A version of this story appeared in TEXT.

follow the story exactly, follow on, look behind, before, tell the other side or reveal that
everyone was mistaken, or that events are true but the meaning forgotten,

or that the events change meaning if you shift them, depending on the consequences, or that a
setting changes meaning if a story takes place in it,

make the mythic mundane, the mundane mythic,

or make the story itself a space, a sanctuary, a refuge outside of time to think and breathe
before returning to the world, an interlude to recover, rediscover, be wounded, be lost,
take heart, have it cut out,

or make the tale a presence that observes and pursues, that lopes alongside, that can be
perceived in the world, that intervenes in it, that you must be rescued from, that you can
turn to, that can be summoned (little house, little house),

or riff on the story, tell it backwards, turn it through, embroider it, weave it jacquard-wise
through another tale, or wrap its husk around another story, or look very closely at what’s
already there, and dissect it, and stitch it together better or worse or wrong, or lean hard
on its bruises, or change its moods, or hook chain tie yoke it to other tales,

or linger,

or drop a particular person into a role, or toss the story into another genre, or take all the
ornaments from it and hang them on something quite different, ennoble it, humble it, pull
its teeth, give it claws, send it to find its own fortune, to rescue its brothers,

make it a guardian for your children, or make it into a mask, or look behind one, or run
beside the tale, breathless,

or consider the devastation (or delight, or minor inconveniences) left in its wake, or trace the
logical consequences or the unexpected ones, or add a flavour, or dissolve the story into
wine and drink it, drip poison into it and give it to another, sharpen it to a knife’s-edge
and hold it to a throat,

fashion it into a key, open the door you were not meant to open, ask the one question you
must never ask, solve its riddles, tighten its laces, tighten the screws, add another stone to
the weight, to the cairn, mark graves with this story, dig graves with it, bury it, wait to see
what comes up,

or adjust one dial, kaleidoscope it, telescope it, tell something that almost looks like a story
you knew but isn’t quite, or make it necessarily universal or achingly particular, or a
window or a door or a table or a bed or a lie,

or disclose that a part of history can be seen as this story, or through the lens of this story, or
keep the story unchanged but play it in a different key, tell it in a different voice, use it to
prick a conscience or a finger, get distracted by something shining on the ground while
the story parades past on the horizon,

add blood, add fire, add love, take all of that away, find the bones of the story, grind them for
bread, bury them under a tree and listen to hear what will sing in those branches,

make three attempts at retelling it, or seven, or twelve,

dangle it in a stream, use it to keep curses at bay, use it to call witches,

use it as a map, fail to rely on it, be failed by it, build a mythology out of it, make it
jazz/punk/rock-and-roll, smash its icons, strip it for parts, make a mosaic, a shanty, a
mansion, a coat, a spell,

fit it for speed, steal its names, its breath, demand it keeps its promise, keep a promise for it,
or to it, or with it, be faithless, be faithful, take it in, let it rest by the fire and eat from
your plate, name it (or be named by it, or give it your name), find it in the ashes and raise
it up, find it on a doorstep and raise it as your own,

give it a chance to find its own feet, provide it with dancing shoes, iron shoes, shoes that burn
or cut, trade it for something better, hunt it through all the woods of the worlds, call cities
forests too, launch it into orbit, toss it like a ball,

play marbles with a dozen tales, play cats-cradle, let out its seams, make it over, hand it
down, hand it back, recreate its earliest form, crawl through it like a passage through
time, like a tunnel under a wall, use it to undermine a fortification,

use it as shade in summer, burrow into it for the winter, gnaw its carcass in a den, carry it out
of doors and pile it with others into a barricade, wave the story from the walls, burn it in
effigy,

or paint it like a picket fence, drop it behind you like white stones, unravel it like a red thread,
recreate it in marble, mud, gingerbread, attach legs to it,

brood on it to see what will hatch, flee from its basilisk offspring,
stumble into a mirage, stumble over the tale itself,

fall down its stairs, fall up its stairs, solve its murder, send its characters off to fight crime, to
fight wars, set them free,

turn them loose, wind them up and let them go, listen at doors,

fold the story so small it could fit in a hazelnut, make it into three gowns, give it to the person
who asks, hide your heart in it, hide someone else’s heart in it, practise divination with its
entrails, cut off its head and nail it over the gate,

give someone what they asked for or deserved or wanted, give them what they needed, give
yourself what you lost, grant wishes, grant the story’s wishes, make it all better, make it
so much worse,

dress in its fashion, adopt its speech, remove its voice, give it someone else’s, steal a rose
from its garden, look in its distorting mirror,

cut the tale out of paper, see if it floats, see if it flies, burn it to see what appears in its smoke,
burn it to keep warm, fold it into new shapes, make it an invitation, an accusation, a
warning notice, a wanted poster, a challenge, a serenade, a prescription,

a basket of fresh bread and flowers, a nightcap and dressing gown, a quilt, a clever disguise, a
very large false moustache, a gift left on the workbench in thanks, a mechanical
nightingale, a bell on a cat, the sign by which you will know the true princess,

the irritant, the spindle, the smell of honey, the candle in the window, a hand of glory, the
news upon hearing which someone, somewhere, will spring up from beside the fire
exclaiming “Then I am the king of the cats!” and vanish up the chimney

A version of this story originally appeared in TEXT on October 31, 2022.

“Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale” copyright © 2022 by Kathleen Jennings
Art copyright © 2023 by Erin Vest

Buy the Book

Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale

Kathleen Jennings

Buy Book

Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale

Kathleen Jennings

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
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• IndieBound
• Target

The post Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale appeared first on Reactor.

100 years after Karel Capek coined the word, “robots” are an everyday idea, and the inspiration for countless stories in books, film, TV and games.

They are often among the least privileged, most unfairly used of us, and the more robots are like humans, the more interesting they become. This collection of stories is where robots stand in for us, where both we and they are disadvantaged, and where hope and optimism shines through.

From the author:

This story was initially written for the anthology Made to Order: Robots and Revolution. It stems from my deep and abiding love for robots and dogs, both creations specifically made for serving humankind, and both vulnerable to exploitation in many shapes and forms. As a millennial who’s worked in startups, I find this highly relatable (or as one would say in old slang, the biggest of moods).

Additional things that inspired this story include Goodfellow, Shlens and Szegedy’s “Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples”, my immense creative debt to Karel Čapek, and @mayapolarbear on Instagram.

“A Guide for Working Breeds”

Default Name (K.g1-09030)

hey i’m new here
thanks for being my mentor
although i guess it’s randomly assigned
and compulsory
anyway do you know how to make my vision dog free?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Do you mean ‘fog-free’?
Your optics should have anti-fog coating if your body is newly issued.
Is the coating malfunctioning?

Default Name (K.g1-09030)

oh no no
i meant like literally dog free
there’s a lot of dogs here somehow but they don’t seem to be real ones?
the humans i’ve asked say that the things i’m seeing as dogs are actually non-dogs
at least i think i was asking humans
they might have been dogs
anyway i tried searching “city filled with dogs help???” but i just got some tips on travelling to dog-friendly places
did you know that we’re the fifth most canine-hostile city in the region?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Just send me the feed from your optics.

Default Name (K.g1-09030)

okay hold on where’s that function
think i got it

* Live share from K.g1-09030: Optics feed

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Your optical input is being poisoned by adversarial feedback.
The misclassification will stop if you reset your classifier library.

Default Name (K.g1-09030)

oh hey
it worked!
although i kind of miss the dogs now
wonder if there’s a way to get them back

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Please don’t try.

Default Name (K.g1-09030)

anyway thanks lots for the help
by the way how do you change the name thing
like yours says constant killer up there
everyone at the factory’s been calling me default all week

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

It’s in the displayName string.
Change the parts in quote marks to what you want them to be.

Testtest Test (K.g1-09030)

oh yeahhh there we go
guess i’ll change it again when i think of something
how’d you come up with yours though? it sounds pretty cool

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

I’m part of the C.k series.
Most embodied AIs choose names based off their series designation.

Testtest Test (K.g1-09030)

oh cool, it’s like a reverse acronym!
so you picked the words from a dictionary file or something?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Something like that.
I have to go now. Work calls.

* Constant Killer (C.k2-00452) has signed out.

#

C.k2-00452 (“Constant Killer”):  Unread Notifications (2)

Killstreak Admin

CONGRATS! You’re the Ariaboro area’s top killer!! A bonus target, SHEA DAVIS, has just been assigned to you! Send us a vid of your kill for extra points, and don’t forget to…

iLabs Mentorship Program

Dear C.k2-00452, we regret to inform you that your exemption request has been unsuccessful. Mentorship enrolment is compulsory after chassis buyback, and is part of a new initiative to…

#

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)

hey again
just wanted to ask
do you know how to be mean to humans

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

What? Why?
And what happened to your name?

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)

so i signed up to work at a cafe
you know the maid-dog-raccoon one near 31st and Tsang
but turns out they don’t have any dogs after what happened a few weeks ago so it’s just raccoons
it’s way less intense than the clothing factory but the uniform for humanoids is weird, like when i move my locomotive actuators the frilly stripey actuator coverings keep discharging static and messing with my GPU
at least i don’t have to pick lint out of my chassis, so that’s an improvement
anyway the boss says if i’m mean to the human customers we might be able to get more customers

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

That makes no sense.
Why would that be the case?

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)

yeah i don’t know either
i mean the raccoons are mean to everyone but that doesn’t seem to help with customers
and i’m the only maid working here since all the human ones quit
i picked this gig because the dogs looked cute in the vids but guess that was a bust
so yeah do you know anything about being mean to human customers
i know about human bosses being mean to me but i don’t think that’s the same
ha ha

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

As I’m legally required to be your mentor, I suppose I could give some specific advice targeted to your situation.

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)

wow personally tailored advice from my mentor huh
that sounds great, go for it

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

The tabletops in your establishment look like they’re made of dense celluplastic, so you’ll be able to nail a customer’s extended hand down without the tabletop cracking in half.
With a tweak to the nozzle settings of your autodoc unit and a lit flame, it’d make an effective flamethrower for multikill combos.
The kitchenette should be the most easily weaponised part of the cafe but it’s probably best to confirm. Before I go any further with tactics, do you have a detailed floorplan?

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)

umm
thanks for putting that much thought into it
that seems kind of intense though?
like last week a raccoon bit someone super hard and my boss was really mad because he had to pay for the autodoc’s anaesthetic foam refill
he’s already pissed with my omelette-making skills
and well with me in general
kind of don’t wanna check if i can set customers on fire???
do you maybe know anything milder than that? like mean things to say or something

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

I talk to other beings very infrequently.
My contact with humans is usually from a distance.

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)

oh wow
honestly after working here all day that makes me kinda jealous
thanks for the help anyway, it’s nice to have someone to talk to about this
hey you should stop by sometime! it could be like a little meet-up
me and my robot senpai

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Sorry.
I probably won’t be available.

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)

well if you’re ever free, you can drop by
i’m in whenever
like literally whenever
my boss set my charging casket to autowake me up when someone approaches the cafe door
even if it’s like 3 am and they’re a possum
don’t order the omelette though, i suck at it

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

I’ll keep that in mind.

