five days in the emergency room, he opened his eyes, but his kidneys had sustained irreparable damage. Upon discovering that his body couldn’t take a kidney transplant, I realized that my son would have to undergo dialysis three times a week for the rest of his life. In despair, I pored over every piece of medical literature I could get my hands on until I stumbled upon the topic of regenerative medicine, the goal of which is to use the patient’s own stem cells to grow replacement organs.

One of the foremost scientists in this field is my ex-wife. A rising star, she’s in charge of a new chimera lab that successfully grew a rat’s pancreas inside a mouse. They created a chimera that had never before existed in nature. In journal articles, commentators viewed this study as a milestone for regenerative medicine. Based on this success, a human-pig chimera could, in theory, be viable. And now, I’m hoping that she can grow Tony’s kidneys inside a pig. After the pig matures, the kidneys can be transplanted back to Tony.

• • • •

As she gently stirs a cup of Darjeeling tea, she murmurs, “Of course I love him. You have no idea how painful the news of the accident was for me. But what you mentioned in your letter—I really can’t make that happen.”

“I read your article, plus the discussions in Cell. You and your lab are the only people in the whole world who would be able to duplicate Tony’s kidneys.” Seeing her disbelief, I can’t stop myself from adding, “Please don’t assume that I can’t find and read scientific articles.”

“Of course. You’re so smart—if you want to accomplish something, you’ll get it done.” She masks her surprise and lets out a small sigh. “It’s just that, if you’ve already read my article, then you’d know that this is all only theoretical. Rat-mouse chimeras and human-pig chimeras are two entirely different things; it’s like—” She looks up, blinking, then looks back at me. “—Like how you can sing, and you can play guitar, but that doesn’t mean you can play a pipe organ.”

“I could do it with time,” I say. “These skills share similar principles.”

Facepalm. “Lord, that was a terrible analogy. How should I explain this to you… I imagine you already know how the chimera I created came to be.”

I turn on my iPad. I’ve already highlighted many paragraphs in her article, so I find the quote I’m looking for easily: “We injected induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from a rat into blastocysts from a mouse lacking the Pdx1 gene. Mice lacking the Pdx1 gene are unable to develop a normal pancreas; the rat iPS cells were able to remedy the genetic deficiency of the recipient mouse blastocysts. These rat-mouse chimeras were able to develop into adults with normal, functional pancreases.”[1]

She points to a sentence. “Oh right, this part. You must know that rats and mice are two entirely different animals, right? In taxonomical terms, the former is of the genus Rattus, and the latter is Mus—”

I interrupt her. “Of course!”

“Sorry.” She shrugs, then points again at that line of text. “Look here. If we wanted to use a similar method to create a human-pig chimera, then we would first have to get blastocysts from a pig that lacks the genes to produce kidneys. But where would we get such blastocysts? And how would we locate genes that can develop kidneys? These are all problems we have to solve from the ground up, and we don’t know if we’d be successful at any of them.”[2]

“I’m begging you to try.” I see her lips opening and closing, but I don’t understand her words. “I know there’s no guarantee of success.”

“Please don’t say ‘beg’; he’s also my son. I’m willing to do anything for him.” She implores me with a doleful look, her eyebrows downturned. “‘Try’—See, that’s the second question. Let’s say we could find all the genes that contribute to kidney development and knock them out of the pig blastocyst with precision. Then what? Can I inject Tony’s cells into the blastocyst? No. Using human embryonic stem cells to do research is illegal and highly unethical.”

“You care about that?” I stare at her, astounded. “You care about ethics?”

She touches a finger to her lips. “Please lower your voice.”

I know her all too well. If she didn’t want to respond to my request, she wouldn’t have come to see me.

She winks, as if we share an unspeakable little secret.

“Tell me, what would it take to get you to try?” I really can’t take much more of her antics.

She breaks eye contact and turns to look outside. A long silence. I gaze at her profile: her refined, nurturing face is as beautiful as it was the last time I saw her. In the afternoon light, she’s radiant, like a statue of the Virgin Mary in a church—a cold statue that can breathe. At last, she smiles and turns back to me:

“A mother smashing through scientific taboos to save her son’s life—such a tale is enough for me, even better if I get to play the role of the magnificent mother in this story.”

Yes, that would be her. Her actions are endowed with philosophy and poetry, but her performance is always built upon her own awareness of the philosophy and poetry that her actions will bring to her. In her mind, she’s cut off from the rest of the world, a god surveying the Earth. She will undertake this difficult task not because Tony is her son, but because doing so will turn her into a glorious legend.

What a selfish, abhorrent monster.

She continues. “I must tell you that I have no confidence of success. When it comes to human experimentation, there’s no precedent to refer to, and I may even create a monster—but that’s what makes it exciting, no? I’ll do it, but I still recommend that you go to the hospital and look into standard kidney transplant—”

“Every one of his lymphocyte cross-matching tests has come back positive.”

She looks at me, not quite understanding. “So?”

“Kidneys from a donor will likely lead to acute rejection,” I say. “It’s possible he can only take a transplant from his own body.”

“My God.” She furrows her brow.

“Right now we’re relying on dialysis to keep him alive. You can’t imagine how painful this is.” I think of Tony’s cries and can’t help but shudder.

The light in her eyes grows firm and resolute. “I understand. I’ll put my all into this.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“There’s one more thing that I should tell you.” She gets up and walks to my chair, then sits on the armrest. She holds up the iPad and finds another paragraph. “Look here.”

A few locks of her hair fall against my face. I stare at those words, but they’re beyond my comprehension. I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

“The commentator here points out that although the result of the chimera experiment is successful, we don’t fully understand the underlying principles. So, in the course of these experiments, we can’t control the degree of chimerization. Although the goal may be to produce a pancreas, other areas of the mouse body may also have rat cells.”

“So?”

“This is the primary reason why we can’t just play around with human cells in research,” she says. “If we did a human-pig chimera experiment, I have no way of controlling how many human cells end up in the pig.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

“Think about it, Evan.” She puts her hands on my shoulders and looks at me. “This pig may become a second Tony—our son could be concealed in its body. And when it grows up, we’ll snatch its kidneys together, then kill it.”

A. Adam

Lin Ke lay outside the operating room.

They were already an hour late, and the anesthesiologist hadn’t even arrived yet. The only thing separating her naked body from the people walking up and down the corridor was a thin layer of white fabric. She felt very uneasy.

“Why haven’t we started yet?” she asked the nurse.

Flustered, the nurse replied, “We’ve just received notice that due to factors outside our control, your cultivated organ order was canceled. We’re very sorry.”

What kind of reason was that?! She was the biggest goody-two-shoes aboard this spaceship. In all her one hundred years here, she’d always paid her cultivated organ insurance premiums on time to ensure that her every organ would remain young and healthy. Her heart, the very organ that she was trying to replace, palpitated from rage.

She put on her clothes as quickly as she could. The first thing she did was to file a police report. Then, she took the rail to Deck Seven—supposedly, her new organ was there, in an Adam.

“As your customer,” she protested to the overseer, “I demand an explanation for why my order was canceled. I absolutely will not wait another three years with only this shoddy heart!”

“But your order is perfectly fine,” the overseer said, surprised. He turned on the monitor. The feed showed the interior of an organ cultivation cabin: organ after organ was wrapped in thin film, all of them growing from tubes that hung from the ceiling. They looked like bunches of grapes waiting for harvest.

But the heart that belonged to Lin Ke was already gone and marked as “harvested.”

Stunned, Lin Ke checked the hospital’s information platform again, forwarding the notice with the subject “Order Cancellation” to the overseer. But she wasn’t expecting that he would doubt the veracity of the notice. “Ma’am, our monitoring platform can’t be wrong.”

The overseer’s response enraged Lin Ke. She stood up. “If you can’t figure out what happened, then I’ll have to go take a look myself.”

“Of course. The organ cultivation contract specifies that to be within your rights.” The overseer didn’t back down at all. “But please remember, you can only look. You cannot enter the cabin.”

Ten minutes later, Lin Ke, accompanied by a police droid, opened the door to Organ Cultivation Cabin 35. A horrifying, bloody stench assaulted her nose. As she realized what she was seeing, her view narrowed to an intense spasm as her chest tightened. Then, everything went dark as she fainted.

• • • •

Luo Ming was the first human police officer to arrive on the scene.

Total chaos.

Those were the first words that came to his mind. As he entered Cabin 35, he had a hard time imagining what the mountain of flesh and blood he was seeing used to look like.

“What happened here?” He regretted not donning a filtration mask before coming in. He lowered his voice as he spoke to his “assistant” Edmund, an AI that was invisible to the naked eye. Edmund was his most dependable companion.

“Ms. Lin Ke, who filed the police report, suffered a heart attack from shock and is now being treated in the hospital.” Edmund’s voice emitted from a speaker inside his ear. “She complained that the cultivators breached their contract and canceled her order.”

At a loss, Luo Ming said, “I think we’re looking at a lot more than a breach of contract here.”

Viscous blood was still seeping onto the immaculate white floor from a pile of organs three meters in diameter. In some places, the blood had already congealed into a pitch-black patch. Some organs in the outermost layer of the meter-tall flesh pile still looked fresh; a few were even twitching and wriggling—the rotting smell in the air had to be coming from something deeper inside the pile.

As he imagined what the inside might look like, Luo Ming felt his scalp tingling. “We’d better make sure that there are only cultivated organs here. God forbid that this mess is hiding a murder scene.” Luo Ming commanded Edmund to scan the room. Edmund took control of the police droid via the wireless remote, overriding the droid’s visual system to complete his assigned task.

“I’m always a little unsettled by how easily you take control of them,” Luo Ming muttered. He could, of course, issue commands to the police droid directly, but then he would have to waste time organizing and analyzing the raw data himself.

“Please don’t grumble about your misgivings concerning AIs to me,” Edmund replied. “I believe I’ve found something that’s even more unsettling.”

While Luo Ming had been griping, the scan revealed that two arms and half a head were also buried within the mountain of organs. The Adam matrix absolutely could not have created those three body parts.

“Alright, looks like we’ve just added a dismembered corpse to the case,” Luo Ming said, sighing. “The Eden Daily is going to have a field day with this.”

Luo Ming had Edmund scan and record the details of the scene in the cabin; then, he answered First Officer Qin Wei’s videocall. Qin Wei was the spaceship Eden’s head of security.

“This is perhaps the worst case I’ve seen on my one hundred and three years aboard this ship.” As Luo Ming spoke, his gaze fell on a pair of human eyes that dangled from the ceiling. His voice shook. “You—you’d better come take a look.”

2. Echidna

And in a hollow cave she bore another monster, irresistible, in no wise like either to mortal men or to the undying gods, even the goddess fierce Echidna who is half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth.

—Hesiod, Theogony 300–305 (as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)

“Excuse me, are you—” After observing me for twenty minutes, the woman beside me asks timidly, “Typhon’s lead singer Evan Lee?”

“No.” All that feels like a past life.

She blurts out an apology and follows up with, “You really look like him.”

I channel all the cold disinterest I can muster into my voice. “Is that so.”

So ends that conversation. The flight attendant soon comes around with drinks. I ask for a glass of wine, followed by another. The cramped economy seat constricts my body, and terrifying words throw heavy shackles on my mind: “father,” “responsibility,” and so on.

When I was still Evan Lee, my days of pleasure and riches seemed endless—until she left me, taking with her half of my possessions and all of my musical inspiration.

For a long time after our separation, I constantly thought of her, analyzed her, studied her. I flipped through old tabloids, gathered paparazzi gossip, replayed our wedding video again and again to pick up each of her frowns and smiles, and examined every picture and recording of all the times she appeared with me to support my publicity efforts. During that darkest period of my life, these were the best benefits from my once-great fame—plenty of materials for me to study. And so, bit by bit, I got close to the monster beneath her perfect shell, the serpent-half concealed beneath her beautiful appearance. But there was one part of our life together that I could never understand.

Her pregnancy.

The pregnancy happened only because it was part of her plan. During the first three years of our marriage, I told her many times that I wanted a child, but she would always brush me off with a “no need to rush,” plus a session of hot sex. When she decided it was time, she didn’t think to discuss the decision with me at all.

“Evan, guess what?” That was the first night after the end of my tour. When I opened the door to our home, a festive atmosphere greeted me.

“What kind of surprise does my little sweetheart have?” I cupped her neck and kissed her lips.

“A baby.” She laughed, her eyes curving with joy. “Darling, we’re going to have a baby!”

I was stunned. After three years of begging, I had all but given up on the idea.

“It’s already three months old.” She put my hand on her flat stomach. “Right here.”

My palm detected absolutely no movement, but, in that moment, the word “father” entered my mind. Every cell of my being filled with joy. Two months later, Typhon released its last single, “Fire by Lightning.” Music critics felt that its “every note was imbued with love and joy.” Then, on the day our hit single won the Golden Melody Award, my wife changed in a way that I never could have imagined.

On that day, her labmate called me and said that she had suffered a nervous breakdown.

Impossible. My wife—for whom even an “off mood” was rare—had suffered a nervous breakdown?

Nothing like this had ever happened before. I rushed to campus. Her laboratory was at the end of a boulevard shaded with trees. The rows of Chinese parasol trees had already shed their leaves, leaving behind only branches full of round, dangling fruits. As I walked into that red-brick building, one of her students recognized me.

“Mr. Lee, finally!” His expression was a mixture of agitation, worry, and curiosity, but he prudently suppressed his emotions under a veneer of politeness. “I’m Edmund. She’s in the third-floor animal room. You should hurry.”

“Thank you, Edmund,” I said in a rush.

Although the campus was where we first met, that was actually my first time in her lab. The sparkling floor was like a hospital’s; there were rows and rows of metal shelves, each neatly packed with plastic cages connected to a central ventilation system. This room must’ve held a thousand, no, ten thousand rats!

I found her behind the shelves full of rats. She was cradling her head as she crouched in a corner, her hair a mess, her shoulders shuddering, but her cries were inaudible.

“Honey—” Seeing her like this frightened me. “What’s wrong?”

The moment my hand touched her, she let out a screech. I stepped back. “Okay, I won’t touch you. What happened?”

Slowly, she raised her head. I had never before seen such panic in her eyes. Her parted lips trembled, but a long time passed before she uttered my name: “Evan.”

“Yes, it’s me.” I chastised myself. “I should’ve held you back; I shouldn’t have let you go to work. The baby’s already almost six months old—”

“No!” she shrieked. “No! Don’t bring it up! Don’t—”

“Alright, we won’t talk about the baby.” I reached out and tried to get close to her. Her whole body trembled, as though she were struggling to escape. Defeated, I could only call upon my own specialty: “Honey, let’s sing ‘Titans’ together, okay?”

She stopped struggling and looked at me blankly, like a helpless child.

“A singer in the wilderness, recounting tales of the gods…”

It was a gentle song, and also her favorite melody. I sang as softly as I could, so soft the words were almost inaudible. Music turned out to be more effective than language. She listened until I was halfway through the song, sniffled, then threw herself into my arms and sobbed. I stroked her messy hair and tried to soothe her terrified shivers.

“It’s okay, it’s okay; I’m here.”

She slumped against my chest and, with great effort, uttered a few disconnected phrases: “It’s a… parasitic… parasitic… monster…”

“What?”

“I don’t want the baby. Evan, I don’t want that parasite inside my body!”

Shocked, I asked, “What happened? I don’t understand.”

She wiped her nose on my sleeve. Finally, she could speak in complete sentences. “The baby is taking over my life; it’s a parasite in my body. It’s controlling my thoughts, commanding me to eat what it wants to eat, telling me to go where it wants to go, demanding I do what it wants to do. It’s a parasitic monster in my body, a monster! It’s devouring me, do you understand? I can’t control myself anymore! I can’t stop myself from thinking about it! I can’t focus on what I want to do. I can’t understand my own notes. I don’t care about my papers, either. The only thing in my mind is how I can make it feel more comfortable! I’ve been possessed by it; it’s already wormed its way into my brain—do you understand?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “My silly girl; this is a normal reaction to pregnancy. It’s because you love the baby—our baby.”

“No!” She stared at me with alarm. “This is absolutely not normal! Not normal at all! You just don’t get it because it hasn’t possessed your body!”

I held back my laughter and said as sincerely as I could, “If it were possible, I would bear the baby for you, but I can’t. Chin up; you’re a mother now.”

She stopped crying. For a few seconds, she stared at me in an unfamiliar way, as though I were the one who had lost my mind. But she soon became her usual self again. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then looked up and giggled sheepishly. “Oh goodness, I really did go nuts today.”

“It’s a very common anxiety, honey.”

She leaned against my shoulder. “You’re right. These are normal feelings for a new mother. I need to get used to them.”

In the months that followed, there were a couple more incidents in which she was dejected and depressed, but there were no more episodes as intense as the one in the lab.

But I started to be more vigilant, canceling a new tour so that I could spend more time with her. Around the 39th week of her pregnancy, I stumbled upon a file in her computer that recorded in detail the “conversations” she had with her unborn baby: when she went to the restroom, dreams, favorite foods and kinds of music—all trivial things. Reading these notes, I began to understand what she said that day in the lab. The things she noted were not her own habits or tastes, but someone else’s.

The baby growing inside her was using her body to do what it wanted to do. Once she realized this, she was terrified.

If she had been a typical mother, perhaps she would have used “love” to explain her behavior. But she couldn’t do that. Emotions to her are a kind of camouflage, something to let her blend in with others. So she could only understand everything from the baby’s perspective: this was a monster that had possessed her body and taken control of her so that it could survive inside her.

Maybe the plane’s air conditioning is too cold, but suddenly, I shiver. I never thought I’d come to understand why she’d abandon her own child: If she didn’t, she’d always be under Tony’s control, forced to give up on having her own life—just as I have.

“Please fasten your seatbelt, Mr. Lee,” the flight attendant says. “We’re about to land.”

As we descend, a city surrounded by an oasis blooms in the vast expanse of desert outside.

B. Eden

After completing a genetic survey of the scene, Luo Ming received Edmund’s interim report: the limbs and head in Organ Cultivation Cabin 35 belonged to three deceased passengers. Terminal illness was unquestionably the cause of all three deaths; furthermore, they had all chosen to donate their bodies to science to advance research on those illnesses. Edmund’s discovery allowed Luo Ming to unfurrow his brows just a bit.

“It’s not murder,” he said to First Officer Qin Wei, who had rushed to the scene. “That’s good news at least.”

Like Luo Ming and the majority of the passengers aboard Eden, Qin Wei was close to a hundred fifty years old. He had just gotten a scalp replacement: only an infant-like layer of fine hair covered the top of his head, lending a comical air to his overall appearance.

“Thank goodness.” Qin Wei was distracted, and he muttered as though to himself, “But… how’d these limbs even get here?”

“The body parts should have been sent to the medical research center under Deck Seven,” Luo Ming said.

“Should have been, yes.” Only now did Qin Wei look at Luo Ming. “The organ cultivation cabins are the most heavily monitored and secure part of this spaceship. For something like this to happen is unbelievable. You might not know this—even the police don’t have the clearance to view documentation about Adam.”

“Sharing such information could greatly help my investigation.”

“I’m very sorry, Officer Luo, but those documents involve classified information about the very heart of Eden,” Qin Wei said. “Since there aren’t any suspected murders, I’d say this investigation has come to an end. Why don’t you let me and the Adam overseers tie up any loose ends?”

Luo Ming read between the lines. “So you’re saying that this is just an ordinary accident?”

Qin Wei smiled noncommittally. “The ship has experienced severe organ cultivation failures before, you know? Malfunctions in the cabin’s temperature control.”

Luo Ming studied his expression and let out a small sigh. “Alright, sir, I understand.”

• • • •

Only a day later, as he sat in his office, Luo Ming received an info packet from Edmund concerning Adam.

“You’re a genius.” Luo Ming sighed with approval and opened the document. As the unredacted details filled his view, Luo Ming gasped. “This ship’s security system must have serious flaws for such classified data to be so easily accessible.”

“Or perhaps it’s your fault for illicitly bringing an AI aboard, hmm?” Edmund’s voice was a cross between pride and smug derision.

“Well, no one’s discovered you over all these years.” Edmund was a gift Luo Ming had received a long time ago, and after years of working and living together, he had found the AI indispensable. Even after hearing about Eden’s ban on AIs, Luo Ming still chose to implant the terminal into his body and smuggle Edmund aboard the spaceship.

“That’s because the intelligence systems here are far too primitive,” Edmund said. “But you don’t need to worry about the security of the ship. Its core systems are sealed off from outside networks. I haven’t found a single entry point.”

Luo Ming nodded and returned his attention to the documents. It appeared that Eden was actually a research vessel that provided replacement organs for its several hundred thousand passengers, allowing them to extend their lives indefinitely. At the same time, it transmitted the residents’ health data back to Earth, so that people back home could learn first-hand about potential complications from a large-scale organ replacement program. Eden followed a comet’s orbit in the Solar System so that its path crossed with the Earth’s once every four years, allowing the ship to dock at a space station and exchange both personnel and information.

“I always thought we were heading away from the Solar System,” said a surprised Luo Ming. “And nobody ever told me we could leave the ship!”

Edmund said, “Looks like they’d gone to a lot of trouble to hide the truth and prevent you all from discovering that you’re actually laboratory mice.”

In light of this new-found knowledge, the organ cultivation cabins really were the soul of Eden. They were often called “Adam” chambers, after that figure from Christian lore who used his own rib to create humanity’s other ancestor. But, to be more precise, every mucous membrane pouch in the organ cultivation cabins that bore a human organ—those were all Adams. They were distinct, each carrying different passengers’ genes, cultivating different organs.

When Eden was first designed, the Adams were separated from one another. But, as time passed, the Adam overseers discovered a strange phenomenon: after a few Adams began cultivation inside the same room, cells would start growing along the feeding tracts until all the Adams were connected to each other.

However, this connection did not delay or corrupt the growing organs; rather, organ cultivation in all the Adams became more efficient as organ maturation time decreased. Some researchers believed that this “genetic networking” created a system among the Adams for exchanging growth signals and hormones, accelerating organ development.

As a result, when the cultivation cabins were renovated forty years ago, the overseers installed passages that allowed all the Adams to connect to each other, resulting in an awe-inspiring effect—while each passenger’s genome was still preserved as separate and complete, the vast majority of organ cultivation times were cut by at least half. Even the development time for lungs, the slowest organ to cultivate, was cut down by a third.

“I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with our case.” Luo Ming felt agitated. “I keep feeling like we missed something at the scene.”

“I recorded a complete scan of the room,” Edmund said.

“Perhaps—” Luo Ming pondered. “The problem may not only be inside the cultivation cabin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember the dispute between the woman who filed the report and the Adam overseer?” Luo Ming asked.

“The hospital’s notification system showed that Ms. Lin Ke’s order for a heart had been canceled, whereas Adam’s monitoring platform showed that everything was fine.”

“Right,” Luo Ming said. “Adam’s system should be much more secure than the hospital’s, yet the cultivation cabin overseer didn’t know the true state of Cabin 35. Why is that?”

“Could it be that Adam’s overseers were trying to conceal the mess inside?” Edmund asked.

“Maybe. But we can’t rule out another possibility: none of those in charge, including the first officer and the cultivation cabin overseers, have any idea what really happened.” Luo Ming put the recording of Lin Ke arguing with the overseer on the display. “Watch the man’s expression—the surprise is genuine.”

“True, as I can confirm with microexpression analysis,” Edmund said.

“Based on the scene we observed, it’s very likely that what happened to Lin Ke wasn’t an isolated incident. But she was the only one who felt strongly enough to make a report to the police, and who went to open the door to Cabin 35. That’s in the contract, but it looks like passengers only exercised their right to examine the cabins during the early years of the ship’s journey.”

“Are you suggesting that all the organs we saw on the ground had their orders canceled?”

Luo Ming’s eyes lit up. “We might as well follow this lead. Edmund, can you break into the databases for both the cultivation cabins and the hospital and pick out all relevant records? It’s possible that there are discrepancies between the two systems—those would be the organs we saw in Cabin 35.”

“You really know how to come up with hard problems for me.” Despite these words, Edmund sounded delighted. “I’ll give it a shot.”

3. Typhon

From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear.

—Hesiod, Theogony 820-835 (as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)

Nine years later, I find myself in her laboratory again. Edmund has gone from an undergraduate to a doctoral student, but the way he looks at me hasn’t changed in the least—he’s just like any other awe-struck fan. “Mr. Lee, the professor is waiting for you in the animal room.”

“Thank you, Edmund.”

She doesn’t notice when I enter. She’s squatting beside a pig that has to be half a meter tall, all her attention focused on it as she laughs. She puts her cell phone on speaker, and music starts playing. It’s my song, “Fire by Lightning.”

“When I cradle it in my hands,

The sun and moon tumble, stars fall.

Go ahead and fight, destroy;

The king of the gods’ undying wish is in my hands.”

The pig dances to the music on its hind legs, clumsily twisting and rocking. Gradually, it catches up to the tempo. She stands with it and leans against a desk, laughing so hard she can’t breathe. The pig faces her, dancing now with gusto, keeping up even better with the beat. It’s unbelievable—the pig is actually dancing to the brisk pace of the music.

The song, now in an ornamental cadenza, switches tempo. The pig stumbles and tumbles to the ground, startling her. She falls to her knees by its prone body. “Are you okay?”

The pig oinks in reply. Annoyed, she jabs its head with a finger, then says in the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard, “You rascal, don’t scare me like that.”

The pig’s oinks are now laced with a hint of whining. She rubs its back. “Alright, alright; it’s okay, as long as you’re not hurt.”

This is such a bizarre sight. I cough. She and the pig turn their heads simultaneously to look at me together—an image I’ll never forget.

“What’s wrong, Evan?” She stands.

It has Tony’s eyes.

She’s never seen Tony, so she can’t know. But the eyes in that one-and-a-half-year-old pig belong to Tony: light brown irises with a hint of gray. It’s not just the eyes, but also something unnamable in their depths, something that sends chills down my spine, making me forget why I’m here.

It reminds me of how I felt the time I found myself in the middle of a stage, having forgotten everything about the song I was supposed to sing. The electric guitar’s prelude was nothing but white noise, and my legs trembled in the flickering magnesium lights.

“Do you need a cup of coffee?” She peers at me, concerned. “You don’t look so good.”

“Can we… talk… alone?” Even if I performed at three back-to-back shows, my voice still wouldn’t sound like this.

“I was just about to show you our pig,” she says. “It’s doing really well. Fantastic, don’t you think?”

I catch its gaze again, and in that second, I feel my soul being torn apart.

“My God!”

The pig stares at me as though it already knows its destiny: a wordless acquiescence to suffering, imbued with a fatalistic sense of tragedy. The last few times Tony underwent dialysis, he gazed at me with the exact same expression.

“Okay, Evan.” She steps forward to hold my trembling hands. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

• • • •

We don’t say a word on the way to her office. The afternoon sun dissipates all shadows in the spacious room. Edmund brings in two tiny, round cups. “Thank you,” she says, but then she doesn’t say a word to me after Edmund leaves. The dappled shadows of tree leaves upon the desk lengthen. I take a sip of the now cold and bitter coffee. Finally, she breaks an afternoon’s worth of silence.

“I thought you might want to take a look at the report.”

A thick file lands before me. I open it, my arms stiff. Inside are notes starting from when the pig was an embryo until now. I can only make sense of the pictures. From the outset, it’s always smiled at the camera, if that joyous and eager expression can be called a “smile”—but within the last month, it’s ceased smiling. On the last page is a close up portrait of its eyes. Staring at them, I can barely tolerate the agitation in my stomach—I throw the file to the ground.

She stands and picks up the file, chuckling. “Good thing I didn’t give you a digital version, or else I’d have to fill out a damaged equipment report now.”

“How could this be?” I murmur.

“Evan, we have to face the facts.” She lets out a soft sigh. “This is perhaps the best outcome: the pig is now in prime condition for organ donation—if you were to ask me, this experiment went unusually smoothly. We found the right path from the very beginning, and we overcame every obstacle within the shortest possible time. I doubt you’d find another instance in the history of science where the road to discovery was so smooth—”

“You—” I interrupt her, but I’m not sure what I should say.

“I’ve already gotten in touch with my friend Dr. Sanger. He’s the best kidney surgeon at the state hospital.” Her tone is level and calm. “I’ve already sent him the pig’s file. He’s reviewed the data and thinks the surgery will be no more risky than a standard human-to-human transplant. Evan, I don’t understand why you’re still not satisfied.”

Only her last sentence betrays her suppressed anger, but it’s enough to provoke all my terror and rage. I unlock my phone: the wallpaper is a picture of Tony staring innocently at me.

“Enough.” I fling open the file and place my phone on top of the close up of the pig’s eyes. “We both know where the problem is, right? Look at these eyes: they’re exactly the same—”

“—as Tony’s,” she finishes. “Of course I know. Those are Tony’s eyes; the cells in that organ are human cells.”

I read the unspoken message from her face. “Are you… are you saying there are human cells in other organs as well?”

“Yes… it’s a bit hard to take. Its nervous system is almost entirely made up of human cells.” She shrugs. “Don’t be naïve, Evan. We knew from the start that we couldn’t control the degree of chimerization, but we went ahead anyway.”

“The nervous system?”

“The cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the spinal cord—the vast majority of it,” she says, enunciating each word, as if she’s trying to engrave the words into my heart with her poisoned tongue. “To put it simply: our son is inside that pig.”

I’ve never been so frightened, not even the time I saw Tony being pulled under that car. Back then, I was a father, but now, I’ve become a criminal—what in the world have we done? We’ve melded our son with a pig, and now we’re going to butcher it with our own hands!

My silence allows her to relax her tone. “So long as I stay quiet, no one will know about this. These notes won’t appear in my paper. The nervous system isn’t the focus of this experiment, and it’s not important for whether the experiment is declared a success. The kidneys are perfect, Evan. You don’t have to worry about that at all.”

“I’m not worried about that!” Her forced composure is intolerable. “Killing it is cruel—it’s wrong! Don’t you realize that the pig knows what’s going to happen?”

She smiles. “Evan, what do you plan to do?”

“I—”

“You know, I haven’t been able to sleep for the last two weeks.” Her voice is low. “I keep thinking about whether you’ve been trying get back at me with this pig. I abandoned Tony, so you thought up the cruelest of methods to reawaken my motherly instincts. I kept telling myself that this isn’t Tony, that this isn’t my son; I even refused to name it out of fear that doing so would humanize the animal. But it went beyond my imagination: out of all the researchers, it’s closest to me; out of all the music we play for it, it only likes yours.”

Tony is the same way. From when he was a baby, as soon as he heard “Fire by Lightning,” he’d start dancing.

She continues. “I’ve thought about it: should we stop and let Tony succumb to his fate, thereby allowing the pig to live? But then I saw you, and I realized that we’ve never had any choice but to go forward.”

Her gaze penetrates me to the root, and I, in turn, finally see the trembling that she’s kept hidden inside. Her terror and pain are undoubtedly far sharper than mine: it’s only because she’s been ruminating on them for so long that she can bury them under a tranquil façade. I’ve only glanced at the pig, but she’s been raising it since it was a single cell.

Of course we can’t turn back. Tony continues to deteriorate, and everything her lab has invested into this pig can’t be hidden from her supporters. I demanded that she cross the Rubicon; it’s only reasonable that both of us should bear this heavy cross.

“Right.” I force myself to forget the pig. “Tony hasn’t been doing so well lately. I’ll bring him here as soon as possible. Don’t want to miss the best window for surgery.”

“We have an understanding then.” She smiles, erasing all misgivings from her face. She opens her notebook and gives me Dr. Sanger’s contact information as well as his CV. Then she tells me her own opinions and recommendations for the transplant surgery. Only after it’s gone dark outside does she stop talking. “You should go,” she reminds me. “If you leave now, you can still catch your flight.”

I get up, hesitating for a moment over whether to shake her hand in a sign of friendship and gratitude. But she’s holding her hands together before her chest. I guess there’s no such need.

“I’m off then. Thank you,” I say, my mouth dry.

She laughs and shakes her head. “Evan, Tony is my son too. Why are you saying ‘thank you’?”

“Ah, yes.” I laugh too.

We walk out of the laboratory together. The shadows of the trees pool together, enveloping the world in the stillness of night. I’m about to say goodbye, but then she speaks.

“The first time I saw you was over there, right?” She whispers, “That day, you played such a gentle tune. Who’d have thought that the song you’d end up recording would be so wild?”

I know she’s talking about “Titans.” The inspiration for the first phrase had come to me while I was performing at this school. That night, as though in the throes of a craving for some drug, I rushed around in search of a piano to bring the notes in my mind to life. I climbed through the window of my room and felt my way back to the locked auditorium, never realizing that there was another pair of ears outside listening.

“Detested by our forefathers,

Buried deep, hidden from the sun,

Scythe-wielding, throne-stealing, we bear curses and epithets.

We’re destined to rebel,

Smashing barriers, heedless of cost;

Let smoke choke the air, let the earth burn to oblivion!”

She sings, only remembering some of the lyrics. She’s also totally off-pitch, but I can’t laugh as freely as I used to.

She turns to look at me. “Now that I think of it, your song was rather prophetic.”

• • • •

In the end, she never went to the state hospital, nor did she show up at Tony’s recovery party. For five years, she disappeared into her lab, cutting off contact with all her friends.

I’m shocked when she calls me out of the blue. She tells me that she would like me to set up a charitable foundation in Tony’s name to support organ transplants for children. During the last five years, I had emailed her with such an idea, but all my messages had been returned as undeliverable. I immediately agree.

Once the framework of the foundation is in place, I contact her again.

“I get the feeling that you’re about to make a grand gesture,” I say.

“I am,” she replies. “I reprogrammed the chimera gene regulation network and turned it into a blastocyst-like structure—”

“Sorry,” I interrupt her. “You know I don’t understand all that.”

“Give me a minute.” She pauses, as though she were switching her linguistic module from scientific jargon to common. “We already have the capacity to produce human organs in a lab. I used existing chimeras to create a more stable structure; all you have to do is add new human cells, and it will create the corresponding organ.”

“That’s fantastic!”

“I’ll never allow it to look like a human being again.” Her tone is exhausted.

Simultaneously with the creation of the foundation, she publishes a series of papers on chimeras in Cell. Starting with the first human-pig chimera, she traces her groundbreaking work through the regenerative medicine lab. Overnight, she rocks the foundation of humanity’s understanding of “life.”

I buy that issue of Cell. The reviewers lavish her with praise: “This is a revolution for regenerative medicine, hinting at our near future: humanity will be able to swap out our organs as if they were interchangeable parts. We will live longer, maybe even forever.”

Criticism and debates follow soon after. Although a mother’s pressing need to save her son’s life is understandable, experimenting with human stem cells is nonetheless an ethical taboo.

Her third paper pushes back against the torrent of attacks, laying out her model for the organ-cultivation matrix, which she names “Adam.” It resembles a small, square box filled with mucous membranes and doesn’t look like a living creature at all.

“The Adam technology won’t encroach upon any ethical concerns,” she says in an interview. “It won’t develop a human brain; it can’t think; it has no feelings—because we haven’t provided it with any mechanisms for thoughts or feelings. The only thing it can do is use its own rib to save the people who need it.”

C. The Captain

Luo Ming didn’t really think that he could get in front of the captain of Eden based on just a letter—though that was his plan.

The woman before him had ashy white hair, wrinkled skin, and a hunched back; even sitting on the sofa seemed to take a lot of out of her. Luo Ming was surprised by the captain’s appearance. The women he knew prioritized external beauty, listing organs related to appearance at the front of their replacement queue.