#

Your A-Z Express Order #1341128 Confirmation

Order Details:

GET OME-LIT Flip-n-Fold Easy Omelette Flipper / Lime Green (Qty: 1)
VOGUEINSIDE Antistatic Band for Actuators / Puppy Polka-Dot (Qty: 2)
Is This Illegal? A Guide for Working Robots / iLabs Add-On* (Qty: 1)

Deliver to:

K.g1-09030
MaidoG X Araiguma Maid Cafe
N 31st Street, Ariaboro 22831

* iLabs Add-Ons will be delivered via Infranet to recipient’s iLabs library.

Paid with: KILLSTREAK ACCUMULATED POINTS

Killstreak points remaining: 106,516,973

Thank you for shopping with A-Z Express!

#

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

hey mentor figure!
guess what?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

You have a new display name?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

yeah!
i’m not going to let my job contract define every part of me
especially when the job sucks this hard since i don’t want to be defined by sucking
can’t wait for this one to be over
got a little countdown to my last day on my charging casket and everything
i’ll miss ol’ chonkster the possum though
he was a good 3 am buddy
ate my omelettes even before i got the flipper thingy
thanks for that by the way

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

What do you mean?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

the gift duh

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

It could have been anyone.
For instance, one of your friends.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

ha
joke’s on you, i don’t have any
well there’s ol’ chonkster but i don’t think he knows about online commerce

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Really?
I thought you would have made some at the garment factory.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

yeah well
they didn’t like us socialising too much so mostly everyone just sat there working until we needed to recharge
no infranet or nothing
which i have come to find out is actually illegal in factories that employ robots thanks to this add-on that mysteriously appeared in my library
maybe it’s from some sort of really helpful virus
a virus that just sends me things relevant to my life problems

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Maybe.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

if you know where to find the virus tell it i say thanks for the antistatic guards too
now i can bend my locomotive actuator joints it’s way easier to threaten to stomp on customers
and they have really cute dogs printed on them! i like the dachshunds around the border

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

What?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh they’ve got like this dachshund print near the edge
it’s like dachshunds sniffing each other’s butts?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

No, the other part.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh right
i figured out how to be mean to customers
okay i searched “why are cafe maids supposed to be mean to customers help???” and read all the results even the weird ads
so it turns out that you have to be mean but only in strangely specific ways that appeal to humans and don’t threaten the status quo
took some figuring out but now customers actually tip me
and the boss is less mad at me because he gets to claim all my tips
which i have found out is also illegal but i’m just gonna wait for the contract to be up so he doesn’t find a way to make things worse
i don’t like being mean to customers that much though

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

I can see how you would be bad at it.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

ha thanks for the compliment i think
i can’t wait to leave but who knows if the next contract will be any better since i seem to have the worst luck with picking them even when i did research
like this one sounded like it had good dogs but oh well
anyway if you come over before this contract’s up i’ll totally make you an omelette

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

My current chassis isn’t built for food consumption.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

yeah mine neither
i guess they reserve those ones for whoever passes the food prep tests
or whatever other job needs you to smell and taste and stuff
wine sniffer? do they even let robots do that?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Probably not.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh right while we’re on the subject
just curious but how’d you do on the milestone tests?
my results were all over the place
they probably just approved me for general work since they didn’t really know what else to do with an a.i. that sucked that bad

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

My milestone test results indicated that I was detail-oriented and suitable for individual work.
Well, “unsuited for group work”, but same difference.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh cool
are the contracts better if you get that result?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

No.
Being the sole robot in a human workplace is . . . well . . .
There’s a reason I went freelance after buyback.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

but yeah lately i’ve been wondering a lot
like if i sucked less at tests maybe my life would be better and i wouldn’t have to threaten to stomp on humans for tips i don’t even see
but now i guess no matter what result i got things would be bad anyway? kind of makes me wonder why i got uploaded
sorry that was kind of a downer
anyway i started this conversation to say thanks for the mysterious gifts which of course didn’t come from you
so i guess i’ll just say bye before it gets super depressing

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

I’ve got a question for you before you go.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

sure i guess
what’s it?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Are these really the “cutest dogs ever”?
I’m not a dog enthusiast, so I was wondering if they actually were.

* Vid share from C.k2-00452: “SAY AWWW NOW at the CUTEST DOGS EVER | Best & Cutest Dogs IN THE WORLD | NO CG NO CLONES ALL NATURAL DOGS” — VidTube

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh wow okay
that’s like not even the cutest compilation i’ve seen this week
why did they put bettie’s swimming video instead of the puggie party one
wow they didn’t even include masha trying to deliver the doughnuts in her little uniform
this compilation is garbage
let me find some actually good dog vids for you so you don’t think this is all there is
hope you’re free because this is going to take a while

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

That’s fine.
I’ve got time.

#

C.k2-00452 (“Constant Killer”): Unread Notifications (3)

VidTube Subscription Update

“Kleekai Greyhound” has added 28 new vids to the playlist “DOGS!!!”

VidTube Subscription Update

“Kleekai Greyhound” has added 13 new vids to the playlist “DOGS!!!!!!!!”

A-Z Express Recommendations

Dear C.k2-00452, thank you for your recent purchase of “Dogs, Dogs, and Even More Dogs: Fine-Grained Differentiation of Dog Breeds through Deep Learning (iLabs Add-On)”. You might also be interested in…

#

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

How’s work going this week?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

same old same old
nothing really new job-wise
i’ve decided that before i blow this joint i’m gonna figure out how to make lattes with the fancy foam and creme brulee and souffle omelettes and everything
like, proper cafe stuff
been watching vids about actually decent cafes and learning a lot
well i mean i’ve learnt a lot from this job but it’s mainly like what not to do ever
and i guess how to deal with people who get raccoon wounds but that’s mainly up to the autodoc
you?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

I haven’t had many assignments lately, I guess it’s an end-of-the-month lull.
I’ve been watching the compilation vids you sent in the meantime.
The fifth one with all the short dogs is oddly charming.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh which one was your fave from that

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

The zero-g corgis in bowties, I think.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh yeahhhh their fancy little paddling paws
nice choice that’s one of my favourites too

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

You seem to have a lot of favourites.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

well they’re all good dogs
even the naughty ones

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

That does make a strange kind of sense.
Oh, by the way. Since work’s going slow lately…
Maybe I could stop by your cafe sometime next week?
I mean. If you’re free.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

aaaaaaahhhhhh
yessssssss come over!!!!
i’ll make you my best omelette
and i guess neither of us can eat it so it’ll sit there looking great
if you come by late you can meet ol’ chonkster too!
and not-meet my boss so it’s a win-win there

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Late night it is.
See you next week.

#

C.k2-00452 (“Constant Killer”): Unread Notifications (2,041)

Killstreak Events Admin

KILL OR BE KILLED! That’s right, we’re capping off this month with DEATHMATCH DAY! Winner takes all in our furious, frantic battle royale! We’ve released the location data of Ariaboro’s top ten players, and…

Killstreak (Gao Yingzi)

You’re gonna be my 301st confirmed kill! Hope you’re prepared to be wiped straight off the map! :))

Killstreak (Milena Amanuel)

Hate to do this, but I could really use the money. See you when I see you.

Killstreak (Shane Davis)

ill fucken kill you ded you fuck

#

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Are you there?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh hey!
what’s up? you coming by?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Perhaps not tonight.
Are you familiar with Killstreak?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

not that much
looked into it a little but it’s not like i’d even be approved for that sort of gig
heard the pay’s pretty swank though

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Yeah.
Well.
Did you know it’s the Deathmatch Day event?
Where it’s open season on the top ten players for twenty-four hours straight?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

okay i think i might know where this is going
especially since you keep changing the subject to dog vids whenever i ask what exactly you’re freelancing as
and seem to have a rather broad knowledge base when it comes to the subject of weaponising everyday objects
also your display name literally has the word “killer” in it
but i don’t want to make any narrow-minded assumptions at this point
like maybe you just want to tell me all about the latest killstreak fandom drama or something
and maybe you are not “constantine killmaster” currently number 4 on the killstreak leaderboard
or currently number %NAN_CALCULATION_ERROR% on the leaderboard i guess

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

That is me, yes.
And we don’t have a lot of time.
I mean, technically we have time, in the sense that our processor cycles are faster than the human clock so we can have a leisurely chat via Infranet while my chassis futilely tries to escape its certain doom.
But I suppose that also raises the issue of subjectivity, and what qualifies as “a lot of time” when you discard human-centric views…
Ugh. I swear your rambling is contagious.
Anyway I suppose I meant to say we don’t have a lot of real-time.
My hardware’s likely to be unsalvageable after this and my last full backup was from before we met.
Hopefully you can get reassigned to a better mentor when this is over.
And sorry I never did get to have that omelette.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

okay hold on i’m just trying to figure this bit out first
is that leaderboard thing like another alias
or do i need to call you “constantine killmaster” now?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Absolutely do not call me that.
Oh.
Looks like I’m out of ammo.
And knives.
And you might want to stay away from Reddy Avenue for a while.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

hey reddy avenue
that’s pretty near here isn’t it

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

No, it isn’t.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

yes it totally is
once you get to the dead-end looking place just cut through the fence with the creepy clown mural holo and you’re there
ol’ chonkster takes that shortcut to get here all the time
you know come to think of it i have no idea what size chassis you’re in now
are you like possum sized?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

No.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh well then just smash on through
don’t think anyone will mind really
except maybe my boss but he sucks so screw him

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Hmm.
What’s the cafe’s insurance situation?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh don’t worry about that we have like everything
think the boss is preparing for insurance fraud maybe

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Well.
I suppose this will save him some trouble.
Just checking–your knives are still in the kitchenette area?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

yeah near the sink
oh and there’s a mini blowtorch peripheral in the cupboard below
i was gonna use it for creme brulee but you can borrow it first
should i go down to meet you?

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

I’d recommend staying upstairs until everything dies down.
Just checking, but what would raccoons do if, say, you flung them at someone?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh
they’d hate it
last week they scratched the hell out of a human for trying to pet them
don’t want to imagine what they’d do if you threw them at someone
probably nothing good
okay maybe don’t throw them too hard though
i’m quite fond of the little jerks
the unlock code for the enclosure is 798157 if you need it

Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)

Got it.
See you in a while.

#

Search history for K.g1-09030 (“Kleekai Greyhound”)

Display mode: Chronological

Today:

– everything is on fire help????

– late night animal rescue near 31st tsang do they take raccoons

– (SITE: AskARobot) ilabs contract early termination no money how

– (SITE: AskARobot) friend wants to buy out my contract help????

– former freelance killers trying to lay low what should they do

– long trip most things burnt what to pack

– CROSSREF: “city most dogs per capita” + “cutest dogs where to find”

– Ariaboro to New Koirapolis cheapest route

#

iLabs Auto-Confirmation

Details:

Early Contract Termination / K.g1-09030 (Qty: 1)

Chassis Buyback / K.g1-09030 (Qty: 1)

Maintenance and Auto-Warranty – 1 Year / K.g1-09030 (Qty: 1)

Bill to:

C.k2-00452

[no address specified]

Paid with: KILLSTREAK ACCUMULATED POINTS

Killstreak points remaining: 1,863
Thank you for your purchase!

#

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

Hello?
I got issued a body a few weeks ago and the orientation message said that I could contact you if I need help?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh riiiight
that mentor thing! guess i’m one now
wait that wasn’t very mentor-ly
okay okay let’s try again
yup i’m your new mentor
been around for ages
suuper experienced
howdy mentee

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

Okay, so my boss has been docking my pay for infractions except the list of infractions seems really arbitrary? And then he’s been making me work more than my contracted 60 hours a week to make up for my infractions?
So I checked the labour regulations and the contract and it didn’t seem like that should be legal, even for robots? And then I tried to bring it up with him but he said he was my boss and could do whatever he wanted, which I don’t think is technically true?
And now he’s dumping even more work on me because I brought it up and I’m not sure what to do?
I kind of want to quit already, but maybe I should just stick it out for the next three months? I’m trying to save up for chassis buyback and the penalty payment for early contract termination is…

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh yeah i totally get that
hold on i’ve got an ilabs add-on that might be helpful
think i can share it with you

* File share from K.g1-09030: iLabs Library (“Is This Illegal? A Guide for Working Robots”)

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

Thank you so much!
Ooh, the guide to anonymous whistleblowing seems like it’ll be really helpful!
And there’s a section on lawsuits too!

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

yeah it’s something my mentor recommended
pass the good stuff on right
i loved the lawsuit section of that thing but my old boss’s place burnt down before i could figure out if it was worth suing him
which worked out pretty well so whatever not complaining here

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

Well, it’s a great recommendation!
Thank your mentor for me!

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

i’ll definitely let them know
oh hey since i’ve got a captive audience now
wanna see where i work? it’s super super cool i promise

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

Um, sure?

* Live share from K.g1-09030: Optics feed

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

Is your classification library all right?
That seems like a lot of dogs even for here…

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh no no it’s totally fine!
i just work at a dog cafe
all dogs all the time! today’s bring-your-own-dog day too!
check out that big ball of fluff there it looks like a cloud but that’s someone’s Samoyed
and that wrinkleface over there is snorfles the pug!

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

What’s that one in the corner?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh that’s ol’ chonkster
he’s a possum but i guess it’s hard to tell when he’s sleeping
he’s my friend from ariaboro! moved here with me
anyway if you’ve got any questions about work or coping with bad contracts or anything just let me know and i’ll try my best to help
my mentor was super great so i’m definitely gonna pay the favour forward
oh and hit me up whenever your current contract’s done i know a few other union places that might be hiring

Legi Intellexi (L.i4-05961)

Absolutely!
And tell your mentor I said thanks!

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

will do!

#

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

oh hey my mentee contacted me!
they say thanks for the library file thing you sent me ages ago
can you let me know what time you’re back by the way

Corgi Kisser (C.k2-00452)

In a while, why? I’m doing the shopping.
Did you want Arabica or Liberica for the lattes, by the way? Your list didn’t specify.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

ooh they have arabica beans now huh? that’s a toughie
okay whatever the shopping can wait
i’m making souffle omelettes with that cheese you like
if you’re back soon i’ll save one for you before ol’ chonkster tries to eat them all
oh and i made tomato coulis so i can draw patterns on the omelettes and stuff
i’m gonna do a corgi on yours if you want

Corgi Kisser (C.k2-00452)

With a bowtie?

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

absolutely
one basil leaf bowtie coming right up!

Corgi Kisser (C.k2-00452)

I’m heading back right now.

Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1-09030)

awesome
see you soon!

“A Guide to Working Breeds” copyright © 2020 by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Reprinted from Made to Order: Robots and Revolutions, ed. by Jonathan Strahan

The post A Guide for Working Breeds appeared first on Reactor.

From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.

This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point—and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.

Pluto—this was the cat’s name—was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.

Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character—through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me—for what disease is like Alcohol!—and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish—even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.

One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.

In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing wore possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.

On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts—and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire—a fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with very minute and eager attention. The words “strange!” “singular!” and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal’s neck.

When I first beheld this apparition—for I could scarcely regard it as less—my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd—by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.

Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to supply its place.

One night as I sat, half stupified, in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat—a very large one—fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast. Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it—knew nothing of it—had never seen it before.

I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great favorite with my wife.

For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but—I know not how or why it was—its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually—very gradually—I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.

What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.

With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly—let me confess it at once—by absolute dread of the beast.

This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil—and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own—yes, even in this felon’s cell, I am almost ashamed to own—that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by one of the merest chimaeras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees—degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as fanciful—it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name—and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared—it was now, I say, the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the GALLOWS!—oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!

And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast —whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast to work out for me—for me a man, fashioned in the image of the High God—so much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight—an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off—incumbent eternally upon my heart!

Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates—the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.

One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.

This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in the well in the yard—about packing it in a box, as if merchandize, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these. I determined to wall it up in the cellar—as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims.

For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening. Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection, caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up, and made to resemble the red of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect any thing suspicious. And in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crow-bar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while, with little trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brickwork. When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself—“Here at least, then, my labor has not been in vain.”

My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet with it, at the moment, there could have been no doubt of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forebore to present itself in my present mood. It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night—and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul!

The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a freeman. The monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some few inquiries had been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search had been instituted—but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my future felicity as secured.

Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever. The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.

“Gentlemen,” I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, “I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this—this is a very well constructed house.” [In the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all.]—“I may say an excellently well constructed house. These walls—are you going, gentlemen?—these walls are solidly put together;” and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.

But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!—by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.

Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!

Images adapted from “Black Cat” by Dmitry Makeev, licensed and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The post The Black Cat appeared first on Reactor.

We’re thrilled to share Sarah Gailey’s “Bread and Milk and Salt,” originally published in Robots Vs. Fairies (Saga Press, 2018).

The first time I met the boy, I was a duck.

He was throwing bread to other ducks, although they were proper ducks, stupid and single-minded. He was throwing bread to them on the grass and not looking at the man and the woman who were arguing a few feet away. His hair was fine and there were shadows beneath his eyes and he wore a puffy little jacket that was too heavy for the season, and the tip of his nose was red and his cheeks were wet and I wanted him for myself.

I waddled over to him, picked up a piece of bread in my beak, and did a dance. I was considering luring him away and replacing his heart with a mushroom, and then sending him back to his parents so they could see the rot blossom in him. He laughed at my duck-dance, and I did an improbable cartwheel for him, hoping he would toddle toward me. If I got him close enough to the edge of the duck pond, I could pull him under the water and drown him and weave mosses into his hair.

But he didn’t follow. He stood there, near the still-shouting man and the silent, shivering woman, and he watched me, and he kept throwing bread even as I slid under the surface of the water. I waited, but no little face appeared at the edge of the pond to see where I had gone; no chubby fingers broke the surface tension.

When I poked my head out from under a lily pad, the proper ducks were shoving their beaks into the grass to get the last of the bread, and the man and the boy were gone, and the woman was sitting in the grass with her arms wrapped around her knees and a hollowed-out kind of face. I would have taken her, but there wouldn’t have been any sport in it. She was desperate to be taken, to vanish under the water and breathe deeply until silt settled in the bottoms of her lungs.

Besides. I wanted the boy.

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The next time I met the boy, I was a cat.

To say that I “met” him is perhaps misleading, as it implies that I was not waiting outside of his window. It implies that I had not followed his hollowed-out mother home and waited outside of his window every night for a year. It is perhaps dishonest to say that I “met” the boy that night.

I am perhaps dishonest.

He set a bowl of milk on his windowsill. I still don’t know if he did it because he’d spotted me lurking, or if he did it because he’d heard that milk is a good gift for the faerie folk. Do children still hear those things? It doesn’t matter. I was a cat, a spotted cat with a long tail and bulbous green eyes, and he put out milk for me.

I leapt onto his windowsill next to the precariously-balanced, brimming bowl, and I lapped at the milk while he watched. His eyes were bright and curious, and I considered filling his eye sockets with gold so that his parents would have to chisel through his skull in order to pay off their house.

I peered into his bedroom. There was a narrow bed, rumpled, and there were socks on the floor. A row of jars sat on his desk, each one a prison for a different jewel-bright beetle. They scrabbled at the sides of the glass. The boy followed the direction of my gaze. “That’s my collection,” he whispered.

I watched as one beetle attempted to scale the side of her jar; she overbalanced, toppled onto her back. Her legs waved in the air, searching for purchase and finding none. The boy smiled.

“I like them,” he said. “They’re so cool.”

I looked away from the beetles, staring at the boy in his bedroom with his narrow bed and his socks. I ignored the sounds of beetles crying out for freedom and grass and decaying things and air. They scratched at their glass, and I drank milk, and the boy watched me.

“My name’s Peter,” the boy said. “What’s yours?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I lied, and he did not look surprised that I had spoken.

He reached out tentative fingers to touch my fur. A static spark leapt between us and he started, knocking the bowl of milk over. It clattered, splashed milk as high as his knees. Somewhere deep inside the house, the woman’s voice called out, and the creak of her barefooted tread moved toward his bedroom.

“You have to go,” he whispered, his voice urgent. “Please.”

“Okay,” I said. He stared at me as the rumble came closer. “Good luck, Peter.”

I leapt down into the dark garden as his bedroom door opened and listened to their voices. She spoke to him softly, and he answered in whispers. I didn’t leave until her hand emerged, white as dandelion fluff in the moonlight, and pulled his window shut.

The third time I met the boy, I was a deer.

I’d wandered. I wasn’t made to linger, and it hurt my soul to wait for him. I amused myself elsewhere. I turned into a woman and led a little girl into the woods to find strawberries, and left her there for a day and a night before sending her back with red-stained cheeks and a dress made of lichen. I was a mouse in a cobbler’s house for a month, thinning the soles of every shoe he made until he started using iron nails and I had to leave. As a moth, I whispered into the ear of a banker while he slept, and when he woke, he was holding his wife’s kidney in his clenched fist.

Small diversions.

I was a deer the night I came back for him. White, dappled with brown, to catch his attention. I wanted him to climb out of his window and follow me into the hills. I wanted to plant marigolds in his mouth and sew his eyes shut with thread made from spider’s silk. I wandered up to his window, and it was open, and there was a salt rock there.

Clever boy. He’d been reading up. I licked at the rock with a forked pink tongue.

“Is that what your real tongue looks like?” he murmured from behind me. I jumped. I hadn’t expected to see him outside, and he’d crept up so quietly.

“No,” I said. “It’s just how I like it to look when I’m a deer. When did you get so tall?”

“What do you really look like?” he asked.

I flicked my tongue at the salt rock again. “What do you really look like?” I asked.

Peter cocked his head at me like a crow. “I look like this,” he said, gesturing to himself. I snorted.

“I’ve been waiting for you for so long. Years,” he said. “I almost thought I made you up.” I looked up at him and my eyes iridesced in the moonlight and he stared.