“Regarding the incident in Cabin 35”—belying her appearance, the captain’s voice was energetic—“I’d like to hear your point of view.”

“The first officer has indicated that the incident is beyond my purview,” Luo Ming said carefully, placing his hands before him.

“I actually think it’s better to have a professional involved in the case.” The captain gestured for Luo Ming to take the armchair before her. “But given the sensitive nature of the cultivation cabins, the results of the investigation should be kept confidential. That’s not an issue for you, is it?”

“No.” Luo Ming sat down. “I assume you’ve read my letter carefully?”

“Yes.”

“As I mentioned, I believe this was no accident, but a premeditated crime.”

The captain dropped her gaze. “Your theory is in conflict with the first officer’s report.”

“Haven’t you summoned me here for another perspective?” Luo Ming studied the captain’s expression, then continued. “I went over all the orders that the hospital’s system canceled without explanation from the last three months. The total was over seven times the normal cancellation rate. I traced all the canceled organs to Cabin 35, but the monitoring system showed all the organs to be developing normally.”

“And that’s enough to convince you this wasn’t an accident?” the captain asked. “Maybe the monitoring system is malfunctioning.”

“It’s not just the monitoring system, Your Excellency. Don’t forget the cultivation cabin itself—how did that pile of ‘accidentally harvested’ organs come to be? And we have no explanation for the discrepancy between the cultivation cabins’ monitoring system and the hospital’s order tracking system.”

The captain stared at him. “I’m listening.”

“Before coming to see you today, I wasn’t too sure about my conclusions.” Luo Ming smiled modestly. “I originally suspected that the mismatch between orders was due to the overseers’ efforts to hide the truth. But by summoning me, you’ve told me that even you, the captain of this ship, aren’t sure what exactly happened. That leaves us with only one other possibility: The Adam overseers did not know about the recent incident in Cabin 35. Thus, we can theorize that the monitoring system has been tampered with.”

“I had First Officer Qin Wei examine the cultivation cabin monitoring system,” the captain said, her gaze growing more intent. “It appears to have been modified with a ‘green screen’-like technology. Police droids entering and leaving the cultivation cabins would show up on the monitors as normal, but they’d always appear against a background showing the interior of the Adam chambers functioning normally.”

“You’re saying that the recording was selectively tampered with? The images of the Adam cabins on the monitors never changed?”

“No, not ‘never changed;’ they showed as ‘functioning normally.’ On the monitors, you could see the organs growing as expected, and when orders were supposed to be fulfilled, they were ‘harvested normally.’” The captain shook her head. “This method of tampering with the system is highly sophisticated.”

The captain’s news deepened Luo Ming’s puzzlement. “But this is what I can’t figure out. If the entire incident was a premeditated crime, then the criminal already accomplished the most difficult step—taking over Adam’s high-security monitoring system. Yet they forgot to cover their tracks in the far more basic hospital systems.”

“There’s a simple explanation for that: the criminal couldn’t conjure the patients’ requested organs out of thin air. They had no choice but to leave the orders alone and hope that patients would not exercise their right to examine the cultivation cabins.”

Luo Ming shook his head. “But they could have played any number of other tricks that would have worked better. For instance, they could have systematically delayed the order fulfillment dates for all the affected organs to prevent anyone from knowing what had happened. However, based on my review of the hospital’s records, the doctors and patients only found out at the last minute that their orders had been delayed or canceled. The notices came through the hospital’s regular organ reception channels, not Adam.”

“I’m now thoroughly confused.” The captain furrowed her brow. “What are you trying to say?”

“For someone who came up with such a complicated scheme—going so far as to use a green screen to tamper with the monitoring records—forgetting about the hospital’s basic database is a very strange oversight. They clearly have the capability to break into the hospital’s systems, but they didn’t—why not? One possibility is that they actually wanted to draw attention to what they did, but another possibility is that they didn’t even know that the hospital’s information platform existed.”

“That’s impossible,” the captain said. “Every person aboard Eden knows about the hospital’s organ replacement database.”

“Of course, that’s how it should be,” Luo Ming said. “But there are always bound to be some people who don’t know.”

“I’m not interested in a vague hunch. If you have a definite suspicion, say so.”

“On this ship, who wouldn’t know about the existence of the hospital’s organ replacement database? Or rather, who’s never ordered an organ?” Luo Ming looked at the captain. “I hope you can help me gather a list of names. They’re the primary suspects.”

The captain tapped the armrest with a wrinkled finger and chuckled coldly. “That’s quite an accusation.” She met Luo Ming’s gaze. “I’ve never replaced an organ.”

4. Orthrus

Men say that Typhaon (Typhon) the terrible, outrageous and lawless, was joined in love to her, the maid with glancing eyes. So she conceived and brought forth fierce offspring; first she bore Orthus the hound of Geryones… but Echidna was subject in love to Orthus and brought forth the deadly Sphinx which destroyed the Cadmeans.

—Hesiod, Theogony, 304–335 (as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)

Some legends say that it was actually Orthrus, and not Typhon, with whom Echidna conceived of those other monstrosities: Chimera and Sphinx.

—Anonymous

The first time I see her is at my father’s funeral.

Although at least half of that crowd of tens of thousands have come to see her, I’m the only one who picks her out. She’s wearing a black silk dress, a diamond ring dangling from a string around her neck. Her face looks even younger than mine. I don’t know if it’s my practice at identifying faces or a natural instinct that makes me recognize her as my mother. Then, she sees me too.

Five seconds later, I receive a direct message: “I’d like to chat after the funeral.”

I remember my father’s last words to me as he lay dying: “She’s your mother, and she gave you the gift of life twice—be grateful.”

Once the crowd dissipates, I duck into her car. She enters Oslo Airport, Gardermoen as the destination and turn her seat around to face me.

“Hello, Tony.”

I haven’t been called that in years. After my parents created the Tony Lee Charitable Foundation, I had to change my name to protect my privacy and live a normal life.

“Mom?” It turns out to be easier to say than I thought. “You look so young.”

“Yes, it’s me.” She laughs, then winks, as though we share a secret. “I’m conducting a new experiment to restore my cells to a more youthful state. It’s a dangerous experiment, and we don’t know all the side effects—it’s such a shame that I don’t have another son to be the guinea pig this time.”

“Um—” I have no idea what to say in response.

“Oh, darling, I’m just joking!” She spreads her hands disarmingly. “Now, tell me about your life. I hear that you’re a police officer?”

“It’s just a job.”

Her grin widens. “You’ve done well. I noticed that you’re dealing with AI crimes. Amazing.”

“The world changes so quickly. Scientists can’t control everything they invent.” I resent her tone: she’s speaking as though she’s always been a part of my life, exercising a mother’s care.

“That’s true.” She nods vigorously. “Sometimes we don’t understand our creations as much as we’d like people to think.”

That’s unexpected. “Really?”

She doesn’t answer, asking a question instead. “Will you come to our press event? We’re going to announce some important news.”

I’ve heard about her research group’s press event, scheduled for next month. After seven years of silence, everyone’s dying to find out what she’s going to say.

“This could change the course of humanity.” The car slows down. She glances out the window, then looks back at me. “You’ll be there, of course.”

Her confidence irritates me. I am not my father, who was always so entranced by her. “Sorry, I’m not interested in it.”

“Believe me, darling, you will be interested.” The car stops. She taps twice on her watch, and I receive an invitation as well as a packet of documents. “The thirteenth of next month. Be there.”

She holds my hand for a moment, then leaves for the airport. The midnight sun throws her black dress into sharp relief.

Three hours and forty minutes later, the Airbus A400 she’s on plunges into the sea.

I end my vacation early to join the search and rescue effort, but the Baltic Sea has swallowed any trace of her. In the depths of the turbid waves, I see the wreckage of the plane.

They say that there lies entombed humanity’s wildest dream.

• • • •

The day the rescue efforts end, I receive another invitation to the press event.

I’ve run out of excuses. Heeding the call of fate, I set forth on a journey of more than ten thousand kilometers. On the plane, I look through the documents she gave me.

There are pictures of a pig from when it was a piglet to when it was fully grown—undoubtedly my savior. I transfer planes at Amsterdam and New York before arriving at a small town in the middle of the desert. My father once told me about this town: it’s the birthplace of my kidneys.

“Tony Lee,” I say to the person who’s here to meet me. The name is written on my invitation.

Her mouth hangs open with exaggerated surprise. She lowers her gaze. “I’m Chen Ying. My condolences.”

“Thank you.”

I enter the auditorium to a hero’s welcome. Everyone seems to recognize me: they surround me, chattering about my mother and my kidneys, but neither of these two topics feels real to me. Thankfully, the press event starts up soon after. The chattering ends as the lights dim, and everyone turns to look at the illuminated stage.

“We will change the world once again.” The middle-aged man on stage opens the ceremony with these words.

The applause is enthusiastic. “Alright, Edmund!”

Edmund is the chief scientist of my mother’s medical research group—he and my mother once won a Nobel together. After the applause dies down, he speaks again.

“In the past thirty years, we’ve accomplished the unimaginable. From chimera experiments to the first successful human organ cultivation, as well as the spread of regenerative medicine thereafter, we’ve saved many people’s lives—but we’ve also faced much opposition. The main objection has been: should we use humans as research subjects?”

Edmund picks me out of the crowd. “We’re honored to have Mr. Tony Lee among us today. The fact that he’s healthy and alive is our answer.”

Thunderous applause and a blinding spotlight fall upon me together. The world goes white for a moment, and I can’t see a thing.

“Our lab has never backed off from the effort to make our case to the public, but we’ve always lacked a decisive argument for the moral rightness of allowing human experimentation.”

The spotlight eases away from me as Edmund continues, “But our latest discovery should finally settle this decades-long ethical dispute. First, let me introduce the youngest and most powerful member of our team: Mr. Sphinx, an avatar personifying our quantum computer.”

Rays of light gather at his fingertips and then scatter to form a human shape—a powerful demonstration of the latest hologram technology. But given my profession, what draws my attention is the word “avatar.” After handling hundreds of AI-related crimes, I’m leery of them, especially one taking advantage of quantum computing.

Sphinx renders as a golden-skinned teen. Once the rays of light have condensed, I almost can’t tell that he’s a hologram. A shy smile appears on his face, perfectly calibrated to give the impression of innocence.

“Good evening, everyone. I have a riddle—”

Laughing, Edmund interrupts him. “Let me guess: ‘What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?’ Sphinx, everyone knows the answer: humanity.”

“Humanity, yes. That riddle compares a lifetime to a day,” Sphinx says. “But I have a different riddle for you.”

“Go ahead. The best minds of the world are gathered here today.”

“Where did humanity come from? Before ‘morning,’ what happened in the darkness before dawn?”

“Evolution, Sphinx. I taught you this,” Edmund says, sighing.

“But you must have proof,” Sphinx says.

“We have many fossils of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.” Edmund pauses. “But—”

Sphinx takes over. “But, there is a gap in the fossil record. Until now, we have no direct evidence that modern humans, or Homo sapiens sapiens, evolved from the archaic Homo sapiens.”

“But you have no evidence to disprove that modern humans evolved from Homo sapiens, either,” Edmund counters.

“No, I do have proof. I know that humanity’s ancestor is a chimera.”

For about ten seconds, Edmund is silent. Murmurs rise in the meeting hall.

“A chimera?” Edmund says finally. “What kind of joke is this?”

“I never joke,” Sphinx says. “Before the birth of quantum computers, calculating the product of two large prime numbers was very easy for classical computers, but figuring out the prime factors of a semiprime number, a natural number which is the product of two prime numbers, was practically impossible, making them useful for cryptography. After the creation of quantum computers, these early encryption technologies are no longer of use, as we can easily decrypt those methods using quantum algorithms. After adding me to the lab’s research team, Edmund had a new idea—he wanted me to factor humanity’s DNA.”

“In other words, I wanted Sphinx to take one person’s genome and separate it into their parents’ genomes. It’s a biologist’s extension of quantum decryption.” Edmund shrugs. “What I didn’t expect was that Sphinx would actually be able to do it.”

Sphinx nods. “Yes, after continuous algorithmic improvements and experimental confirmation, I can ensure a very high degree of recoverability. That is, if I have the complete genome sequence for any one of you, I can figure out the genome sequences of all your ancestors. I can recover their skin color, blood type, hair and eye color—give me enough time, and I can even recreate an ancestral human. With the support of medical databases from around the world, I quickly created a database of the genomes of humanity’s ancestors.”

“As we factored human genomes,” Edmund added, “we also attempted to factor the genomes of as many other species as possible, including mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, mollusks, and even plants—a total of 115,000 species for which we now have an ancestral genomic database. In the end, we made an astounding discovery.”

The whole meeting hall is silent, enraptured.

“In every species other than humans, there is a similar trajectory for the number of ancestors that contributed to the species’ genome.” Rays of light once again gather in Edmund’s hand. “Observe this graph—the x-axis is the number of genetic specimens per time period, and the y-axis is time. As we go further up, we go further back in time.

“Let’s start with puffins. As we go up in the time scale, we discover that, regardless of how long the population has remained stable, there is always a period where the population rapidly declines—a ‘bottleneck zone.’”

The graph slowly rises in pace with Edmund’s gesture and stops at the midway point to show an hourglass shape. “What does this mean? At some point, for whatever reason, puffins died off in great numbers. The puffins we see now are descended from the few survivors of the bottleneck zone.

“If we continue tracing back the population count of the puffins’ ancestors, we discover a fascinating phenomenon: history repeats itself. Above the bottleneck zone is an expansion period, and above that, another bottleneck—this goes on. We’ve calculated the trajectories for 115,000 species over the past 500,000 years, and they are all the same.

“Now, let’s take a look at the human population.”

Edmund waves his hand to the side. The human population graph rises up a bit, then quickly narrows to an almost invisible dot.

“A rather terrifying bottleneck, is it not?” Edmund says. “But, when we go back from here—”

He lifts his hand, but the graph doesn’t rise with him. It stops there, towering, like the minaret of a mosque.

“What does this graph of humanity tell us? It tells us that, approximately 180,000 years ago, our common ancestor ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ gave birth to her children, and those children gave birth to more children, until human civilization dominated the globe.” Edmund slows his speech. “But please take note: this graph also tells us that humanity can trace back to only one common ancestor.”

Sphinx breaks in, “Let me remind you, one individual cannot proliferate the species.”

“Of course, ‘one’ is neither accurate nor possible. We know now that, other than this woman, our common ancestors include four men as well. But regardless of how many people survived that bottleneck, how could something like this have happened? Sphinx’s genome factoring analysis tells me that, before these ancestors, there were no ancestors.”

“It’s true,” Sphinx says.

“Was there a mistake in our calculations?” Edmund says, “But we tested our calculations on fast-reproducing bacteria and generations of laboratory mice with detailed genetic records, and our algorithms were confirmed to be correct! Sphinx did not make any errors. Why, esteemed guests, why is it that we can trace the unbroken trajectories of 115,000 other species, but we can’t do the same for humans? Before humanity’s morning, what happened during the predawn darkness?”

Dead silence.

Everyone looks up at the inconceivable graph. Judging by the introductions given to me earlier, this room is filled with the world’s top scientists and doctors, a few politicians and business tycoons, as well as representatives from a number of influential media outlets. Everyone is trying to find a flaw in the graph, but no one speaks. “Chimera,” the word that Sphinx said at the beginning of the presentation, floats like a ghost over our heads.

“When I, too, was at a loss like everyone here today, I called my mentor. After she listened to my description, she asked me only one question: ‘Edmund, do you still remember that pig?’”

Edmund looks at me. “Tony, do you still remember the pig that saved your life?”

Faint murmurs fill the hall.

Edmund shakes his head. “Maybe you don’t; but I do. I always thought that that pig was the first chimera with human cells. But I was wrong.

“I had Sphinx trace back a few other populations, those of the chimeras we’ve been cultivating these past few decades. Although there aren’t many chimera species, some rat-mouse chimeras have already reproduced over a hundred generations. What happens when we calculate the genomes of their ancestors?”

All of the graphs except for the human population graph disappear, replaced by the graphs of a few dozen chimera species. Like demons, the graphs climb upward, all terminating in a single point, some higher, some lower.

“They are the same as humans—these chimeras are the same as humans.” Edmund pauses, then raises his voice. “But can we conclude from this that humans descended from a chimera? Of course not!

“I had Sphinx add to this model all of the Homo sapiens and Homo erectus genomes that we could find, leading to the discovery of one of our ancestors that shared a blood relationship with their ancestors.

“This ancestor was not Eve’s human husband, but rather the hybrid child she had with a Homo sapiens. We used quantum algorithms on this child’s Homo sapiens genes to conduct a complicated ‘subtraction.’ Finally, we extracted the part of Eve’s genome that did not include any DNA from Homo sapiens.”

Along with Sphinx, every point of light dissipates, then gathers into a huge double helix, one portion of which is highlighted in bright white.

Edmund emphasizes every word as he concludes. “We are certain that this is a chimera—a cross-species chimera.”

• • • •

I close my eyes. A photo my mother sent me appears in my mind’s eye. In the documents, that photo was perhaps the most nondescript one, bundled together with countless standard shots of the chimera pig in the research notes. It was a close-up shot of the pig’s eyes.

On the plane, I had glanced at it for maybe half a second, only to find that it had branded itself into my memories like a curse.

Those were my eyes. It had my eyes.

• • • •

The hologram graphs disappear, leaving only Edmund on the stage.

“Humanity’s common ancestor is a chimera. The foundation of all the ethical attacks and criticisms levied against us over the years has disintegrated. We have the evidence to prove that humanity was born in a laboratory. We are the product of science, not nature.”

Edmund’s voice trembles with excitement. “We don’t yet have the technology to figure out what creatures were used to create humanity, and we can’t tell who our creator was. But the success of chimeras and regenerative medicine tells us that we are only one step away from our Creator!

“So what is there left to fear? Shall we boldly stride across this ethical barrier and let each person choose whether to join us, or shall we hesitate, timidly adhere to the fate of every other species on earth, and wait for the next bottleneck to return civilization to square one, or perhaps even to annihilation?

“Esteemed guests, I submit that we’re at a crossroads of science and history: we must make a choice—now is the time for full-scale human experimentation.”

The sound of scattered applause gradually swells to a thundering roar that fills the auditorium. Some in the crowd still wear expressions of doubt, but they’re also full of admiration. From the birth of that pig, this town has been the battlefront of human genetic transformation. It’s the holy site within the heart of every biologist and medical specialist. The announcement today has advanced the field again, perhaps even bringing humanity closer to a new world.

It’s too bad my mother isn’t here to see this.

Right at that moment, I receive a high-priority direct message. The sender’s name makes my heart skip a beat.

“I’d like to chat after the event.”

D. Cabin Zero

“Edmund?”

No answer.

In the hundred years he’d been together with his AI, nothing like this had ever happened before. Luo Ming looked around, then raised his voice: “Edmund!”

His assistant finally appeared. “I’m here.”

Full of concern, Luo Ming asked, “What did you find in the captain’s cabin?”

Before meeting the captain, Luo Ming suddenly thought of a trick—entering the captain’s cabin would give him the opportunity to have Edmund break into the ship’s core control systems, which were isolated from external networks. The AI would then be able steal all of the top-secret information there. The plan went smoothly until Luo Ming unexpectedly provoked the captain and was thrown out too soon.

“It’s true: the captain has never replaced an organ,” Edmund said. “She was using prolonged hibernation to delay the aging process. The ship can awaken her in fifteen seconds, so there’s no impact on the ship’s normal operations.”

“I don’t care about that,” Luo Ming said. “What else did you find?”

“I only had time to gather some population data. There are 29,000 people aboard who haven’t undergone organ replacement surgery. The vast majority are young people under the age of 30. Only 15 are over 50 years old; above 80, only the captain. But she couldn’t have been the criminal because she’d been in deep sleep for the past month, and wasn’t awakened until after the incident had occurred.”

“Then it seems we’ve reached a dead end here, too,” Luo Ming said, sighing.

“Do you still think that the criminal is a ‘person’?”

“You’re the only AI aboard this ship,” Luo Ming said. “If you did it, now would be a good time to confess.”

Edmund’s voice lowered. “That’s a terrible joke. I have no way to clear my own name.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Luo Ming said, backpedaling. “It was… a terrible joke.”

“I know; I’ve already forgiven you,” Edmund said. “But I have indeed run into a bit of trouble.”

“What happened?” Luo Ming turned and saw First Officer Qin Wei walking toward him with a couple of police droids.

“I’m afraid that when I broke into the ship’s control system, the captain discovered me,” Edmund said apologetically.

“Dammit!” Luo Ming furrowed his brow. “How can I turn you off?”

“It’s too late. A part of my data was left behind in the captain’s cabin. By now, she probably knows everything about you.” Edmund hesitated. “For example, your other name.”

For the first time, Luo Ming wished that Edmund had a physical form, so that he could give him the evil eye—both his “artificial” nature and his “intelligence” could learn to take secrecy more seriously.

But he didn’t have time to scold the AI; Qin Wei was already standing before him. “Mr. Luo, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us.”

“What for?” Luo Ming asked, his face impassive.

“There have been additional incidents involving Adam,” Qin Wei said, his rapid speech revealing his unease. “I need your help.”

Luo Ming let out a held breath. “I would be happy to assist you, Mr. First Officer. But I recall that information concerning Adam is beyond my clearance level.”

Qin Wei snapped his fingers: an enormous file suddenly filled Luo Ming’s inbox. Coldly, Qin Wei said, “You’re cleared now.” He turned and walked away.

Luo Ming rushed to catch up. Summoning every ounce of sincerity, he said, “Please tell me what happened.”

Qin Wei’s expression softened. “I’ll be brief: the other organ cultivation cabins all followed Cabin 35’s example. Our orders have been canceled en masse, and the hospital is paralyzed. The captain has declared a state of emergency.”

As he spoke, he sent more files to Luo Ming. The documents included a three-dimensional cultivation cabin model that even Edmund hadn’t been able to find. According to these documents, the oval Deck Seven was the site for hundreds of linked cultivation cabins, which formed an inward spiral like a whirlpool.

Luo Ming recalled what Edmund had said earlier. “Do these cultivation cabins communicate with each other?”

“They share the same feeding ducts, so, theoretically, they’re not isolated from one another.” Qin Wei was now fully cooperating.

Luo Ming mulled over Qin Wei’s response. Five minutes later, they arrived at the security line before Deck Seven. The white-haired captain stood amidst a crowd of police droids. She saw Luo Ming and made an unhappy face as she asked Qin Wei, “Why did you bring him here?”

“Luo Ming is the officer in charge of this investigation, Your Excellency,” Qin Wei replied simply.

The captain scrutinized Luo Ming. Luo Ming avoided her gaze and examined the scene instead. “Edmund,” Luo Ming said softly, “wasn’t there something within the documents you sent that said one of the cultivation cabins is dedicated to the nervous system?”

No response. Edmund had disappeared completely. Luo Ming had no choice but to ask Qin Wei the same question.

Qin Wei’s answer was quick: “Cabin Zero. Though it’s not a cultivation cabin; rather, it’s a conservation cabin that preserves a few exceptional brains.”

“I thought brains were on the list of organs that can’t be replaced.”

“Right.” Qin Wei gave him an odd look. “The brains grown in Adams have no memories. Replacing the brain would turn a patient into a mindless fool… who would do that?”

A terrible chill ran up his spine. Luo Ming felt himself getting close to the answer. “Then the ones in Cabin Zero are—”

Qin Wei hesitated, but still replied. “On their deathbeds, some important individuals chose to deposit their brains here. We adjusted the genetic expression modules of the Adams inside Cabin Zero so that they would age extremely slowly.”

“So you’re telling me that though the bodies of these people have died, their minds live on.”

“Their minds are in deep sleep.” Qin Wei was growing impatient. “Why are you asking this?”

“I’d like to take a look at Cabin Zero.”

“Cabin Zero is perfectly fine.” Qin Wei eyed him suspiciously. “The captain herself confirmed that.”

Luo Ming persisted: “Last time, you and the captain also thought everything was perfectly fine.” He noted Qin Wei’s expression, then added, “I’m concerned that things are deteriorating faster than we imagined.”

As things really did seem to be getting out of hand, Qin Wei finally agreed to Luo Ming’s request. Cabin Zero was on the lower part of Deck Seven, at the center of the whirlpool of cultivation cabins. When the cabin doors opened, Luo Ming was met with an unbelievable sight.

Sacks made of translucent membrane dangled from the ceiling, each holding a spinal cord or a cerebrum. Between the Adam pouches, additional membranes had already enveloped all the interconnecting passageways, creating an actual web—a three-dimensional network made of neurons, spinal cords, and lumps of cerebral tissue. Two “people” were laid out neatly on the ground: the first a complete body—clean, naked, cold; the second a bulging sack of human skin, whose open abdomen revealed a heap of organs arranged in neat order: large intestines, stomach, liver…

It wasn’t a human at all, but a pile of human parts.

“My God, what in the world—” Qin Wei murmured.

Luo Ming put on a pair of gloves and carefully peeled back the skin covering the loose organs. Where the thoracic cavity should have been, there was only a ghastly segment of gleaming white bone.

“That’s his rib—Adam’s rib,” Luo Ming blurted. “He’s trying to create an Eve.”

5. Argus

And [Hera] set a watcher upon [Io], great and strong Argus, who with four eyes looks every way. And the goddess stirred in him unwearying strength: sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.

—Hesiod, Aegimius (as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)

It is said, too, that Echidna, daughter of Tartarus and Earth, who used to carry off passers-by, was caught asleep and slain by Argus.

—Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, 2.1.2 (as translated by Sir James George Frazer)

When I see her again, I begin to understand why my father was so madly in love with her.

She can’t be controlled, can’t be known, can’t be predicted. But when she’s standing before me, she’s thoughtful and warm. This contradiction allows her to exude allure like a demon. She’s sitting on a black Barcelona chair now, her face pale and wan like a girl’s. Her gaze falls upon me and she laughs weakly. “Tony, I’m so sorry that I didn’t tell you earlier—did I worry you?”

Neither “yes” nor “no” would do—both would reveal me as a hypocrite. So I say, “I helped out with the rescue effort. I’m overjoyed to see you’re alive and well.”

“When I was at Gardermoen Airport, I realized something was wrong with my body, so I borrowed a friend’s plane to get back to the laboratory more quickly.” Her speech is deliberate, slow. “Then I discovered that nothing could be done about my problem, and so I just let the world think I was in the crash.”

Anxious, I ask, “What do you mean?”

“I’m going to die soon.” She looks at me, unperturbed. “For ten years, I’ve been exploring the potential of genetic modification. I thought I had resolved the entire genetic network, but I was wrong.”

I don’t know what to say.

Warmly, she tells me, “See, this is science. Most of the time, we aren’t so lucky.”

“Mom—”

“My failure has led me to make some adjustments to my future plans. We have to face the risks inherent in large-scale experimentation. I got in touch with a friend who’s investing in an interstellar colonization program.” She makes a call, and a hologram of a person appears before us. “Chen Ying, this is Tony. I believe you’ve already met.”

The woman is the one who had come to meet me at the airport on the day of Sphinx’s announcement.

Chen Ying ignores me completely. “How do you feel?”

“Terrible,” says my mother. Then she looks at me again. “Tony, Chen Ying is one of the wealthiest people on Earth, but most people know nothing about her. I’m trying to convince her to lend me two of her five colonization ships for a few hundred years to use as research vessels.”

“I’ve already agreed.” Chen Ying furrows her brow as she looks at her.

“Right, but you haven’t heard the actual plan yet. I’d like to put them on the same orbit as a short-period comet—”

“That’s not important,” Chen Ying says, interrupting her. “Send these details to the technicians; you need your rest now.”

My mother makes a face. “Alright.” Then, she ends the call.

The brief conversation leaves me with an impression of intimacy. Maybe it wasn’t so much the topic of the conversation as it was Chen Ying’s expressions. My mother senses my questions, but she doesn’t answer them. “I’m going to move the next-generation chimera lab onto the spaceships. That way, I don’t have to worry about the catastrophic consequences in the event of an accident in a terrestrial genetic lab. Eden is my first ship, which will conduct more conservative research. The chimeras she carries come from the first generation of stem cells—that is, part of them comes from you.”

I remember the pig’s eyes.

She continues: “We’ve been cultivating these cells for many years. Strangely, although we’ve tried to use other human cells and cells from other animals, this combination has always been the most stable. I guess we stumbled on a miracle with my first trial. Tony, you and I are both very lucky.” She realizes my mind is wandering and changes the topic. “Speaking of which, what did you think of the big announcement?”

I think over the commentary from the last few days. “From what I’ve heard, this hypothesis still has some holes…”

“I left them on purpose.” She gives me a cunning grin. “I just wanted to get everyone arguing, even start a war within science—only then can there be a revolution.”

“But you seem to be losing.”

“You still don’t understand people.” She touches a finger to her chin. “Only through conflict can people have choices; only then can we rouse people’s emotions, even whip them into a frenzy. As the flames of war expand, the news will spread farther. More and more will join the battle, creating more soldiers for me. Only then will I stand forth to protect my believers, dealing a deadly blow to the opposition.”

“You’re already holding the weapon for dealing that blow, aren’t you?”

“Not only that, Tony,” she says gently. “All of this is a trap I’ve set to distract them from the real question.”

“The real question?”

“What we announced at the event has nothing to do with the research I want to conduct. The interesting question has never been whether we can use humans as test subjects. I’ve long trodden in that forbidden territory, starting from when you were six. The far more interesting question is: What have we created through these experiments?”

“Chimeras.”

“Chimeras, sure.” She nods. “But what exactly are chimeras—people or beasts? Do chimeras have thoughts? Can they reproduce with other chimeras? Are chimeras the path forward for human evolution or humanity’s downfall?

“These are my fatal weaknesses because I don’t know the answers. From the very beginning, I didn’t understand why the chimera experiments were successful. I was like a child playing with clay, rolling various colors together until they turned into something new.

“But I won’t tell people that I don’t know the answers. I’ll let them stare at an irrelevant chimera ancestor, a point of controversy where I hold in my hands all evidence, where the theory is both simple yet evocative. Look, they’ll use this issue to attack me, thinking that this is the foundation of regenerative medicine. But they’re wrong: once the arguments start and the flames of academic war erupt, I will be the only one who benefits. My opponents will fail and be thoroughly discredited; my soldiers will become a dedicated but foolish hivemind. Tony, this is what makes the game fun.”

Seeing her eyes sparkle with excitement, I finally understand why my father would so often murmur the word “monster” whenever she came up in conversation. She’s far more terrifying than any AI I’ve encountered. I surmise her tactics: “Do you plan on continuing to let Edmund lead the charge for you?”

“Edmund?” She’s startled for a moment, then laughs uproariously. “Oh my goodness, you really didn’t notice?”

“Notice what?”

“The Edmund at the press event was a hologram—the real Edmund passed away five years ago.”

Once again I feel helpless, like an insect that’s been caught in a spider’s web. “I really didn’t notice—”

“Okay, then that’s our little secret.” She giggles and taps her head. “There was no Edmund on stage at the announcement. The one standing there speaking through the hologram was me.”

“But you… Why did you keep his death a secret?”

“Using him and your father as the mouthpieces of the research group and the charitable foundation saved me a lot of trouble. Plus, he agreed to let me use his likeness,” she explains patiently.

I notice her expectant gaze. “Then—do you want me to join the foundation?”

“That would be the most perfect outcome. Tony Lee would without a doubt be the finest spokesperson for the Tony Lee Charitable Foundation.” She shrugs. “But you won’t join.”

“Why not?”

“Because your body language and your expression give you away,” she says. “You don’t want this, and this kind of work doesn’t suit you anyway—either way, I want you to make your own choices. From your reaction just now, I think you’re far more interested in the spaceship.”

I relax my hands, held tightly all this time in front of my chest. “It’s true; a research ship does sound interesting.”

“And also mad,” she says. “As your mother, I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to become a research subject again.”

Her gaze now seems to truly carry a deep love. I don’t understand her at all. “I’m sorry—I’ll make up my own mind.”

“Of course. I have no right to tell you what to do.” She lets out a soft sigh. “But I still want to tell you that you’re my most perfect creation, so perfect that you frighten me.”

“Why?”

“Every time I saw you, heard about you, or even earlier, when I was pregnant with you and felt you, I experienced such terror.” She looks out the window. “Because once I turned my head and saw the pile of trash in my lab, I’d suddenly realize the vast distance between myself and the Creator. I’d worry if I’d made a mistake from the very start, because I’d broken His rules.”

“You weren’t wrong,” I say. “You saved my life.”

“At a price.” Her voice softens, revealing a deep exhaustion. “An enormous price that you can never imagine.”

• • • •

Everything happens just as she predicted.

Controversy after controversy concerning chimeras and human experimentation erupt, and every politician and college student seems to have something to say about the subject.

The dispute of the century ends three years later with news of Edmund’s “death.” His obituary, in combination with a new paper, deals a mortal blow to her opponents.

The revolutionaries reap the fruits of their victory, and the conservatives, in the face of ironclad proof, wilt and fade. Chen Ying’s timely announcement of the research spaceships turns into the last lifeline for these drowning ethicists to clutch. The wild plan easily gains everyone’s support: immortality proves to be an irresistible temptation for all, and even the wealthiest can’t obtain a ticket aboard the ships.

Of course, obtaining a ticket isn’t a problem for me.

I end up boarding Eden after all. Called by a strange impulse and yearning deep in my heart, I abandon my family, my friends, my job—everything I have on Earth. At the embarkation ceremony, I watch Chen Ying, the captain, deliver a speech.

“From today on, this is our ship. My dearest friend named it Eden, for it carries humanity’s wildest dream, and because it will bring us new life.”

E. The Complex Chimera

“It’s still a child,” Luo Ming said. “This explains everything.”

“What do you mean? What exactly is ‘it’?” Qin Wei asked, confused.

“Adam,” Luo Ming replied. “Or, to be more accurate, ‘it’ is the collective made up of the Adams within all 109 cultivation cabins. They’ve connected with one another to create an enormous creature that thinks, breathes, and bleeds—a complex chimera.”

Qin Wei paused for three seconds before he processed what Luo Ming was saying. “Preposterous! How could this be?”

“Yes, that’s really what it is. Originally, it wasn’t supposed to have thoughts, but you placed brains into its body, thereby giving it consciousness. All chimera experiments prohibit the creation of a nervous system—this was a basic rule put in place during the design of the Adam matrix, but you’ve broken it.”

Luo Ming noticed that the captain had stopped outside the cultivation cabin to listen to his explanation. “It’s extremely smart, but, at the same time, extremely naïve. After observing for a long time, it was clever enough to break into and take over the monitoring system for the cultivation cabins, but it had no idea that the hospital ordering system even existed. Now it’s trying to imitate us. It found a human corpse to study and analyze, and it’s trying to use these organs to create a self—it really thinks of itself as the Adam of lore, so it’s trying to create an Eve. God, this is too funny!”

“Enough!” Qin Wei shouted. “I need you to provide me with evidence, Officer Luo, and not mere crackpot theories.”

“I believe that, in every cultivation cabin, you’ll find extra organs that haven’t been ordered—for example, eyes, because it’s eager to learn about this world.” Luo Ming was speaking quickly, his tongue racing to catch up with his thoughts. “Please send someone to check—oh, it must also have had help moving the corpses and limbs into the cultivation cabins, unintelligent helpers that it could easily control.”

Luo Ming trailed off as a police droid entered. It was carrying a whole set of human ribs. Seeing Qin Wei and Luo Ming, it stopped, dazed, as though it didn’t know what it was supposed to do.