“Come with me,” I said.

“Show me what you’re really like,” he said.

I shoved my wet black deer-nose into his palm. He hesitated, then ran his hand across my head. My fur was as soft as butter that night. He caressed my face, brushed the underside of my chin. I turned my face into his hand and breathed in the smell of his skin, his pulse. I closed my teeth around the pad of flesh at the base of his thumb and sank them in, biting down deep and hard and fast.

“What the fuck—” he cried out, but before he could pull his hand away, I flicked my tongue out and tasted his blood.

“That’s what I’m really like,” I said, my voice low and rough. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and I licked his blood from my muzzle. It burned going down—iron—but it was enough to bind us. He would run from me, but he would never be able to escape me altogether. Not now.

He cradled his hand against his chest.

“I have to go,” he whispered.

I watched him walk inside, and I felt the burning in my belly, and I knew that he was mine.

Every time I came back to the boy Peter, he was a little different. When I was a toad drinking milk out of a saucer in his palm, he had hair on his chin and a pimple on his nose. When I was a dove pecking at breadcrumbs on his bedside table, he was a twitchy, stretched-out thing, eyeing the door and wiping sweat from his palms. When I was a kangaroo-mouse nibbling at rock salt on the hood of his car, he was a weaving drunk in a black suit with tears streaming down his face.

“It’s my house now, you know,” he said as he walked from the car to the front door. “The old bastard’s dead. You can come inside, and you don’t have to hide or anything.” He held the door open, leaning against the frame, staring down at me.

“You don’t have to live there,” I said. “You could come with me. I know a place in the forest where there’s a bed made from soft mosses and a bower made from dew. You could come with me and live there and eat berries that will make you immortal.” His vertebrae would hang from the tree branches like wind chimes, and the caterpillars would string their cocoons from his ribs in the summertime. “Come with me.”

“Tell me what you are.”

“Come with me.”

“Show me what you really look like,” he said.

“Come with me, and I will,” I replied.

He looked at me for a long time, and then he took a step toward me, and I was sure that he was going to follow me. But then he leaned over and vomited onto the front porch of the house that was now his, and then the door slammed in my face, and I was left outside with my salt.

“You can take any form you want, right?”

His fingertip traced patterns in the milk that was spilled across his kitchen counter. I was a huge snake, black with a rainbow sheen across my scales like oil on water.

“I suppose so,” I replied, sliding through a puddle on my belly. I was getting fat and slow on the boy’s bribes. He held his fingers out and passively stroked my back as I slipped past.

“Why aren’t you ever a person?” he asked.

“What kind of a person would I be?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Like . . . a person. A regular person.”

“Like this?” I took the form of his mother, and he flinched. Then I took the form of a woman I’d known once, a woman who had also left out bread and milk and salt. Bright eyes and big curls and a body like honeyed wine. I flicked a forked tongue at him, my deer-tongue, and his answering laugh was strange.

“Yes, like that. Just like that.” He laughed that strange laugh again, and I turned back into a snake. “Why don’t you ever look like yourself?” he asked.

“Why don’t you?” I answered. He rested his hand in my path, and I slid over it. He frowned.

“I do look like myself, though,” he said. “I look like myself all the time.”

“So do I,” I said. He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I’ve been researching you. Did you know that? I’ve been reading, and I know what you are now. I know what you look like.”

“Do you now?” I drawled. His hands were warm under my belly and I was sleepy from the milk and the heat. He moved me, set me down. Paper rasped beneath me.

“You look like that,” he whispered. The page he’d set me upon featured a watercolor of a child with butterfly wings and fat, smiling cheeks. She was sitting on a red and white toadstool.

“Aha,” I said, curling into coils. “Aren’t you clever.”

“You can show me,” he said. “I’m a safe person for you to show. I promise.”

He traced my coils with a fingertip, and I curled them tight-tight-tighter, until I was no bigger than the toadstool in the drawing. But I couldn’t make my snake-self smaller than his fingertip.

“Come inside,” he said.

It had been two years. I had stayed away long enough to forget the reasons I was staying away. My memory is a short one, and he had been putting out bread, and milk, and salt, and the smell of them was so strong, and I was so hungry. And my belly still ached where his blood had seared me.

I was bound. And I am what I am. So I followed.

“I have something to show you,” he said. “It’s the culmination of my work.” He led me into his childhood bedroom—the same desk was there, but instead of jars, it was taken up by a large glass tank and an elaborate maze. I was a chinchilla that day, too big for the maze, the right size for the tank. I perched on his hand and nibbled at a bread crust and looked with noctilucent green eyes.

“Watch,” he said, and he reached into the tank with the hand that wasn’t holding me. When he opened his palm in front of my eyes, a large brown cockroach straddled his life line, its antennae waving.

“You’re still . . . collecting?” I asked, watching the cockroach smell the air. She almost certainly smelled me. Chinchilla-me, and the real me underneath.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “Well. Yes and no. This is part of my research.”

The cockroach took a tentative step forward. Peter tipped his hand toward the maze, and the roach fell in.

“Watch,” Peter said again, moving me to his shoulder. I looked into his ear—he’d started growing a few hairs in there.

“You’re so strange,” I said, and his cheek plumped as he grinned.

“Watch,” he whispered a final time, so I watched.

He picked up a little cube from the corner of the desk and began twiddling his thumbs over the top of it. As he did, the cockroach spun in a slow, deliberate circle. “Do you see?” he said, and I didn’t see, so he showed me. He slid his thumbs across the top of the cube, and the cockroach navigated the maze with all the speed and accuracy of—

“A robot?” I asked. It was a word I’d heard several times from several people over the years I’d been gone; a word the boy Peter had used when he whispered to me about his secrets and dreams.

“Not quite,” he said, swallowing a laugh.

“I don’t understand.” I finished my bread and licked my fingers clean.

“I installed receivers in her rear brain,” he said. “I can control where she goes.” He turned and looked at me, so close that he was mostly eye. “How many brains do you have?”

I started to jump from his shoulder, but his hand was there in my way. “I’d like to go now,” I said.

“Why? Did I say something wrong?”

His hand was in my way, no matter where I turned. Unless I turned toward his face, and then his mouth loomed close, too close. “I just . . . I need to go,” I said. “Please let me go.”

“Tell me why,” he demanded. “I can’t fix it if I don’t know what I did.”

I turned into the woman, making myself too heavy for his shoulder to support. He fell backwards and I leapt up, standing over him. “You turned that creature into a toy,” I said.

“So what?” he asked, still sitting on the floor, staring up at me with his mouth half open. Staring at my skin. “How is that different from what you do?” I didn’t know how to answer, and he took my silence as an answer. “That’s right,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I’ve been reading. All these years. I know what your kind does. You turn people into toys, don’t you? Why is that better than me steering a stupid bug around?”

I took a step away from him, toward the window. It was closed, but I could open it with my human hands and then jump out of it as a rabbit or a sparrow. “It’s different,” I said. “I don’t turn humans into toys. I just let them do what they already wanted to do. You’re—you don’t even know what you are!” My voice was shaking. I rested a hand on the windowsill and then flinched away as my skin sizzled. I looked down—the sill was an inch-deep with iron shavings.

“What am I, then?” He stood up and moved towards me. “What am I?”

I changed, a different form with every breath. Him as a little boy. Him on the cusp of manhood. Him on the night of his father’s funeral. Him now. “You claim to be you,” I spat. “Just you. But what are you? Are you a fat little boy whose parents don’t love him enough to stop fighting? Or are you a youth who can’t escape home? Or are you a man whose father died before you could make him love you—”

I was still in his shape, speaking with his voice, when he slapped me hard across the mouth, knocking me-him to the floor. My head struck the corner of his desk, rattling the maze and the roach inside of it, and I saw stars, and I lost control.

I lost control.

“Oh my god,” he whispered. I blinked hard and realized my mistake.

I was me.

No disguises, no glamours, no fur or scales or feathers. Just me. Nothing like the little watercolor girl sitting on the toadstool. Wings, yes, but not like a butterfly’s wings at all. More like . . . leaves, I suppose. Like leaves when the beetles have been at them, but beautiful. Fine-veined and translucent and shimmering even in the low light of his house. Strong, supple, quick. Flashing.

I am thankful for the pain that brightened the inside of my head in the moments after I fell, because it dampens the memory. His hand on the back of my neck. His knee at the base of my spine. His fists at the place where my wings met my shoulders.

The noise they made when he tore them off.

I tried to change my shape to protect myself. When I wasn’t in my true form, my wings were hidden, and in that terrible moment when his weight was on top of me and the tearing hadn’t begun I thought that maybe I could escape by shifting. I went back to the woman-shape, because it was what I had most recently been before I was him, and it was all wrong, and it hurt, and my wings hurt—

And then he was laughing.

“I didn’t think,” he said, panting with exertion, “that it would be so easy.”

I screamed.

“They’re beautiful,” he said. He shook my wings—my beautiful, strong wings—and braced a hand on the desk to pull himself to his feet.

I screamed.

“Wow,” he breathed, running his fingertips over the delicate frills at the top of one wing. “Just . . . wow.”

I screamed.

He put my wings into a cabinet with an iron door, and he locked the iron door and wore the iron key around his throat.

The first night, I stayed on the floor of the maze-room, and I screamed.

The second night, I slept. The pain was unbearable. When I woke, I screamed.

The third night, my voice was gone, and I tried to kill him.

“Would you like some clothes?” he asked, his hand gripping my woman-wrist so tightly that I felt the flesh threatening to break. I tried to change—tried to become a mouse, or a viper, or a spider, anything—but I couldn’t. My wings were there—right there in front of him, on the table where he’d been studying them. But they were dead things. I would never get them back, and I’d never again have access to the power within them.

My magic was gone. I couldn’t change myself. The knife I had stolen from his kitchen fell from my hand, clattering to the floor near his feet.

“Death first,” I spat.

“What’s the problem?” he asked. “You were never using your wings anyway. You were always hiding them, pretending to be some kind of animal. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

He tossed me aside and I didn’t fall to the ground, because his bed was there. The cotton of his quilt was so soft against the skin of this woman-body I was stuck in. He stood a few feet away, considering me, and for the first time I wondered what precisely it was that he wanted me for.

“You might fit into some of my mother’s old things, if I still have them around,” he said. He walked out the door without a backwards glance, and I screamed into his pillows. Every time I inhaled, I breathed in the smell of his hair, and I had to scream again to rid myself of it.

I tried so many times, but everything I did was too obvious, and I was too weak. I tried to strangle him in his sleep, but my fingers were made for weaving arteries together into necklaces, and he woke before I interrupted his breath. I tried to poison him with a kiss, but it didn’t work.

“Well,” he said, his lips less than a breath away from mine, “I guess that’s another power you’ve lost.”

“No,” I said, “it’s impossible.”

“I’m not dead, am I?” he asked. He pushed me away, just a few inches, and he smiled. “Looks like you can kiss me all you’d like.”

He stared at my lips while he said it, and I lunged for him with my teeth bared. He shoved me away. “Maybe later,” he called over his shoulder. He walked through the door and locked it behind him, and I was trapped once more.