“I’ve long said that the ship’s intelligence systems are too primitive.” Unwittingly, Luo Ming had borrowed one of Edmund’s phrases. “If the complex chimera can take over the monitoring system, then controlling these police droids would be child’s play.”

The appearance of the confused police droid forced Qin Wei to accept Luo Ming’s conclusion: the one responsible for the series of incidents was Adam, the soul of Eden. After a hundred years of growth, it awakened the brains stored inside its pouches, dreamed up its own ideas, and was now trying to use the organs it had cultivated to create a new human-shaped self.

“I’ll go check for those eyes you mentioned.” Qin Wei’s face was dark as he exited the cultivation cabin. Luo Ming watched him leave.

Alone with Luo Ming in the cabin, the police droid came back to life and shut the door.

Luo Ming heard his own heart thumping. This was no good. He had no idea where Edmund was, and this police droid looked much stronger than he was.

“Did you find me,” the police droid said, “because you are me?”

“Are… are you speaking through that thing?” Luo Ming stared at the pair of eyes hanging in the corner of the cultivation cabin—light brown with a hint of gray.

“I am,” replied the police droid under the control of the complex chimera. “Please answer my question, Tony Lee.”

“When did you discover my true identity?” Luo Ming countered.

“When I first received your organ order,” the chimera said. “You asked for eyes. My eyes.”

Those are my eyes—Luo Ming gazed into those irises, recalling the close-up photograph sealed away in his memories.

“So I was the one who triggered your self-awareness.” He let out a soft sigh. “Yes, I felt your presence the very first time I entered a cultivation cabin. I deduced everything from that feeling.”

“Would I have grown to look like you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve failed; I didn’t create Eve.” The police droid looked down at the floor, then carefully placed the ribs atop the human skin. “Why? Tell me: where did I go wrong?”

“This isn’t the way humans create new life.”

“But this is how you created me. You put different things into my body, and then I became me.” The police droid looked at him, puzzled. “And I also know that I’m the same as you.”

“No, you and I are not the same. We weren’t born in this way—even you weren’t born like this.” Luo Ming took a step back, gingerly making his way toward the cabin door.

“How are we different? My cells are identical to yours.” The pair of eyeballs stared at Luo Ming.

“Only some parts are the same.” Luo Ming burst through the cabin door, leaping out without any hesitation. Only after he landed did he yell, “Edmund!”

The silhouette of the police droid froze by the cabin door. Edmund had appeared just in time to take control of it. “Nice work,” said Luo Ming.

But there was no response.

“What’s the matter?” Luo Ming tapped his ear. “Didn’t you do this? Stop hiding!”

“I used the ship’s control system to lock down all police droids.” The captain answered him. “Thank you for helping us uncover the truth, Officer Luo—or do you prefer Tony Lee?”

“Whatever you want.” Luo Ming looked at her. “I suppose you’ve known about my identity for a long time, Captain Chen Ying.”

“Of course. Do you think I would have allowed you to gallivant about my ship, poking your nose into everything otherwise?” Chen Ying glared at him. “Enough. Don’t play innocent with me. Your acting skills are nowhere near your mother’s. Let me see: taking over a police droid, hmm? And stealing information from my cabin—do you need me to list out every violation you’ve committed over the years?”

Luo Ming tried to placate her with a grin. “All in the service of solving cases, Your Excellency.”

Chen Ying harrumphed. “I have to admit you’ve done a good job.”

“Thank you for your approval.”

Chen Ying shook her head, deciding to change the topic. “I’ve already directed the ship to land. Luckily, we happen to be headed toward Earth already. The regenerative medicine group will send scientists to study this complex chimera. Eden’s mission is over, and I’ve done my duty to your mother.”

“I’d say you’ve done a good job, too,” Luo Ming said.

“Have you kept your distance from me because I was your mother’s lover?” Chen Ying suddenly asked.

Luo Ming couldn’t help laughing. “I’m sorry, but my mother has never ‘loved’ anyone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Love requires being with someone; words of love are just lies,” Luo Ming said. “She would never have wasted time being with anyone.”

Chen Ying looked at him. “Are you sure?”

6. Epilogue

Before I leave Eden, I go find Chen Ying.

“She passed away not even a month after you saw her for the last time,” Chen Ying says. “Of course, she’d already planned everything.”

“I guessed.” It was around then that I received the AI Edmund as a gift.

Chen Ying takes me to the medical research facility under Deck Seven. Her real tomb is hidden there: a small, white box, not a single word anywhere on it.

“Is this really what she wanted?” I ask.

“Actually, I decided to bring her with me when we loaded the ship.” Chen Ying laughs bitterly. “She wouldn’t have cared where she’s buried, anyway.”

“But to be on a spaceship—” I think about it. “Forget it. This is fine.”

Chen Ying looks at me. “Thank you.” After a pause, she says, “From the very beginning, I knew she wanted me only for my ships.”

“What happened between my mother and you is none of my business.”

But she goes on, speaking to herself. “My family was among the first to get into the space assembly business, and the first to construct a ship large enough for interstellar colonization—I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to hear any of this.”

“Uh—” I hesitate for a moment. “Please go on.”

“To make a long story short, by the time I met her, we’d already completed the designs for the spaceships and the preliminary investment. The first time she saw me, she asked me right away whether she could borrow a couple ships for research. I thought she was nuts—each ship cost hundreds of billions!”

That sounds just like my mother. “I can imagine that.”

“To change my mind, she switched to an equally ridiculous method of persuasion. I was younger than her by six years. I had two children, but I’d never gotten married. At first, I told my boyfriend about her as a joke.”

“But she succeeded in the end.”

Chen Ying sighs. “Yep.”

“That’s just how she was,” I tell her. “My father was more or less in the same situation.”

“She was… very unique.” Chen Ying pauses and looks at me again. “When I hesitated about starting a relationship with her, she said something that changed me. She could plant her ideas into your heart and make it seem like they were native to the soil.”

My curiosity overcame the awkwardness of hearing about my mother’s love life. “What did she say?”

“She said, ‘You’re standing inside a cage that I can’t see, but outside the cage is the whole world. I’ll be here waiting for you to come out, and then you’ll see that there’s nothing to be scared of.’”

I’m reminded of a recording of an interview my father did shortly after setting up the Tony Lee Charitable Foundation. That was the one time he and my mother appeared together on TV after their divorce, and they’d appeared only to respond to the attacks on chimera experiments. The host was losing in verbal jousting with my mother and decided to change tactics by turning to my father: “I’d really like to know why you’ve agreed to work with the former Mrs. Lee. Didn’t she abandon you and Tony?”

My father paused thoughtfully, and then said, “We’ve chosen different paths in life, but, as her friend, I’ve never doubted her wisdom and courage. You must understand that she’s not an ordinary person like you and me.”

“How is she different?” asked the host.

“We’re often bound by custom and habit, but she’s not. She doesn’t even understand why we’re confined by these rules, unable to keep up with her. Marriage, science, what have you—to her, these are all mere problems to be solved. She’s like a curious child, afraid of nothing, intent on finding out what the world beyond the fence is like—this is why she was able to successfully create a chimera, and it’s also why she can now save lives through Adam.”

While he spoke, the camera was focused instead on my mother’s face. Her perfect little smile disappeared, replaced by confusion and surprise. I can’t remember if I asked Edmund a question while watching the recording or if he had jumped in on his own initiative, but I distinctly remember the AI’s commentary:

“She thought she knew the truth about everything, but she didn’t know the truth about herself—only your father understood her.”

F. Regeneration

The last person to disembark from Eden was Lin Ke—the woman who was so upset by her organ cancellation that she reported it to the police, and who suffered a heart attack upon seeing Cabin 35.

After three days of emergency medical treatment, her heart was still on the verge of failure. And, due to oxygen deprivation, her cerebrum was barely alive. Having obtained the captain’s authorization, the doctors decided to take the extraordinary step of conducting an emergency transplant with two organs found in the cultivation cabins—they certainly weren’t hers, but they came back negative on the lymphocyte cross-matching test. Unexpectedly, the procedure was a complete success.

A week later, Lin Ke, supported by a doctor, disembarked from Eden. Standing together with Luo Ming, they waited for the shuttle to take them back to Earth. She said “hello” to Luo Ming, who recognized her as the woman who had first pursued the mysterious organ cancellations and who had collapsed in front of Cabin 35.

After some small talk, he said, “So, you’ve recovered?”

“Thanks to organ replacement surgery,” she said, “How did you solve the case?”

“That’s quite a story.” Since she was the first witness, he felt comfortable recounting for her the details of the mystery, including the part where all the Adams had joined to become a complex chimera.

“Incredible!” Lin Ke’s eyes shone as she listened. “How’s the pig—I mean, how’s the complex chimera doing now?”

Luo Ming looked at her, startled. “Wait, did you just say ‘pig’?”

“I’ve got some strange ideas in my head now.” She laughed sheepishly. “You told me all the cultivation cabins are joined into one chimera; maybe a part of ‘it’ is now in my brain.”

“Did you have a cerebrum transplant? I thought those weren’t possible!”

“Ah, yes, but the doctors had to try to save my life,” she said. “They used a preserved brain from Cabin Zero instead of one grown from scratch. My current brain must have spent quite a long time in Cabin Zero.”

Luo Ming nodded. “I’m glad the risky surgery worked out. But are you still ‘Lin Ke’?”

“Who knows.” She shrugged. “I don’t plan to see her friends any time soon, at least.”

Luo Ming felt a sense of déjà vu when he saw her warm and cunning smile. Uneasy, he cleared his throat and said, “The complex chimera is still on Deck Seven. Right now Eden is swarming with regenerative medicine specialists.”

“So that’s what’s going on! After you go back to Earth, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll travel the world after so many years spent cooped up in a ship.”

She smiled again. “Sounds like a great plan.”

The shuttle arrived at the port. Luo Ming stepped through the door and turned around. He found Lin Ke rooted to her spot.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

She dismissed him with a little wave. “I’ve decided to stay on the ship, Tony. This time, I won’t abandon it again.”

Luo Ming’s eyes widened. “What?”

“I’ve spent more than a century with you—I think that’s long enough,” she said. “My other child needs me now.”

Before Luo Ming could try to go back to her, the doors to the shuttle hissed shut. He pounded with all his might against the metal panels, but they didn’t budge at all. “Dammit! Open the door! Please, open the door!”

But the shuddering of the floor told him that the shuttle had already taken off. Luo Ming looked out the window in despair. The space station was already several kilometers away. He would never again see “Lin Ke.”

He held his breath, and, fingers trembling, found her in his long contacts list.

“Who are you?” Luo Ming asked.

Soon, he received a direct message in response:

“Remember what I told you before, Tony: there never was any Edmund. I was always the one speaking.”

[1] In 2010, Kobayashi et al. published a study in Cell that demonstrated the viability of rat-mouse chimeras. At the same time, commentary about the study also appeared in Cell under the title “Viable rat-mouse chimeras: where do we go from here?” This quote paraphrases that commentary. Of note is the fact that the same research group published another study in PNAS in which they performed a similar experiment with a pig. Ethical concerns stopped them from creating a human–pig chimera.

[2] Named as one of the ten greatest scientific discoveries of 2013, CRISPR/Cas9 allows the creation of organisms with knocked out genes. That is, so long as we know which genes control the development of which organs, those genes can be made inoperative (“knocked out”). If a knockout pig blastocyst were combined with human stem cells, theoretically, a pig could be grown with a human organ.

Gu Shi is a speculative fiction writer and an urban planner. A graduate of Shanghai’s Tongji University, she obtained her master’s degree in urban planning from the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design. Since 2012, she has been working as a researcher at the academy’s Urban Design Institute. Ms. Gu has been publishing fiction since 2011 in markets like Super Nice, Science Fiction World, Mystery World, and SF King. Notable works include “Chimera,” “Möbius Continuum,” and “Reflection.” In 2016，she won the Gold Award for Best Novella at the Chinese Nebula (Xingyun) Awards with “Chimera”.

S. Qiouyi Lu is a writer, narrator, and translator; their fiction has appeared in Uncanny and Strange Horizons, and their poetry has been published in inkscrawl and Liminality. A dread member of the queer Asian SFFH illuminati, S. currently lives in Seattle with a tiny black cat named Thin Mint. You can visit their site at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter as @sqiouyilu.

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), and a forthcoming third volume) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016), a collection. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017). In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous works from Chinese to English, including The Three-Body Problem (2014), by Liu Cixin, and “Folding Beijing,” by Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners.

Hammers on Bone
By Cassandra Khaw

1: MURDER, MY SWEET

“I want you to kill my stepdad.”

I kick my feet off my desk and lean forward, rucking my brow. “Say that again, kid?”

Usually, it’s dames trussed up in whalebone and lace that come slinking through my door. Or, as is more often the case these days, femmes fatales in Jimmy Choos and Armani knockoffs. The pipsqueak in my office is new, and I’m not sure I like his brand of new. He’s young, maybe a rawboned eleven, but he has the stare of someone three times his age and something twice as dangerous.

Not here to sell cookies, that much is obvious. I saw him take a firm, hard look at the door, take in the sign I’d chiseled on the frosted glass: JOHN PERSONS, P.I.

“I said”—he plants his piggy bank on my desk like a statement of intent—“I want you to kill my stepdad.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because he’s a monster.”

You learn things in this line of work. Like how to read heartbeats. Any gumshoe can tell when a darb’s lying, but it takes a special class of sharper to differentiate between two truths. Whatever the reality is, this kid believes the spiel he’s selling, marrow and soul. In his eyes, his secondary sad sack of an old man’s a right monster.

I let a smile pull at my mouth. “Kid. I don’t know what you’ve been hearing. But I’m a P.I. You want a life taker, you gotta go somewhere else.”

Right on cue, a whisper crackles in the back of my skull, like a radio transmission from the dead, shaky and persistent: wait wait wait.

The kid doesn’t even flinch. “You kill when you have to.”

I knot my arms over my chest. “When I have to. Not when a gink with a bag full of change tells me to. Big difference.”

A muscle in his cheek jumps. Brat doesn’t like it when someone tells him no. But to his credit, he doesn’t break form. He sucks in a breath, nice and slow, before exhaling. Class act, this one. If I ever meet his folks, I’m going to have to tip a trilby to them.

“Well,” he announces, cold as a crack-haired shyster on the courtroom floor. There are plenty of problems with the body I’m wearing, but we tend to see eye to eye on this brand of vernacular. “You have to.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because if you don’t, my brother and I are going to die.”

Please.

I sigh, feel the air worm out of my lungs. I could do with a cigarette right now, but it’d be impolite, not to mention stupid, to leave a client hanging about this dive. No telling if he’s going to stay put, or if he’s going to paw through places he don’t belong. And I couldn’t afford that.

So, I shake out a few folders instead, rearrange a stack of papers. Just to give my hands something to do. “Tell your mom to call child services. The bulls will have your old man dancing on air in no time.”

“I can’t.” He shakes his head, curt-like. “He did something to my mommy. And he’ll do something to the police, too. I know it. Please. You’re the only one who can help.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because you’re a monster too.”

Well. This got interesting. I crook a finger at him, beckon the midget closer. He doesn’t hesitate, scoots right up to the edge of the desk and tilts his head forward like I’m some favorite uncle about to ruffle his hair. I take a whiff. Drink his scent like a mouthful of red.

—black and animal bile, copper and cold springwater, herbs and life of every dimension, almost enough to hide the stink of cut-open entrails, of muscles split and tethered to unimaginable dreams, a composition of offal and spoor and predator breath—

“This is some bad shit you’ve gotten mixed up with there.”

“I know.” He fixes his eyes to mine. You could carve Harlem sunsets with that look he’s wearing. “Will you take the job?”

Wehavetowehavetowehaveto.

Persistent as bear traps, those two. I smile through my teeth and the pleas that won’t stop pounding in my head. “Kid, I don’t think I have a choice.”

• • • •

Croydon’s a funny place these days. I remember when it was harder, when it was chiselers and punks, knife-toting teenagers and families too poor to make it anywhere else in grand old London, when this body was just acres of hurt and heroin, waiting to stop breathing. Now Croydon’s split down the middle, middle-class living digging its tentacles into the veins of the borough, spawning suits and skyscrapers and fast food joints every which way. In a few years, it’ll just be another haunt for the butter-and-egg men. No room for the damned.

Home, sighs my ghost.

“No,” I correct him, adjusting the folds of my collar with a careful little motion. “Not anymore.”

I roll my shoulders, stretch to my full height, cartilage popping like a tommy gun. The cold feels good, real good, a switchblade chill cutting deep into the cancer of a thousand years’ nap. Shading my eyes with a hand, I check the address the kid had chicken-scrawled on a receipt. Close enough to walk, and about a block down from this old Caribbean place I remember from the ’90s.

I light my first cigarette of the decade. Inhale. Exhale. Let my lungs pickle in tar and tobacco before starting down the worn-down road. It doesn’t take long before I get to my destination. The house is a dump. Crushed between council estates, it sits in a row of identical structures, a thin slant of property like a hophead drooping between highs.

“Anyone home?” I bang on the door.

The wood creaks open, revealing a scared-looking bird and the reek of stale booze. “Who are you?”

“School authorities.”

She stiffens. “What do you want?”

Smoke leaks from between my teeth as I flash a grin, all shark. “I’m here about your son’s attendance records. The school board’s not happy.”

“I’m sorry—”

I don’t let her finish. Instead, I wedge a foot through the gap and shoulder the door open, knocking the latch free. The broad scuttles back, alarmed. I can see the cogs in her head wheeling as I swagger in: what’s this shamus doing dripping rain in her foyer? As she slots together an objection, I slice in between.

“So, what’s the deal here, sister? You making the runt work sweatshops or something?”

“Excuse me?” She’s staring. They always do. These days, it’s all bae and fleek, bootylicious selfies and cultural appropriation done on brand. That puts me in a weird linguistic space, with my chosen vocabulary. I mean, I could embrace the present, but I feel a responsibility to my meat’s absentee landlord.

“Your son.”

Her eyes glitter, dart away like pale blue fish.

“Well?” I press, smelling advantage, blood in brine.

“I wouldn’t do something like that to my special boy.”

“Yeah?” I champ at my cigarette, bouncing it from one corner of my mouth to the other. There’s a pervasive smell in the hallway. Not quite a stench, but something unpleasant. Like the remnants of a molly party, or old sex left to crust on skin. “What about his old man? He working the kid? That why your son isn’t showing up at school?”

The broad twitches, shoulders scissoring back, spine contracting. It’s a tiny motion, one of those blink-and-you-lose-it tells, but oh, do I catch it. “My fiancé doesn’t involve our sons in hard labor.”

“Uh-huh.” I rap ash from my cigarette and grin like the devil come to dine on Georgia. “Mind if I look around?”

“I really don’t think—”

You gotta love the redcoats. Americans, they’re quick to tell you to make with the feet. But the Brits? It just ain’t in them to be rude. I take one last, long drag before I stub out my smoke in the aging carpet and start deeper into the house, the bird’s complaints trailing behind like a slither of organs.

The stink grows stronger: less human, more maritime malfeasance. A reek of salt and hard use, of drowned things rotten with new life. An old smell, a childhood smell. I walk my fingertips across the moldering wallpaper, black-blotched like some abused housewife. Under my touch, visions bloom.

Ah.

“Where’s the mister?”

“I’m sorry? I don’t see how any of this is—”

“—my business?” I interrupt, the house’s memories still greasing my palate. “You want to know how this is my business?”

“Yes, I—”

I spin on a heel and bear down on her, all six feet of me on five-feet-nothing of her. I breathe her scent in, eggy and slightly foul, a barely concealed aftertaste. “My business is determining if you’re solely responsible for the stories we’ve been hearing, or if your man is equally culpable. Now, you look like a smart broad. I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at here. If you want to take full responsibility for the shit that’s gone down, be my guest. But if you’d rather I give you a fair shake, you’ll tell me where your honey is so I can ask some questions.”

She flinches like I’d clip a dame of her size, mouth slumping under its own weight. “He’s out. He’s working at the brickworks.”

I glide my tongue along the back of my teeth, counting each stump before I start again. “Where?”

Silence. A lick of chapped, bloodless lips.

“Sister, here’s some free advice. Whatever mess you’re in, you should clean it up and get out.”

“Excuse me? I—”

I cock a bored stare. “You got a mug like a boxer. You want the same for your boys?”

Her fingers twitch to her face. I’m lying, of course. The thing wearing her sweetheart was careful. If there are teeth marks, they’re secreted beneath secondhand hems, pressed into spaces sacred to lovers. But guilt is a funny kind of magic.

I watch in silence as she gropes the cut of her jaw, the line of her nose, features spasming with every circuit, every new or imagined fault. By the time we make eye contact again, her gaze is frayed, wild with visions of things that don’t exist. I tilt my head.

“I think you should—” she declares at last.

I stab my tongue against the inside of a cheek and cluck in disapproval. “I shouldn’t do anything, sister. You, though, you need to give me the address of your man’s workplace.”

“Fine.”

The skirt punches a bony finger at the window, straight at the factory at the end of the road. It’s an ugly thing. Most places in London, the businesses will try to blend in with the neighborhood, mix a little effort into the mortar, so to speak. But this was the brickworks, the smoke-clogged uterus of the English capital. It was never meant to be beautiful. And frankly, it ain’t. The building in the distance, with its boneyard of chimneys, its cellblock windows, is like the corpse of a god that’s been left to rot, picked-over ribs swarming with overall-wearing insects. “That one there?”

She nods.

It catches her off guard when I turn and show myself out. Almost, she calls out to me. I can hear it in the way her breath shortens and snags on the edge of a doubt, nervous, her voice a frayed little thread. But I don’t look back, don’t slow. Not even when I hear the shuffle of slippers on linoleum, a sound like wait and please come back. Just grab the door and yank it shut behind me, the rain painting my trenchcoat the classic, glimmering grays of London.

2: THIS SIDE OF THE LAW

I stroll into the factory with the post-lunch crowd. The boys, plump on bad lager and cheap Indian takeout, don’t give me a second look. Not when I peacock through the front gate, brash as new brass, and certainly not when I trespass into employees-only territory. Good. I’d have felt bad for their molls if we busted the furniture together. This might be the twenty-first century, a time when dames can hustle as well as any testicle-swinging Joe, but London’s no place for a one-income family.

Quietly, I cut through the complex, past rows of heavy machinery, down cramped corridors foul with rust and old sweat. The walk’s longer than I would have liked, so I take it easy, all the while dreaming about a pair of wheels. Something discreet. London’s not a city for muscle cars, not with its narrow streets and treacherous corners, its ant hive of interchangeable lives. Maybe a Tesla. Who knows?

As the factory workers clump around their stations, muscles and mouths straining with the effort of living out another twenty-four hours of urban misery, I find my way into a rat’s nest of an office.

I scan the room. There’s trash everywhere: documents staked to the old asbestos walls, mountains of cardboard boxes, all crisscrossed with arteries of takeout containers, newspapers, and half-empty beer bottles. At the heart of it, a slim little man sits swaying to Ella Fitzgerald.

“You the foreman?”

“Yeah.” He turns in his seat. He has the drooping jowls of a bulldog, a broad forehead, a drunk’s eyes, heavyset, yellow from a liver he’s tortured since he was eleven. There’s something clever to the cut of his mouth, though, like he’s in on a cosmic joke and about to cash out big on the punch line. “Who’s asking?”

I light a cigarette. “Me. I got some questions for you, Mr. Foreman.”

“And I’ve got some questions for you, Mr. Me.” Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh. He laughs like he’s reading the words out of a textbook, staccato and stilted. The foreman raises his eyebrows as he subsides, as though demanding accreditation for his humor. His accent is industrial, a Liverpool drawl. “Who are you and who the fuck do you think you are barging into my office like this? You made an appointment with Tessa?”

Smoke tendrils from my grin. “Like you could afford a Moneypenny.”

His eyes harden.

Before he can retort, I move, one hand braced against the thrust of a hip like an extra from an old gangster reel. The foreman doesn’t question the gesture, doesn’t challenge it. It’s clear that under that ugly mug, there’s a thumbtack brain—sharp, small, and specialized—and it recognizes a man who means business.

“What ya want?” His mouth peels into a scowl.

“Information.”

Fifteen feet, ten feet. Five. I almost lose my cool when I break into the man’s personal space. It was here, was in him, is still in him. Its scent clots hot in his every exhalation: febrile, fecund, dried plasma and mold.

“What kind of information?” he asks as he hooks an ankle over a knee. Under the bobbing orange light, his neck looks scabrous, scaled, the flesh a pebbled gray where it should have been pink.

“I’m looking for a guy. McKinsey.” The name flares in memory, the syllables disgorged by a kid too young for his eyes. “His fiancée said he works for you. Got some questions for him.”

“McKinsey? I know him. Good guy.” A prickle of defensiveness, a calcification of his lidded stare. “Works hard, drinks hard. A little too hard, sometimes. Maybe. But then again, which of us don’t? Either way, good man. What’s your beef with him?”

“Mm.” I breathe in, press the smoke against the roof of my mouth. “No beef. I’m looking to clarify a few things.”

“What things?” His throat flutters, expands.

“Things.”

In his agitation, his skin splits, spreads to frame a moist blue eye, cataracted and lethargically sullen. The foreman doesn’t notice and I do my best to call no attention to it.

“What. Things,” he gurgles, fists clenched, cheeks palpitating. Another eye opens in his neck, bigger than the first, more alert. It bulges against its restraints, ticking madly as more follow in a fusillade of wet noises.

“Things,” I repeat impatiently.

I’m too old to be intimidated, but not old enough to be inoculated against a sense of righteous offense. The thing in his neck is a blasphemy, a mutagenic outrage of flesh, an insult to man and beast and all of us that came crawling out of the ocean before. As I breathe in air syrupy with spores, it hits me: how many more in here are infected? The foreman can’t be the only one. How many others are carrying it under their skin like a case of the clap? How many are changing under the surface as they shit, fuck, and backslap their way through the borough?

Disgust sours my mouth.

“McKinzzzey—” the foreman buzzes angrily. He begins heaving himself upright, slowly, dramatically, like a man twice his weight class.

I shove him back down. “Sit.”

“McKinzzzey is a good employe-ee-e. Zzzo, you can fuck—”

“Sit down, tough guy.”

Mouths begin to dilate under his jawline, smacking moistly, just lips and tongues.

“McKinzzey—”

There’s a humming in the air now. Too low to hear but not to feel, ants burrowing in muscle fibers. The hairs on the back of my neck rise.

“Last chance—”

The noise becomes a whisper, a hiss, a celebration, a roar, a black surf breaking on the glaciers of an old, decaying world. It sutures itself into syllables, strings of sounds that could almost be called words if you’re feeling generous.

Gela Vt’ yah fhma’a

“Shut—”

G’ukhyoi y’okhyoi fhokhu

“—the fuck up!”

I jam my cigarette into one of the eyes in his neck, feel membrane pop and aqueous humor drool between my fingers. I press harder and the foreman screams convulsively, a shriek that would have brought the factory running if it weren’t for my hand over his mouth.

He thrashes in my grip, but I don’t let go. It’s only when the fight has gone out of him, when ululation thins to a whimpering moan, when I feel the cigarette connect with vertebrae, that I lean down to hiss: “You going to behave?”

He nods and gasps air through the hole in his neck.

“You going to stop pretending you’re some kind of hard-ass? You going to cooperate?”

He bobs his head again. The eyes at his neck foam with tears and blood.

“Good.” I pull away, still holding the sodden cigarette. “Now, tell me everything about McKinsey.”

The foreman stutters through his exposition, a beaten dog, hand closed over the weeping injury I’d left him with. Nothing he says surprises me. McKinsey was your typical working-class lug. Liked drinking with the lads, liked meat, football, and especially fresh skirts, the kind of girls barely on the right side of legal. Real Alpha Joe. Up till a few years ago, at least, when the London riots burned through the city.

He apparently started getting real revolutionary then. Head in the clouds. Started talking about transcending boundaries, being more than just meat perambulating through life. The boys thought it was hysterical at first, but then more and more people began paying attention to what he said. McKinsey went from mascot to blue-collar messiah, summoning his mates to a future electric with 4K televisions and upper-class eating.

“He ever talk about his kids?”

The foreman, voice and appearance mostly restored to normal, doesn’t quite flinch. “Sometimes.”

“What he say?”

“Typical shit. Loves them. Thinks they’re gorgeous. Says he’s lucky they’re not girls, or he’d have to share one day.” And he laughs, a rat-ta-ta-ta kind of noise this time around, like knuckles banging on a locked door.

“He ever said anything weird about them?”

“No.” Yes, says the cock of his head, his sideway stare, his halfway grin. The foreman drops his hand from his neck and begins swiping his fingers along his trousers. Already, the wound is closing.

I roll the options in my head. “Can you get him to come into the office?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Here, I see his eyes light up. Satisfaction laps at the twist of his scowl, even as he thins his gaze. “Because he just finished his shift.”

I’m not even surprised. “Next time you see him, tell him Mr. Persons is looking for him. If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll come calling at my door.”

I leave the address to my office, scribbled on a blue square of cardboard. The foreman says nothing, just keeps his stare pointed forward, face mangled by hate, some of it his, some of it borrowed. I start toward the door, then hesitate at the threshold. Under my rage and my disgust, there’s an urge to put this horror right. No one deserves this slow dissolution of muscle and self. I’ve seen his affliction. I know where it’s going. I know how it ends.

“Hey. You.”

“What?” The foreman’s a lump of coal at his desk. Already, he’s whipping out a bottle of cheap hooch. No glass. Just a half-emptied reservoir of liquid numbness.

“You really think McKinsey’s a good guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Even knowing what you do about the moron?”

“Listen, buddy.” A cork is popped and the room floods with a cleaning-fluid aroma. He takes a loud swig. “Every man’s got a little bad in him. If we spend all our time judging people for one wrong, we wouldn’t have enough left over to get on with it. Besides, there are worse people out there.”

“I see.”

It’s all I need to hear. I set my last cigarette between my teeth, light it up, and turn the corner. The foreman and his new pal, they deserve each other, could eat each other up for all I care. When the smoke settles, I’ll come back and set fire to whatever’s still writhing on the floor.

• • • •

I find my way into the old Caribbean joint. It’s smaller than I remember. Half of it’s been transformed into a bare-bones grocery, all essentials, no luxuries. What remains is fragrant with allspice and roast chicken, a heady chiaroscuro of flavors and memories, enough to make a dead man’s mouth water.

“What can I get you?”

I look up through wet hair, still dusting my coat off, rain sluicing off my fingers. The server’s a pretty brown girl with a halo of dreadlocks and a Star Wars varsity jacket over her uniform, her smile precociously savvy. She—Sasha, declares the nameplate pinned to her breast—slants a look at me over a battered copy of Dune.

“Jerk chicken, steamed vegetables, rice and peas?”

“Sure.”

She struts into the kitchen, confident, cocky, humming a tune I almost recognize, leaving me alone in the empty restaurant. I slide into a booth and breathe out, the memory of the foreman’s debasement sitting heavy on my gut. I probably should have done something, should have slit his throat, quarantined the factory. Something. Anything.

“You want some soup while you wait, monsieur?”

“Sorry. What?”

I jolt. Somehow, the girl had managed to sneak up on me while I was contemplating my navel. Sasha wipes long pianist fingers on her apron as I gather myself, a smile hanging off one corner of her mouth. The body reacts to her proximity, not unpleasantly. An almost imperceptible quickening of the pulse, an increase in temperature. Who knew pretty dames could still give the old man a rise? “I asked if you wanted some soup.”

“No. Thank you. I—”

“It’s free.”

That brings me up short. “Pardon?”

“It’s free,” she repeats, a laugh gilding the rich, smooth contralto of her voice. “On the house. No extra charge. We had some left over from last night, and you look cold.”

“I—”

“Don’t worry.” Something jagged touches her eyes, but it stays for only a fraction of a breath before she smooths it under a practiced smile. “I’m not hitting on you. Don’t even swing that way.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Mm-hmm.” Her self-assurance untangles a laugh from my chest. It turns into a cough partway through, but it doesn’t matter. Sasha answers in kind, expression bright, like she knew from the start where it’d all end. “So, soup? Yes? No?”

“Yes.”

She nods, firm, a bull passing judgment. Having acquired consent, the girl leaves again. She’s not gone long. When she returns, her arms are laden with food. I try to stand up, try to take the tray from her, but she tuts me back into my seat.

The spread is divine, voluminous, a king’s ransom in meat and crisp, crackling skin, in sauce and spice and spring greens. The soup is the lightest offering, delicately sweetened, a composition of pumpkin and onions, roast marrow left to steep. As I devour my meal, the girl folds into a seat.

“You look like a man who hasn’t eaten in years.”

I flick a glance up, suckling my fingers clean. “You could say that.”

The answering smile is distracted, distant. I watch as she scrutinizes the bare wall opposite our table, one arm slouched over the back of her chair, the other flat on the table, fingers drumming an irregular beat. Then, without warning, her attention swings back and her smile broadens into mischief.

“What are you doing in Croydon, mister? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

“I’m here about a case.”

“A case? That’s exciting.” Her eyes gleam, feline, impish. “What kind of case?”

“The details, as they say in the business, are confidential. But I could use any help I can get. I need the dirt on a guy.” It’s barely been five minutes, but I’ve bulldozed through half the food already. Her question barely invites a pause. “A man named McKinsey. He lives about a block, two blocks from here. You might have seen him.”

“Don’t know the name. But I might know the face?”

I shake my head. “Haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the guy, so I can’t tell you what his mug looks like.”

“How do you not have a picture of him?”

“Long story, sister.” I put my cutlery down and steeple my fingers. “Anyway. McKinsey’s a family man, if that helps. Got a skirt that’s about five feet, real skinny. Blond. Blue eyes. At least one boy. About ten, maybe? Mediterranean-looking.”

Her expression alters. She recognizes the description. There’s no mistaking it. Not in the flash in her big, brown eyes, or the way the muscles in her neck gather and tense, her jaw closing with an audible clack. When she finally speaks, it’s with intense suspicion. “Yeah. I know him.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Nothing. He’s bad business. That’s all you need to know.”

“Does he come in here regularly? Does he have friends? A favorite order—”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

She breathes out, and I catch it then: the ghost of its scent, winnowed down into something fleeting, barely there, but still unmistakable, camphor and burnt pine wood, leavened with dried gore.

I make a leap. “Did he hurt you?”

And land on the money. Sasha’s eyes grow round, glacial. “I think we’re done talking, monsieur.”

“He did, didn’t he?”

“I don’t—”

I snake a hand out and trap her wrist.

—a simian jaw, cheeks too wide and face too ugly, a lizard stare, heavy, hanging with sins. He won’t let her go, holds her elbow with a dog’s death grip on its favorite bone.

“What are you doing?” Her blood thumps against my skin, hummingbird shivers.

She pushes him. He slaps her. Her head ricochets backward. Impact. A crack of pain blurs her vision to red. She looks up as he wrenches her forward. Up into eyes—there are so many of them, like constellations, like unclean galaxies—and more eyes, a nightmare of sclera and blue.

“Get out of my head.” The images break against Sasha’s voice, the sound filled with an indisputable authority. Her memories contract to a pinpoint smear of light. I’m flung out even as she pitches back in her seat, half-rearing, a snake enraged, chair screeching. Sasha’s eyes flare wide. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“Someone who wants to help.”

“I didn’t ask for your help.”

“You want him to do that again? To someone else?”

Sasha shudders like a frog someone had rigged up to electrodes, limbs spasming without direction. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t fucking presume anything about me. You—” She swings her head, left, right, left, an animal prepared to charge. “God. You think you’re better than him? Than them? Just because you’re trying to help?”

“I’m not just trying to help. I told you. I’m on a—”

“Case.” She finishes for me. In her anger, her t’s disintegrate, her sentences accelerate, frenzied, halfway to local creole. “And that makes it better? Because you’re doing it for money?”

“I—”

“You want something, bruv? You ask. You ask me like I’m a person. When I say no, you fuck off. What you do to someone’s head and what you do to their meat, it isn’t much different, you hear? You don’t take what you’re not given. Get me?”

“Yes.”

Her rebuke knocks the wind from me. I remember when somebody else said that to me. You don’t take what you’re not given. I had laughed, then. But I’d asked. And he laid open every room of his mind, every chamber of his being, and it was better, better than anything else I’d experienced and any body I’d ever inhabited.

I scan Sasha’s features, distorted by rage. Briefly, I flirt with the idea of an explanation, of telling her that this transference of thought, this neural osmosis, is as intrinsic to my being as breathing is to hers, that it wasn’t an attack, just circumstance, that I’m better than this accidental violation, and this form is proof.

But it would have sounded like an excuse, because that’s exactly what it was. She was right. I shouldn’t have done that. So, I hold my tongue instead, watch her as she sits with the bridge of her nose crushed between fingertips.

After a long while, she breathes out sharp and slumps, arms tucked under her breasts.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she says at last, slow, guarded.

“Them?”

“Those.” Sasha repeats, picking through the words like a minefield. “Immortals. Dead Ones. Star-spawn. Elder Things. Great Old Ones.”

The last name dries my mouth. “I’m not an Old One. Not even close.”

Sasha holds my stare before she drops her chin in a surly nod. “Okay.”

“But you’re not completely wrong.”

Our eyes clinch. I can practically hear the question, lying subcutaneous beneath the silence, held in check by propriety. The scholastic longing in her gaze almost tempts me into exposition, penance for my misdemeanor. But I don’t. Some stories, you keep in the deep.

“How . . . how did you know I was different?”

A shoulder ripples upward. “How do you know the sky’s blue? It’s like that. Like the knowledge that comes with breathing, with knowing when you’re hungry, when you’re cold. Exactly like that.”

The words slip from her, one after another, and when they’re gone, Sasha simply stops. A beat. And she breathes: “You really want to know about the guy?”

“If you’re willing.”

Her mouth crooks a rueful smile. “He isn’t that special. Lots of people like him these days.”

“What?”

Sasha drags a nervous eye over the restaurant before she speaks again, a finger scratching at her collarbone. “Been like that since the riots a few years ago. When I was little, I’d see them once every few years or so, tall and too thin. Always smelling like saltwater. Like my Nan. But since the riots? They’ve been everywhere, brother.”

“De—” I catch myself. “The ones like your Nan?”

“Sometimes,” she replies, too lost in memory to pounce on my slip. “Usually, they’re a bunch of chavs. Loud, crazy-like. Their skin”—Sasha half-clenches a fist in the air, fingers twitching, features contorted, as though she were considering the elasticity of something repulsive—“always look diseased. Psoriasis, I want to say? One of those. I don’t know. But yeah. Real ugly, you know?”

“Like McKinsey.”

She makes a face. “Like McKinsey.”

I push to my feet, palming the back of my neck, Sasha’s memories a mouthful of bile, souring my tongue. “I—about earlier. I’m sorry.”

“I want to say I forgive you. But I can’t. When you were in my head, I was in yours. I know about the man you’re wearing. I know what you are.” She shutters an eye, her smile tense. “Sorry. I know you don’t mean harm, so there’s that.”

The bell above the door chimes silver as the street disgorges a Chinese family—a mom in a pinstripe suit, a patriarch in tweed, two and a half kids, all solemn as a funeral—into the restaurant. Sasha turns, hand smoothing through her hair, a professional smile, nuclear in its brilliance, already reattached to her face. “Be with you in a second!”

She looks back at me. “You want to make it up to me? You don’t stop where the money ends. You find out where they’re all coming from and you take them out. You hear?”

Under the weight of her ferocity, I can only nod.

3: RAW DEAL

We have to.

“Why?” I demanded, when his cries were too loud to ignore.

Because we are the only ones that can.

• • • •

You know how they say you never forget how to ride a bike? Magic’s like that. Deeper, even. The knowledge of it inks itself on the inside of your bones, as does the practice, the methodology of execution. You can’t unlearn it any more than you can unlearn the symbiosis of ventricle and aorta.

I stroke the razor across my arm. Three deep welts: one for every god devoured, every world forgotten. Blood wells, bruise-green, runnelling off my skin and onto the city map, branching into a thousand smaller tributaries, a million cilia to puncture the strands of hair I’d pinched from Sasha and the foreman.

I breathe.

In my head, a ghost squirms and shivers.

A hissing noise froths and builds, builds and froths. The follicles thrash like something alive, even as the blood continues to creep, mapping itself to the blueprint of the city, hue altering, shading to orange.

“Oh, kid. What did you get yourself into?”

There were entire streets outlined in ochre, neighborhoods throbbing lymph-yellow. I fumble for the cigar in my drawer and ignite the bulbous tip with a flick of my fingers. As a rule, I don’t like spending power, but the body, the body wouldn’t let me rest until I did something. Anything, rattled the man that once lived in this skull, rags and bones and memory, but somehow still stubborn as capitalism.

So, I did my voodoo and he kept his part of the bargain, settling to uneasy dreams once more, even as the flesh frayed and stuttered. That’s the other problem with power. It likes things its own way, and very often, that doesn’t include maintaining the cohesion of genetic structure.

The flame shimmers blue and oily, oozing over my knuckles, before I dismiss it with another snap. The map’s not done transforming yet. I breathe out smoke rings as it continues to change, darkening to pus, to abattoir colors teeming with rot and warning. I was wrong. There isn’t just one kid to save. There’s an entire city waiting to be pulled out of the fire.

I drum my fingers against the desk. I hate being wrong.

The blood begins to congeal, hardening into reams of rusty cornelian. A good man would have started planning for a counterassault, a one-person crusade against the encroaching dark. That man wouldn’t be me. I do what I’m paid to do, and no one’s cut me a check to save the Big Smoke.

Or the girl from the restaurant.

Please.

Another breath of too-expensive tobacco. I can feel her presence, saltwater and old libraries, glowing like a miniature sun. Her existence is a protest, a rebellion, a clarion demand to bend the world into a better place. People like her either ride the space elevator to the constellations or get cut down in dark alleyways.

As it stood, the second seemed more likely.

“Not my job,” I tell the dark office, piled high with the accouterments of my profession, ashtrays and brown folders stacked to the ceiling.

Please, sighs my specter again.

Damn thing is never happy. I get as far as finishing the cigar before I’m calling on the old ways again, the power coming eager and exultant, a pup on its first hunt. And this time, it sings, pure as silver, as it travels my veins. Like it already knows there won’t be a focus, won’t be a totem, no physical thing to constrain its joyous kinesis.

“I’ll decide once I know what we’re facing,” I tell the emptiness. The ghost shudders in acknowledgment.

The world skews, splits into fractals of possibility, an endless concerto of maybes and may-have-beens, every possible variation of the future laid out like a feast. I find the thread I’m looking for, and my vision detonates.

• • • •

“You.”

“Me.”

“What are you doing here?” Sasha glares at me from behind a metal door grill, her uniform swapped for an oversized T-shirt and pyjama pants that lap at the floor. Behind her, I can see a pair of kids walking plush animals across a green carpet and a television playing Peppa Pig.

“We need to talk.”

She slides a step back. “No.”

“This won’t take a minute.”

“I told you. I don’t—”

“It’s—” I slide my hand between the bars, pivot it palm up. “Please.”

“What do you want?”

“To help.”

Silence. She jerks her chin upward, a command to resume. Her hair has been gathered into a knot above her head, exposing the long stem of her throat. Similar to the foreman’s, it’s ridged with lesions, puckered like mouths.

“I know he—” I hesitate. Up till now, delicacy hasn’t really been a part of my job description. I feel like a bull in an antique store. “He left more than a psychological mark. He—”

Sasha thins her mouth into a gash and crosses her arms over her chest. Somewhere, a door slams open, disgorging hip-hop and drunken shouting, a pack of teenagers with long, lean faces and hungry looks. I glance sidelong and watch until they’re swallowed by the elevator.

“Look, sister. I’m not good with words. That’s not my forte, you know what I’m saying? My point . . . my point is he did something to you, and I can help fix some of that. You just need to trust me.”

Her lips ruck into a frown. “I—”

“Please.”

I don’t know if it’s my voice, or the way I stare at her with my heart held up bleeding, or even if it’s just a lapse in her anger. But she relents and takes my hand.

Like I’d said to her, I’m not one for a fine touch. I’m a man. I barrel through life, guns blazing, asking questions rarely. For her, though, I’ll dig through my guts for the right approach. I close my grip over hers and reach in.

Sasha sighs, the tiniest exhalation of relief.

The thing inside her isn’t as settled as the life festering in the foreman, a viscous intruder loosely conjoined with her lungs, her liver. Whatever the case, whether accident of heritage or stupid luck, it isn’t hard to excise. Using nerves will-sharpened into scalpels, I flense it from membrane and organ, carefully pare it from nucleotide and sinusoid, cell by cell, atom by atom. Through it all, Sasha stands and shivers like a leaf in the gale.

When I’m done, we break contact, her infection migrated to a squirming in my throat.

“What was that?”

I withdraw my mitt and try not to cough out the phlegm of my labor, cramming both hands into my pockets. “What I promised to do.”

Sasha parts her mouth and then closes it again, a nod replacing whatever question she had aborted. “Thank you.”

“It’s the least I could do.” I nod, my voice watery from my efforts. “Nothing wrong with having a heart. No need to pretend machismo.” She laughs, more freely than I’ve heard, fingers pressed to the space between her clavicles.

I wait, half expecting her to ask for more, to erase the memories of her encounter with McKinsey. To my slight surprise, she doesn’t, only turns to fix a warm eye on the children in the apartment. When she speaks again, it’s with a fresh, unvarnished joy.

“Thank you.”

I nod again, gruff-like. Dames don’t generally give me this kind of treatment. Terror or predatory interest, those are the usual suspects. But this happiness? New.

I could get used to it.

“You’re welcome.”

In the movies, this would be where the hero and the dame chew face. Sasha is no happy lady, and I don’t remember the last time this body had dreamed of bare skin. So, before she can speak again, I walk away, a new poison in my system, the sounds of the council estate bouncing around me.

I light the cigarette.

“Hope you like smoke, chump.”

• • • •

It screams when I spit it into the sink. In the harsh fluorescent glare, it resembles a living bezoar, hair and tissue material and gobbets of dusky phlegm. There are no limbs, no discernible features. Yet somehow it continues to wail and howl, the sound muffled by succulent layers of stolen fat and skin.

I nudge it with the end of a toothbrush. It twists in place, pseudopodia forming to attach to the plastic, but the weight of its body prevents it from actual motion.

“Ugly thing, ain’t ya? Just like your dad.”

I contemplate the squirming mass for a minute before I start mashing it into the drain, one flailing tumor at a time. Its agonized ululations sound strangely like a new beginning, like the birth of heroism.

: INTERLUDE

I don’t do it, of course. The skirt’s problems are her own. I have too many of my own dilemmas, and a bounty on a stepdad to reap. Nice as it is, good karma don’t pay the bills.

4: I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES

“Hey, short round.”

The kid barrels from the gate and out of a cloud of similarly dressed peers. The schoolyard is a riot of parents and cars, school buses and teachers, a scattering of older siblings, and a few vagrants like me. One dame shoots me a frigid look as I exhale plumes of smoke, drifting serene over the heads of the children. I ignore her.

“My stepdad isn’t dead yet,” the kid snarls. His school uniform is rumpled, mud-limned; the tie sits undone like a hangman’s noose snipped off mid-use. “Why isn’t he dead yet?”

“Calm down. I’m working on it.”

“No!” The kid stomps his foot and then practically flies from the pavement, like he burnt his sole against the asphalt.

The temper tantrum seems to have surprised the kid. He scowls at the ground for a minute before he turns his eyes up at me, David in the shadow of his Goliath. There is no fear. The kid crosses his arms over his xylophone chest, squares his stance like a tired boxer. The fact I’ve got about three and a half feet on him doesn’t seem to worry him at all.

“Every minute—” He sucks in a breath, cheeks denting. “Every minute you waste, it’s going to cost me. You’re going to get my brother hurt. You—”

And here, his bravado snaps. Tears prick at his eyes, a treacherous wetness that he wipes aside with the back of his hand.

“He’s going to hurt James and it’s all your fault.”

The words fly like kicks, hard and loose, ugly swings with no artistry at all, just raw emotion. I keep standing here, head cocked. One of the most effective tricks in a gumshoe’s playbook is the act of silence. Wait. Let the other guy pull the trigger first. It costs you nothing, and it gets you everything.

“You finished?” I ask, after the kid subsides into a panting quiet.

He glares.

I stoop to my knees, suck down one last breath of carcinogenic fumes, and flick my cigarette stub into the bushes. Smoke fizzes out of my nostrils and through my teeth as I clamp my paws on his shoulders. He stiffens, twitches. I can feel him strain against the impulse to run.

“First things first. I don’t like being insulted, kid. When I take a job, I see it through to the end. But I do it my way, you get me? Second, I’d advise you remember that you never paid for a deadline, just a death. Big thing in business. Always set your deadlines. So, you’ve got no sway here.”

The crowd eels around us, parents and children, teachers and older sisters, whispering vague concern but little else. The world’s too full of trouble to adopt those that don’t belong to you.

“Putting all that aside, I’m going to square with you. This is bigger than you think it is. I need a bit more time—”

“We don’t have time,” he whispers raggedly.

“What do you mean, kid?”

“He—” He breathes in his courage, a long and shuddering gulp. “He’s going to hurt James bad.”

“Who’s James?”

“My little brother.” The kid curls his voice around the proclamation like he’s trying to hold it safe, trying to shelter it from whatever nightmare gave him those old-man eyes.

“Okay. I—”

“I’ve got money.” He springs into motion, scrabbling at his pockets. The kid pulls out a few grubby notes, some gum, a half-melted truffle, a single pound coin that gleams bright like a mother’s hope. Without hesitating, he crams the offerings into my face. “You can have all of it.”

“Kid.” I nudge his hand away. “It’s not enough.”

“Please.”

“That’s not what I meant. I—” I pause. I what, exactly? I didn’t know yet. That might-have-been with Sasha nagged at me like a splinter.

“Please.”

“Fine. Wouldn’t be right to have a client die on my watch.”

The kid doesn’t flinch from the implication, brightens even, a fact that makes me glad I’d said what I said. I’m beginning to get an idea about what’s going on, and the knowledge doesn’t make me happy. I roll to my feet, easy-like, and extend a hand to the kid. He stares at it for a long second, like he’s reading my fortune, before he takes hold.

“Come on, let’s get you home.”

His grip spasms tighter. “No, we’re going to get my brother.”

• • • •

The kid keeps yapping as we stroll through South Norwood, an inventory of classroom drama, personal projects, and batteries. Everything but the man he wants dead. I have slightly better luck getting him to talk about his brother (four years old, likes plush sharks and pepperoni, gets too much attention) and his biological dad (works too much, sees him too little). His mom and stepdad? Nada.

We pick up his brother about two miles from his school, a sweet-faced boy with dirty-blond hair and a thing for hugs. He doesn’t hesitate when I stretch out my arms to collect him, crashing into me like a Russian gangster’s scarred-over fist. The boy, James, shrieks his joy when I scoop him into the air.

“So, what’s yours?”

The kid looks up, expectant, his hand still caged in mine.

“Your name?” I prompt.

“Abel.”

“Abel,” I repeat, weighing the word on my tongue. “Abel. Good to meet you, Abel.”

He replies with a curt nod.

We keep walking, him, his brother, and me, a dysfunctional crew if you ever saw one. Slowly, the road begins to lose its suburban charm, the park giving way to squalor and shops, all hunkered together like they’re afraid of the morning frost. The pavement cracks, grows pockmarked with wadded food wrappers and empty beer bottles. Bars spring up along the windows like a crop of rusty ribs. A hard neighborhood. Not the worst I’d seen, but definitely no tourist town.

“Right here.” Abel points down a turning.

I oblige, James still wedged against my chest, his head drooping. And—
saltwater and silt and dead, drowned things, the too-sweet stink of meat rotting in clean muscle, old blood, cold dirt—

“Abel?” A new voice.

I blink.

My vision adjusts. There’s a man in front of us, stocky, belligerent, face too wide, brow too simian. He hits me with an appraising stare.

“So you’re the stepdad.”

I feel the kid’s hand tighten around my palm.

salt, slithering decay, the contractions of a leviathan’s ventricles, like the chanting of monks in the deep.

“Who you?”

“A friend.”

“Friend’s not good enough, mate.” He rakes his gaze over my tall frame, his mouth pursing. “I need more information than that.”

I don’t quite manage to conceal the grin, or the surge of irritation. Ignoring everything else, McKinsey’s as abrasive as I’d imagined he would be. Even if he were perfectly human, I’d still have disliked him.

“A friend”—I punctuate the word with a growl—“who has spoken to your fiancée about certain important things. A friend who is concerned about the way you’re raising these children and—”

“You from the authorities then?” He pronounces the word as “au’hori’es,” with a sharp emphasis on the bit concerning those hardworking damsels of the evening.

“In a fashion.”

He looks me over again with those porcine eyes, no doubt tabulating his chances in a fight. “Look more like a pervert to me.”

“Funny you’d be the one to say that.”

He goes on the offensive immediately, flexes his shoulders wide, takes a step forward, chin tipped up in challenge. The smell is overwhelming. It crawls through my nose, my pores, my mouth, putrid and wet, like fish forgotten in the sun.

“What’d you say, muppet?”

“What do you think I said?”

Against my chest, James stirs, fingers digging into my coat. He doesn’t turn around. I cock a grin at the ass, and try not to think of blood nearly congealed, spilling droplet by droplet onto the limestone floor, singing counterpoint to a hymn I used to know like the beating of my pulse.

The man changes tack. “Just what do you think you’re doing to my boys?”

“Taking them home.”

“Your home?” Under his jawline, eyelids palpitate like gills.

Gela Vt’ yah fhma’a

“I’ve got to hand it to you, bub.” I slide James back down to the ground and push the kids behind me. They cluster behind my legs, one for each limb. I straighten, and the man leans back. “I don’t know many guys who’d immediately project themselves on strangers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” That lizard stare again, dumb and animal and vicious.

I bare my teeth. Under skin and sinew, something rouses itself, unknotting joint by joint by joint. Shlock. Shlock. Shlock. Under the surface, bones reknit and sharpen, become bladed with purpose. I shift my stance, trying to make room for new edges being nursed under the epidermis. “What do you think I mean?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he drops to a crouch and reaches out big, work-coarsened hands.

“Abel, James. Come here.”

“No,” Abel growls.

“Abel.”

“I don’t want to go with you!”

“Come on, Abel. You don’t want to make your mummy worried, now, do you?”

“Mummy” proves to be the magic word. Both kids seize up, Abel practically digging his nails through my trousers. James emerges first, face ruddy with guilt. He stands limp as he lets the man gather him up like a lump of washing. Abel holds out for a few seconds longer, but he gives in at the end, making a strangled noise before he stomps forward, hands bunched into fists. I don’t stop them. There’s no bull in the world that’d stand with this pound-shop gumshoe if I got in between parent and kids. Not right now, at least. Not without evidence.

The man grins, victorious, smug as a cat with a mouthful of canary. Without a word, he turns to leave, a paw rested on Abel’s mess of curls. The kid shoots me a fierce, wordless glare before he slouches down the walkway, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the cold and the susurrus of flesh reassembling, a hiss like the crash of the surf.

• • • •

The hardest part about being a P.I. is the stakeouts. Hours of motionless scrutiny broken up by mouthfuls of bilgewater coffee and stale fried dough, a stillness that eats at the mind until it gibbers for stimuli or sleep, whichever comes first.

Luckily for me, I don’t really need either.

I tap my cigarette against the outside of the car, raining ash on the road. Something about the encounter with the stepdad felt off. To be fair, the whole case was a nightmare, but there was something about that meeting in particular, something about the interaction that kept itching at the back of my skull. I’d spent the entire night mapping it out, trying to exhume the logic in my own unease, but I couldn’t work it out.

I’d briefly considered the possibility that the kid was setting me up. But those eyes wouldn’t lie. He hated his stepfather, hated him like Hitler hated the face in the mirror. That much was clear. He wouldn’t be working with the mook. There was no way.

So, what then?

I chew on the inside of my cheek. I can’t abide mysteries. Give me something to punch any day of the week, something clean. An alcoholic lout who can’t keep his mitts to himself, a cheating wife. Simple, human troubles, you know what I’m saying? I’d take those any time, any hour. This shit, though?

I flick my eyes to the glove compartment. Not for the first time, I consider giving the kid a refund. I’d gotten into the detective business to escape the deepwater blues, from the songs that squirm in your veins like worms. Sure, I’d go for an easy job, sometimes, ice a monster that had gotten too big for his bed. But this?

I take another drag from my cigarette. A few hours after lunchtime, the bird emerges, a tote on each elbow, blond hair squeezed into a scraggly bun. She doesn’t wear any makeup, which should be a surprise, given the bruises flowering along her jaw. But I’m not surprised. Her face is haggard, worn through. This isn’t the first time he’s laid into her like this.

I slip out of the car as she minces down the pavement, kitten heels clicking on the stone, and keep my distance until she makes the left toward their neighborhood Tesco. Then, I close in, quiet.

“Hey, toots.”

She gives a startled, strangled scream. Jumps back about a foot, nearly colliding with a lamppost. “Are you following me?”

“No, I just happened to be in the area for some bubble and squeak.”

“What—”

“We need to talk.”

She retreats another step, eyes going round. I can see she’s thinking about calling for help, terror melting on her tongue like ice. But we both know that no one’s going to stop. Not for her.

“No.” Her voice shakes.

“You keep saying no like you have a choice here. You don’t.” I glide forward, palms out, trying to look harmless while still making a point.

It doesn’t work. The broad shudders and shrinks away, a little further, shrinking into herself. An old man hustles past us, but as expected, he doesn’t step in. And why should he? Domestic altercations are a dime a dozen. The doll notices too, and I watch her throat work as she swallows, the skin gray and rough.

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Too bad.” I glance down at my wrist, tap my watch. “We’re going to talk. And since it’s just about time for tea, we’ll do it over something to eat.”

• • • •

The café the bird picks isn’t so much a place for light bites as it is a diner, complete with plastic furniture and a bored-looking waitress in a frilly apron. The miasma of burnt bacon clings tightly to the air.

“Wot can I get you?” she demands, in between chomping on an unlit cigarette.

“Full English for me and some filter coffee,” I say.

Her attention flicks to the bird, who shakes her head and keeps her eyes low, hidden under her bangs. The waitress angles me a cold look before she shrugs and struts off.

“There’s one thing that I don’t understand,” I begin, once we’re alone again. “Why do you want to protect that man?”

“Who says that I do?”

“Your actions say you do, princess. Unless you’ve got a fetish for being knocked around, none of this makes sense to me.”

She doesn’t reply.

“I’ve talked to his boss and your sons. I—”

“I know.” Her hands spasm into white-knuckled fists.

“Yeah.” My eyes sweep over her jawline, already swollen into softness. “I can see that.”

The waitress returns, deposits my order on the table along with an unordered stack of pancakes, drizzled with caramel and banana slices, right in front of Abel’s mom. When I begin to protest, she twitches a lean shoulder, walks away without another word. Small kindnesses, I suppose. The bird doesn’t move.

“You’re going to get my boys hurt.”

“Staying with him is going to get them hurt.”

“You don’t understand.”

I sigh and cut into a stretch of sausage. The crisp skin bursts beneath my fork, grease oozing. “So, explain it to me again. Make me understand. Because I’m about two hash browns away from taking this out of your hands, you know what I’m saying?”

Her head jumps up. “No.”

The little mouse’s got some claws. Good.

“I know—I know what you’re thinking,” she begins, licking her mouth as she pulls the plate of pancakes into reach. The cutlery clatters in her grip. “I know. Trust me. I know. But it’s not that easy. I’ve been—I’ve been saving money, on the side. And it’s—”

The bird drinks a long, long gulp of air.

“It’s not easy. He gets in my head. Every time I get the nerve to tell him I’m leaving him, he—he talks me down. Makes me sit. He tells me that this is the best it’s ever going to get. And it’s true. I know it’s true. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a degree. This house, this life—where would I take the kids? Every time I try to walk away, he tells me this. Over and over. He—he—” Utensils stammer from nerveless hands. I can hear a sob rustling in her voice, trying to slough off her calm, trying to rip it up.

Now, the diner’s listening too. A pool of quiet spreads from our table. I keep my attention on the bird. To her credit, she’s still hanging on to her composure, clutching it with a hanged man’s obstinance.

“I can’t leave. I want to, but I can’t leave. I have to think about the boys, you understand? I have to. I—”

I spoon baked beans onto a slice of buttered toast and let out a gusty sigh. “Parents?”

“No. Impossible.”

I take a bite of the bread. “Social services.”

“No, no, no.” Her voice dies to a whisper. The words rattle like dice in a cup, an echo, a half-memory. No, no, no. “They wouldn’t ever let me see my babies again. No, no. No, please—”

“Easy. I’m not taking them anywhere, lady.” I extend a hand across the table. She surprises me by latching on to my fingers and squeezing harder than you’d expect from a dame of her size.

The contact sends a shotgun-jolt of images, too brief to process, but also the sensation of brittleness, of papier-mâché and porcelain. Like eggshells. Whatever McKinsey had done to her, it was different from what he’d done to the other two. The infection in the foreman, in Sasha—that was organic, tumescent and alive. This tastes like anticipation, smooth and unyielding and richly salted.

I unknot my fingers from hers, slowly. “But staying isn’t going to help them either.”

“I know, I know.”

I smell him before I see him, before the chime of a bell announces his entrance. The sickness in him. In the confines of the diner, it seems bolder, thicker, hungrier. I look up just as his silhouette falls across our table.

“What are you doing with my wife?”

“Phillip—” The bird lets out a squeak, recoiling.

“McKinsey.” I turn and loop an arm around the back of my bench, mouth cocked into a smirk. “Was wondering when you’d show up.”

“You macking on my wife?” he says again, slamming fists on the table. The plates leap. A pancake flops backward off its perch, smearing the wood below with syrup and fruit.

I cut myself some bacon. Bite. Chew. Chew. Swallow. Try to ignore the sweet tang of infected meat in the air. Wife, he said. Even though no legal department in the country would collaborate. Such a small thing, but it gets on my nerves, this unlawful ownership. Everything about the asshole gets on my nerves. The least that I can do in return is inconvenience him. “No offense, McKinsey, but I’m trying to eat here. The thought of being a worm so low he’d fuck someone else’s wife is going to make me hurl.”

He bristles instantaneously. “You saying my wife ain’t hot enough for you?”

To my surprise, his attention snaps to the bird, eyes full of a strange, fierce hate. Before anyone can react, he backhands her. The blow catches her unexpectedly. It sends her into the divider between booths, head bouncing off, a whimper puffing between her teeth. As she twitches upright, McKinsey raises his hand again.

This time I catch him.

“McKinsey, McKinsey, McKinsey.” I rise, teeth bared, as he launches into a soliloquy of curses. He pulls at my grip, but I don’t let him go, only increase the pressure. “We need to do something about your command of the language, chump. And that temper. How do you expect self-respecting gumshoes like me to tremble in your presence if all you do is repeat yourself and beat up women?”

I won’t lie. Testosterone can be a social lubricant, albeit the kind that leads two grown monsters to bump pectorals. I widen my snarl and broaden the set of my shoulders. McKinsey’s scent plucks at the tendons of my patience, already stretched taut. This close, all I want to do is
rip tear bite cut
expose the artery, flay the vein
eat chew eat tear
devour muscle, gobble up viscera,
consume until there is nothing left, until meat subsumes the weight of millennia, the bone-beat longing for vengeance, the memory of—

My nails dig into his skin, and then I breathe out. I’ve spent so long holding on to this form, so many years stubbornly human. If I lose control, it won’t be for this fat palooka. “If you want to take our problems outside, I’m more than happy to.”

McKinsey grins in return, giving another experimental tug, his skin writhing, like he has worms sandwiched between epidermis and subcutaneous fat. I don’t let go. “Tough guy, are you? Sorry. But I don’t deal with chavs.”

“I’m a chav now, am I?”

“Guys—” The waitress’s voice cuts into hearing.

“On a good day.” McKinsey cocks his head, ignoring the skirt as she saunters up. “Right now, I think you look more like a wog.”

“Guys. Seriously. Break it up. This ain’t your mama’s house, you know?”

The waitress, fearless, shoves herself between us. I feel a hand flatten against my sternum and push.

“Ah. Racial pejoratives. The last bastion of the desperate man.” I concede the space and release McKinsey’s wrist, let the waitress nudge me a step back, the urge to damage, to injure, to eviscerate still drumming the blues in my bones, syncopated to the thin shriek of rage from my host.

“I’m taking my wife home, and if I ever see you within ten feet of me, I’m gonna call the cops.” He loops his fingers around her upper arm and drags her upright, the bird limply acquiescing.

“This really what you want?” I look to her, a wilting lily under her man’s silhouette, even as the waitress folds her arms. A busboy has run up to exchange whispers with her, low and urgent, their eyes full of danger.

The bird doesn’t reply. She strokes a lock of hair from her face as McKinsey hauls her into a stuttering march.

Almost unnoticed, the busboy glides away.

“A guy like this? This the kind of role model you want for your boys? What would their real father say?”

She flinches, but keeps her silence under an expressionless mask. McKinsey glowers at us both, daring her to speak, daring me to goad her forward. In the end, just as the busboy returns with a frown and the gravity of borrowed authority, she whispers:

“Nothing.”

“Sir, we’ve spoken to the police. If you and your friends won’t leave—”

“We’re going,” says McKinsey. “Remember, if I ever see your face again, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“I thought you said there’d just be cops.”

The mook works his mouth like he’s chewing gum, cheeks inflating, deflating. At last, he spits out, “Yeah.”

I laugh in his face. “I’ll be holding you to it.”

5: BORN TO KILL

The street is getting dark, the pavement tiger-striped by halogen. It wears the fog like a dame’s best scarf, slightly jaunty, with an edge of challenge. For hours not a soul, not a rat moved, but now shapes are emerging into the chill. A housewife and her brood. A drunk in a cheap overcoat, sleeves caked in yesterday’s lunch. Gangbangers in oversized hoodies, cheeks addiction-gaunt, eyes feverish.

I wait, burn my way through the rest of my cigarettes, and open a fresh pack.

Halfway to seven, a bus unloads the kid onto the pavement. He skips the last step, pivots, extends a hand to his brother. Under the streetlight, his eye socket blooms indigo. I scowl.

From what I can tell, the bruise hasn’t done much to dampen the kid’s enthusiasm. He’s laughing as he pulls at his brother, half-jogging, half-scampering between the other kids. Together, they navigate the sidewalk, Abel always careful to march them around every crack and every obstacle in their route.

They strut to their house, knock on the door, and it opens to their stepdad’s silhouette and the wire-sliver of their mama’s figure. Instantly, their postures deflate. The kid keeps between the man and his brother, chest puffed as the lug dips down to his knees. They exchange words like prizefighters, the kid’s breath thinning with every round, until his chest shakes like a man having a seizure. When the man finally touches his head, Abel flinches but he doesn’t back down, only snakes around the adults, dragging his brother along as he goes, always keeping his body wedged in between, always glaring.

That kid’s got a lot of moxie.

I sip smoke and dig into an oil-soaked bag for my last festival. A street away, the man straightens, turns to spit something hard at the broad. She mouths an answer and he slaps her, a blow that smashes her head against the doorway, before he clomps back into the house. The chippie doesn’t follow. Not immediately. She lingers at the entryway, sinking to her knees, hands clenched around bony elbows, sad eyes searching the dark. Maybe for me, maybe for answers, maybe for nothing.

Whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t find it. After a minute, she gets up and goes inside, locks herself in with her monsters.

• • • •

I catch glimpses of the family through a birdshit-encrusted window, the skirt vacuuming, the kids darting through with toys in their hands, a vision of milquetoast normal. The stepdad’s the first to take roost in the living room, slouching into a leather recliner, beer can held like a scepter. He pops open the lid, chugs.

I salute him with a sip of my spit-warm coffee.

Asshole.

It takes about an hour, but eventually they come back to the living room, huddling around an old-fashioned CRT as Downton Abbey crackles to life.

The bird tries to fence the boys off with her body. She sits tits-out, back curved, a mouse playing at coquetry. The first time the man gestures at the boys, she moves to sit on his lap, one arm looping over his shoulders. He allows it for a while, hooking a grip around her waist, then squeezing her belly like it’s something more risqué.

But his attention doesn’t linger. They talk. The chippie evacuates, and he rises to pick up Abel and put him on his lap. He uses the boy’s thighs as a tray for his Sainsbury, all the while holding the trembling bird’s gaze. Like he’s goading her to do something about it.

She doesn’t.

• • • •

They finish eating. There’s a short argument. The bird wants the kids out of the room, it seems, but the stepdad likes his lap ornament. To my surprise, it’s the skirt who wins the squabble. I don’t know what she promised him in exchange, but it was probably big. The mook lets Abel scuttle off and slumps deeper into his chair. He flicks through television channels, looking for all the world like a bulldog with opposable thumbs, before eventually settling on a football match.

The kids don’t return. Occasionally, I see them flickering past the doorway, eyes wide, faces haunted.

• • • •

Another hour passes. Two. A bull rolls up halfway in between to rap politely on my window. We talk. In not so many words, he expresses concern that I might be a neighborhood voyeur, a vengeful ex, a foreign talent looking to knock over a local family. Plenty of those around, he tells me, apologetic, meaningful. I shrug and flash my credentials. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you accumulate spare badges.

He leaves, richer by a cigarette. I go back to my vigil. Not too long after, the living room lights blink out, and the lamps in the two rooms upstairs blink on. The blinds hiding one window are tweaked aside. I see Abel framed against a messy room, the walls a galaxy of childish drawings and posters, the cupboards stacked with toys. His brother enters, and Abel turns to hustle his sibling up their bunk bed before returning to the window. Stares out with his old-man eyes.

Whatever is coming next, I realize, he wants me to see.

• • • •

Night comes. Real night. Not just the chronological byproduct of Earth pirouetting around the sun, but a blackness that shoves the lizard brain nose first into the dirt and hisses for caution.

Nothing moves. Even the alleys sit quiet like dogs in a court of wolves, hunched down, antsy. I glance up at the second floor, bare now of soft white bodies fucking, squirming like worms in the earth.

I crank the window down. The air is wet and cold as Yahweh’s tit. In the distance, a woman howls her rage at someone who did her wrong. I hear the crack of flesh on flesh. A sob. But it’s not my business.

Then, I see the kid’s door open. I see something like a man stretched in the dark. A gleam of teeth, a glimmer of naked skin, pale as salt-scrubbed bone. It lurches toward the bunk bed.

No, anger wrenches at the body, pulls on instinct and neural pathways, a clamor of fury that supersedes all thought of reason.

Not on my watch.