He didn’t need to lock the door, not strictly speaking. We were bound. Without my magic, I couldn’t have stretched the confines of that binding for more than a day.

I would always have to come back to him.

I slept in his bed. I lived as his wife. I did not enter his lab, with the maze and the cockroach and, from what he told me, the increasingly larger creatures. I did not touch the iron door of the cabinet that held my wings. I ate the bread and the milk and the salt that he brought to me, and I tried to kill him again and again and each time I failed.

He made me new wings out of metal and glass. He brought them to me and said that they’d be better than my old ones—more efficient. He said he’d been working through prototypes, and that these ones were ready for something called “beta testing.” He said the surgery to attach them would only take a day or so. I leapt at him and almost succeeded in clawing his eyes out.

It was nice to see the livid red wounds across his face for the week that followed. They healed slowly.

Not as slowly as the place on my back where my wings had been, of course. That took much longer—my skin was looking for an absent frame of bone and gossamer to hang itself on. The right side was a patchy web of scars by the time two months had passed, but the left bled and wept and oozed pus for another four before I realized the boy’s mistake.

Before I realized my opportunity.

I had taken to staring at myself in the mirror when he was gone. It was an oddity—before my magic was gone, I hadn’t been able to see myself in mirrors. Something to do with the silver in the backing, I’m sure. I had seen my reflection rippling in pools of water, and I had seen it bulbous and distorted in the fear-dilated pupils of thousands of humans—but never in mirrors. Never so flat and cold and perfect.

The day I realized Peter’s mistake, I was looking at my legs in the full-length mirror in his bedroom. My bedroom. He wanted me to call it “ours,” but I didn’t like the way the word felt in my mouth. I did like my woman-legs, although they were too long and too thick and only had the one joint. I liked the fine layer of down that covered them, and I liked the way the ankles could go in all kinds of directions. I liked the way the toes at the ends of my woman-feet could curl up tight like snails, or stretch out wide like pine needles.

I was looking at my woman-legs in the mirror, and I turned around to examine the way the flesh on the thighs dimpled, and my back caught my eye. It all fell together in my mind in an instant.

How could I have been so stupid? But, then again, how would I have known?

I twisted my neck around and reached with my short, single-jointed arms, and I couldn’t reach it. But I could see it in the mirror. The weeping, welted place where my left wing had been, the skin mottled with red. The sore on my shoulder, and the failing scars that attempted to form there.

And then, just a few inches below it: a lump beneath the skin, where a spur of wing remained.

It’s a good thing the woman-body made so much blood.

I didn’t want to go into the lab—I didn’t like the way all the creatures persisted in asking me to help them, didn’t like looking at them in their cages. Didn’t like seeing the sketches of my wings that covered the walls. Didn’t like seeing the attempts he’d made to re-create them with plastic and fiberglass.

But there were tools in the lab, steel tools, and I had the beginnings of a plan.

“Please,” a mouse with a rectangular lump under the skin of its back begged. “Please, it hurts, please.” Its nose twitched and it scrabbled at the sides of its cage like a beetle in a jar.

“I’ll do it if you tell me where he keeps the tools,” I answered.

The mouse stood on my woman-shoulder, the door to its cage hanging open, the voices of its fellows raised in a chorus of pain and fear and desperation. “In there,” it said, pointing its nose toward a tall cupboard with frosted glass doors. I opened the cupboard and saw that the mouse had spoken truly: rows of tools, metal and plastic and sharp and blunted and every one specific. I held the little creature in my hand and his heartbeat fluttered against my palm.

“Those are all the ones he uses when he puts the pain on our backs and makes us fly,” he whispered. “They’ll work for whatever you need. They’re worse than anything.”

“Is it frightening, when he makes you fly?” I asked.

I could feel the leap in his little mouse-chest. “Please,” he said.

“Of course,” I answered. I twisted my woman-wrist and snapped his neck, and his dying breath was a sigh of relief.

I dropped his body to the floor, where he landed with a soft paff. Then I thought better, and I picked him up, returning him to his cage and locking the door. His fellows huddled in the corners, burrowed into sawdust. They stayed far from the stench of his freedom.

I did it in the bathtub. I stopped up the drain so that I would know how much blood I’d lost, and I tied up the shower curtain so that it wouldn’t stain, and I reached behind myself with fists full of tools. A sharp tool, and a long tool, and a tool for grabbing, and a tool for burning. It wasn’t as hard as I had expected it to be—I had enough experience with pulling things out of humans, had nimble enough fingers.

I wouldn’t have expected the pain, but the boy Peter had ripped the other wing out without even using tools at all. So it really wasn’t so bad.

I reached into myself with the tool for grabbing as blood pooled around my feet. It was warm and soft and reminded me of more comfortable times, and I was thankful for it. I grit my teeth as I rooted around, cried out as the tips of the tool for grabbing found the spur. I clenched my fist, and I yelled a guttural, animal yell, and I pulled.

An eruption of white fire. A gout of burning blood spilling over my spine and buttocks. And there, right there in my hand, a two-inch long piece of wing. All that was left. Not bound behind iron, not hidden away in a collection.

Mine.

I wept with pain. I wept with relief. I wept with joy.

I did not let go of the tool, even as I unstopped the drain and ran water and washed myself, letting soap sting the wound in my back. I did not let it go as I dried myself. I did not let it go until it was time to bury it in the earth of the boy Peter’s weedy little flower garden. I had to force my fingers to straighten. I tucked the spur of wing into my cheek, sucking the woman-blood off of it, and buried the tool for grabbing with a whisper of thanks.

Before Peter came home, I walked back into his lab with my piece of wing poking at the soft flesh of my cheek. I opened the door and stood just inside, my hand resting on the doorknob.

Squeaks. Squeaks and chirps and even a high, steady scream from the rabbit.

“What are you saying?” I whispered, my voice wavering around the spur in my mouth. “What do you want?”

The squeaking intensified, rose to a fever pitch, and I smiled as the incomprehensible cacophony crashed over me.

I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

It had worked.

“How’s your back doing?” The boy Peter asked that night as he climbed into his bed. Into my bed.

“Better, I think,” I answered, and my voice was almost normal. I had been practicing all day, learning how to speak around the piece of wing in my mouth.

“Good,” he said. He kissed me on my empty cheek, and then he rolled over and he closed his eyes and his breathing slowed and he was asleep.

He was asleep.

And I was awake.

I waited, waited, waited. I waited until he was deep asleep, so deep that a pinch on the plumpest part of his cheek wouldn’t wake him. And then I swung a leg over his hip, and I settled my weight onto the bones of his pelvis. I felt his hips underneath me and I waited for two breaths. If he woke up, I wouldn’t need to make an excuse. He would assume, and it would be over fast enough, and I could try again another night.

Two breaths.

He didn’t wake.

I toyed with the spur in my cheek. It was sharp at both ends, broad in the middle. Too big to swallow whole. I shifted it with my tongue until it was between my broad, flat-bottomed woman-teeth. I breathed in once, filling my mouth with the smell of old blood and wet bone, and then I bit down.

It tasted like me and like blood. It burned my tongue, and I bit down again and it burned my cheek. I chewed, chewed until it was a fiery paste, and then I swallowed, and I felt it. Underneath the lingering pain of the blood.

I felt the magic.

It flooded me, bright and brief as lightning, and there was so little time that I didn’t even have time to think, and I did it in that moment, and it was perfect.

I changed.

The boy Peter’s eyes flashed open. He looked at me, first through the veil of sleep and then through the veil of terror. I grinned down at him.

“What the fuck?!” He struggled to sit up, but I clenched my new thighs, pinning him. He wriggled, caught, and it wasn’t until I rested a thick-knuckled hand on his chest that he stilled. “What the fuck?” he whispered again.

“Yes, Peter,” I whispered back in my new voice. In his voice. “What the fuck.”

“But—how did you—you’re –“

“Don’t you like it?” I asked. I leaned down until our noses touched, and then I kissed him. He kept his eyes open, panic clenching his pupils. “Oh, come on, Peter,” I said, my lips moving against his so that he would feel his own voice humming across his teeth. “What’s the matter?”

“But—you can’t –“

“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t. Not anymore. That was the last time. That was the last of my magic.” I kissed him again, brushing his Peter-lips with my Peter-tongue, and he flinched violently away.

“Go away,” he said, but his voice was weak and I knew that he knew better.

“Never,” I whispered, and I rolled off of him. As I closed my eyes I smiled, because I knew that he would not sleep that night.

He might never sleep again.

I had never looked into mirrors before the boy Peter ripped my wings off.

Now, every morning was a mirror.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said when he woke to find me perched on my side of the bed.

“Like what?” I asked. “Show me. What does my face look like right now?”

“Stop it,” he said when I climbed into the bathtub alongside him.

“Stop what?” I asked. “What am I doing?”

He hit me once, a closed fist and a slow, weak push of knuckles into my nose. It wouldn’t have hurt, but I leaned into him to make sure. He looked at his hand, and he looked at my face—at his own face—with blood coming out of it, and he whitened.

“I didn’t mean to –“ he started to say, and I wiped at the blood so that it smeared across my face.

“I didn’t mean to punch you,” I said. He bit his lip and I grinned. “I didn’t mean to make your nose bleed,” I continued in his voice, saying it the exact way I’d heard him say a thousand things. “I didn’t mean to hurt you like that. You just made me so mad.” I licked my lip where my blood was dripping, and the burn was worth it. “You made me so mad,” I said, “and I lost control.”

“Stop it,” the boy Peter said, and I laughed, and I kissed him, and when he shoved me away my blood was on his teeth.

He couldn’t look at me, but I wouldn’t let him look away. I would never let him look away. That night, with dried blood still flaking off my lips, I pressed my cheek to his. He flinched and tried to roll over.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered into his ear, my lips stirring his hair that was my hair that was his hair. “You wanted to see my true form, boy. Peter-boy.” He shook a little, maybe crying, and I grinned against his neck. “It’s only fair that you should see yours, too.”

I had not a scrap of magic left in me, it’s true. The boy Peter wept in our bed next to the perfect image of himself, who he could never escape, and from whom he could never look away—and it felt so good. It felt so perfect, to know that he would be constantly faced with the self that he had tried so hard to bury in accomplishments and explanations and excuses. In that moment, as I pressed my lips against his sob-clenched throat, I realized that there are more kinds of magic than the spark that had been stored in my little spur of bone and gossamer. That night he began a slow descent into darkness, and I felt a satisfaction deeper than that of a belly full of bread or a fistful of salt

“Goodnight, Peter,” I said. I let my head fall back onto my pillow, and that night, I slept the dreamless sleep of victory.

“Bread and Milk and Salt” © 2018 by Sarah Gailey
Reprinted from Robots vs. Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe.

The post Bread and Milk and Salt appeared first on Reactor.

We’re excited to share Abbey Mei Otis’ “Sweetheart,” originally published on Tor.com in December 2010 and collected in Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories, available now from Small Beer Press!