Before I know it, I’m clambering out of the car and sprinting toward the door. This time, I don’t knock. Instead, I flatten my palms against the walls. The house, it shivers like a joy girl with a millionaire john as it takes me in deep.

• • • •

I swim through the concrete, thought and fibrous muscle, no longer discrete, no longer trapped between vein and vertebrae, but protean and primordial, a sludge of atoms worming through molecules.

Images metastasize, oiling together like a watercolor painting gone to rot, as I crawl up, up—
teeth and tongues and eyes, a thousand eyes, replicating without pattern, pustules of optic nerve dribbling into new maws, new sclera; invasive, furious, predatory, seeking to take take take take feast feast EAT—

A gasp of stale, musty air. I tumble out, hit the carpet with a snap of calcium, heat blooming razored along my skin. I bite down on a curse, not wanting to alert the family to my intrusion, or worse, my indignity. Wincing, I sit up and study my environment, cataloging my aches under my breath.

It’s quiet. There’s a sound that sleeping houses make. They breathe, with brick lungs and ribs of wood, creaking and groaning, snapping in places. But this house is still and pregnant as a corpse.

Pregnant? The word surprises me, even as it arrives with the rest of the thought, but only for a second. Yes. That sounds exactly right. The air is aching, swollen, like a vast entity frozen in paroxysms of birth. I unroll onto my feet and take the stairs two at a time, soundless in this taut, breathless silence. Inside me, cartilage rejoins with cartilage, tendon with sinew. And my flesh, my flesh it sings.

• • • •

Nothing.

The room that Abel shares with his brother is empty. The beds are unmade, covers and quilts strung about like guts in a murder scene. It’s clear that they were just here. Their warmth lingers in the atoms of the air. I can almost feel them, frenetic and kinetic, youth at its most volatile, a gilding of clean fire so unlike everything else that hangs in this house. But there’s nothing in the room to tell where its occupants might have gone, or if something had happened to them.

I scowl and dig incisors through my thumb, splitting the meat. Blood drips, crystallizes, slithers along the hallway, branching outward, searching, hunting.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

My grimace deepens. Something is trying to play with me, and I don’t like it. Out of habit, I settle fingers on my revolver, the metal cold and reassuring against my skin. I step out of the room and into the corridor, my back to the door. The walls seethe with my blood, a web of ink and rust, like overgrown vines, quaking for an answer the house will never release.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I grumble, vicious. I know how monster movies work.

Nothing stirs. But I can smell it now, an illness permeating the air, sticky, sour, challenging. I lick my mouth, taste rot. Any regular mook would be suffocating on the fumes. Instead, the stink just makes me angry. So, I unbox myself a cigarette and ignite the tip, breathe out carcinogens by the lungful.

Carefully, I navigate the other rooms. The storage cubby is dank, dimly lit by a single flickering bulb, and crammed with old baby things and household supplies: eight-for-two toilet rolls, rubber gloves by the dozen, cheap shampoo, dusty cans of Spam. The bathroom is dense with mold, the plumbing corrugated from years of disuse, the patina of rust so thick it flakes like dandruff on the tiles. Someone threw up in here recently, but hadn’t bothered to clean up. I don’t look behind the shower curtains. As I exit, I snatch a look at myself in the cracked mirror and the sight stops me.

My face is older than I remember, the lines longer, more entrenched in coarse brown skin. Puckered flesh details a history in bullet wounds, knife scars, burns. Ugly but human. The eyes, though. I lean in. The sclera isn’t too different, slightly bloodshot but otherwise unremarkable. The pupils, on the other hand, are goatlike, octopoid in an ocean of scorched amber.

“Hm.” I palm a cheek. Not a great sign.

I turn and walk out. There isn’t much I can do, except keep that epiphany in mind. I’ve done worse to this body. It’d hold. But I have to want it to hold. Which may be harder said than done, with my bones still humming, and my veins still irradiated from transformation.

I shudder delicately. No, there are expectations. Laws.

A contract.

Pushing my trepidation into a box in the back of my head, I make my way to the main bedroom. The door’s unlatched and slightly ajar. From inside, I can hear the low drone of late-night British television programming. I step in. A body lies curled on the edge of a queen-sized bed, the mountain range of hip and shoulder outlined in florescent light. Blond hair snakes across a pillow in thick, wet clumps.

I move closer. The shape remains motionless on its side, an arm dangling over the edge.

Closer.

Without warning, it spasms, back thrusting upward, a motion so violent that it almost carries the figure right off the bed. But then, just as abruptly, all the fight gives out and it collapses, panting in shrill, shallow gasps.

I stroke the hair away from its head and find a harvest of eyes, only eyes, saline-drenched, strangely languid, secured in place by ropy membrane and yards of exposed nerve, blue-green and luminous. The bird’s glazed stare is almost entirely buried beneath the alien growths. She doesn’t notice my attention, her own regard trapped by a point in the ceiling, pupils thinned from anguish.

When she opens her mouth, I see more eyes, half-budded, blinking in the cavern of her throat.

“I told you to run.” I sigh.

Her nightgown, oily with stains, quivers. Beneath the thin fabric, shapes move, quickening to the sound of my voice. I make no attempt to investigate, only twitch the corner of her quilt over her limp, trembling form.

“It hurts.” The bird.

I look back. “Can’t help you.”

“It hurts.” She repeats, a whimper snagged between her teeth. She rolls over, and I hear things squelch.

“I told you to take the kids and run.”

“I can hear it in my veins.”

I pause.

“Gela Vt’ yah fhma’a,” she croaks, stupidly, like a child pretending worldliness. “G’ukhyoi y’okhyoi fhokhu.”

“Yes.” There wasn’t anything more I could say.

She stops, judders. “It hurts so, so much.”

“I know.”

“He told me—it was like a dream.” The story unspools in chunks and gasps, wet noises caked with pain. “He told me, he—this was supposed to be beautiful. Like being reborn. Like giving birth. Like creating life. But this is—”

“Wrong.” I finish.

“It hurts.”

The impulse to do something, to undo this error of existence, rouses, bright and hot as the passage of a bullet through bone. I stare at her, feeling the body’s sympathy, its longing to assist, to fix, to help her, help her, we need to help her, help her.

• • • •

The cry of the gun is loud as the death of stars.

6: THE RED HOUSE

The walls howl.

The keening is inhuman, played by a hundred damaged throats, birthed of larynxes unbound by terrestrial biology, an ululation that goes on and on and on.

Then, it tapers off, and I catch it, even as the walls tremble and thrash from the approach of something monstrous. A desperation, an animal pain, resonating in the fading percussions. McKinsey’s still there and he is hurting over the death of his girl.

But that note of sapient agony isn’t enough to convince me to roll over and bare my underbelly. I snarl as the floors quake, concrete and plaster spilling in a storm. I lurch out of the boys’ room even as a pseudopod lashes free of the carpet, slamming into the spot I once occupied. I skid across the landing, extract my gun, fire.

Bang.

Warning shot. We both know it’ll sting, but it won’t do much more than that. Bullets don’t kill creatures like us. But the tentacle, a strip of muscle adorned with bloodshot, bulging eyes, rears at impact. Blood geysers. The creature shrieks again.

You killed her.

Youkilledheryoukilledheryoukilledher.

Human anguish wraps itself about the screams, layers itself over the distorted rage, a hymn for the heartbroken, looping over and over, until it fades into a guttural wail, indistinguishable from everything else.

Another shot.

Bang.

More tentacles geyser from the floorboards. There is no art to their onslaught, only violence. They slap blindly at the air, at anywhere I’ve been, growing by the heartbeat, as though quantity can replace accuracy.

It’s a surprisingly effective tactic.

Every time I blink, they’ve multiplied again, frothing and writhing, their fury resonating through the blood I’ve left on the walls. The house becomes indistinguishable from an intestinal tract, throbbing with polyps and wet tissue, with tendrils. They push me back, back, blocking off the stairwell and any hope of exit.

I’m panting now. I empty the last of my rounds into whatever is closest and chuck my gun away, the pointless fucking human machine. I’d underestimated the thing. McKinsey’s stronger than I anticipated. Way stronger. Stronger than me if I stay like this. On cue, my bones crackle, eager, aching to participate in this primordial struggle. I feel epidermis begin to unravel.

No, no, no, no.

Not yet.

And then—

A single, unwavering note held in a voice of pure silver.

It is respite, it is clean water on a clear blue day, it is beauty, it is hope. And it is ice in my veins, it is fear, it is horror, it is something impure and strange and it calls to me, to McKinsey.

The tentacles still, riveted.

I’m far less entranced. My eyes snake to a string dangling from what appears to be the attic door. One hard yank later and the ladder slides forward. I rush up the rungs. Bad idea, probably, but like they say: when you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s no way to go but up.

• • • •

I blink.

The attic is enormous, its darkness cold. Moonlight crawls corpse-gray through a single skylight, illuminating wood and cardboard boxes stuffed with someone else’s memories. Here, at least, the air is clean. I fumble for a cigarette and sigh as I take my first breath, not quite relaxing, but relishing the lull.

Below, that unknown voice continues to sing, beautiful and deadly as a draught of liquid mercury.

“Daddy?”

I jerk at the noise.

How hadn’t I noticed? A small figure hauls itself from behind a tower of precariously stacked containers, its face chalky with terror as it waddles into the moonlight. James. He’s dressed to endure the attic, a fact that elicits a twinge of cold surprise. Someone prepared him for this.

Wariness tightens my scowl. “James?”

The boy scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms and smiles, slightly sad-like. In the reflected glow of everyone’s favorite satellite, a chicken scrawl of hastily drawn runes, barely language, barely coherent. A child’s pantomime of adult literature.

“Abel said Daddy was coming.”

Ice struts down the highway of my spine. “Say that again, kid?”

“Abel said he was calling for Daddy.”

Abel said he was calling for Daddy. The words reverberate like a warning. I had known that something was up. I’d known it from the start: that someone was playing me for a fool. But the memory of the kid’s eyes, large and full of hate, the sheer organic quality of his presence. It was him, wasn’t it? It was Abel all along. But how did it all fit together?

“Hello again, Mr. Persons.”

I spin about.

Abel is standing about five feet away, arms crossed behind his back. I can see a hammer ticking in his grip, wagging like a puppy’s tail, perfectly ordinary, perfectly unmagical. Just like Abel. Just another kid, a rawboned eleven, with deep-set eyes and a mop of dark hair, skin sallow, face untouched by broken capillaries.

“I should have known you were up to something.”

He shakes his head slowly. “You got me all wrong, detective.”

“Did I?”

“I’m not trying to hurt you, Mr. Persons. I really, really am not. I definitely want our stepdad dead.”

“And that’s the reason you lured me here? You hoping he’s allergic to gumshoes? Hoping he’d choke on my hat?”

“No.”

I exhale smoke rings. “What’s your game, kid?”

He doesn’t get the chance to answer. No longer bound by whatever magic sits in Abel’s voice, McKinsey comes seeping through the attic door, slow as molasses, then rising, a bank of meat and bones and eyes, eyes, eyes.

Slowly, it resolves into something shaped like McKinsey, naked save for the threads of fabric still caught between compressed fat. It gurgles once.

There are so many, many eyes on the thing. They fill his mouth, unhinge his jaw, distend his cheeks with their bulk. I can see rips in the skin, oozing plasma.

“Tekeli-li.”

“Hello to you too, ugly.”

Beside me, Abel fastens a double-handed grip on his hammer.

The creature’s head rocks back further than it should, tilting, tilting until I hear McKinsey let out a moan of pure anguish.

“Tekke-ke—” it burbles again.

I slide in front of Abel. “Yeah.”

“T-t-tekeli. Tekeli.” A rustle of motion, the kids vanish like cats into the shadows.

Briefly, I think about stepping around the thing, letting McKinsey have a go at the two. I don’t like being double-crossed, especially not by children.

But a job’s a job.

“Heard you the first time, you fat palooka.”

Amputated from the idea of human, it writhes and undulates inside its meat suit, testing the elasticity of mammalian epidermis. Judging from the way the flesh rips, it’s used to a better class of accommodations. The man gargles in pain. The thing hisses. I see his eyes rolling back, helpless. But I’d be damned if I give two fucks about a chump like him.

“T-t-t-t—”

“Fuck you too.”

It lunges.

Not at me. At Abel.

The body dives to intercept before I can get up to speed as to what’s going on. I squirm around and grapple it to the ground, But it’s too late. Crack. Bone gives, and Abel wails his rage as he skitters back.

We dance, the thing and I, shedding structure with every pivot, every turn. Human anatomy surrenders to the pragmatism of combat. Muscles unbraid, sinews lengthen, even as veins become garrote and bones blade. In minutes, we’re viscera commanded by will, flayed tissue, tendon, and teeth. Through it all, the thing keeps its human head, like a tumor in the writhing heart, McKinsey’s eyes bulging with terror.

And I am alive as I haven’t been for decades, no longer restricted by the grammar of human flesh but free, finally.

Free.

Oh, I know it’ll come and bite me in the ass later, but it is hard not to exult in the moment. Even as the body fails, even as it sags under the things I make it do, molecules destabilizing as proteins tear apart under the pressure, I rejoice in the motion. Distantly, I hear a voice pounding with warning, that if I keep this up, if I keep going, there will be nothing but slop by the time we are done.

But I am ripping into McKinsey.

I am swallowing. He tastes rancid, sublime, steeped in pain. I am fashioning bones into more mouths, into more teeth, and bite, chew, swallow, devour.

I am alive.

The thing that was, is McKinsey screams and reciprocates, but I have the advantage of experience. If the thing is rage, I am a small blade in the correct place, the perfect time.

My being swims with the pleasure of the feast.

More.

My maws close over meat and bile.

Then, something in the corner of my eye moves unexpectedly, and I make the mistake of dropping my guard. The thing doesn’t. It strikes. I feel hooks saw through my lungs, a thousand perforations, spreading the tissue, stretching it until there is pain and only pain, as I gasp my way between one breath and the next. I crash into a wall.

The thing howls and howls, loud as eternities.

“Shit.” I pull at myself, try to find purchase. Anything. Something. But there’s no room, no—

“James! Now!”

A net explodes, thumbtacks and sharp wire. Then the kid follows, leaping through the air, hammer held up high. He lands. Brings the iron down on his stepdad’s skull.

Crack.

Brain dribbles.

Crack.

The thing screams.

Crack.

• • • •

“Kid.”

We stand in silence for a while. Just above eye level, his brother stirs and peeps over the edge of an alcove, round little face bright as a candle flame.

“Yeah?” the kid says at last.

I look down. The thing that was their stepfather is meat now, pulped lymph and dangling muscle, a low moaning as it tries to reassemble, tendons slurping along the walls. I bring a heel down on a lump of liver, grind it against the wood floor. There are so many questions growing in me, but I don’t voice any of them. Instead, I say: “Like I was saying, I don’t think you were playing it straight with me.”

The kid has the gall to look embarrassed. He kicks his feet, like he was caught skipping classes. “No . . .”

“Uh-huh.” I mop my brow, then slide a cigarette from its case. “I suppose you figured I wouldn’t take the case if you told me you wanted me to be bait.”

“Yeah.”

I spit teeth on the floor. Despite everything, it’s hard not to smile. “You’ve got a lot of guts, kid.”

He says nothing, stares at the mess on the floor. Blood oozes black and claret around my feet.

“So, here’s my question: why me?”

“Because they needed the gift of a Dead One’s blood.”

My pulse speeds up.

“Dead One.” I repeat. Dead One. I had heard that term before. I hadn’t thought to wonder then, towed under by the tide of violent memories. But now? I make a mental note to check in on a certain waitress.

Abel nods. “Yes.”

“I was meant to be a sacrifice.”

His eyes flicker, darting sidelong. James inches up to us and settles against his brother’s lean frame, fingers digging into the older boy’s coat. “Not . . . like that.”

He pauses, cocks his head to one side, before diving into exposition. “There had to be blood. Not death.”

“Why?”

“Because they said so.” Abel spits out a cracked tooth, his face already swelling, impacted cheekbone already bruising.

“And in exchange?”

“They’ll keep us safe.”

“How?”

He sighs, a strangely adult sound. “I made a bargain.”

“With what?”

The kid doesn’t answer. Not exactly. Instead, he extends his tongue, reveals a country of sigils delicately etched onto the red muscle. I don’t recognize the language, but their greasy luminance is familiar, a memory of lightless water and the life beneath.

“I made a bargain,” Abel repeats, stiff, tongue sliding back into place, jaw tense.

I bob my head slowly. Not all of us wear our demons on our sleeves. “Fair enough.”

He nods. And we stand there, just for a while, in the quiet, soaking in Croydon’s muffled struggles, their stepdad’s remains still warbling in delicate agony.

I should tell them about their mom. But pettiness, or maybe the body’s sense of compassion, a spongy ache nesting in my sternum, keeps my trap shut.

“Anyway,” I declare, lighting a smoke as I turn to walk away. “I’ll be back in five minutes, in case anyone wants to try some funny business.”

Neither of the boys move. It’s not until I’ve clicked the door shut that I hear tiny feet scrabbling over wood, hear the steady rhythm of hammers on bone.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

• • • •

I don’t remember who said it, but there’s an author out there who once wrote that we don’t need to kill our children’s monsters. Instead, what we need to do is show them that they can be killed.

Or, in some cases, stand by as they do the killing themselves.

I never went back to the house. They took care of loose ends themselves. Before I could stub out the cigarette on the stoop, the kids began howling, screaming about how a bad man had come and put their daddy on ice, screaming about their ma, who was sleeping in her halo of red. In less than an hour, buttons and newshawks were swarming the street, lighting up the sky like it was Bonfire Night.

They called the kids heroes, heroes for being brave enough to watch their stepdad die, heroes for surviving their mother.

I stayed for a spell, indistinguishable from the neighbors who poured out of their houses to gawk at the spectacle. The boys didn’t ID me, much to my surprise. I thought Abel would have said something when his eyes washed over my face. But he only frowned and looked away. James was catatonic from the shock. Poor kid; sometimes life cuts you a bad deal.

As for me, I took the scenic route home. Partly because there’s nothing like a slow drive after a hard case, with pit stops for a bottle of Jack and a bellyful of jerk. Partly because a stolen car’s something to be relished.

And also partly because my hands won’t stop shaking like they’re palsied, the muscles raw and red under tissue-paper skin. My body was more battered than I had initially thought, reduced to palpitating nerve endings and ribbons of meat, a worn-down husk of scars. But it’d heal. Rest.

I just needed to rest.

: EPILOGUE

“So, you want to tell me which part of what you said was true?”

Sasha raises her head, a feline grin curling into place. “I remember you.”

“I bet you do.”

The restaurant is empty when I walk in, the tables cleared out, the floors swept, the chairs neatly stacked away. Sasha props herself against a counter, hands braced behind her. She cocks a hip like a challenge. “We’re closed, y’know?”

I glance outside the glass door. Even the neon sign has been switched off. The only lighting we have is the strobing of passing cars, and the orange bleed-out of the street lamps. “Not here for food.”

She smiles like she knew it already. But then again, we both did. It’s clear as day why I’m here, dripping blood and someone else’s gore, shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. “You going to answer my question?”

Sasha hops up on the counter and daintily crosses her legs, elegant and infuriating. Gone is her varsity jacket and the crinkly uniform, replaced by tank top and jeans and toned flesh, the national costume of any young adult. But it’s not her skin that catches my eye, it’s what on it.

Tattoos. Archaic symbols of fecund power, inscriptions of soil and blood and birth. Wrist up and neck down, every part of her is infused with those intricate patterns, a flood of frantic, furious spirals.

Shub-Niggurath’s marks.

The signs cut in Abel’s tongue finally made sense.

I feel the air gush out of my lungs.

Fucking hell.

Sasha lets loose a grin. “What question is that?”

“How much of what I saw is true?”

“Enough.” She shrugs and taps the side of her nose, the universal sign for secret.

“What about the thing you said about the riots? And the epidemic of altered chavs?”

“True, and also true.”

“And they’re all McKinsey’s fault then?”

Sasha cocks her head, a birdlike motion, somehow more distressing for its delicacy. “Not exactly.”

I hobble closer, careful to keep enough room between us to prevent her from getting a jump to me. What gets to me is the fact that there’s nothing to read. As far as my senses are concerned, Sasha’s human, powerless, fragile.

As far as I’m concerned, she’s clearly not.

“Not exactly how?”

She bisects her mouth with a raised index finger, and smiles and smiles, while saying nothing at all. I take the hint. Sasha isn’t going to spill.

I bite down on the urge to curse, not wanting to give her or her mistress the pleasure of seeing me squirm. Inhale. Exhale. Baby steps. My ghost shrivels further into itself.

“Back to more important business. Riddle me this: why would a dame like you let a mook like McKinsey knock you around? Unless you didn’t and were, in fact, manufacturing memories for the benefit of little old me.”

Her smile brightens.

“Funny you should say that.”

I spit black blood on the floor and grimace. “Come on, Sasha. Play it straight with me.”

“No.”

Dames.

“Do I have to bribe you with flowers? Is that what it’d take? Because I will go out and pick you some daisies, if I have to. I—”

Sasha decants from her perch, easy as a summer day, all long limbs and that sly, steady smile. “It’s not that simple, John.”

“I never told you my name.”

“We both know that doesn’t matter.”

She got me there.

I take another stab. “If you’re one of old Shubby’s cultists, why’d you need me? My kind never had anything to do with her or any of her siblings.”

Sasha’s eyes grow abstract even as the skin on the back of my forearms pimples and the hairs rise, like someone is running electromagnetic waves over me. She sighs and blinks out of her fugue, about thirty seconds later. “That answer is above your pay grade.”

“Try me.”

“Come on, John. You know you’re out of your depth here.”

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

I shrug. “Can’t blame a man for trying.”

She smiles the detached, reverent grin of the high or the religious, just teeth and folded-back lips, and continues her slide toward me. “No. But you understand why you’re not getting answers, right?”

“Right.” I pop a cigarette from the box, and make a big show of igniting the tip. NO SMOKING signs glare at me from around the restaurant, but given the circumstances, I’m not feeling particularly rule-abiding. Besides, Sasha isn’t kicking up a fuss.

Her mouth twitches. She stops, inches from touching, close enough that my field of vision is her, only her. In the near darkness, her face is a cipher. And much, much older than I thought she was.

“You are a fascinating creature, do you know that?”

“I’ve been told I have my charms.”

“You are the last of your kind on this planet.”

“What about it?” I exhale tobacco and defiance into her face.

“A coward.”

The truth stings less than I thought it would. I shrug and tip my skull, enumerating my options. “I’d like to think it’s more of a case of knowing what I want.”

“And what do you want, Mr. Persons?”

Sasha—the body strains to think of her as “the dame,” “the skirt,” or any of the other metaphors familiar to noir, but nothing fits the understated gravity of her person—plants a slim hand on my chest. The presence of the All-Mother permeates through the contact, sex-sweat, black woods, cold mountains, and grave soil.

And curiosity.

I feel a trill of ice barrel through my nervous system. This is a new and unwelcome development. It’s one thing to mouth off at a cultist; it’s another to have Shub-Niggurath’s personal attention.

“I want what the body wants: to live.”

“But your people are doing exactly that ninety-seven million years into the future.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t like bugs.”

“What an ironic thing for you to say.”

“You know me, Sasha.” I gingerly lace my fingers with hers, and then push her hand away. She doesn’t resist, but she doesn’t let go either, tightening her grip. “I’m full of clever words.”

“Indeed.”

And then She speaks.

Shub-Niggurath doesn’t bother taking over Sasha’s mouth. Too mundane, I guess. Instead, she circulates the words through the young woman’s cells, a chorus of fifty billion transmitted through the exchange of air and the throb of Sasha’s pulse, the sloughing of epidermal layers. It isn’t so much a sound as it is a blunt force.

The truth.

I shiver. You don’t say no to dames of that caliber. I close my eyes and try not to think about the All-Mother, black as pitch and bigger than worlds, Her Many Eyes blinking like headlamps between the tree line.

Watching me.

Listening.

Waiting.

“Because I like this place. Because this body’s a dead man walking. Because I can’t imagine existing in a world of endless darkness, dirt, and Yithian academics. Do you know how boring it gets? The pursuit of knowledge ain’t all it’s cracked up to—” The words become a desperate babble, a twenty-syllable pileup on the highway of truth. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to stop the deluge. “So much talking. Like you would not believe, sister. Endless hypotheses. No matter how much we discuss a subject, no Yith ever seems capable of—”

Cease.

I shut up.

“Life is cyclic,” Sasha intones, backing away, her voice swaying with the cadence of revelation. “With every death comes a thousand new beginnings, and with every fresh start comes the demise of something old. You know this.

“Should know this, at least.” Sasha purses her lips. “But it’s clear that you’re, how we say, a bit mawkish. Sentimental.”

The body. She meant the body and its broken mind, curled up in the cup of my skull. I bristle but I don’t say anything. For one, I can’t make heads or tails of her taunting, whether she’s angling to get a rise or just Shub-crazy. None of what she’s saying connects. They’re facts, pieces of the truth. Without order or context, they might as well be a mad saint’s gibbering, or the vestiges of a dead man’s compassion.

And two, Shub-Niggurath hadn’t greenlit vocal expression yet.

“You can talk.”

There we go.

“What exactly are you doing with the kid? Contrary to the biblical name, Abel doesn’t look like the religious type. Sure, he’s kind of young—”

Sasha cracks an amused grin. A shimmer of memory pulsates through her skin: men and women draped in fresh skins, still beaded with a patina of blood; a living fire, alive with the voice of the All-Mother, a thunder of bacchanal affection. “Something that will be good for him. I can promise you that.”

The vision wrenches at my insides like a hook. The body isn’t happy with this development, and neither am I. But what can we do but nod mutely? The silence doesn’t last, though. Foolhardy courage, or maybe it takes me a moment to gather my thoughts and my courage. “And his brother?”

“If he obeys Abel, certainly.”

“Too bad about their mom, eh?”

“Casualties happen.” Sasha dips her head and I am almost, almost fooled into believing she cares.

Still, there’s rarely anything else to say once a skirt drops a bombshell like that. “Fine. In that case, I’ll be going then. I’ve got a piggy bank to redeem.”

Sasha dips into a fluid, mocking curtsey as she spins on her heel and hops away, like a little bird stretched out tall, fingers slipping from mine. Her laughter rings out, sweet and knowing. “One last thing before you go, Mr. Persons.”

I am almost at the door when she speaks, rain already speckling my face. Outside, the world is cold and black, an abyss of bad decisions, stirred up by the encroaching rain. “And what’s that?”

“If you know what’s good for you, don’t come back to London.”

I freeze. That was a threat if I ever heard one. Not direct from Shub-Niggurath’s mouth, sure, but definitely a significant threat, given that Sasha appears authorized to carry her warnings. I rake my eyes over her carefree, enigmatic expression, full of playful, darting shadows.

Fuck. This.

A wet, wheezing laugh jumpstarts in my throat, before cresting into a full-fledged guffaw. It whoops upward, full of hysteria, even as I bend over double from the effort. After all this, after the betrayal and the double-crossing, the machinations. After all this madness, do they still expect me to bow?

The sound keeps boiling through the silent restaurant, Sasha watching quietly on, before it finally trickles into a wobbling halt. I straighten and meet Sasha’s gaze, wiping the tears from my eyes, even as she tilts her head slow.

I flick the cigarette at her like a last word.

“Don’t count on it.”

Her laughter, hyena-shrill and strange, stalks my long walk back home.

• • • •

I stand in the bathroom of my office and stare into the mirror, thumbs threaded through belt loops like a gunslinger at high noon. The bruised, torn-up visage in the mirror regards me solemnly in return, its mouth pulled into a line.

“We did good,” I announce to the emptiness.

My ghost doesn’t reply.

Abel’s piggy bank sits on the sink between my toothbrush cup and hand lotion, its dead-eyed grin and dead black eyes pregnant with judgment. The kid’s word was good. Better than many grown men. He’d come to my office the very next day, holding the damn porcelain boar in one hand and James in the other. Without saying a word, he placed it down on my desk. No fuss, no muss. A clean transaction.

I’d expected him to ask about their mother. To yell at me, to hit me, to do or say something. The coroners would have found the bullet lodged in her brain. But he didn’t. Only stared at me with those huge, old-man eyes for what felt like an eternity before they left, hand in hand, grave as marriage, silent as ghosts.

“We did good,” I repeat, but again, the body doesn’t answer.

Then, a knocking strikes up on the front door, a confident rat-ta-ta-ta, like the music of hammers on bone.

CASSANDRA KHAW writes a lot. Sometimes, she writes press releases and excited emails for Singaporean micropublisher Ysbryd Games. Sometimes, she writes for technology and video-game outlets such as Eurogamer, Ars Technica, The Verge, and Engadget. Mostly, though, she writes about the intersection between nightmares and truth, drawing inspiration from Southeast Asian mythology and stories from people she has met. She occasionally spends time in a Muay Thai gym punching people and pads.

Runtime
By S.B. Divya

The wall behind Marmeg thrummed with the muffled impact of bass beats. A line of girls in heels mixed with boys in lacy shirts, both interspersed with androgynous moots wearing whatever they wanted. Blue light spilled from the club’s doorway onto cuffs and bracelets but mostly on bare skin.

The host was a moot with minimal curves of breast and hip, draped in a sheath of satin gray. Candy-colored red hair in two long curls framed zir face. This host wanted to be seen, and Marmeg had a hard time not looking.

Her own body tended toward her mother’s build—no hiding the mammary glands and rounded buttocks. She mitigated it with the torso shell and a neutral haircut while dreaming of moot surgery.

Marmeg glanced at her cuff. Another twenty minutes until the end of her shift. The line drifted forward and two new people came into view. A nat male with waves of silky brown hair and a translucent suit stood near Marmeg, his gaze fixed on the screen in his hands.

“Unbelievable,” he crowed. “Last round. Canter’s winning!”

His friend was a moot with a rainbow ‘hawk and a bored expression.

“Fights? Last century much?” Zir red lips curled. “Races be where’s at.”

Zir friend looked up from his screen. “Minerva starts tomorrow.”

Marmeg’s heart pounded. The Minerva Sierra Challenge would be the first race of her life. She was a long shot with her outdated, refurbished embed gear, but one dark horse usually made it to the top five. She planned to be this year’s surprise element.

“Be following that, sure,” said Rainbow Hair. “Minerva’s winner trumps the BP International.”

“Not always. Two years ago, remember that? Topsy-turvy all over,” the friend countered.

Their voices faded as the host let them in. Marmeg checked her cuff—fifteen more minutes—and shifted her weight. The host shot her a dirty look. Be invisible: that was Marmeg’s role. Here at the club or out in the world, nobody wanted to see the likes of her, but she would be worth noticing soon.

The second-shift bouncers came out on time. Marmeg walked to the bus stop in full gear, drawing surprised glances from the small crowd waiting at the signpost. A faint star forced its light past the competing glow of Los Angeles. Tomorrow night, she would be out in the middle of nothing and nowhere, and then she’d see more than one twinkle. Star light, star bright, first and only star I see in this concrete clusterf— The bus arrived.

She climbed in last and sat on a hard plastic chair. The screen above her displayed a white-haired Congressman next to a blonde talk-show host. Their voices blared through tinny speakers.

“US citizenship is a birthright. Voting is a birthright,” the Congressman said. “But social services—public education, health care, retirement benefits—those need to be earned. Unlicensed families haven’t paid into the system.”

The blonde nodded. “Do you think we should repeal the Postnatal License Act?”

“The problem with postnatal licensing is the barrier to entry: it’s too low. The unlicensed pay a small fee—that doesn’t scale with age—and then they’re like us.”

“Bull,” Marmeg muttered. She’d spent three years saving for her “small fee.”

Her cuff zapped the skin on the inside of her wrist. She flicked it. The screen lit up and displayed a message from Jeffy.

SORRY TO BUG. SHIT’S GOING DOWN. HELP?

So much for getting a few hours of rest before catching the midnight bus to Fresno. Her brother needed rescuing more often than Marmeg cared to tally, especially right after a club shift. She hopped off the bus at the next stop and used Jeffy’s cuff GPS to locate him: Long Beach.

She took the train to the station closest to her brother’s location. From there, she ran in long, loping strides. Leg muscles encased by exoskeletons flexed and relaxed in a stronger, more graceful counterpoint than she could have achieved naturally. As she moved, she downloaded new code into the chips controlling her gear. She had developed the software to bypass the legal limits for her embeds. When it came to Jeffy’s “friends,” legal wasn’t always good enough.

The fight house was a narrow single-story with a sagging wood porch that had been white at some point. Puddles of stale beer and vomit soaked into the weedy lawn. A cheerful roar rose from the backyard.

Marmeg ran along the right side of the house. A ring of people—mostly nats—blocked her view of the action. She crouched and sprang onto the roof, landing on all fours.

Jeffy reeled in the center of the crowd. Blood dripped from his nose and left ear. His black curls were plastered to his head by dripping sweat, one hank covering part of a swollen eye. His left leg had an obvious limp. Cords of muscle rippled under his torn shirt. Chestnut skin peeked through the hole.

Her brother hadn’t done much after leaving the army, but he maintained a soldier’s body. Not that it did him much good in these fights. His lithe opponent, clad in deteriorating exos, kicked him hard in the bad leg. It flew out from under him. He collapsed and lay unmoving.

The crowd cheered. Some of them waved bottles in the air. Others held old-fashioned paper money in their raised fists. Marmeg jumped into the clear center. The crowd roared again, probably expecting her to fight. Instead, she scooped up her unconscious brother, slung him over her shoulder, and leapt over the crowd. A disappointed groan rose from the onlookers. Marmeg barely heard it. She stumbled on her landing, Jeffy’s bulk complicating her balance. She kept to a simple jog on the way to the bus station.

She paid for their bus fare with a swipe of her cuff. The orange-colored account balance glared from the screen. The extra cost to rescue her brother was unexpected, but she had enough money to buy her ticket to Fresno, barely.

“Can walk,” Jeffy slurred when they were a few blocks from home.

Fine, let him arrive on his own two feet. He wouldn’t be fooling anybody. Marmeg’s cuff said it was slightly past ten o’clock, so the boys would be sleeping. That was a small mercy.

They walked in with Jeffy leaning heavily on her shoulder. She hardly felt his weight, but their mother’s gaze landed like a sack of stones.

“Again?” Amihan Guinto looked worn out and disappointed as only a parent could. She grunted and stood up from the concave sofa. “Put him here. I’ll take a look.”

“How was your shift?” Marmeg asked as she helped Jeffy lie down. The metal frame creaked under his bulk.

“Miss Stevens missed the bedpan again so I guess it was a normal day,” Amihan said. She rummaged through a kitchen cabinet. “Take that unnatural junk off, Mary Margaret.”

Marmeg was tempted to refuse, but she needed to do a once-over on her gear anyway. She dropped the parts in a heap. Amihan walked by, carrying the odor of warmed-up chicken adobo and rice with her. Marmeg hadn’t eaten since the afternoon, before her shift at the club. Her stomach rumbled as she helped herself to some leftovers while her mother patched up Jeffy’s wounds.

Amihan hadn’t objected when Marmeg learned to program. She’d expressed cautious optimism when Marmeg began winning contest money, but she had never approved of embeds or moots or any modern trend. Elective surgery goes against God and the Pope. Marmeg had heard the words often enough that they were tattooed on her brain.

Her mother had kicked her out after her first chip implant, but Marmeg could easily match her mother for stubbornness. She’d lived on the streets, spending the nights in homeless shelters when she couldn’t crash with her friend T’shawn. Luck had landed her some workable exoskeleton discards and then the club security job. The money was enough to split rent with her mother, which let Amihan relent while saving face.