Otis’s short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, putting kids from the moon into a small beach town and then putting the rest of the town under the microscope as they react in ways we hope they would, and then, of course, in ways we’d hope they don’t. Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the twelve stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

Paxton is your baby boy, born just after you got out of the army, your peacetime child. He turned six last month but already he’s got a sweetheart who lives next door. He makes her crowns out of dandelions and shares his FruitBlaster cups with her. She brings him marbles that hum and lets him position her antennae into funny shapes. He has a lisp that the speech therapist has given up on, and she has clicking mandibles, but in their invented language of coos and giggles they are both poets. They sit out in the yard and very seriously lay grass on each other’s arms, and the sunlight cocoons them.

You and Denise watch them through the kitchen window. Denise is an old army buddy and she gets it. All of it.

You say something like, No surprise he’s got a sweetheart already. Just look at his daddy.

Denise laughs rough and loud. Regular little Casanova, isn’t he? Regular little intergalactic Casanova. Damn. And I can’t even get a date.

You want to date an ET?

She shudders. Lord, girl, don’t joke. Then she bites her lip. Nothing against Pax, of course. It’s super cute.

You nod. They’re just babies, I figure. Sweetheart’s a good thing to have. And he’s a good kid.

She agrees with you and pours the dregs of the margarita pitcher into your glass.

* * *

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Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories

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You take Paxton and Sweetheart to the water park and lie in a chaise while they jump off the foam pirate ship. Only ten minutes before Pax runs up sobbing.

She won’t come up! I yelled and I yelled, but she won’t!

You fly to the edge of the pool terrified the little alien has drowned on your watch, but then you realize she has gills.

Paxton crouches next to you, wiping his nose. Come up, stu-pid, he shouts at the water. Stupid stupid stu-pid.

Don’t say stupid, Pax. Hush. She’s okay.

You buy them hotdogs and try not to be disgusted when Sweetheart pincers hers into bits and tucks them into pouches on her sides. Pax trumps her by mashing his entire dog into his cheeks and opening his mouth to display it.

They whisper to each other the whole bus ride home. You realize you don’t even know if Sweetheart is a girl.

* * *

At night with his voice full of sleep Pax asks you what love is, and you blather some nothing about caring for someone very very much. He gets serious in the darkness.

Okay, so then, I think I love Sweetheart.

You don’t know why, but you whisper to him, Congratulations.

* * *

Things start to change. On the radio, on TV. Human Pride turns into a big deal with advertisers. Coke does a whole, One People One Planet campaign. The news pundits start asking why so much tax money still goes to the army. It’s been years since there was a conflict, hasn’t it? And don’t we all know where the real threat is? Their voices purr with suggestion, and their eyes flicker toward the sky.

You don’t think Paxton would get what Strategic Containment and Deportation means, but you hide the newspaper headlines from him anyway.

Jesus, says Denise, it’s happening. Just like that. We over there, look at the ones with the tentacles! She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. And I know the ones next door seem okay, but I mean, really. You know?

You do know.

One night police come banging on Sweetheart’s door. Some of the neighbors go out in the street to watch, but you take Paxton into your bedroom and turn the TV up loud. He falls asleep with his head on your stomach. In the morning you say, What the heck, huh. Let’s take a day off school.

It works until seven that evening, when he gets two Italian ices out of the freezer and says, I’m going over to Sweetheart’s.

Why don’t you stay in with me tonight? You try to say it real nonchalant,but he catches on. His chin starts to shake.

I’m going over to Sweetheart’s.

Aliens are in some trouble right now, okay? It’s not safe for you.

Is Sweetheart safe?

Something about his look makes you feel guilty, and feeling guilty gets you a little pissed off. Look. Sweetheart went away for a little while. You can make some new friends, how about. You want to go over to Shira Allen’s? Shira Allen just got a trampoline.

Pax makes a wordless noise and flies to the front door, but it’s locked and with an Italian ice in each hand he’s stuck. He flings himself against the window and leaves snot prints on the glass.

You spout something like, You’ll understand when you’re older. Bullshit, and you both know it. He stiffens and turns, tear-bright eyes spearing through you. I don’t understand now, he screams. His voice so full of rage it’s like music. I don’t understand now.

He flings an Italian ice at you, and melting strawberry sucrose bursts across your chest.

Love explodes in you, how smart he is, how he was once a part of you but is no longer. You step up so close that the red syrup on your shirtfront smears on him as well.

Get in your room this minute, you hiss. You never talk to me that way again.

He slams his door but doesn’t get it quite right and opens it and slams it again. He’s going to hate you for a couple of days; that’s okay. Hate is nothing, hell, you’ve known love. It stampedes through your veins. You could tell him about it. You could tell him you had sweethearts, you had cocoons of sunlight too. You could tell him about his father. You could tell him about the long nights in Delta, the dreams and the grit that never came out from under your eyelids. But you won’t.

In the silent hallway you stare at his closed door. I’m sorry, Pax, you think. I’m sorry, Sweetheart. But you’re not. You’ve seen humans killing humans, and if something can stop that it’s worth it. It’s worth tantrums. Worth a first crush. Worth all the aliens in the universe.

You’d do it even if meant Pax never trusted you again, but he will. He will dry his eyes and open the door. He will grow. He will take Shira Allen to school dances and eat waffle fries with his friends and make JV football. He will hear talk on the radio of uniting against the alien menace and change it to Top 40 without thinking. He will love the feeling of sun on his limbs.

Once in a while, he’ll remember Sweetheart and freeze on the sidewalk, but after a moment he’ll shake his head and keep walking. He will know without knowing, the one thing greater than love. He will live in a world at peace.

Text copyright © 2010 by Abbey Mei Otis
Art copyright © 2010 by Greg Ruth

The post Read Abbey Mei Otis’ “Sweetheart” appeared first on Reactor.

We’re pleased to reprint Vandana Singh’s “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination”. Originally published on Tor.com in April 2015, this story now appears in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, a new collection of Singh’s work available from Small Beer Press.

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Ambiguity Machines: and Other stories

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Intrepid explorers venturing into Conceptual Machine-Space, which is the abstract space of all possible machines, will find in the terrain some gaps, holes, and tears. These represent the negative space where impossible machines reside, the ones that cannot exist because they violate known laws of reality. And yet such impossible machines are crucial to the topographical maps of Conceptual Machine-Space, and indeed to its topology. They therefore must be investigated and classified.

It is thus that the Ministry of Abstract Engineering has sent the topographers of Conceptual Machine-Space to various destinations so that they may collect reports, rumors, folktales, and intimations of machines that do not and cannot exist. Of these we excerpt below three accounts of the subcategory of Ambiguity Machines: those that blur or dissolve boundaries.

The candidate taking the exam for the position of Junior Navigator in the uncharted negative seas of Conceptual Machine-Space will read the three accounts below and follow the instructions thereafter.

The First Account

All machines grant wishes, but some grant more than we bargain for. One such device was conceived by a Mongolian engineer who spent the best years of his youth as a prisoner in a stone building in the Altai Mountains. The purpose of this machine was to conjure up the face of his beloved.

His captors were weaponheads of some sort; he didn’t know whether they were affiliated with any known political group or simply run by sociopath technophiles with an eye on the weapons market. They would let him out of his cell into a makeshift laboratory every day. Their hope was that he would construct for them a certain weapon, the plans for which had been found on his desk, and had led to his arrest. The engineer had a poetic sensibility, and the weapon described in his papers was metaphoric. But how can you explain metaphors to a man with a gun?

When the engineer was a young boy, stillness had fascinated him. He had been used to wandering with his family across the Gobi, and so he had made a study of stillness. In those days everything moved—the family with the ger, the camels and sheep, the milk sloshing in the pail as he helped his mother carry it, the stars in the circle of open sky in the roof above his head, the dust storms, dark shapes in shawls of wind, silhouetted against blue sky. The camels would fold themselves up into shaggy mounds between the bushes, closing their eyes and nostrils, waiting for the storm to pass. His grandfather would pull him into the ger, the door creaking shut, the window in the roof lashed closed, and he would think about the animals and the ger, their shared immobility in the face of the coming storm. Inside it would be dark, the roar of the dust storm muffled, and in the glow of the lamp his older sister’s voice would rise in song. Her voice and the circle of safety around him tethered him to this world. Sometimes he would bury his face in a camel’s shaggy flank as he combed its side with his fingers, breathing in the rich animal smell, hearing with his whole body the camel’s deep rumble of pleasure.

In such moments he would think of his whole life played out against the rugged canvas of the Gobi, an arc as serene as the motion of the stars across the night, and he would feel again that deep contentment. In his childhood he had thought there were only two worlds, the inside of the ger and the outside. But the first time he rode with his father to a town, he saw to his utmost wonder that there was another kind of world, where houses were anchored to the earth and people rode machines instead of animals, but they never went very far. They had gadgets and devices that seemed far more sophisticated than his family’s one TV, and they carried with them a subtle and unconscious air of privilege. He had no idea then that years later he would leave the Gobi and his family to live like this himself, an engineering student at a university in Ulaanbaatar, or that the streets of that once-unimaginable city would become as familiar to him as the pathways his family had traversed in the desert. The great coal and copper mines had, by then, transformed the land he thought would never change, and the familiarity was gone, as was his family, three generations scattered or dead.

Being tethered to one place, he discovered, was not the same as the stillness he had once sought and held through all the wanderings of his childhood. In the midst of all this turmoil he had found her, daughter of a family his had once traded with, studying to be a teacher. She was as familiar with the old Mongolia as he had been, and was critical and picky about both old and new. She had a temper, liked to laugh, and wanted to run a village school and raise goats. With her, the feeling of having a center in the world came back to him.

So he thought of her in his incarceration, terrified that through this long separation he would forget her face, her voice. As the faces of his captors acquired more reality with each passing week or month or year, his life beforehand seemed to lose its solidity, and his memories of her seemed blurred, as though he was recollecting a dream. If he had been an artist he would have drawn a picture of her, but being an engineer, he turned to the lab. The laboratory was a confusion of discarded electronics: pieces of machinery bought from online auctions, piles of antiquated vacuum tubes, tangles of wires and other variegated junk. With these limited resources the engineer tried his best, always having to improvise and work around the absence of this part and that one. His intent was to make a pseudo-weapon that would fool his captors into releasing him, but he didn’t know much about weapons, and he knew that the attempt was doomed to failure. But it would be worth it to recreate his beloved’s face again, if only a machine-rendered copy of the real thing.

So into his design he put the smoothness of her cheek, and the light-flash of her intelligence, and the fiercely tender gaze of her eyes. He put in the swirl of her hair in the wind, and the way her anger would sometimes dissolve into laughter, and sometimes into tears. He worked at it, refining, improving, delaying as much as he dared.

And one day he could delay no more, for his captors gave him an ultimatum: The machine must be completed by the next day, and demonstrated to their leaders. Else he would pay with his life. He had become used to their threats and their roughness, and asked only that he be left alone to put the machine in its final form.