Marmeg washed her plate and then sat with her equipment. Her embedded control chips were legit, but the surgery to put them in wasn’t, and her exoskeletal gear was filched from trash bins in rich neighborhoods. The pieces tended to break. She had backup parts to rube a fix during the race, but she’d rather catch a loose bolt or hairline crack now than in the mountains.

“Have you registered for the certificate program yet?” Amihan asked.

“Yes,” Marmeg replied, staying focused on the pieces of gear scattered about. She’d filed the forms, not the payment.

“Did you get a spot in the elder care program?”

“Mm-hmm.”

She had requested a spot, but she was stalling the registrar at UCLA with promises of tuition. As long as she placed in the top five in tomorrow’s race, she’d have the money to start a four-year embed degree program. Real degrees led to real money, and that’s what she needed to live on her terms, not her mother’s.

“I know you’re disappointed, mahal, but four-year colleges won’t qualify a postnatal for financial aid. Working in the nursing home isn’t that bad.”

“No? Our life is so good?”

“There’s food on the table,” Amihan said sharply. “My children are healthy, except for this idiot.” She nudged Jeffy.

“And all of us born unlicensed.”

“So, we don’t get free education and health care. You can’t have everything handed to you on a gold plate. Let’s be grateful for what God has given us.”

“I am, Ma, but I want more. Six-digit ratings. Big money and benefits jobs. Make some rules, even with no vote. Run the world. Not be run down by it.”

“Are you calling me run-down?”

Marmeg pressed her lips together. She had no safe answer to that question.

“Look at me! Four kids, and my body still looks great. My tits aren’t saggy. My ass is nice. When I’m out after my shift, men buy me drinks.”

“That explains the four kids,” Marmeg muttered.

A slap against the back of her head knocked the multi-tool out of her hand.

“Hey! That’s—”

“Don’t disrespect your mother. My body only bears children when God wants, and I’ve been married every time.”

“So, He doesn’t give a shit if your kids are unhealthy, uneducated, under—”

This time, the blow landed hard across Marmeg’s cheek, making her face burn and her eyes sting.

“Take that vile metal filth and get out! Go back to your club! Surround yourself with those people who deny God’s gifts. Go! Ugly, ungrateful child.”

Marmeg clamped down on the surge of answering violence. Even without the exoskeletal enhancements, her body was bigger and stronger than her mother’s. Self-defense or not, if she hurt Amihan, she’d be the one feeling lower than a worm.

“Ma?” said a sleepy voice from the hallway. Then, “Marmeg!”

A small body clad in faded cupcake pajamas hurtled into Marmeg. She wrapped her little brother in her arms and glared over his shoulder at their mother. Your yelling woke them up!

“It’s late, Felix. Go back to bed,” Marmeg said.

The six-year-old was wide awake now, and he spotted Jeffy on the sofa.

“Again?” He almost sounded like their mother.

“He’ll be fine,” Marmeg and Amihan said simultaneously.

“Go to sleep, Felix, or you’ll be feeling it on your backside.”

Marmeg kissed the soft brown cheek and then stood, picking her little brother up in a smooth motion. “I’ll tuck you in.”

Lee was fast asleep on the upper bunk as Marmeg laid the baby of the family in the lower.

“Tell me a story?” Felix wheedled.

“Not tonight. It’s late.”

“You say that every time,” he grumbled.

He had a point. Marmeg left anyway, knowing that Felix would draw her further into the argument if she stuck around. She glanced balefully at their mother. That was your fault, she wanted to say, but she kept the peace for the sake of her brothers.

“I’m tired,” Amihan said, some of the shrillness gone from her voice. She walked toward the bedroom. “I’m going to bed too.”

“Fine,” Marmeg said.

She finished tuning up the exos and then pulled a large nylon backpack from the hall closet. She loaded it with spare parts and repair tools. A shabby plastic poncho went in too, in case the slight chance of rain materialized. The bag was old, with multiple patches of duct tape, but it held. She was about to put it on when Jeffy groaned from the sofa.

“Marm,” he said, motioning her over.

She walked back and knelt by the sofa.

“You goin’? Tonight?”

“Yeah. Midnight bus to Fresno. Six o’clock to Oakhurst. Run or hitch from there. You be okay to watch the littles tomorrow?”

“Don’t worry ’bout me. You focus on this race. You got ’nough money?”

As if her brother had any to spare. “Be okay, long as I place.”

“An’ if you don’t?”

“But I will.”

“That’s my girl. You take care. An’ kick some ass, eh?”

Marmeg smiled lopsidedly. “Hooah.”

She tried to find a clean inch on her brother’s face to kiss and settled for the top of his head. He was snoring by the time she reached the front door. A glance at her cuff told her that she couldn’t catch the bus in time on foot.

She sent T’shawn a message: NEED A RIDE FROM HOME TO BUS CENTRAL. YOU FREE?

The response came a minute later. BE RIGHT THERE.

Ten minutes later, T’shawn pulled up in an old two-seater that he’d inherited from his uncle. The young man himself was tall, skinny, and garbed in his typical outfit of baggy jeans and a loose, long-sleeved shirt. His goggles—a relic from age twelve—were wrapped around his head. They were his first project. He’d fit the lenses from his regular glasses into old blue swim goggles that he’d found in the trash near school. When he showed up to classes wearing them, Marmeg was terrified for his safety, but he was so casual and confident that derision fell off him like paint flakes from his car. He did get beaten up later that day, but, as he’d pointed out to Marmeg when she patched him up, the goggles had saved him from yet another pair of broken glasses.

These days, T’shawn had such high black-market ratings that no one with a working brain would harass him. He still wore the goggles.

Marmeg smiled at him as they clasped arms, each one’s hand to the other’s elbow.

“What got you late?” he said.

The car’s electric motor whined to life, and they pulled away from the curb.

“Jeffy had a 404.”

“Gonna get himself killed one day. Can’t be rescuing him always, Marm. You almost missed the bus.”

“Know it, but he’s my brother. Had my back all these years. Gotta look out.”

T’shawn nodded, then shrugged. “Be growing up, getting yourself out. You win Sierra, he’ll be on his own. Oh, yeah, got some treats for you.”

He took a small case from the car’s center console and handed it to her. Four tiny capsules nestled in gray industrial foam. They gleamed with gold and green.

“New chips?”

T’shawn grinned. His teeth reflected white in the lights of opposing traffic, his face a dark shadow. “Payback for your latest code. Done my clients real good; said they did parkour times a hundred. Clean getaway last night.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Black market pays.”

“Sure, but don’t gotta like it. Want a better way.”

“That’s why you racing tomorrow. Don’t be grumpy, Marm.”

She smiled. Even if she didn’t like his clients, she couldn’t hold a grudge against T’shawn. Legit sales channels demanded certifications she couldn’t afford. Yet. She closed the case and slipped it into her gear bag. The capsules were identical to the ones Marmeg had in her body. Those had also been rewards from T’shawn and his friends in dark places.

They arrived at the bus station ten minutes before midnight. Marmeg grabbed her bag and stepped out into a cloud of diesel fumes. She coughed and thanked her friend for the ride.

“Good luck,” T’shawn said.

“Owe you for this, brud.”

“It’s nada. You go win.”

The car behind them honked. T’shawn rolled his eyes, gave her a salute, and pulled away.

Marmeg walked into the squat concrete bus station. Security guards in bulky exos watched her motions as they did with anyone wearing gear. She found her bus and boarded it. The dozen other passengers were mostly migrant farm workers from Mexico and Southeast Asia. Half of them had already dozed off, and the others were staring at their screens.

Marmeg had a row to herself. Her pack sat next to her, bulky and comforting. She wrapped her arms around it and tried to sleep, to forget the flash of red after she’d paid for the one-way ticket to Oakhurst. Her account was zeroed.

• • • •

The bus from Fresno to Oakhurst arrived late. Marmeg had intended to foot it from the small town to the starting line, but no way would she make it on time. She stood outside the station, staring at the distant peaks in despair. A woman emerged from the building and walked to her.

“I’m headed that way myself,” the woman said. She was obviously middle-aged and a nat, reminiscent of Marmeg’s mother. “Want a lift?”

Thank God for the kindness of strangers.

Marmeg felt the first twinges of motion sickness as the pickup truck bounced and swayed through the curves of Sky Ranch Road. The woman—Lauren was her name—kept her eyes on the uneven dirt road, but she must have sensed Marmeg’s discomfort.

“You want to turn back? It’s not too late. You can still catch the bus to Fresno.”

Marmeg explained, “Carsickness, not nerves.” Then she shrugged. “Can’t go back. Account’s full busted. Gotta race. Gotta place.”

“How old are you, sweetie? Does your mom or dad know you’re up here doing this?”

“Twenty,” Marmeg lied. “Mom knows.”

They bounced through a particularly vicious dip. Marmeg’s head smacked into the truck’s ceiling on the rebound.

“Sorry,” Lauren said.

Marmeg stared through the pockmarked but clean windshield. Trees towered above them on both sides. They mostly looked like elongated Christmas trees. Some had rusty red bark with a feathery texture. She was tempted to look them up on her cuff, but the thought of trying to read while her stomach lurched put her off. Every few minutes, she caught a glimpse of rounded granite mounds: the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

“Here we are,” Lauren said as she turned right into a large dirt clearing.

Dust rose around the truck as they pulled up next to the tree line. Sleek but rugged vehicles were parked nearby. The whole area swarmed with people.

Marmeg flicked her wrist to activate her cuff. The time read 8:35. She would not have made the nine o’clock cutoff on foot, not with all the enhancements in the world.

“Thanks,” Marmeg said. “Owe you big. Credit you some grid time? Call it quits?”

Lauren raised her eyebrows. “What?”

Marmeg spoke in slower, fuller sentences. “Can’t pay you back for the ride, but I got grid time to spare. Trade for your help. If you want.”

“This was a favor, kid. You don’t owe me anything. Just promise me that you’ll make it through and back to your mom in one piece, okay? I’ve got a son not much younger than you. You remind me of him.”

Marmeg ducked her head shyly.

“Deal. You look out tomorrow. See my name.”

Marmeg ignored the bemused look Lauren gave her and hauled her bag out of the back. She waved once as Lauren drove away. Dust stirred in the wake of the tires, making her sneeze. Its scent reminded her of the housekeeper who lived downstairs and always smelled of pine, though that was harsher than the natural version. Even the air smelled different from home—sharper, simpler.

Marmeg walked across the crowded dirt lot to the race booth. Journos surrounded former winners and high-rated contestants. Marmeg’s heart beat faster. She was nobody today, but she knew that a few people had placed bets on her. Her odds were long—this was her first race—but they wouldn’t be on her next one, not if she finished Minerva in the top five.

Contestants and their support teams clustered in small groups. Most had their screens out for last-minute tune-ups and optimized settings. A few were warming up. Flashing their feathers, Marmeg thought. She felt more than saw their curious glances as she walked by. Somebody snickered. Marmeg was glad of her brown skin. It hid the flush.

The registration booth was a modest structure made of canvas and plastic. A giant electronic panel across its top looked out of place as it displayed vid clips from previous Minerva Challenges. The corporate logo—a clockwork owl—hung on a banner to the left with the words EQUIPPING THE ATHLETES OF THE FUTURE printed below.

Two people sat behind the booth table. The one who faced outward was an attractive moot with short, floppy blond hair and a toothy smile. The other had zir back to Marmeg.

She dropped her gear bag on the dirt and waved her cuff over the screen on the table. It came to life and filled with upside-down text next to her picture.

“Mary Margaret Guinto?” the blond read.

Marmeg nodded.

Zie frowned. “Where’s your support team? They need to check in too.”

“My, uh, team?” Marmeg struggled to recall the race application and requirements. “They’re late. Be here soon.”

The other person behind the table turned around, and Marmeg startled at seeing zir—his—beard. She had assumed everyone here would be a moot.

“They need to meet you on the far side,” he said, also frowning. He bent over the screen and flicked through Marmeg’s registration. “You didn’t put their names in the application. We’ll need their information and your emergency contact’s as well.”

Marmeg scribbled three names with her index finger into the blank fields: Jefferson Marcos, Lee Inciong, Felix Inciong. Her brothers were the first people Marmeg could think of who didn’t have a criminal record. Not that it would matter if the Minerva reps bothered to look them up—two of them were underage. She listed Amihan as her emergency contact.

Beard-guy rotated the display to face Marmeg. Tiny, dense text filled the page.

“Fingerprint at the bottom,” he instructed.

Marmeg glanced over the section headers as she scrolled through pages of rules, regulations, waivers, and exclusions. She knew the rules well enough. The rest didn’t matter. She pressed her thumb against the sensor. The blond grabbed Marmeg’s other wrist, injected a subdermal chip, and slapped a Band-Aid over it.

“Race ID,” zie explained. “Good luck, and see you on the other side.”

Start time was in an hour. Marmeg found an unoccupied space near the trees to do a final gear check of her own. She examined the pins on the leg ports, making sure their alignment was good and the screws were tight. The torso shell came next. It made her feel like a turtle, but it was the best she had found in the castoff bin behind the used gear shop.

“What is zie wearing? Second generation exos?” said someone nearby.

“I think you mean she.”

“Why are you picking on her, Zika?” asked a third, more melodious voice. “Worried about the competition? She’s brave to even go out in that kit.”

Marmeg kept her body relaxed and ignored them. Doing security at the club had given her a fairly thick skin. She pulled muscle-enhancing sleeves over her arms and stuffed the skeletal-looking braces in the bag, hoping she wouldn’t need to climb any overhangs. The braces only half-worked on the best of days. A quick systems check on her screen showed everything powered up and responding correctly.

An enormous tree trunk lay fallen at an angle a few yards away. Marmeg walked over to it. Its high point came up to her shoulders. She flexed her legs, crouched, and leapt to the top, landing lightly on the crumbling wood. A few heads turned to stare at her, and she quirked her lips. They wanted a show? Fine. She flipped backward off the tree, sprung off her hands, twisted midair, and landed on all fours.

Her audience shook their heads and returned to their tasks. Irked by the lukewarm reaction, Marmeg pulled her screen from the backpack and found the software she’d given T’shawn. Parkour times a hundred. She loaded the code into her chips.

She stood and flexed, testing the reaction time and spring coefficients. A mound of granite boulders the size of a small house was her target. She ran toward it. Cool alpine wind brushed her cheeks. Pine needles crackled underfoot. Crouch. Jump. Right foot on a near-vertical wall of rock. Push off. Land on the balls of the feet. Keep the momentum! Up, sideways with a hand and foot, diagonal. Pause.

She stopped for a few seconds at the highest point and chose her next target. She jumped, grabbed a branch, swung, flipped, and landed lightly enough to go straight into a run. Her breath came hard as she arrived at her gear bag. The air was sweet but thin. Marmeg didn’t have the luxury of arriving a few nights early to let her body acclimate to the altitude.

“See that, Zika?” said the voice from earlier. “Maybe Cinderella will make it to the ball.”

Marmeg almost laughed out loud. My fairy godmother isn’t done with her tricks. She sipped at her water and then pulled up a motion analysis on her screen. A few tweaks to the rebound settings, and next time, she’d be able to run up the rock without using her hands.

Her cuff buzzed—two new messages and fifteen minutes to start time. Marmeg repacked her gear bag, cinching everything tight, and slung it over her shoulders as she walked to the trailhead. A cluster of people clad in smartskin and carrying next to nothing already stood there with distant gazes. Their lips moved and fingers twitched.

Someday, Marmeg promised herself, I’ll have all of that. Maybe even someday soon. She checked her messages.

WHERE ARE YOU? IF YOU’VE RUN AWAY FROM HOME, DON’T BOTHER COMING BACK: that was from her mother.

The second was T’shawn: GIVE ME YOUR GEAR IF YOU TOAST OUT?

OVER MY DEAD BODY, she sent back.

She ran a final download of map and satellite information before deactivating her grid access. That was the primary constraint of the Minerva Challenge. Stale data and live GPS would have to carry her through the race. The second requirement was to traverse a minimum of seventy-five miles before crossing the finish line on the eastern side of the Sierras. The record holder, from two years past, finished at a minute over eighteen hours.

The sun blazed through the heavy clouds for one eye-dazzling second, making Marmeg squint. When she looked around again, the crowd at the staging point had increased. A giant clock counted up to 10:00 AM on the screen above the registration booth.

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” Marmeg muttered.

The person next to her, shiny from head to toe, smiled.

“What are you brewing?” zie said.

“Not me. Them.” Marmeg inclined her head at the booth. “Stirring up some drama.”

“I suppose they are. It’s not like seconds or minutes matter at the finish. If they really wanted to make some excitement, they’d be funding Mountain Mike. So, is this your first race?”

“Yes. What’s mountain mike?”

“Not what. Who,” zie said, sounding amused. “He’s a radical nat who lives in the backcountry. They always get a glimpse of him around the biggest accident sites, but they can’t seem to catch him. You’d think it would be simple, him being a nat and all. Maybe living off-grid makes it easy to disappear.”

Marmeg frowned. She hadn’t planned for crazy forest nats.

“Don’t look so worried,” zie said with a laugh. “I think he’s mostly a scare story. There are worse things for you to worry about. Like the rain. And have you deactivated your grid access? If it’s on at the start, that’s an instant disqualification. They’re checking, you know?” Zie gestured at the camera drones buzzing overhead. “Those aren’t all journos.”

“It’s off,” Marmeg said.

Yes, her cuff showed that grid access was disabled. No more messages. No more support. She was on her own.

The clock display had switched to a countdown timer. Ten seconds to go. Someone called a verbal version through the booth speakers. Drone-cams buzzed. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“Good luck.”

“You too.”

“Zero!” boomed a voice.

The race opened like sand pushing through the neck of an hourglass. The lead contestants took off down the main trail at an easy run. Marmeg kept herself in their midst. A swarm of cameras flew above them, tracking every move and narrating the action to faraway viewers.

Being in the lead at the start had no correlation to being in the winners’ list at the end, but it did boost your ratings. Most viewers only paid attention to the crowd during the open and the finish. The rest of the race belonged to the pros who could record and sell their whole experience as movies.

Marmeg pushed her body and her gear hard. A few heads turned in surprise as she passed them. Her breath came fast and shallow, but she gained until only three people remained ahead of her. If nothing else, she was in the top five at this moment.

They sprinted together over rocks and fallen trees. Dodged the grasping branches of low-growing bushes. Curved around trunks as wide as the pillars of City Hall. A cool wind brought the smell of rain.

The lead cluster spread out over the course of the first thirty minutes. People split off to follow their predetermined routes or took alternate ways around ponds and meadows. The other runners became blurs flitting between columnar trunks, far enough to be unobtrusive. The last drone camera had turned back at the twenty-minute mark, pushing the limits of its range.

Marmeg leapt on a fallen tree and used it to cross a boggy section. She skirted a car-sized knot of rotten wood at the far end and stopped to get her bearings. The other contestants had disappeared from sight. Like the fingers of a river delta, they would follow unique paths to the finish line. Her own route headed northeast toward the first of many low ridges.

As Marmeg ran, she heard nothing but the whispers of her footfalls and the wind through the trees. The rushing sound reminded her of rice pouring from a burlap sack. Don’t think about food, she told herself. The clouds grew darker as she gained elevation. The air thinned and cooled. The light was dim for midday. Marmeg stopped to get a kinetic charger out of her gear bag and strap it to her left arm. Her cuff had solar cells, but they wouldn’t be of much use in this weather.

She set her pace at a jog, leaping over the occasional fallen tree. Once, she startled a squirrel as she landed on the far side of a trunk. Had it been a snake, she could’ve been out of the race, like two years back when a contestant needed air rescue for a rattlesnake bite. She avoided blind jumps after that.

Heavy drops of rain spattered Marmeg as the trees dwindled. The pale hue of granite filled the widening gaps between reddish-brown trunks. In minutes, the woods went from sparse to nonexistent, replaced by boulders and twiggy bushes. A towering ridge rose from the open ground. Slabs of gray laced with pale blue and white loomed like sloppy icing on her mother’s homemade cakes.

Marmeg grinned and raised her wrist to take a picture. Her brothers would be amazed that she’d climbed over this. Raindrops fell faster as she leapt from one mound to the next, the muscles of her legs reacting with unnatural force, driven by the exoskeleton. The journey to the top of the ridge was a dance. Jump. Twist. Take three delicately balanced steps to the left. Jump again.

A cramp in her right calf forced her to stop and adjust the exo’s settings. Marmeg breathed heavily and took a break to look around from the high point. She stood on an island of stone surrounded by conical tips of dark green, a sea that undulated and shifted in color depending on the terrain. In the distance, sheets of rain obscured the serrated peaks that awaited her. Lightning flickered in her periphery.

She stared, unblinking, until she saw one strike in full. The jagged, white-hot flash was a phenomenon she’d never seen in her eighteen years of life in Los Angeles. Alone on the ridge, she thought to herself: This must be how God felt after creating the world.

A loud crack from behind brought her back to mortality. Lightning preferred to strike at exposed locations. She would be safer in the forest. Marmeg descended the ridge, favoring speed over grace. When she reached the shelter of trees, she slowed down. Rain trickled down her head in steady rivulets. The precipitation made a gentle rustle as it fell through the alpine canopy. The air had become noticeably cooler, and her wet state wasn’t helping. Marmeg activated the heating coils in the torso shell.

Twenty minutes later, her breath came out in cottony white puffs, and she was colder than ever. She slipped a hand under the shell to confirm what she suspected: it hadn’t warmed up.

Muttering curses in Tagalog that she’d learned from her mother, she stopped and reached into her pack. Her hand found the soft bundle of spare clothing.

Marmeg slipped out of the torso shell and sleeves. Goosebumps popped up along her bare arms. She pulled on a thermal shirt and a fleece sweatshirt with a faded US Army logo. Back on went the gear, and over that, the dollar-store plastic rain poncho. At least the torso shell’s abdominal activators and cardio monitor still worked.

Some semblance of warmth returned after Marmeg jogged for a mile through the sodden trees. Her steps converged to an even rhythm. Her mind wandered to daydreams. She would finish her degree in embed design and get a “benefits job,” as people said back home. If she was lucky, the company would pay for additional enhancements and surgeries. Then, once she was sufficiently buffed, she could quit and become a professional racer.

The pros had embedded audio and video recording capabilities with stereo sensors for immersive playback. The best had haptic sensors for whole-body virtual reality. Not many in the general public could use that level of technology, but the day was coming when they would. She had to become a star before that happened. That was the way out of the nat ghetto, to go from cash to credit to rich on ratings. This race was only the first step.

When she made it as a big-time embed racer, she could get her brothers in on the game. T’Shawn, too. They could be her legit support team. Maybe Felix would grow up to become an embed developer too. They could live in an actual house with separate bedrooms, and she would never have to share a bathroom again. Or worry about someone eating her food. She wouldn’t even have to think about food, because she would hire someone to keep their fridge well stocked.

Best of all, if she were rich, she could have moot surgery and maybe convince her younger brothers to do the same. Jeffy was a lost cause, though he didn’t hate moots like their mother did. And what would Amihan say about Marmeg’s success? She would have to take back every nasty, negative comment she’d made about Marmeg’s looks or smarts. She might even get licensed grandkids. Marmeg would gladly gift Jeffy the fees if he could stay with one girl long enough.

Her cuff beeped. She was off course by a quarter mile. She stopped running and traced a corrected path. Her sweat cooled. She shivered and looked up at the gray skies. They’d grown darker and more swollen with rain. Keep moving, stay warm.

She headed toward a mountain pass, the first of several on her planned route. The pass had looked smooth in the satellite images, an easy way to cross the first range. Maybe she’d meet another contestant there, though the pros preferred a challenge. Their sponsors paid for drama. This route did not promise excitement.

Marmeg was damp, chill, and borderline miserable when she arrived at the rock pile marking the climb to the pass. The rain had eased to a sprinkle. Cold had settled in its place like a determined, unwelcome houseguest.

Someone stood at the cairn. Marmeg was momentarily relieved at the sight of another human being, but she hung back, out of zir line of sight. Would this person be a friend or a foe? Given her mixed reception at the staging area, zie was as likely to scoff at or even sabotage her as zie was to be helpful. If only she could look up zir ratings on the grid, she would know the answer in seconds.

The person was staring at the space in front of zir face. Looking at maps, Marmeg assumed. She gathered her courage.

“Hoy,” she called, coming forward.

Zie turned and focused on her. Zir eyes were almost black in the gloomy afternoon light. They were framed by long, curving lashes. This one definitely looked moot, with dark brown skin and curly black hair much like Marmeg’s, though zie wore it to zir shoulders. It hung damp and limp in ropy waves. Zie had the slightest hint of curves at chest and hip, enough to be alluring but not enough to give away what zie was born with. Zie showed little sign of wetness and no signs of cold, wrapped as zie was in an expensive-looking smartskin.

“Hello. Are you headed up to the pass too?” Zie had an accent that Marmeg couldn’t place.

“Firm.”

“Pardon?”

“Yes. Up the pass.”

“Great. We can walk up together if you don’t mind the company.”

Zie was rather cute. She wouldn’t mind spending an hour with zir, and they’d have plenty of time to split up and get back to racing on the other side. All or nothing, she thought.

“Let’s go.”

They walked along something that resembled a path but was more of a clearing between scraggly bushes, boulders, and twisted trees. They made a course correction whenever one of them spotted the next stack of rocks that marked the way.

“My name is Ardhanara Jagadisha, but that seems to be a mouthful for Americans. You can call me Ardha.”

“Arda,” Marmeg repeated, trying to shape the unfamiliar sound.

“Close enough,” zie said with a friendly smile. “So, what brings you to this contest?”

Chatty sort. Not her type after all.

“Prize money,” Marmeg said.

Ardha let a few beats of silence pass. Zie must have been expecting more from her.

“I see. My father works for the Lucknow branch of Minerva, and the division there sponsored me to enter the contest. I’m mostly here to field-test their new technology, but the division wants publicity, too. If I win, they’ll be able to push for an expansion of the design center there. I’m studying electrical engineering. I might even work there someday.”

“Where’s Lucknow?” Marmeg said, trying to keep up with zir words and strides. Ardha’s smartskin was much lighter than Marmeg’s old exoskeleton frames, and zie wasn’t carrying a pack.

“India,” Ardha said, sounding surprised. Zie waved at zirself. “You couldn’t tell where I’m from?”

Marmeg shook her head.

“No tells on you. Full moot, full embed, right? It’s good.”

Ardha looked pleased.

“My grandparents are very progressive. They funded the sex surgery. For the embeds, I only had to pay for the implants. My sponsors donated the rest. So far, everything is holding up quite nicely. And your gear? Where is it from?”

Marmeg flushed as she thought about what to say. The truth wouldn’t matter now, out here with no grid access and no way to update their ratings.

“Gear’s filched, mostly,” she confessed. “Got some legit chips—arms, legs, body.” She tapped the base of her skull for the last one.

“What’s ‘filched’? I’m not familiar with that term.”

“From a Dumpster. What some loaded embed threw out.”

“So, you picked up your gear from . . . a garbage bin?” Ardha’s face wrinkled in repulsion and then smoothed into neutrality. “We’re very careful to recycle all of our used gear so that it doesn’t fall into criminal hands. Of course, there’s so much corruption back home that the real criminals are running the country. That’s a different problem. So, isn’t this filched gear broken?”

“Fix it. Rube it.” Marmeg shrugged. “Been doin’ since I was eight.”

Ardha’s eyebrows shot up. “You’ve been repairing embed gear since you were eight years old? You must be very bright. How many sponsors do you have?”

“Nada.”

Ardha turned and stared at Marmeg.

“Zero,” she clarified.

“Yes, I understood that. I was simply speechless. Unusual for me, I know,” zie said. “But how is this possible?”

“Born unlicensed. Bought my own later, but sponsors don’t like that. Amnesty parents, kids—too much contro. Can’t use us to sell their stuff.”

“Ah, yes. I had forgotten about the new American caste system. If you’re racing without any sponsorship, what will you do if you can’t finish? There’s a heavy fine for being extracted mid-race. You know that?”

Marmeg shrugged again.

Something small and white drifted by. Then another. And another.

“Snow?”

“So it seems. I didn’t see that in the weather forecast. Did you?”

Marmeg shook her head.

“This should make the race more interesting.”

Ardha reached back and pulled up a snug-fitting hood around zir head. Only zir face was exposed now. Tiny white flakes landed on zir brows and eyelashes, glittering there for a few seconds before melting away. Zir breath came in gentle puffs.

Marmeg, working much harder, exhaled clouds of white. She wished she had thought to pack a warm hat. It hadn’t occurred to her that they would need winter weather gear in late spring, especially in California.

The snow smelled incredible, somewhere between iced vodka and fresh rain. Bare mountain rock surrounded them. They’d left the trees behind and below. Up here, the only colors were wet cement, gunmetal grays, and white. The clouds hung heavy and close. Wind batted down at them and tossed tiny snowflakes into demented, gravity-defying spirals.

Marmeg squinted, trying to see how much farther they had, but the slope and weather combined to make that a challenge. Ardha saw what she was doing and did the same.

“Oh, bloody hell,” zie said.

“What?”

“You’ll see in a minute. Come on.”

Ardha must have enhanced zir distance vision. Zie broke into a run as the granite surface flattened into a gentle incline. Marmeg followed. They stopped abruptly just before the ground turned white. A field of ice stretched before them, all the way up to the top of the pass. Sheer vertical walls of stone rose up on either side. All Marmeg could see through the gap was sky.

“Can you believe it? A glacier! I studied the satellite images extensively. This pass was supposed to be completely clear.” Zie kicked at the ice. “We’ll have to go back and take a different route.”

“Nah. Let’s rube it,” Marmeg said.

She sat and pulled out every metal item from her bag, spreading them on the ground until it looked like she was surrounded by shrapnel. Ardha stared as if she had lost her mind. Marmeg ignored zir and examined one item after another. Most were spare parts for her leg and arm exos—screws, pistons, actuators. The screws were too small, but the multi-tool with screwdrivers and blades? That had potential.

Marmeg showed Ardha the small device. “Cut this up. Strap on the sharp bits. Could get us over.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d help me through the pass?”

“Sure. Splitsville after.”

“That’s . . . very sportsmanlike of you.”

“Got a prob, though.” Marmeg looked at the rest of the debris. “No metal cutters.”

Ardha held out zir left hand as if zie wanted to shake. A sharp, two-inch-long blade pushed out of zir palm, just below zir pinky finger. Blood welled around the base of the blade, then congealed quickly into a brown scab.

“It will cut through metal like butter, or so they promised me. I didn’t think I’d need it, but one of the engineers insisted. Give me the army knife.”

Marmeg placed the multi-tool into Ardha’s right hand and tried not to look envious. As the engineers had predicted, Ardha’s blade sheared the hinge off with no effort. The various tools slid out and fell to the ground.

“Got a drill, too?”

“Yes. Right here in my index finger.”

Ardha retracted the blade, and Marmeg watched in fascination as zir skin speed-healed over the wound. A small drill bit poked through zir right index finger. Marmeg pulled off her boots.

“Drill here and here,” she said, pointing.

The drill made the barest whine as Ardha punctured the reinforced carbon steel lining of her boots. Ardha’s boots were much thinner, and zie put holes in them to match hers. While zie worked on zir boots, Marmeg attached the tools—one screwdriver tip and one short blade for each foot. It was a poor substitute for crampons, but their enhanced balance could make up for it.

“The pass must have been in shadow for the latest satellite images,” Ardha grumbled as zie worked. “I don’t see how else we could have missed the ice. Do you?”

Marmeg nodded. “Sure. Image hack. Get a high-rater to post it. Fooled us, yeah?”

Ardha frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Marmeg pulled on her boots. Her toes were stiff with cold, and she wiggled them against the interior to get back some warmth.

“I should have asked them to include a routine for walking on ice. If only we were allowed grid access, I could download one.”

“Could code one.”

“Here? Now? Write an ice-walking routine?”

Marmeg had her screen out and was scanning the subroutine that handled slip and balance. “Needs a few adjustments. Tweak the numbers in here. Might help.” She blew on her fingers to warm them up and typed in an option to run with lower friction. If it didn’t work, she’d need a quick way to return to her normal settings.

“Can I use your software?”

“What chips you got?”

Ardha didn’t carry a screen—zie didn’t need one—so Marmeg waited for zir to read her the information. The verdict was a no. Ardha’s chips were a new design with a new instruction set. She didn’t carry compilers for it.

“Sorry,” she said, downloading the new routines into her legs. “You got a compiler?”

Zie shook zir head. “I don’t even have source code. It was worth a try, though. I can’t believe you can write code on the spot like this.”

“Did contests in school. Gotta work fast.”

Marmeg was happy to have come this far without having to fix any equipment. Her cuff showed three hours and eleven miles, well below the record-setting pace, but she wasn’t after a record. Even fifth place awarded enough cash to buy one semester’s tuition and Felix’s license.

“Are you ready?” Ardha said, standing gracefully on zir cobbled boots and holding out a hand.

Marmeg quirked an eyebrow and pointedly ignored zir as she pulled on her pack. She crawled over to the ice field and cautiously stood. She slipped a bit with the first few steps. Then her gyros, chips, and brain figured out how to dance on ice.

Ardha was now holding out both zir arms as if to catch her. It reminded her of a live ballet performance she’d seen years ago with her mother.

“Wanna dance?” she said with a wide grin.

Ardha laughed. “I’d rather race.” Zie took off up the snowbound slope with rapid but choppy steps.

“Cheat!” Marmeg called after zir.

Then she tried leaping, inspired by the thought of ballerinas. She reached down mid-jump to one leg, then the other, increasing the spring tension. In less than a minute, she leapt past Ardha. The software routine worked beautifully.

Exhilaration soared when she arrived at the top. A glance back showed Ardha jumping but also slipping and counterbalancing as zir smartskin failed to accommodate for rubed crampons. Zir face was drawn with concentration, eyes scanning the ice for the best course.

From the peak of the pass, Marmeg caught her first view of the vastness ahead. Waves upon waves of sharp, rocky peaks continued out to the horizon. Many were shrouded in clouds, and the valley itself was obscured by the haze of falling snow and rain. Somewhere, on the far side of it all, lay the striated columns of Devils Postpile and the finish line.

Ardha stopped next to her, admiration clear on zir face. “Thank you for the assistance. That saved me at least thirty minutes of rerouting.” Zie reached down and snapped off the blades from zir boots.

“Keep them.”

“I would, but I have no pockets.”

They both laughed. It was true: zir smartskin was smooth and almost featureless. Marmeg took the blades back, snapped off her own, and stowed them in her pack. When she straightened, Ardha wrapped her in a brief but gentle hug. Her friend—because it seemed that’s what they were now—had a warm, smooth cheek that smelled subtly of roses.

“See you on the other side. Good luck!”

“Luck,” Marmeg replied.

The embrace had startled her, but she didn’t mind it. As Ardha pulled away, Marmeg caught a flicker of motion in the corner of her eye.

“Did you see—” she said, but zie was already running down the slope.

Marmeg looked around but didn’t see any signs of life. Odd, she thought. Perhaps an animal, though anything big that was up this high was not something she wanted a good look at. She recalled the story about Mountain Mike. A tingle of fear ran through her. Then a sudden gust of wind almost knocked her over and loosed the feeling from her head.

There was no one there but her, and she had to move. Marmeg flicked her wrist and pulled up the route map on her cuff. It headed in a different direction from the way Ardha had run. Zir silver form shrank in the distance. Good. She didn’t want to spend too much time getting friendly with the competition.