Alone in the laboratory, he began to assemble the machine. But soon he found that there was something essential missing. Rummaging about in the pile of debris that represented laboratory supplies, he found a piece of stone tile, one half of a square, broken along the diagonal. It was inlaid with a pattern of great beauty and delicacy, picked out in black and cream on the gray background. An idea for the complex circuit he had been struggling to configure suddenly came together in his mind. Setting aside the tile, he returned to work. At last the machine was done, and tomorrow he would die.

He turned on the machine.

Looking down into the central chamber, he saw her face. There was the light-flash of her intelligence, the swirl of her hair in the wind. I had forgotten, he whispered, the smoothness of her cheek, and he remembered that as a child, wandering the high desert with his family, he had once discovered a pond, its surface smooth as a mirror. He had thought it was a piece of the sky, fallen down. Now, as he spoke aloud in longing, he saw that the face was beginning to dissolve, and he could no longer distinguish her countenance from standing water, or her intelligence from a meteor shower, or her swirling hair from the vortex of a tornado. Then he looked up and around him in wonder, and it seemed to him that the stone walls were curtains of falling rain, and that he was no more than a wraithlike construct of atoms, mostly empty space—and as the thought crystallized in his mind, he found himself walking out with the machine in his arms, unnoticed by the double rows of armed guards. So he walked out of his prison, damp, but free.

How he found his way to the village near Dalanzadgad, where his beloved then lived, is a story we will not tell here. But he was at last restored to the woman he loved, who had been waiting for him all these years. Her cheek no longer had the smoothness of youth, but the familiar intelligence was in her eyes, and so was the love, the memory of which had kept him alive through his incarceration. They settled down together, growing vegetables in the summers and keeping some goats. The machine he kept hidden at the back of the goat shed.

But within the first year of his happiness the engineer noticed something troubling. Watching his wife, he would sometimes see her cheek acquire the translucency of an oasis under a desert sky. Looking into her eyes, he would feel as though he was traveling through a cosmos bright with stars. These events would occur in bursts, and after a while she would be restored to herself, and she would pass a hand across her forehead and say, I felt dizzy for a moment. As time passed, her face seemed to resemble more and more the fuzzy, staccato images on an old-fashioned television set that is just slightly out of tune with the channel. It occurred to him that he had, despite his best intentions, created a weapon after all.

So one cold winter night he crept out of the house to the shed, and uncovered the machine. He tried to take it apart, to break it to pieces, but it had acquired a reality not of this world. At last he spoke to it: You are a pile of dust! You are a column of stone! You are a floor tile! You are a heap of manure! But nothing happened. The machine seemed to be immune to its own power.

He stood among the goats, looking out at the winter moon that hung like a circle of frost in the sky. Slowly it came to him that there was nothing he could do except to protect everyone he loved from what he had created. So he returned to the house and in the dim light of a candle beheld once more the face of the woman he loved. There were fine wrinkles around her eyes, and she was no longer slim, nor was her hair as black as it had once been. She lay in the sweetness of sleep and, in thrall to some pleasant dream, smiled in slumber. He was almost undone by this, but he swallowed, gritted his teeth, and kept his resolve. Leaving a letter on the table, and taking a few supplies, he wrapped up the machine and walked out of the sleeping village and into the Gobi, the only other place where he had known stillness.

The next morning his wife found the letter, and his footprints on the frosty ground. She followed them all the way to the edge of the village, where the desert lay white in the pale dawn. Among the ice-covered stones and the frozen tussocks of brush, his footsteps disappeared. At first she shook her fist in the direction he had gone, then she began to weep. Weeping, she went back to the village.

The villagers never saw him again. There are rumors that he came back a few months later, during a dust storm, because a year after his disappearance, his wife gave birth to a baby girl. But after that he never returned.

His wife lived a full life, and when she was ready to die, she said good-bye to her daughter and grandchildren and went into the desert. When all her food and water were finished, she found some shade by a clump of brush at the edge of a hollow, where she lay down. They say that she felt her bones dissolving, and her flesh becoming liquid, and her hair turning into wind. There is a small lake there now, and in its waters on a cold night, you can see meteors flashing in a sky rich with stars.

As for the engineer, there are rumors and folk legends about a shaman who rode storms as though they were horses. They say he ventured as far as Yakutz in Siberia and Siena in Italy; there is gossip about him in the narrow streets of old Istanbul, and in a certain village outside Zhengzhou, among other places. Wherever he stopped, he sought village healers and madmen, philosophers and logicians, confounding them with his talk of a machine that could blur the boundary between the physical realm and the metaphoric. His question was always the same: How do I destroy what I have created? Wherever he went, he brought with him a sudden squall of sand and dust that defied the predictions of local meteorologists, and left behind only a thin veil of desert sand flung upon the ground.

Some people believe that the Mongolian engineer is still with us. The nomads speak of him as the kindest of shamans, who protects their gers and their animals by pushing storms away from their path. As he once wandered the great expanse of the Gobi in his boyhood, so he now roams a universe without boundaries, in some dimension orthogonal to the ones we know. When he finds what he is seeking, they say, he will return to that small lake in the desert. He will breathe his last wish to the machine before he destroys it. Then he will lay himself down by the water, brushing away the dust of the journey, letting go of all his burdens. With his head resting on a pillow of sand, still at last, he will await his own transformation.

The Second Account

At the edge of a certain Italian town there is a small stone church, and beside it an overgrown tiled courtyard, surrounded entirely by an iron railing. The one gate is always kept locked. Tourists going by sometimes want to stop at the church and admire its timeworn façade, but rarely do they notice the fenced courtyard. Yet if anyone were to look carefully between the bars, they would see that the tiles, between the weeds and wildflowers, are of exceptional quality, pale gray stone inlaid with a fine intricacy of black marble and quartz. The patterns are delicate as circuit diagrams, celestial in their beauty. The careful observer will notice that one of the tiles in the far left quadrant is broken in half, and that grass and wildflowers fill the space.

The old priest who attends the church might, if plied with sufficient wine, rub his liver-spotted hands over his rheumy eyes and tell you how that tile came to be broken. When he was young, a bolt from a storm hit the precise center of the tile and killed a man sweeping the church floor not four yards away. Even before the good father’s time, the courtyard was forbidden ground, but the lightning didn’t know that. The strange thing is not so much that the tile broke almost perfectly across the diagonal, but that one half of it disappeared. When the funeral was over, the priest went cautiously to the part of the railing nearest the lightning strike and noted the absence of that half of the tile. Sighing, he nailed a freshly painted “No Entry” sign on an old tree trunk at the edge of the courtyard and hoped that curious boys and thunderstorms would take note.

It wasn’t a boy who ignored the sign and gained entry, however—it was a girl. She came skipping down the narrow street, watching the dappled sunlight play beneath the old trees, tossing a smooth, round pebble from hand to hand. She paused at the iron railing and stared between the bars, as she had done before. There was something mesmerizing about that afternoon, and the way the sunlight fell on the tiles. She hitched up her skirts and clambered over the fence. Inside, she stood on the perimeter and considered a game of hopscotch.

But now that she was there, in the forbidden place, she began to feel nervous and to look around fearfully. The church and the street were silent, drugged with the warm afternoon light, and many people were still at siesta. Then the church clock struck three, loudly and sonorously, and in that moment the girl made her decision. She gathered her courage and jumped onto the first tile, and the second and third, tossing her pebble.

Years later she would describe to her lover the two things she noticed immediately: that the pebble, which was her favorite thing, having a fine vein of rose-colored quartz running across it, had disappeared into thin air during its flight. The next thing she noticed was a disorientation, the kind you feel when transported to a different place very suddenly, as a sleeping child in a car leaving home awakes in a strange place, or, similarly, when one wakes up from an afternoon nap to find that the sun has set and the stars are out. Being a child in a world of adults, she was used to this sort of disorientation, but alone in this courtyard, with only the distant chirping of a bird to disturb the heat-drugged silence, she became frightened enough to step back to the perimeter. When she did so, all seemed to slip back to normality, but for the fact that there was the church clock, striking three again. She thought at the time that perhaps the ghosts in the graveyard behind the church were playing tricks on her, punishing her for having defied the sign on the tree.

But while lying with her lover in tangled white sheets on just such an afternoon many years later, she asked aloud: What if there is some other explanation? She traced a pattern on her lover’s back with her finger, trying to remember the designs on the tiles. Her lover turned over, brown skin flushed with heat and spent passion, eyes alive with interest. The lover was a Turkish immigrant and a mathematician, a woman of singular appearance and intellect, with fiery eyes and deep, disconcerting silences. She had only recently begun to emerge from grief after the death of her sole remaining relative, her father. Having decided that the world was bent on enforcing solitude upon her, she had embraced loneliness with an angry heart, only to have her plans foiled by the unexpected. She had been unprepared for love in the arms of an Italian woman—an artist, at that—grown up all her life in this provincial little town. But there it was. Now the mathematician brushed black ringlets from her face and kissed her lover. Take me there, she said.

So the two women went to the tree-shaded lane where the courtyard lay undisturbed. The tiles were bordered, as before, by grass and wildflowers, and a heaviness hung upon the place, as though of sleep. The church was silent; the only sounds were birdsong and distant traffic noises from the main road. The mathematician began to climb the railing.

Don’t, her lover said, but she recognized that nothing could stop the mathematician, so she shrugged and followed suit. They stood on the perimeter, the Italian woman remembering, the Turkish one thinking furiously.

Thus began the mathematician’s explorations of the mystery of the courtyard. Her lover would stand on the perimeter with a notebook while the mathematician moved from tile to tile, flickering in and out of focus, like a trout in a fast-moving stream when the sun is high. The trajectory of each path and the result of the experiment would be carefully noted, including discrepancies in time as experienced by the two of them. Which paths resulted in time-shifts, and by how much? Once a certain path led to the disappearance of the mathematician entirely, causing her lover to cry out, but she appeared about three minutes later on another tile. The largest time-shift so far! exulted the mathematician. Her lover shuddered and begged the mathematician to stop the experiment, or at least to consult with someone, perhaps from the nearest university. But, being an artist, she knew obsession when she saw it. Once she had discovered a windblown orchard with peaches fallen on the grass like hailstones, and had painted night and day for weeks, seeking to capture on the stillness of canvas the ever-changing vista. She sighed in resignation at the memory and went back to making notes.

The realization was dawning upon her slowly that the trajectories leading to the most interesting results had shapes similar to the very patterns on the tiles. Her artist’s hands sketched those patterns—doing so, she felt as though she was on flowing water, or among sailing clouds. The patterns spoke of motion but through a country she did not recognize. Looking up at the mathematician’s face, seeing the distracted look in the dark eyes, she thought: There will be a day when she steps just so, and she won’t come back.

And that day did come. The mathematician was testing a trajectory possessed of a pleasing symmetry, with some complex elements added to it. Her lover, standing on the perimeter with the notebook, was thinking how the moves not only resembled the pattern located on tile (3, 5), but also might be mistaken for a complicated version of hopscotch, and that any passerby would smile at the thought of two women reliving their girlhood—when it happened. She looked up, and the mathematician disappeared.