• • • •

The weather worsened as Marmeg traversed the undulating wilderness. Down she went into the quiet of trees, green and gloom, damp earth and soggy pine needles. Up, through scrub and rock, over a small rise with a local view. Down again. Her steps treacherous as ice crystallized in the shade. She climbed and descended until the repetition became mind-numbing.

Three hours and thirteen miles passed by with no company but an occasional squirrel dashing for shelter. Once in a while, Marmeg heard a rustling sound—usually when she’d stopped to catch her breath or tweak her leg settings—but she never spotted the source of the noise. Deer? Bear? She didn’t have any weapon but the broken multi-tool blades, and those would offer poor protection against an angry or hungry animal. Better that the creature stayed hidden.

She was leaping cautiously up a rock-strewn ridge, now speckled with patches of invisible ice, when her right arm froze in mid-swing. That threw off her already delicate balance. She came crashing down into a nearby bush.

Marmeg winced as she tried to stand. Her left hip was bruised, and her arm was locked into a right angle. She got up awkwardly and walked to a sheltered rock under a tree. Using her working arm, she tried to pull off the right sleeve. It was completely rigid. She took her screen out of the pack, unrolled it, and pulled up the diagnostic software.

A quick check of the sleeve showed everything reading normal. With a grimace of annoyance, Marmeg called up its controller chip next. Every register read back an ominous set of zeroes. She tried sending the reset code, but it made no difference. Either the chip or its communications was fried.

Marmeg looked up into the feathery dark-green needles and let out a stream of curse words that she’d learned from one of her stepfathers. Now what? She could try to keep running with a locked arm. She could cut the damn sleeve off, though it would be worthless forever after. Or she could give up, turn on her grid access, and quit.

The third option wasn’t a real choice. Not yet, though the likelihood of her placing in the top five was looking a lot lower than it had ten minutes before. Fixing the sleeve would take too much time, but she might as well preserve it as long as possible.

Her hip throbbed, probably from landing on a rock. Her right shoulder ached from the weight of the frozen arm. She chose the first option.

Marmeg grabbed the stim pills out of the backpack and downed two. Then she pulled out an old leg sleeve that she’d brought as backup gear and used it to make a sling. She shivered as she stood. The cold had seeped in quickly while she sat still. She headed onward in a slow jog, wary of every obstacle.

• • • •

An hour later, the weather went from bad to worse as rain turned to sleet and intermittent hail. Marmeg’s plastic hood grew heavy with ice crystals. Her leg motions became sluggish. The temperature must have dropped low enough to thicken the hydraulic fluid.

She was halfway across a fallen tree over a raging stream when the leg exos stopped working. Marmeg was stuck like a horse rider in a glitched fantasy game, both legs completely immobile. She tried to warm up the pistons with her mobile hand, but that had no effect.

No way could she remove her exoskeletons while perched ten feet above frigid, frothing water. Instead she scooted, a painstaking few inches at a time, until she was on the other side. There, she swung one leg over the top and landed on her knees in a soggy clump of ferns.

“Are you testing me?” Marmeg said out loud.

Her mother’s God might or might not have been listening, but she was tired of being alone. And just plain tired. The cuff showed the time as five-thirty and her mileage at twenty-nine—less than four miles per hour and well under the four-point-two record, but not bad, either. Where was everyone else, she wondered, and how were they faring in this weather?

The background image on her cuff switched to a picture of her brothers. Seeing their faces made tears sting the backs of her eyes.

“Want to go home,” she whispered to the cuff.

Off-grid as she was, nobody would be listening.

“I’m cold. One of my chips is fried. Ice is falling from the sky. Forecast said rain. This isn’t rain! Okay, God? You got that? Want me to fail? Teaching me a lesson, like Ma always said you would? Well, screw you! I’m not a quitter.”

The words were a small comfort against the constant patter and crunch of frozen droplets making their way through the trees. Marmeg repeated the last few words like a chant while unscrewing and removing the leg braces. After they were off, it occurred to her to check the embedded chips in her legs.

All four were toast.

Marmeg’s scream ripped through the silence and faded into the gentle chatter of precipitation. She kicked viciously at one of the exos. It flew into the muddy, half-frozen stream bank. Her mind reeled. How could five of her embedded chips choose this day, this race, to stop working?

Virus, whispered a voice in the back of her brain.

The chips had programmable boot codes, ones that Marmeg could access using the near-field emitter from her screen. The last time she’d been up close with other people was back at the race start. Someone must have planted the virus with a built-in delay, like a ticking time bomb.

She tested the core chip, the one lodged in her brain stem, and almost cried with relief when it responded correctly. She wiped its memory and reloaded clean code from her screen. That one, at least, wouldn’t fall victim to the virus. She did the same for her left arm.

What next? The sun wouldn’t set for three hours, but it was getting close to the mountain peaks in the west. The sky was dark with clouds, and the air wasn’t getting any warmer. She was facing down a long, cold night with ordinary legs, no heat, and no shelter.

Bail out, she thought. It’s over. You can’t win this. You’ll be lucky not to freeze to death.

Then she remembered the spare chips, the last-minute gift from T’shawn, that she’d tucked into her gear bag.

“Crazy talk,” Marmeg whispered.

But her left hand moved, took the small blade from the broken-up multi-tool, sliced through the right sleeve. She wouldn’t attempt surgery with only one arm. With both arms free and mobile, she rummaged inside the pack until she found the box.

Four clear capsules nestled in dark gray foam. Inside them, tiny wafers of silicon and gold gleamed in the half-light of late afternoon. Delicate threads of wire lay coiled beside each capsule, the ends surrounded by a protective sheath.

Marmeg had been awake for the original surgeries. T’shawn had held her hand. They’d watched in fascination as Marmeg’s leg was numbed; as the surgeon sliced into the flesh of her calf; as he pulled up a quarter-inch flap of bloody skin and muscle. Then he’d tucked a capsule into the incision, threading the lead wires into the muscle fibers, and stitched it up neatly.

Marmeg rolled up one pant leg and traced the old scar with an icy finger. The stim pills ran through her veins, but they wouldn’t help much with this. She gritted her teeth, took a deep breath, and pushed the short, dull knife into the scar.

An agonized groan turned into a sob. Blood welled and fell onto the spring green leaves of the fern below like crimson rain. With a trembling hand, Marmeg reached into the cut. She whimpered as she felt for the capsule. When she touched something hard and slippery, she grabbed and yanked. The leads pulled free of the muscle. Adrenaline and endorphins surged. Her heart raced.

The sudden wrench of her stomach caught Marmeg by surprise. She bent over to the side and managed not to throw up on herself. Then, taking a few shaky breaths, she carefully removed a new capsule, unwound the leads, and pushed it into her leg. She shoved the leads apart as best as she could, and then stopped. There was nothing to suture with, not that she even knew how.

Frustration and despair took over like fog filling a valley. Her heart hammered. Think, you stupid, lousy brain! You wanted to do this race. You thought you could take these people, but you’re useless! Just another crapshoot filcher who doesn’t know a damn thing about being an embed.

Glue.

She had glue in the pack.

Marmeg found the small tube of industrial-strength fixative. Don’t glue your fingers to your leg. She sobbed and laughed. She stanched as much blood as she could with the ruined sleeve and then squeezed glue along the outer part of the incision. She pressed down with one hand while wrapping the useless, ripped fabric around her leg like a bandage. With a shaky sigh of disbelief, she sat back and stared at her handiwork.

“Not bad, but what’ll you use to tie off the other three?” a deep voice said from behind.

Marmeg screamed, leapt up, and then cried out from the pain in her calf. In the shadows of the trees stood a tall, wiry man with a face from a nightmare: dark, dirt-streaked skin, wild hair to his shoulders, features hidden behind a coarse beard. Marmeg’s tiny blade was lying on the ground. It might as well have been on the moon.

“What—who are you?”

“Let’s save the introductions for later. Right now, we need to get you warm and clean that wound up before you contract a raging infection.”

The words took a minute to penetrate the fear pounding through her head.

“Why?”

He raised a bristly eyebrow. “Why what?”

“Why help me?”

“Don’t trust me, eh? Well, that’s not a bad instinct for a kid like you in a place like this. Too bad you didn’t think of it earlier when you were with the other racer. Now come on. Save your questions for when we’re inside. I swear I’m not going to hurt you.”

The man grabbed Marmeg’s muddy exos and the rest of her gear, including the bloodied blade, and shoved it all into her pack. He pulled the bag onto his back with a grunt.

“What the hell is in here? Weighs as much as a small person.”

“Gear.”

He snorted, then tried to put an arm around Marmeg. She instinctively twisted away and shoved, but she was the one who lost her balance and fell on the ground. He looked at her with a bemused expression.

“Fine. You go ahead and walk on your own.”

He moved away, threading a path between the plants and trees. Marmeg limped after him.

• • • •

A short but painful walk brought them to a log cabin. The low building nestled under the trees next to a lush, green meadow. The mountain man pushed open a wooden door. Marmeg followed him into a one-room cabin. A cot, a table, and a tree stump stool made up the furnishings. A locked metal chest was tucked under the table. Across from the door, in the corner, stood an oblong black thing, about the size of a large pot, with a metal tube leading out of it and through the roof. Dim light filtered in through a dirty window.

The man busied himself with the black device, pushing small pieces of wood in through a door in its front. Then he grabbed a box, took out a toothpick-looking thing, and struck it against the side. The toothpick lit up, and he tossed it in with the wood. As Marmeg watched in fascination, the smaller pieces caught fire, and soon everything started to burn.

The man noticed her fixed gaze. “It’s a wood-burning stove.”

“Not legit.”

“That’s true. It’s illegal in California to burn anything that smokes, but it’s the only way to survive out here.”

“You Mountain Mike?”

His eyes twinkled. “Is that what they’re calling us?”

Marmeg caught the plural. “Who else?”

“We’re a network. Now, enough standing around. You’d better lie on the bed while I look at that hack job you did on your leg.”

The stove warmed the cabin. Marmeg sank onto the cot, wary but glad of the comfort. The mattress had lumps and smelled moldy, but it was better than a bed of pine needles. Pain wrenched at her leg as she swung it onto the pallet.

Mike, or whoever he was, had removed a plastic box with basic medical supplies from the metal trunk. He placed the stool next to the bed, sat, and cut away her makeshift bandage. His face twisted into a grimace as he examined the wound.

“I can’t do much, but I’ll disinfect the outside and cover it with sterile gauze. You’ll have to get it looked at tomorrow after you’re back in civilization. What I can do,” he said, glancing briefly at her before looking back at the leg, “is help you with the other calf chip. I’ve got rubbing alcohol to clean off that knife blade some, and I can make a better incision than you can. Will you let me?”

Marmeg winced as he applied the ointment. If he’d wanted to hurt her or kill her, he could’ve done so by now, and she could use the help. Then again, nothing in life was free.

“Why? What you want of me?”

“Your word that when you win this race, you’ll help our movement.”

“Help how?”

“You give us half your prize money.”

“Half! If I don’t?”

“We’ll provide evidence to Minerva of this encounter—that you took help from me—and they’ll disqualify you and take their money back.”

“If I don’t place?”

“You will. You might even come in first. The people we help always end up in the top three.”

Marmeg frowned. “All cheats? Every year?”

“The last four years. That’s when we first got the idea. I suppose it’s cheating, but it’s a win-win situation the way I see it. We choose someone who deserves a little help, like you, and we get to keep doing our work.”

That explained the dark horse winners.

“Look around, kid! Nature isn’t static, and it’s always full of surprises. Take this cold front right now. Everyone comes into these races believing they just have to be strong and fast, that studying images of the terrain and digital maps is enough to know what they’re going to get. It rarely is. You know that already from that glacier you and the other fellow had to climb.”

“You were there? Thought I saw someone.”

Mike nodded. “You did, but it wasn’t me. We’ve been watching from the start. That’s how we know who to pick. We have to be careful, choose someone who could plausibly win. Now let’s get back to the question at hand: do you want my help with that other calf? Do you want to win this race?”

Marmeg looked down at her cuff and her brothers’ goofy smiles. She didn’t have to tell them the whole story, but she did have to come home with some money. It was that or call her mother to come bail her out. That was the worst possibility Marmeg could imagine.

Amihan would never forgive Marmeg for the enormous sin of spending her money on gear and race fees. She would call it gambling. And she would be convinced that God was punishing Marmeg for partaking of such an evil pastime. She might be right, considering that Marmeg would be back to club security and nothing more if she didn’t place. Winning by any means, even for half the prize money, would be better than that.

“Do it.”

Mike handed her a few white pills. “These won’t help with the pain now, but they will later.”

He went back to the trunk and pulled out a dark-brown glass bottle. He worked the cork out and handed Marmeg the bottle. She washed the pills down in one swallow, glad that Jeffy had given her opportunities to drink cheap booze. At least she didn’t make a fool of herself by choking on whatever this was. It burned the back of her throat. A pleasant, tingling warmth soon spread through her body. She leaned her head back against the rough wood and closed her eyes.

“You go ahead and scream if you need to. Nobody’s around to hear it.”

That sounded like a line in a bad horror vid. Marmeg chuckled, but she kept her eyes closed. The sounds of gear clinking played counterpoint to the pops and crackles from the wood stove. The scent of smoke filled the air. Marmeg sank into a stupor.

A sensation of cold and wet against her leg snapped her eyes open. Mike rubbed an alcohol pad against the old incision on her other calf.

“Ready?” he asked.

“As ever.”

Marmeg lay on her side and clenched her hands around the edge of the mattress. Mike sliced into her flesh, a quick, sure cut. She gritted her teeth against the pain; no screaming, not this time. She was breathing fast and harsh by the time he dug in with a pair of tweezers and extracted the bad chip. While he disinfected the replacement, she took a deep, steadying breath and reached for the brown glass bottle. She gulped three times.

“You better put that down before I finish this.”

He was much more deft with the capsule placement than she had been. She was surprised that he knew what to do. Unlike her field surgery, he took the time to close the wound neatly, wiping it clean before applying the glue. The result was a red, ragged mess, but it looked better than her other leg.

“I’m not going near the quad chips and your femoral artery.” He handed Marmeg her screen. “Your turn.”

She pulled up the control software and reprogrammed the new capsules. She had splurged for a brain-stem chip as her only legit surgery, using the programming contest money she had ferreted away from her mother. One of its benefits was that her muscles adapted more quickly to program changes. Another was that new chips would integrate faster with her physiology. The pain, however, was something she would have to ignore for the next twelve hours.

Marmeg hissed as she limped to the table where her gear pack lay open. She gritted her teeth, pulled the calf exos on, and went through a basic test sequence: walk, run in place, jump, balance on one foot. The incisions twinged but the pain intensity decreased with every flexion and extension of her muscles.

As a final exercise, Marmeg jumped from the floor onto the table, landing on it in a crouch and poised for her next motion. Mountain Mike leaned against the door, his arms crossed across his narrow chest, his expression inscrutable under the facial hair. His eyes followed her movements.

Marmeg leapt lightly off the table and repacked. She left the two quadriceps exos out. They wouldn’t be worth much on the open market. She’d have plenty of time to replace them once she was done with this race, though she wouldn’t have much money, not after she shared with the Mikes. That meant no license for Felix.

“What’ll you do with your half?” she said, stowing the last of the gear.

“We use it to keep up the knowledge of how to live with the land. When catastrophe strikes, which it inevitably will, what are you embeds going to do? Your gear makes you dependent on technology. Same with everyone who never leaves the city. Without electricity and clean water and food delivered to you, you’ll be lost. You’ll need people like us to show you how to survive. Someone has to keep the old skills alive.”

Mike was busy at the stove, poking inside with a metal rod and splashing water into it from a bucket that Marmeg hadn’t noticed before. The flames died down into glowing bits of wood and burnt black sections. He closed the stove door.

“We also use the money to maintain these cabins, pay for our phones, and supplement our food. This land can provide a lot, but we get hungry for cake and beer sometimes, too.” He grinned. His teeth were yellow but straight. “Let’s go.”

Marmeg followed him out of the cabin. Cold air struck her bare face. The sun had passed behind the western peaks, and icy rain had turned into flakes of snow. Marmeg’s breath puffed out like a friendly ghost. She flicked on her cuff and checked their path. It wasn’t taking them back to her original route.

“Where we heading?”

“Didn’t you wonder how a bunch of survivalists like us could help you embeds win a race?”

“Wondered, yeah.”

“We’ve made tunnels under the ridges and built shortcuts through some of the passes as well. They’re hidden from the satellites by plant cover. Nature does most of the work for us.”

Marmeg’s conscience pricked her. Cheats were not looked on favorably in her neighborhood, and Jeffy was especially contemptuous of people who didn’t play fair. She hated the idea of lying to him. He’d supported her when she started fixing up embed gear. He’d slipped her money, shielded her from their mother’s ire. Without him, she wouldn’t be at this race today. She didn’t want to let him down, but if she didn’t place somewhere in the top five, she would disappoint everyone, especially herself.

Far behind them, thunder rumbled. They climbed up through the trees. The wind blew harder as the vegetation thinned out.

“I’m going to give you a new route,” Mike said.

He stopped at the base of a large slab of rock that rose like a wall. Marmeg craned her neck, following the vertical expanse until it vanished into the clouds. A snowflake landed in her slack-jawed mouth, a tiny crystal of cold that dissolved on her hot tongue.

Mike pulled an old-style handheld from his back pocket. Marmeg flicked on her cuff and allowed him to send her a file. It was a map overlay, much like the one she had made, but with a far more direct route.

“‘Nuf miles?”

“It’ll be enough. Just don’t hug the next racer you come across.”

“What?”

“That boy you helped over the ice field. I’m fairly certain he’s the one who fried your chips. It was probably when you let him get close.”

“Zir,” Marmeg corrected automatically while her mind raced. Had Ardha been close enough to corrupt her chips? Yes: that final embrace. But zie had been so cooperative. Stupid, stupid, stupid! To fall for a pretty moot face and destroy her chance of winning this race fair and square. She wished she could smash Ardha’s rating then and there, make sure no one trusted zir again.

Mike shrugged. “Zie, he, she—until you change your genetics, you’re still male or female as far as I’m concerned. You kids want to play at being something that you’re not, that’s between you. I’m not changing the way I talk.”

“Not playing,” Marmeg said irritably. “Making waves. Changing the world. Better to judge on what you can do, not how you born. Bodies are going out. Nats be left behind.”

“You think so, eh? What do you expect will happen to the human species if we’re all neutered embeds? Who’s going to make the babies?” Mike shook his head. “You think you’re going to change the world. The reality is that the world is changing us. Pretty soon we’re going to need all the nat skills and abilities that our ancestors had. I should know; I used to be like you, full of bits of silicon and titanium. I fought in the Congo. Nature is stronger than we give her credit for. Best that we learn to coexist peacefully with her.”

Not only was Mike a nat, he was a converted one—the worst kind when it came to preaching—but his words didn’t convince her. Companies like Minerva specialized in physical enhancements, but others were working on deeper changes. They wouldn’t need babies in the future. They would live forever, bodies enhanced, minds uploaded.

Mike looked at her and sighed. “Every year I try, hoping that the message gets through to someone . . . someday. You think you understand the world by seeing it through the grid, but reality is messier than bits and bytes.”

They’d been walking along the base of the massive rock wall. Mike stopped at a cluster of scraggly bushes growing between some rocks. He pushed the branches aside and rolled a couple stones away, revealing an opening that was half Marmeg’s height and as wide as an arm span.

“You’ll see for yourself when you’re older. Here’s the tunnel. Someone will meet you when you need to get into the next one.”

“This? Be a tunnel?”

Mike grinned. “I never said you could run it. Trust me, you’ll crawl through just fine. In fact, your calves are going to thank you while you’re on your knees. It’s too bad you lost the upper leg enhancements, but this will still save you a lot of time.”

He took something out of his pocket and then stretched it over Marmeg’s head.

“It’s a head lamp. The switch is here, on top. Good luck. I’m going to cover the entrance once you’re in, so don’t try to turn back.”

Marmeg looked at him like he was crazy, which he was, and then decided that she was equally crazy to do this. She got down on hands and knees, turned on the lamp, and went in.

• • • •

The crawl went on and on until Marmeg’s arms, legs, and back ached. She felt like it lasted for hours, but according to her cuff, it only took forty-five minutes. The sky was nearly dark by the time she emerged into another cluster of bushes and rocks.

She looked around but saw no one. She pushed rocks across the hole and tried to arrange the bushes to hide it from a casual glance. The task was harder than it looked. After three attempts to make it seem natural, Marmeg shrugged and gave up. Let the Mountain Mikes make it better if they wanted to.

She loaded the map from Mike, oriented herself, and walked in the direction it indicated. As she moved, the kinks in her body relaxed into a minor nuisance. She tried jogging and then running. Jumping didn’t work as well as it had with the quad exos, but at least the pain from her cuts faded to a dull ache. She could maintain a respectable pace.

Snow dusted the ground like powdered sugar on cinnamon cake. Marmeg’s stomach growled. Her throat felt parched. The booze back at the cabin couldn’t have helped with hydration. She opened her mouth and caught a few snowflakes on her tongue. They melted with a sensation like popping bubbles.

A laugh burst from her. She wished Felix were there. Lee and Jeffy, too. None of them had left the city, seen true wilderness. Here, with nothing but trees and snow, sky above, dirt below, Marmeg’s spirit soared with glee. It had all gone to shit without a pot, but she was there. She was experiencing something that none of her family could comprehend, surrounded as they were by cement and glass.

Marmeg ran faster, breathing hard and enjoying the burn of cold air in her lungs. The incisions on her calves tugged with each step, but the sensation was gentle and far removed. Snow blurred into an almost uniform whiteness. She had to land each step by feel and hope her balance held. A trickle of sweat traced the space between her shoulder blades. Fingers and toes warmed as her blood pulsed and breath deepened.

“I’m alive!” Marmeg yelled into the dark expanse above.

She’d left the head lamp on. She slowed to a jog and switched it off, then activated the night vision in her contact lenses. Marmeg ran until she saw another massive slab of granite looming ahead. The time on her cuff showed nearly ten o’clock. She’d been out for eleven hours.

Her mileage showed as forty-five, far more than she expected. GPS access had been blocked inside the tunnel, so the routing software that Minerva required had extrapolated from the terrain. It calculated the miles as if she’d climbed over rather than crawled through. How had the Mountain Mikes found that loophole?

She arrived near the base of the mountain and couldn’t go farther. The map indicated that she should turn left. Five minutes later, a figure loomed out of the darkness, its hooded face wrapped in a giant wooly scarf.

“This way,” rumbled a low, decidedly male voice.

Marmeg looked for a beard, but it was impossible to find in the swaddled head, especially with her night vision on. The Mike said nothing more as he revealed the tunnel. He stayed silent even after she went in.

The light from the head lamp blinded her when she turned it on. Marmeg blinked and squinted until her pupils adjusted, then began the long, painful crawl to the other side. Muscles cooled, breath slowed, and a deep cold seeped into her body from the rock surrounding her.

This tunnel was considerably longer than the previous one and had some uphill and downhill sections. Halfway through an incline, the pain pills began to wear off. She couldn’t get into the pack for more, so she gritted her teeth and kept moving. Her calves were screaming with pain by the time she came out of the other end. It was nearly midnight. All of the elation from earlier had evaporated.

Marmeg stopped to stretch her pain-wracked body. She popped a couple more stims and three pain pills into her mouth and tried to work up some spit. The mass went down in a painful, bitter lump that made her gag. The analgesics would take some time to work, but the stimulants were fast.

She sat and waited for them to hit. She hated this race. Winning by any means, cheating the GPS system, getting help—and for what? So she could give half the prize money to a group of people whose values meant nothing to her. This race was supposed to be her chance to prove herself, to prove that she could compete with those who had the latest and greatest tech. Now she was like every other lowlife filcher. She ignored the rules, broke laws, and stomped on anyone who stood in her way.

She checked her cuff. The mileage had jumped by another fifteen. That put her total at sixty miles with only fifteen more to go. If all her gear still worked, she could match her earlier four-miles-per-hour pace. She could finish the race and beat the record. Unless that, too, was faked.

Marmeg groaned and hit the ground with a fist. The faces of her brothers stared at her from the cuff.

“What should I do, Jeffy?”

The image was still, silent, accusatory.

You started this, it seemed to say. Finish it! Don’t be a whiny little girl. You’ve already done enough to be disqualified. You might as well go for the kill.

Marmeg shuddered with cold. Too much time sitting still. Her calves stung at the incisions. She could feel warm blood as it seeped through the bandages and froze against the frigid air. Would bloody ice crystals look like rubies?

Red gems dripped from her legs and fell to the ground, forming a carpet around her. The crystals caught the starlight, sparked with their own internal fire. A thousand tiny flames surrounded Marmeg with their warmth.

She woke with a start. The forest was black. Nothing but chilled dirt and melting snow lay beneath her.

“Wake up,” she told herself, slapping her cheeks.

Her cuff said she’d been asleep for twenty minutes, and her body felt heavy from the weight of it. The stim pills had begun their work, though. With a soft groan, Marmeg stood and forced herself to walk, step by slow, dull step.

A quick check showed the leg exos and one remaining sleeve functioning correctly. The heating elements on the torso shell remained broken—no surprise—but the heart and lung monitors read correctly, and the abdominal boosters were doing their job. So, why couldn’t she move faster?

You’re tired.

She put one foot in front of the next, following the path set out for her. What else could she do? Around one o’clock, the moon rose above the eastern peaks. Its light showed breaks in the cloud cover. Marmeg couldn’t see the stars she’d hoped for, but the moonbeams made for better company than the storm-clouded blackness. The snow had stopped falling. The ground crunched under her steps and glimmered from the faint light.

The pain pills started kicking in, and Marmeg picked up her pace. No matter what prize money she won, she wouldn’t be out for another solitary moonlit hike any time soon. She’d caught a snowflake on her tongue. She’d heard ice crackle under her boots, mimicking the sound of broken glass that had been stepped on too many times. Or the sound facial bones made when your mom’s boyfriend didn’t much like your mom’s kid.

She wished she could have a do-over, a second chance to prove that she was as good as the legit embeds and moots; that she could beat them at their own game; that she deserved to be at a university with people who were born licensed, who never had to worry about food or medicine or shots. But that kind of thinking trapped her in the dark corners of her mind, where bad ideas looped infinitely.

Maybe Mountain Mike was right. Life was never fair. Winning by cheating was okay if you used the money for the right reasons. In her case, she wanted to buy little Felix’s license so he could get his shots and go to school. She wanted a full degree, which ultimately meant a better life for her and her family. Those goals were noble enough to let the ends justify the means, weren’t they?

A figure loomed up out of the darkness. Marmeg gasped and nearly lost her footing. She stumbled to a halt a few feet away, breathing hard. When she looked at the person, she saw a face hidden under bushy hair that glinted in the moonlight.

“The hell?” Marmeg demanded, heart hammering. “No tunnels for miles yet!”

“You’re this girl? The one with the leg cuts and all?” The muffled voice was high-pitched.

Marmeg peered at the Mountain Mike. “You a lady?”

The bundle of hair nodded. “We wear beards to fool the cameras. As long as we don’t come too far into the open, they can’t tell us apart. Follow me.”

“But—”

“Come on!”

Marmeg bit back an irritated reply. This Mike plowed straight through the underbrush. Marmeg followed, small branches smacking into the backs of her calves and making the incisions sting. Her cuff said she’d been on the correct path to the next tunnel. Now they headed toward an overland route that she’d considered before the race. It was direct, but it required rock climbing skills and equipment that she didn’t have.

They arrived at a tumble of boulders. Mountain Mike scrambled up on her hands and knees. Marmeg decided that she might as well take it easy and use all four limbs too. There wasn’t much point in jumping like a goat when she had no idea where to go. What would they put her through next?

A light breeze blew over them and grew stronger as they climbed higher. Broken clouds outlined by ghostly white moonlight hung behind the ridge’s saw-toothed silhouette. As she and Mike neared the top, the wind blew so hard that they were forced to lean into it. The bare rock was mostly free of snow and ice, though a few wind-sheltered pockets glittered like treasure. She scooped a handful into her mouth. Only a few drops of cold liquid, but the relief to her throat was immeasurable.

Mountain Mike tapped her on the shoulder and then pointed down—into the wind and a steep, rocky slope. She put her bristly face next to Marmeg’s ear, and Marmeg fought the urge to pull away.

“There’s someone down there who’s hurt. Another contestant. I think you might be able to help me with him. Follow me very carefully. He went down this scree and got trapped under a rockfall. I don’t want the same thing to happen to us.”

Marmeg peered down, trying to see the other person. The nearer rocks reflected the moon’s glow, but nothing else was visible. Her attention locked onto her footing once they transitioned to the down slope. Stones littered the ground, ranging in size from pebbles to boulders wider than her arm span. Each step sent a few of them skittering away. The rattle reminded her of gunfire, a sound that accompanied many nights at home.

Mountain Mike was doing a respectable job of the climb, though she ended up on her ass after half of her steps. Marmeg managed to keep her balance. The lack of full leg exos made the job more difficult than it should have been. She wondered how another race contestant had screwed this up.

Then she saw the massive vertical scar of pale gray against darker rock. At its base lay a jumble of boulders, and under that, the lower half of a body. She winced and turned away for a second, imagining what it must feel like to be crushed beneath that kind of weight. Her legs would be pulp.

Marmeg and Mike inched sideways, perpendicular to the slope, until they stood near the injured contestant. One look at the pale, unconscious face and Marmeg identified zir as Ardha. You got what you deserved, said the vengeful part of Marmeg’s mind. Shut up. Nobody deserves this, said another.

Marmeg bent to lift a rock from Ardha’s body.

“No!” Mike said. “Don’t touch those rocks! I don’t know how stable they are, and they’re saving his life right now by keeping him from bleeding out.”

“What you want from me, then?”

“I want you to enable his grid access. That way the race organizers or his support team will know he’s in trouble. They’ll come get his body, and you can keep going.”

Marmeg shook her head. “Can’t do.”

“Why not? We’ll make sure you still place. Don’t worry about that.”

“Can’t. Not won’t. Can’t access zir cuff.”

“But you’re a hacker.” Mountain Mike sounded confused.

“Not so easy. Could hack it, yeah, but takes time. Like hours time, not minutes time.”

Mike blew out a frustrated breath and carefully sat down next to Ardha’s body. She held a hand on zir wrist, checking zir pulse, Marmeg guessed. Then Mike felt Ardha’s forehead and cheeks. She reached into a pocket, pulled out an old phone, and held it up to her head.

“His pulse is weak, and he’s clammy,” she said, speaking into the handset.

Marmeg could barely hear the words over the wind.

“Maybe another hour or so to live, best guess. Not long enough for her to run to the finish line and inform them.” A pause. “No, that won’t work. What story could she give them?” A longer pause, then louder: “Are you kidding? Just leave him here?”

Mike snapped the phone closed in anger and stood. “If you idiots didn’t think you were invincible, you wouldn’t get us into situations like this. Let’s go!”

“What about zir?”

“We have to leave him. You need to win this race more than we need to help him. So says our leadership. He lives or dies on his support team. That’s a risk all of you take, right? You sign the damn waivers when you enter.”

“Nobody’s ever died.”

“Then he won’t either. Now, come on!”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not leaving zir. Not like this.”

Mike flapped her arms like she was trying to fly off the mountain. “I thought you said you couldn’t do anything?”

“Got my own grid access.”

“You can’t use that. Then we all lose. We’ll get nothing for helping you, and once they realize you’ve been working with us, they’ll ban you from races forever. Is that what you want?”

Marmeg was certainly happy to see Ardha lose the race after what zie had done to her. But to potentially let a person die over money? She would despise herself for it.

She’d pulled herself from the precipice of self-hatred once before, when the glow of being a prodigy had worn off. Marmeg had lived the high school party circuit for a year. Jeffy left for the service, and she had no one to remind her of her worth. Contest money that Amihan didn’t take was burned on pills. Spare time—and she had plenty of that—was lost in the haze of self-loathing.

If she hadn’t met T’shawn, if he hadn’t remembered Marmeg from the old days, she might never have crawled out of her head hole and back into life. This race, the prize money, her dream future: none of these was worth the risk of returning to that ugly corner of her mind.

“Race not the be-all. Zie might die.”

“I know. That’s why I brought you here. Look, this situation is crap, but we have to put the greater good first. If you won’t change your mind . . . well, I can’t blame you, but I can’t help you, either.”

She turned and started walking up the scree.

“That’s it?” Marmeg called after her. “Buncha nats think you’re the stuff! Let a kid die on money? Some things not worth being.”

Marmeg took out her screen, enabled her grid access, and sent a message to the race organizers. She took some photos of Ardha’s situation, too—so they’d know what to bring—and sent a capture of her map with the GPS coordinates displayed. She made sure to disable her grid access again after seeing the send confirmation.

Minerva Corporation did good work. Maybe they’d be decent and not disqualify her for trying to save another contestant’s life. They could check her system log for proof—she accessed the grid only to help Ardha.

“Better live, asshole,” Marmeg whispered to the unmoving body. Ardha’s face was beautiful in spite of its half-bloodied, pale state.

She stood, flexed her calves, and ran up the rocky slope. Pebbles flew behind her, drawn by gravity to whatever waited at the bottom. The Mike’s figure was a shadow crawling along the scree and struggling for purchase. Marmeg continued her swift ascent without giving it a second look.

• • • •

Marmeg got enough of a lead on Mountain Mike that she was well out of sight before taking her bearings. Once she had her location, she pulled up her original route. It was only two miles away, which wasn’t bad considering how completely she had put herself in the hands of the Mikes.

The moon shone overhead. The clouds had fractured into patches of fluffy gray across the sky. Stars twinkled in the gaps, crystal clear even with the lunar glare for competition. Hundreds of diamond pinpoints—more than Marmeg had ever seen. Cold settled into her, a now-familiar friend, and her spirits lightened.

Win or lose, she’d made the only right decision. Losing wouldn’t be so bad. Then she wouldn’t have to share the contest money with people who valued an agenda over a human being. Or maybe they were only indifferent when an embed’s life was at risk. What would they have said if it had been a Mike under the crush of rock? How many Mikes died out there with no one the wiser?

The land felt emptier with that last thought. Running into Ardha the first time had been a coincidence. If the Mountain Mikes hadn’t sought her out, she might have finished the race without seeing anyone else. The lack of humanity was strange, like an empty street with no cop cars to explain it—wrong but not frightening.

Marmeg’s cuff alerted her to the upcoming pass. This one would take her to the finish line. She found the trail marked by cairns and followed it up an uneven set of steps carved out of the granite mountainside. The footing wasn’t difficult, but she chafed at having to climb the steps rather than simply leaping up them. That would have required functional thigh-control chips.

She walked between looming masses of rock. The faintest trace of purplish blue colored the eastern sky. She checked her cuff: three thirty in the morning. The sun would rise in two hours, but she would reach the finish line long before then.

The rushing noise of Rainbow Falls told her she was close. Next came fences made of rough wood to guide people and keep them on the trail, away from the cliff. And then, at last, the striated columns of Devils Postpile rose into the sky. Artificial lights illuminated the natural formation, a beacon to the contestants: the end of the race.

The thrum of an electric generator greeted Marmeg as she loped into the staging area. She squinted against the flood of light triggered by her motion. Drone-cams perched on tree branches. The nearest ones launched and pointed their lenses at her. Zippered tents littered the area. Silhouettes stirred inside some of them, probably alerted by their drones.

Marmeg flicked on her cuff and saw that it was three minutes past four o’clock. She hadn’t beaten the record. Apparently, no one else had either, given the lack of a welcoming committee. A shadowy figure emerged from the trees on the far side of the camp and walked toward her. Zie came into the lit area, and Marmeg recognized the blond moot from the registration booth.

“I’m so sorry,” zie said. “I had to, you know, answer the call of nature. So, you’re the first! Congratulations on winning this year’s race!”

The drone-cams buzzed closer, recording and transmitting the conversation. Marmeg attempted a smile as they walked to a nondescript brown tent.

Zie unzipped the opening and called into it, “Jer, wake up! We have a winner.”

Within minutes, all the tents had opened. People and drones spilled out into the darkness. Groggy journos snapped pictures of Marmeg. She waved away their questions while she ate an energy bar and huddled in a scratchy blanket someone handed her.

Meanwhile, the blond—whose name turned out to be Larlou—and Jer were rapidly setting up the official Minerva booth. Ten minutes after Marmeg’s arrival, the second race contestant ran in. Keni Matsuki, last year’s third-place winner, held an arm swathed in bloody smartsuit fabric. The medical team immediately looked to zir injury.

Marmeg’s tired mind snapped to attention at the sight of blood.

“Hey, Larlou,” she said. “Ardha—zie okay?”

Larlou looked up from the equipment rack.

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“Ardha! Sent you a message. Zie was hurt bad.”

Larlou looked at Jer in bewilderment. “Did you hear about this from any of the support teams?”

“No,” Jer said. He frowned and turned to Marmeg. “You said you pinged them?”

“Not them. You. Message to race org.”

“Well, shit, kid, why didn’t you inform zir support team?”

“Didn’t know their address. Why didn’t you get my message?”

“I see it now,” Larlou said. “Zie looks bad. We weren’t expecting anything urgent, so we weren’t looking at messages. I’ll go find zir team’s tent.”

“Zie doesn’t make it, it’s on you.”

She closed her eyes against a surge of frustration and fear. So much time had elapsed. What if they were too late? She had assumed that Ardha would be taken care of and gone by the time she arrived. Stupid and selfish not to ask about zir condition sooner.

“Wait a minute,” Jer said.

Marmeg opened her heavy eyelids.

“You sent us a message. That means you accessed grid data.”

She nodded. “Had to. Zie was unconscious. Couldn’t access through zir cuff. Turned mine off after sending.”

Jer’s pale lips pressed into a thin line.

Marmeg’s blood surged in anger. “What? Was I wrong? Leave zir to die out there?”

Her stomach sank at Jer’s expression. They’d declared her the winner. Would they take it back? Could they? Most of her wanted nothing more than a hot shower and a soft bed, but her sense of justice couldn’t rest. Minerva had to do the right thing, make the compassionate call. Didn’t they?

Jer walked away, murmuring into his cuff. Dawn had arrived in full effect. Marmeg could see his lips move, but she couldn’t read the words. Adrenaline, pills, pain-induced endorphins: all of them crashed with the break of day. The energy to worry or rage evaporated. She collapsed into the blanket on the ground and fell asleep.

When she woke, rays of sunlight shone through the tree branches at a steep angle. Dust motes danced in the beams, and the aroma of frying eggs, bacon, and pancakes filled the air. She breathed in deeply and stretched. The cuts in her calves tugged uncomfortably, reminding Marmeg that she needed to see the medics.

The site swarmed with people. Contestants, supporters, and journos stood everywhere, eating and talking. Drone cameras buzzed in any available air space. Someone must have noticed that Marmeg was awake, because several cams moved to circle above her, swooping down to near face level and being annoying. Worse, three actual people surrounded her.

“How does it feel?” one of them asked.

“Congratulations! And condolences,” said another. “For what it’s worth, plenty of people on the grid think you did the right thing.”

“What?” Marmeg said stupidly. Her brain felt like it was filled with wet beach sand.

The journos exchanged glances.

“You came in first place, but they’ve disqualified you because you accessed the grid. Keni Matsuki is the official winner.”

“Oh.”

“Aren’t you upset? It’s looking very likely that you saved . . .” the journo checked zir cuff “. . . Ardhanara Jagadisha’s life. People are already circulating a petition on your behalf to get Minerva to reinstate you as the winner.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Marmeg walked past the baffled journos and over to the race tent.

“Truth?” she said to Larlou and Jer.

They looked at her apologetically.

“The race committee disqualified you, Mary. I’m so sorry,” Larlou said. “I think you did the right thing, but they’re saying that we can’t know if you accessed any information or talked to someone who might have helped you while you were online.”

Marmeg hadn’t done either of those, but she had taken help from people off the grid. She had cheated. How could she justify defending the win?

“Look, kid,” Jer said, “you did your best and you did great, but you should’ve hurried back here instead of turning on your access. We didn’t know about Ardhanara until then anyway. Zie was alive when we picked zir up. Everyone knows the risk they’re taking when they enter this race. Zie did too, and frankly, the route zie picked wasn’t smart. What you did was noble, but it wasn’t too smart, either.”

“Jer!” Larlou protested. “Don’t listen to him. If there’s enough public outcry, Minerva will force the race committee to change its mind. It’ll all come out right, Mary. You’ll see. Have some faith.”

Words bubbled into Marmeg’s mind and floated away before she could speak. Was it better to confess the truth or play the wronged innocent? She had broken the rules—not the ones the race people knew about, but rules nonetheless. At least Ardha had survived. Marmeg hoped zie felt like an ass when zie found out who had saved zir.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Larlou said. “Your support team never showed.”

“That’s because she doesn’t have one,” Jer said. His voice wasn’t entirely unkind. “I bet I know what she needs.”

Jer reached for Marmeg’s cuff hand. She pulled it back by instinct.

“I’m going to transfer some credit,” Jer said patiently. He looked sad. “I wish it had turned out differently, but this race is as much a publicity event for Minerva as it is any real test of ability. You handed them an excuse to keep you out of the winner’s circle. They’re going to take that as a gift.”

Shame and anger welled in Marmeg until she wanted to scream. Instead, she thrust out her cuff while looking away at the treetops. She needed money to get home. Taking it from Jer was better than having to call Jeffy or her mother.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, reactivating grid access on her screen so the transaction could complete.

The amount would cover bus fare and some frugal meals. Messages cascaded in as the cuff and screen rediscovered the rest of the world. Marmeg watched as the number ticked up and then jumped and then shot toward the moon. The cuff’s buffer overflowed first, then her screen’s. Marmeg muttered a curse she’d learned from Felix and Lee’s father.

She searched the grounds for a speck of privacy to read them, but a few persistent drones wouldn’t stop chasing her. She glared up at them.

“Did right!” she said loudly but not shouting.

If she was acting for the grid, she would rather play for sympathy. And she spoke the truth. Abandoning her message queue, she sat down in the middle of everything, activity swirling around her. She had yet to take off her gear.

Marmeg gritted her teeth against a groan when she pulled off the first calf exo. She couldn’t help but wince. Someone must have noticed, because a medic was on her by the time she had the second one off.

The medic took one look at her blood-crusted pants and motioned Marmeg to follow. Her legs were little better than jelly without the exos. She stumbled on nothing, and the medic reached out, supporting her by the elbow the rest of the way. Pitying looks accompanied them as they walked. The relative isolation of the tent provided her with much-needed privacy.

“What the hell did you do?” the medic demanded. “It looks like you cut yourself open with a kitchen knife.”

“Near as much. Had to swap fried chips.”

The medic looked horrified. “Out there? By yourself? With no sterilization or anesthesia? You’re insane!” Zie shook zir head. “You’re lucky you made it this long.”

Zie kept muttering about infection and poisoning as zie readied a tray of gleaming instruments.

“Lie down,” zie said. “On your stomach.”

Marmeg yelped as chilly fingers pushed around her incisions.

“Oh, please. It must’ve hurt a lot more when you made these incisions. I can see quite a bit of swelling here, but the wound is closed. We’re better off leaving it alone. I’m going to take some blood samples to check for infection.”

Marmeg craned her head and watched the medic draw a vial of blood. Zie placed a few drops into a row of cylinders the size of her thumb. After a minute, zie scanned each one with a handheld and frowned at the screen. Marmeg held her breath until the medic’s face relaxed.

“Lucky girl. Your blood is clear of sepsis. You do have a mild infection, which is hardly unexpected, but it’s nothing a course of antibiotics won’t clear up. I’m going to get them from the supply box outside. Stay put.”

Marmeg sat up. The world spun. She debated getting a few more stim pills from her backpack, but the medic returned before she’d moved. Zie carried a blister pack of antibiotics and a bottle of water.

“Take two now and another one every twelve hours until they’re all gone. And no more stimulants.” Had zie read her mind? “You need to let your body rest and recover. Get lots of sleep, drink plenty of water, and take it easy on the legs for at least a week. No exos! I recommend seeing a surgeon at that point to reopen your calves and check the capsule placement. They might be able to reduce the scarring, too. As it is now, you’re going to end up with some ugly ones.”

Marmeg sighed and took the first dose. The giant, bitter pills stuck in her throat, and she drank nearly half the bottle before she swallowed them.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. I’m sorry about the race.”

“Same.”

She shouldered her pack and brought up her planned return route on her cuff. A free shuttle would get her to Mammoth Lakes. From there she could catch the bus to Los Angeles.

A winding cement path led to a rectangular building and the signpost for the shuttle. There was nowhere to sit while waiting, so Marmeg dropped her pack on the pavement and slumped beside it. Two journo drones had trailed her, but they lost interest once she stopped moving. She had thirty minutes until the next shuttle. In her sleep-deprived state, it felt like an eternity.

The bus pulled in with a squeal of brakes that woke her from a light doze. A couple and two young children got down, and Marmeg climbed on. She took up two seats, one for herself and another for the pack, but it didn’t matter. The bus was empty except for her.

She dozed off again, rousing only when the driver informed her that they’d arrived in town. She could smell toasted bread as she stepped off. Her stomach growled. Marmeg entered the bakery from which all the lovely, mouth-watering odors came, and ordered a bagel, toast with fried eggs, and a pitcher of orange juice. It would make a sizeable dent in the money Jer had given her.

She sat at a table in the back corner, though there was no one to hide from except the server. The food arrived steaming. It was the most delectable meal of Marmeg’s life, and she devoured it at a pace that barely allowed for chewing and swallowing.

“Glad you enjoyed your meal,” the server said as zie cleared the dishes away.

“Best ever.” Marmeg held up her cuff to pay.

“No charge.”

“What?”

The server smiled. “Most everyone here follows the race. A free breakfast is the least I can do.”

“Thanks.”

Win or lose, fame had its benefits. Marmeg made sure to bump the server’s and the bakery’s ratings on her way out.

The bus terminal in town was small, but it was enclosed and clean, and had padded seats. Marmeg slept until her cuff zapped her awake. Time to catch the bus. She blearily joined the handful of others getting on. The driver stopped her when she held her cuffed wrist to the credit scanner.

“Sorry, cash only today. Scanner’s broken.”

“Jokin’?”

The driver shook his head. “There’s a cash dispenser inside. I’ll wait for you.”

Marmeg kept her pack with her and limped back into the station. She swiped her cuff three times at the machine to no effect. Then she noticed the small card with OUT OF ORDER scribbled in red and taped to the top.

“My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” she muttered, feeling a strong urge to kick the machine.

She walked back out and asked the driver if he knew of any other machines nearby. He didn’t. When was the next bus? Not for two more days. His face crinkled with pity.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Show me the credit balance on your cuff. If it’s enough, I’ll give you a ride. You can get me some cash at the next station.”

“Deal,” Marmeg agreed.

She sat and put the pack vertically next to herself. She leaned against it like an old friend and fell into a deep sleep. In her dreams, towering trees tangled with walls of granite. Rocks crashed through them, creating an avalanche of roots and soil and mangled, screaming bodies.

“Hey,” said a gentle voice. “Got to wake up here and get your bus fare.”

Marmeg awoke disoriented and stared at the owner of the voice: a graying man with asphalt-colored skin. Right. She was on a bus, nearly out of money, and going home a cheat and a failure. You’re wrong, Ma. God doesn’t love me.

Every muscle ached and every joint protested when she stood and pulled on the pack. The first four steps along the bus aisle were pure agony. Then blood pulsed its way to the right places, including her brain. She wondered where they were until she saw the sign proclaiming RIDGECREST in faded green lettering. The cash machine looked even worse. At least it dispensed.

Marmeg was tempted by the smell of coffee but decided it would be smarter to sleep. She thought of all the messages on her cuff. At the very least, she owed a note to Jeffy that she’d made it onto the bus in one piece. Then again, if the race news kept topping the feeds, he would know enough.

“Hoy. You Mary Guinto, right? Graf me?” said a voice from behind her.

She turned and saw two kids, probably thirteen or fourteen years old. One had her screen thrust out at Marmeg. Her face had a shy, nervous expression that felt all too familiar.

“Lost the race.”

“Won it, squares!” said the kid fiercely. “They gone it ’cause of who you be, but we all know you done first.”

Marmeg smiled at her defenders. “Okay. I’ll graf.”

She scribbled a message next to her signature: TO MY FIRST FANS. Her pack felt a little lighter on her way back to the bus.

Marmeg’s cuff bleated as she took her seat. She flicked it on. The backlog had grown. One after another, messages scrolled by. The earliest were congratulatory. They became supportive, then outraged. Petitions against Minerva’s race committee were filed. Many protested that it was blatant discrimination against a postnatal licensee. Others were appalled by Minerva’s inhumanity.

Hours’ worth of drama played out in the space of a few minutes. Her ratings had soared, dipped, risen, and dipped again. They had acquired a life of their own.

She set her cuff not to wake her until the bus arrived in Los Angeles. Of the rest of the journey, she remembered nothing, not even her dreams.

• • • •

Marmeg felt more like herself when she stepped off the bus at the dingy LA station. A gentle mist fell from a cement-colored sky. The sun had set, painting the west an angry orange.

She walked past the lot full of two-seater pods and older electric cars, intending to foot it to the nearest train station. The sight of her family’s rusty electric minivan caught her off guard. Dirty beads of water trickled down its side windows. Marmeg peered in and saw with a sinking heart that her mother sat at the wheel. The window glass retracted jerkily into the door.

“Come in out of the rain, mahal.”

Marmeg slung her pack into the middle row and climbed into the passenger seat.

“How’d you know?”

“Oh, honey, you are all over the feeds. I made Jeffy tell me how you were planning to get home, so I’ve been waiting here. I’m off today.”

“Ma, that’s . . . real nice of you. Thanks.”

Amihan patted Marmeg’s left hand. “Least I could do for my girl after all she’s put herself through.”

“No stink?”

“No stink. I’m not mad at you. Everybody makes mistakes. Lord knows, I get that better than most, eh?” Amihan laughed. “Sometimes, we have to learn the hard way, us women, especially in our family.”

The wiper blades squeaked, and the scent of stale tobacco filled the car. Marmeg’s comfort at being home warred with her mother’s unexpected sympathy. When added to everything else that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, the whole world felt off-kilter.

She stared through the window at a city turned upside down by a hundred perfect water drops. She was a snowflake poised on a warm tongue, awaiting its inevitable death and cherishing the memory of its brief, spectacular life.

Reality crashed in: familiar shop fronts with peeling paint and screen signs with half their pixels gone. This part of the neighborhood was etched into Marmeg’s memory as clearly as traces on a circuit board.

“What we doing here?”

Amihan kept her gaze fixed on the wet, shiny blackness of the road.

“Ma? Talk to me!”

Her mother pulled into a cracked, weed-choked driveway alongside an industrial-looking building. CASA FRANCISCA WOMEN’S SHELTER: the sign hung on the wall in dull metal letters. Amihan turned off the car’s engine.

“Tell me the truth. Did you register and pay for the nursing home program?”

“No.”

“Did you spend that money on the race?”

“It’s my money.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for being honest. Tonight, I’m going to take you home. Your brothers have planned a little party, and I don’t want to disappoint them. Tomorrow morning, you can come here on your own, or I’ll drop you off on the way to work. You will not be welcome at home again until you figure out how to fix this mess.”

“Fix it your way?”

“Seems better than yours.”

“I won the race!”

“And they took it away from you, like I knew they would. You think because you’re smart, you can engineer your way into their life, but you’ll never be one of them. They don’t want people like us messing up their perfect circles.”

Marmeg crossed her arms, restrained herself against the urge to smash something. Anything.

Amihan reached out a tentative hand. “Take your hardships with grace, Mary Margaret. God is testing you! This is your chance to earn His forgiveness.”

“And yours?”

“Mine comes through His grace. I’m your mother, so I’ll always love you, but I won’t sit by and watch my daughter destroy her life. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

Amihan backed out of the driveway. They drove to the apartment in silence and left the van parked between a two-seater and an ancient gas-burner. The mist had turned to actual falling drops of rain. They hurried inside, where they were surprised by two boys in handmade party hats. A sign reading WELCOME HOME SISSY was written in wiggly lettering.

“Surprise!” shouted Lee and Felix, jumping up and down with giant grins plastered on their faces.

Marmeg forced a smile. She dropped her pack near the door and scooped her little brothers into a tight hug. Felix’s sweet curls tickled her chin.

“Best brothers in the world,” she exclaimed, fighting tears.

“Hey, what about me?” Jeffy said, walking into the apartment.

Marmeg turned and gave Jeffy the next hug. His stubbly cheeks were cold and damp, and he held a bottle in each hand.

“Wine, Jeffy?” Amihan spoke in an appraising tone. She took the bottles from him and peered at the labels. “This one’s not bad,” she said. She walked to the kitchen and grabbed the corkscrew that lay on the countertop. The surface was so littered with pans and dishes that Marmeg could barely see the yellowing, cracked tiles underneath.

Amihan poured the wine into plastic cups and handed one each to Marmeg and Jeffy. She grabbed cans of soda from the fridge for Lee and Felix. Little eyes went wide.

“I get a whole can?” Felix squeaked.

“Sure, baby. We’re celebrating!” Amihan said.

“We are? I got the wine to make Marm feel better for losing the race.”

“Jeffy! No, we’re celebrating that Mary is coming to her senses and quitting this embed nonsense.”

Jeffy and Felix simultaneously said, “She is?”

Jeffy looked at Marmeg for confirmation, and she shrugged. His face darkened.

“No way, Ma. We can’t let her quit. She won! Do you know how hard that is?”

“But she didn’t keep the win, and she threw away her future in the process.”

“Are you saying she should’ve let that person die?”

“Of course not, Jeffy. What do you take me for?”

“Enough! Too tired to fight this tonight,” Marmeg said. “Sort it in daylight, brud, okay?” She raised her cup toward Jeffy, who glowered but raised his as well. “To new beginnings.”

The first sip of wine left Marmeg’s tongue coated in acid. The next slurp was as cool and sweet as a mountain stream. Whether or not she had deserved any of it—Ardha’s sabotage, the Mikes’ help, the disqualification—it didn’t matter anymore. Nobody in real life got what they deserved. At least Marmeg had been spared the self-loathing she would’ve felt for winning by cheating.

Who was she kidding? She desperately wanted all of that success. She wanted to be out there, under the trees and the shadow of mountains, getting interviewed by journos and fending off sponsors and rabid fan requests. Instead, she stuffed some basics into her pack while the boys jumped away their soda high. Jeffy and their mother were too drunk to notice.

The celebration didn’t last long. The younger boys sugar-crashed and turned in. Jeffy fell asleep on the sofa, and Amihan wept at the kitchen table about her ill-fated family until she passed out with her head on her arms.

Marmeg slung the pack over her shoulder. She stood by the door and took in the tableau. Better to leave now than face the drama of the morning. She ducked out and closed the door. The chill, moist air was a welcome relief after the stuffiness of their apartment. The rain had tapered into a heavy mist that clung to Marmeg and slicked the sidewalk. Fog blew in ghostly drifts from the coast and wove around the street lights.

A quarter of the distance passed before her calves protested. Too late she recalled the medic’s warning to stay off her legs. She gritted her teeth against the pain, but she was limping badly by the time she arrived at the shelter.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a bed for you,” said the night manager. She handed Marmeg a ratty sleeping bag. “The rain’s got us full tonight. You’re welcome to find a spot on the floor.”

Marmeg found an empty space by the wall of a cavernous room lined with bunk beds, all occupied. She settled her pack behind her, trying to get the softer items to provide some cushion from the gear. Somewhere on the other side of the wall, a baby wailed. Marmeg slid her legs into the bag, shoes and all, and leaned back to check her ratings.

Minerva had released a statement saying they would look into the Sierra Challenge results, but as of yet, they hadn’t contacted Marmeg even once. The only people who had reached out to her were others in similar situations: born without a license, filching their gear, stuck in dead-end jobs that didn’t require legit schooling—the people for whom she embodied hope.

Her ratings bounded around like a demented basketball. She sighed as she cleared the cuff’s message buffer again and again. In the final cluster of private messages was one from Jeffy: MOM’S WAITING AT BUS STATION FOR YOU. Too bad she hadn’t seen the warning earlier. Then, near the end of the list, a one-liner from a meaningless address: SILENCE IS GOLDEN.

So, the Mountain Mikes were paying attention. Was that a promise? A threat? Did it matter? She had given them her answer already.

She lay awake for a long time and stared at the cement ceiling. Salty, unshed tears ran down the back of her throat, draining away like her dreams. A real degree, embed races, moot surgery: all gone. Hope receded to an unreachable distance in the hours after midnight.

The restless murmurs and snuffles of slumbering bodies surrounded her. She had to get herself out of the shelter, but how? Sleep took her at last, before she came up with a good answer.

• • • •

The morning bell rang. Gray daylight filtered in through high, small windows. The room came to life with yawns and groans and the creak of metal frames. Marmeg left the shelter after eating breakfast. She needed fresh air.

Last night’s rain had left the city smelling earthy and clean. She walked to a dilapidated park bench and sat down to check her messages.

She had a new one from T’shawn: MINERVA RACE COMM SAY RULES BE RULES. FANS BE FIGHTING BACK. His earlier message—the one he’d sent at the start of the race—caught her attention: GIVE ME YOUR GEAR IF YOU TOAST OUT?

He’d meant it as a joke, but she had almost toasted out. The words nagged at her mind. Her gear: exos, chips, sleeves. They would be worth something. She felt sick at the thought, but she couldn’t conceive of a better solution. The shelter would give her two weeks. After that, she’d be out on the street with no address. Her ratings would plummet. No one would employ her. The sooner she could get back home, the better.

MEET UP AT ELEVEN-OH? she sent to T’shawn.

He responded that he could. She spent the morning answering what passed for fan mail, not that she had any prior experience to go by. Half of it was hateful—the usual rants against unlicensed and postnatals freeloading off taxpayers—and the other half exhorted her to fight Minerva. DON’T LET THEM DENY YOU! BE THE HERO WE NEED! But in her heart, she couldn’t be what they wanted, not with this race. Not until she won by her own means.

The walk to T’shawn’s place took ten times longer than it would have with functional calf muscles. She limped past cars for hire that she couldn’t afford. Her mind jittered with lingering frustration, and her whole body ached, but her mood lifted when she entered the abandoned building where her friend lived and worked.

He was holed up in a back room, well hidden from the street by small, paper-covered windows. Black-market gear gleamed in stacks around the perimeter. A workbench sat against the far wall. An oscilloscope, multimeters, probes, and screens littered its surface.

T’shawn gave her a rueful smile, grasped her shoulder in a half hug.

“Win some, lose some,” he said.

“Full right, that.”

“What you be here for today? Twice in a week is a special treat.” He flashed his toothy grin at her.

“Want a quiet talk for a sell-back.”

His grin vanished. “Marm, you not serious. What you do with yourself if you go back to nat? Don’t let this race bull get you lost in the head, friend.”

“Only way out, brud,” Marmeg said. “Get good credit for all my chips. Pay out school fees. Do the slow way.”

“Old way, more like,” he said, grimacing.

“Yeah, well, Ma kicked me out. Stuck myself good.”

“Not again!”

Marmeg pressed the case with the two unused chips into T’shawn’s hand.

“How much for these plus the seven inside? Three of ’em busted.”

T’shawn sucked on his upper lip as he typed in some numbers. He showed her the final tally on his screen.

“Minus a few hundred for the surgeon.”

It would be enough to cover the first tuition installment for the elder care program—enough to get her back into Amihan’s good graces.

“Trigger it. Set me up with the doc. Got any work for me?”

“Naw, Marm, nothing paid. Barely cover my own. Get me some new code, might get you some treats again.”

“Can’t test code without chips.”

“Don’t give up, hear? You one of the best we ever got, and you need to get out. Show the kids what can do. Get me a benefits gig someday.”

Marmeg laughed to cover the lump in her throat. “Stay sane, brud. Ping me when you got the date.”

• • • •

Her next stop was a used-gear shop. She’d filched many of her own exos from the trash cans in the back. The owner didn’t mind, since he couldn’t fix the broken stuff, and he would buy some of Marmeg’s flips when she found an upgrade. The inside of the store was crammed with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Dusty plastic bins brimmed with parts sorted by function.

Marmeg walked along the scuffed, dirty floor tiles and went straight to the front counter. Chips gleamed inside the glass case. She put her bag of gear down, fighting the urge to curse at the tiny capsules. The sound of clanking metal drew the owner from the back. His tight gray curls contrasted with his dark skin, and his face crinkled into a broad smile.

“Marmeg! What can I do for you?”

She marveled that he remembered her name. She couldn’t recall his. He’d tolerated her filching, but he hadn’t been this friendly in the past.

“Want to sell this.”

“Sure, sure. You must be in line for some real gear now.” He sorted through the items, putting the torn and bloody sleeve straight into the trash, separating the older-generation parts from the new.

“No more gear. I’m out.”

“But the race—you can’t be quitting now?”

So, he knew about that. “Full busted. Race took the last of it, and Mom kicked me out. Need money.”

He pushed the gear aside and leaned on the counter. “Well that’s a shame, considering your skills. I thought a scout would’ve picked you up by now, got you some sponsors.”

She shook her head.

“Have you seen your ratings? The news today? You’re up. Minerva’s sinking like a rock.”

Marmeg shrugged. Ratings had their value, but they didn’t pay for tuition or put food on the table.

The shop owner sighed. “This stuff isn’t worth much. How about a job? You fix broken gear for me, I pay you by the hour. And you have to work here, in the front, and record some ads for the store. Help me boost my ratings.”

A job would let her save up, get Felix his license. Maybe earn back her chips if she kept at it long enough. What for? she thought. You’ll never race again. They won’t let you. Regardless, she could use the money for any number of things, not the least of which was keeping Amihan off her back.

“Okay. Deal. Gotta sort some other business. Start next week?”

“I’ll see you on Monday.”

As Marmeg exited the shop, her cuff zapped her wrist. T’shawn had a surgery scheduled for her the following day.

• • • •

Marmeg sat at a plastic table and ate a basket of hot, greasy fries with the last of Jer’s credit. It was a treat to herself. Her legs and arms ached from the chip extractions, and pain pills were the only thing saving her from a stunning nitrous-oxide headache. She’d kept the chip in her brain stem. The surgeon wanted extra fees for that, and T’shawn had talked his buyer into a better price overall. It made little difference to keep it.

She traced the table’s random cracks and stains with her left pinky. The heat from the fries soothed her raw throat. She’d managed to save her tears until she was alone. When she had let them loose, the sobs had ripped through her like an angry spirit. She needed the comfort of starch and fat.

Her cuff buzzed, and Marmeg looked down to see a stranger requesting a live call. The face belonged to an older man with lined brown skin, dark eyes, and wire-rimmed glasses. A full beard and moustache matched his salt-and-pepper hair. She accepted the call.

“Miss Guinto, yes? I’m sorry to bother you like this. My name is Sachiv Jagadisha.”

Marmeg stared at him blankly. The name sounded familiar, but she couldn’t recall why.

“I’m Ardha’s father,” he explained. “I’m calling you because I discovered that not only do we need to thank you for helping our child, we need to apologize for zir behavior. Ardha was gravely injured, and zie has been unconscious until today. They can’t save zir natural legs, but zie is lucky to have so many enhancements already. They say they can integrate artificial muscle and bone into what’s left.”

Marmeg nodded, unsure how to respond. At least now she knew why the name and face were familiar. She could see the family resemblance.

“I’m sorry. I’m talking on and on. My child became lucid only yesterday. Zie confessed to my wife—zir mother—what zie had done to you earlier in the race. And yet you were kind enough to save zir at the cost of the race itself. You are truly selfless, and you have been very badly rewarded. My family and my colleagues who supported Ardha in the race—we would like to extend a credit to you.”

“Can’t take it.”

“Please, you must. It’s not a great deal of credit, but we feel badly about what our child has done.”

Marmeg forced herself to speak in slow, full sentences. “Can’t take it, sir, but thank you.” She took a deep breath and decided she might as well tell him the whole truth; a confession for a confession. “I didn’t win the race fairly. Got help from some . . . mountain people who took me to shortcuts. One of them brought me to Ardha, else I never would’ve found zir. And then—” She broke off, looked away from the kind brown eyes on the screen, and lapsed into familiar rhythms. “Did what was right. Tried to make up for cheats, you know?”

Ardha’s father sighed. “You were sabotaged and you were aided, but that was the work of others. It is you who saved our child. Forget the race and think of the credit as a token of our gratitude. Please. My wife will not forgive me if I accept your refusal.”

Marmeg’s face flushed with suppressed tears. Don’t be an idiot. This money can only help, and why shouldn’t you get something for all that you went through? But the thought didn’t sit right. A different idea nibbled around the edges of her mind.

“You got any pay gigs?”

“Sorry?”

“Paid work. A job I could do,” Marmeg clarified. “Got a college admit but can’t pay for it. That’s partly why I raced. Want to get an embed design degree. Get myself out of this hole. Make a better life, you know? I can code for you.”

“I see.”

Sachiv’s expression was distant, and Marmeg wondered if she’d blown her chance. Her school contests were too far in the past to count, but she had her own designs, the illegal ones.

“Custom built the ’ware for my own rig.” She pulled her screen from her cargo pocket and sent him the source code. “Take a look. Steady pay beats a credit dump, you catch me?”

Sachiv smiled at her. “Quite right. Yes, quite right. Unfortunately, we cannot hire you until you have at least the bachelor’s degree. Let me think about it some more. Perhaps I can find a happy solution. I’ll get back to you.”

The call ended. Marmeg leaned back against the hard curve of the seat. She looked around at an unfamiliar world, noise buzzing around her. Her heart raced and her hands shook as she took a bite of the fries. They were cold. She couldn’t care. Her fate stood poised on a pinnacle, its balance as precarious as her footing during the race. Which way would it land?

Marmeg dumped the unappetizing food in the compost bin and walked outside. A hot, dry breeze whispered through her hair as she strolled along the uneven cement sidewalk and waited for the call. And walked. And waited some more. Sweat itched on the back of her neck. The afternoon wore on and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky, but sitting still proved impossible.

She was gulping water from a tepid public fountain when her cuff zapped. The message came from Ardha’s father, all text: NO JOB OFFER. SORRY! BUT WE CAN PAY TUITION AND IF YOU KEEP UP YOUR GRADES, YOU’LL HAVE A REMOTE INTERNSHIP OFFER FOR NEXT SUMMER.

Marmeg didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she sat on the sidewalk and did both. Getting a fully paid college education was monumental. Even her mother couldn’t deny that. She could save all her money from the job at the used gear shop. Get her chips back. Get Felix’s license. Race again next summer. She could go home.

She sent a reply to Ardha’s dad with an electronic signature and the address to her empty credit account. Marmeg’s mind reeled as she limped her way back to the shelter to collect her bag. In a few weeks, she’d be a college freshman, surrounded by hordes of licensed, well-groomed kids who took for granted three meals and a bed and hot showers. Life was about to get real different.

A half-dead pine tree grew in the empty lot to her left. She recalled the scent of alpine air and melting snowflakes, of cold stone tunnels and wet earth, and she hatched a plan: for another year, another race. She would win on her own merits. Trap the Mountain Mikes into revealing their hand. But most of all, she wanted to dance like the wind over granite mountaintops.

S.B. Divya is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She enjoys subverting expectations and breaking stereotypes whenever she can. Her short stories have been published at Apex, Tor.com, and other magazines, and her novella ‘Runtime,’ was a Nebula Award finalist. Her writing also appears in the indie game Rogue Wizards. Divya is the co-editor of Escape Pod, a weekly science fiction podcast, with Mur Lafferty. She holds degrees in Computational Neuroscience and Signal Processing, and she worked for twenty years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author. Find out more about her at www.eff-words.com or on Twitter as @divyastweets.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of the backers and readers!

Thank you to all the writers who allowed me to reprint their amazing work for this anthology. Thank you to Amanda Makepeace for providing the cover art this year. Thank you to Polgarus Studios for the interior layout and Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout.

Many people helped spread the word, including Mike Glyer at File770, my followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook, 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 & Daryl

Amirf

Luke Addams

Lisa Barmby-Spence

Steve Barnett

Meredith Bentley

Chris Brant

Linda A. Bruno

Michael Adam Childers

Jonathan D. Beer

Amy Brennan

C J Cabourne

Neil Campbell

Ian Chung

Pip Coen

Joshua Cooper

Ellie Curran

Dani Daly

Markus Dimberger

Lynne Everett

Fizzy

Howard Fein

Bryan Feir

Lori & Maurice Forrester

Rob Fowler

Garett Fox

Stephanie Wood Franklin

Rob Funk

Sara Glassman

Steve Gold

Jim Gotaas

Elyse M. Grasso

Arthur Green

Cathy Green

Michael Green

Laura Gregory

Hannah H

Rose Hartley

Andrew Hatchell

Benjamin Hausman

Simon Horvat

Nadia Huq

Katherine Inskip
jag

K.G. Jewell

Fred W Johnson

Kathy Jolly

Christopher Jones

Heather Rose Jones

Ken Josenhans

Marguerite Kenner & Alasdair Stuart

Lydean Kenzall

B. Kitchell

Jim Kosmicki

Andy Lange

Michael Lehrman

Richard Leis

Kiera Lesley

Daniel Lin

Ted Logan

Alberto Lopez-Espinosa

Steve Lord

Stephanie Louie

Stephanie Lucas

Ryan Ludington

Mark Lukens

Paul Lynch

Katherine Malloy

Kevin J. "Womzilla" Maroney

Janice Mars

Ellen Mellor

E.M. Middel

Barb Moermond

Brooks Moses

Robert McCoy

Marjorie Murray-Ure

Sriram Narayanan

Ross Newberry

Mark Newman

Frank Olynyk

Tina Pierce

Ruth Sochard Pitt

Ian Stockdale

Peter Stubbers

Tripleyew

Rachel Quinlan

Eugene Ramos

Scott Raun

Carl Rigney

Ann Robards

Lee Ann Rucker

Victoria Sandbrook

Jonathan Schmidt

Michael Scholl

Jeff Soesbe
stevethegeek

Mike T

Jennifer Tifft

Matt Trepal

Bruce Tsai

Tasha Turner

Rob Voss

Bonnie Warford

Emily Williams

John Winkelman

Steve Wright

Vespry Family

About the Editor

David Steffen is an editor, writer, publisher, and professional web developer. He has edited and written for the Diabolical Plots zine (http://www.diabolicalplots.com) since its launch in 2008, and which started publishing new fiction in 2015. He is most well-known for co-founding and administering The Submission Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com), a free web tool that helps writers find markets for their fiction and to find response time statistics about those markets, as well as for the previous volumes of the Long List Anthology. His fiction has been published in many great venues, including Escape Pod, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, Drabblecast, Podcastle, AE, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders.

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