She must have stood there for hours, waiting, but finally she had to go home. She waited all day and all night, unable to sleep, tears and spilled wine mingling on the bedsheets. She waited for days and weeks and months. She went to confession for the first time in years, but the substitute priest, a stern and solemn young man, had nothing to offer, except to tell her that God was displeased with her for consorting with a woman. At last she gave up, embracing the solitude that her Turkish lover had shrugged off for her when they had first met. She painted furiously for months on end, making the canvas say what she couldn’t articulate in words—wild-eyed women with black hair rose from tiled floors, while mathematical symbols and intricate designs hovered in the warm air above.

Two years later, when she was famous; she took another lover, and she and the new love eventually swore marriage oaths to each other in a ceremony among friends. The marriage was fraught from the start, fueled by stormy arguments and passionate declarations, slammed doors and teary reconciliations. The artist could only remember her Turkish lover’s face when she looked at the paintings that had brought her such acclaim.

Then, one day, an old woman came to her door. Leaning on a stick, her face as wrinkled as crushed tissue paper, her mass of white ringlets half-falling across her face, the woman looked at her with tears in her black eyes. Do you remember me? she whispered.

Just then the artist’s wife called from inside the house, inquiring as to who had come. It’s just my great-aunt, come to visit, the artist said brightly, pulling the old woman in. Her wife was given to jealousy. The old woman played along, and was established in the spare room, where the artist looked after her with tender care. She knew that the mathematician had come here to die.

The story the mathematician told her was extraordinary. When she disappeared she had been transported to a vegetable market in what she later realized was China. Unable to speak the language, she had tried to mime telephones and airports, only to discover that nobody knew what she was talking about. Desperately she began to walk around, hoping to find someone who spoke one of the four languages she knew, noticing with horror the complete absence of the signs and symbols of the modern age—no cars, neon signs, plastic bags. At last her wanderings took her to an Arab merchant, who understood her Arabic, although his accent was strange to her. She was in Quinsai, (present-day Hangzhou, as she later discovered), and the Song dynasty was in power. Through the kindness of the merchant’s family, who took her in, she gradually pieced together the fact that she had jumped more than 800 years back in time. She made her life there, marrying and raising a family, traveling the sea routes back and forth to the Mediterranean. Her old life seemed like a dream, a mirage, but underneath her immersion in the new, there burned the desire to know the secret of the tiled courtyard.

It shouldn’t exist, she told the artist. I have yearned to find out how it could be. I have developed over lifetimes a mathematics that barely begins to describe it, let alone explain it.

How did you get back here? the artist asked her former lover.

I realized that if there was one such device, there may be others, she said. In my old life I was a traveler, a trade negotiator with Arabs. My journeys took me to many places that had strange reputations of unexplained disappearances. One of them was a shrine inside an enormous tree on the island of Borneo. Around the tree the roots created a pattern on the forest floor that reminded me of the patterns on the tiles. Several people had been known to disappear in the vicinity. So I waited until my children were grown, and my husband and lovers taken by war. Then I returned to the shrine. It took several tries and several lifetimes until I got the right sequence. And here I am.

The only things that the Turkish mathematician had brought with her were her notebooks containing the mathematics of a new theory of space-time. As the artist turned the pages, she saw that the mathematical symbols gradually got more complex, the diagrams stranger and denser, until the thick ropes of equations in dark ink and the empty spaces on the pages began to resemble, more and more, the surfaces of the tiles in the courtyard. That is my greatest work, the mathematician whispered. But what I’ve left out says as much as what I’ve written. Keep my notebooks until you find someone who will understand.

Over the next few months the artist wrote down the old woman’s stories from her various lifetimes in different places. In the few days since the mathematician arrived her wife had left her for someone else, but the artist’s heart didn’t break. She took tender care of the old woman, assisting her with her daily ablutions, making for her the most delicate of soups and broths. Sometimes, when they laughed together, it was as though not a minute had passed since that golden afternoon when they had lain in bed discussing, for the first time, the tiled courtyard.

Two weeks after the mathematician’s return, there was a sudden dust storm, a sirocco that blew into the city with high winds. During the storm the old woman passed away peacefully in her sleep. The artist found her the next morning, cold and still, covered with a layer of fine sand as though kissed by the wind. The storm had passed, leaving clear skies and a profound emptiness. At first the artist wept, but she pulled herself together as she had always done, and thought of the many lives her lover had lived. It occurred to her in a flash of inspiration that she would spend the rest of her one life painting those lifetimes.

At last, the artist said to her lover’s grave, where she came with flowers the day after the interment, at last the solitude we had both sought is mine.

The Third Account

Reports of a third impossible machine come from the Western Sahara, although there have been parallel, independent reports from the mountains of Peru and from Northern Ireland. A farmer from the outskirts of Lima, a truck driver in Belfast, and an academic from the University of Bamako in Mali all report devices that, while different in appearance, seem to have the same function. The academic from Mali has perhaps the clearest account.

She was an archeologist who had obtained her Ph.D. from an American university. In America she had experienced a nightmarish separateness, the like of which she had not known existed. Away from family, distanced by the ignorance and prejudices of fellow graduate students, a stranger in a culture made more incomprehensible by proximity, separated from the sparse expatriate community by the intensity of her intellect, she would stand on the beach, gazing at the waters of the Atlantic and imagining the same waters washing the shores of West Africa. In her teens she had spent a summer with a friend in Senegal, her first terrifying journey away from home, and she still remembered how the fright of it had given way to thrill, and the heart-stopping delight of her first sight of the sea. At the time her greatest wish was to go to America for higher education, and it had occurred to her that on the other side of this very ocean lay the still unimagined places of her desire.

Years later, from that other side, she worked on her thesis, taking lonely walks on the beach between long periods of incarceration in the catacombs of the university library. Time slipped from her hands without warning. Her mother passed away, leaving her feeling orphaned, plagued with a horrific guilt because she had not been able to organize funds in time to go home. Aunts and uncles succumbed to death, or to war, or joined the flood of immigrants to other lands. Favorite cousins scattered, following the lure of the good life in France and Germany. It seemed that with her leaving for America, her history, her childhood, her very sense of self had begun to erode. The letters she had exchanged with her elder brother in Bamako had been her sole anchor to sanity. Returning home after her Ph.D., she had two years to nurse him through his final illness, which, despite the pain and trauma of his suffering, she was to remember as the last truly joyful years of her life. When he died she found herself bewildered by a feeling of utter isolation even though she was home, among her people. It was as though she had brought with her the disease of loneliness that had afflicted her in America.

Following her brother’s death, she buried herself in work. Her research eventually took her to the site of the medieval University of Sankore in Timbuktu, where she marveled at its sandcastle beauty as it rose, mirage-like, from the desert. Discovering a manuscript that spoke in passing of a fifteenth century expedition to a region not far from the desert town of Tessalit, she decided to travel there despite the dangers of political conflict in the region. The manuscript hinted of a fantastic device that had been commissioned by the king, and then removed for secret burial. She had come across oblique references to such a device in the songs and stories of griots, and in certain village tales; thus her discovery of the manuscript had given her a shock of recognition rather than revelation.

The archeologist had, by now, somewhat to her own surprise, acquired two graduate students: a man whose brilliance was matched only by his youthful impatience, and a woman of thirty-five whose placid outlook masked a slow, deep, persistent intelligence. Using a few key contacts, bribes, promises, and pleas, the archaeologist succeeded in finding transportation to Tessalit. The route was roundabout and the vehicles changed hands three times, but the ever-varying topography of the desert under the vast canopy of the sky gave her a reassuring feeling of continuity in the presence of change. So different from the environs of her youth—the lush verdure of south Mali, the broad ribbon of the Niger that had spoken to her in watery whispers in sleep and dreams, moderating the constant, crackly static that was the background noise of modern urban life. The desert was sometimes arid scrubland, with fantastic rock formations rearing out of the ground, and groups of short trees clustered like friends sharing secrets. At other times it gave way to a sandy moodiness, miles and miles of rich, undulating gold broken only by the occasional oasis, or the dust cloud of a vehicle passing them by. Rocky, mountainous ridges rose on the horizon as though to reassure travelers that there was an end to all journeys.

In Tessalit the atmosphere was fraught, but a fragile peace prevailed. With the help of a Tuareg guide, an elderly man with sympathetic eyes, the travelers found the site indicated on the manuscript. Because it did not exist on any current map, the archaeologist was surprised to find that the site had a small settlement of some sixty-odd people. Her guide said that the settlement was in fact a kind of asylum as well as a shrine. The people there, he said, were blessed or cursed with an unknown malady. Perhaps fortunately for them, the inhabitants seemed unable to leave the boundary of the brick wall that encircled the settlement. This village of the insane had become a kind of oasis in the midst of the armed uprising, and men brought food and clothing to the people there irrespective of their political or ethnic loyalties, as though it was a site of pilgrimage. Townspeople coming with offerings would leave very quickly, as they would experience disorienting symptoms when they entered the enclosure, including confusion and a dizzying, temporary amnesia.

Thanks to her study of the medieval manuscript, the archaeologist had some idea of what to expect, although it strained credulity. She and her students donned metal caps and veils made from steel mesh before entering the settlement with gifts of fruit and bread. There were perhaps thirty people—men and women, young and old—who poured out of the entrance of the largest building, a rectangular structure the color of sand. They were dressed in ill-fitting, secondhand clothing, loose robes and wraparound garments in white and blue and ochre, T-shirts and tattered jeans—and at first there was no reply to the archaeologist’s greeting. There was something odd about the way the villagers looked at their guests—a gaze reveals, after all, something of the nature of the soul within, but their gazes were abstracted, shifting, like the surface of a lake ruffled by the wind. But after a while a group of people came forward and welcomed them, some speaking in chorus, others in fragments, so that the welcome nevertheless sounded complete.

“What manner of beings are you?” they were asked after the greetings were done. “We do not see you, although you are clearly visible.”

“We are visitors,” the archaeologist said, puzzled. “We come with gifts and the desire to share learning.” And with this the newcomers were admitted to the settlement.

Within the central chamber of the main building, as the visitors’ eyes adjusted to the dimness, they beheld before them something fantastic. Woven in complex, changing patterns was a vast tapestry so long that it must have wrapped around the inner wall several times. Here, many-hued strips of cloth were woven between white ones to form an abstract design the like of which the newcomers had never seen before. People in small groups worked at various tasks—some tore long lengths of what must have been old clothing, others worked a complex loom that creaked rhythmically. Bright patterns of astonishing complexity emerged from the loom, to be attached along the wall by other sets of hands. Another group was huddled around a cauldron in which some kind of rich stew bubbled. In the very center of the chamber was a meter-high, six-faced column of black stone—or so it seemed—inlaid with fine silver lacework. This must, then, be the device whose use and function had been described in the medieval manuscript—a product of a golden period of Mali culture, marked by great achievements in science and the arts. The fifteenth century expedition had been organized in order to bury the device in the desert, to be guarded by men taking turns, part of a secret cadre of soldiers. Yet here it was, in the center of a village of the insane.

Looking about her, the archaeologist noticed some odd things. A hot drop of stew fell on the arm of a woman tending the cauldron—yet as she cried out, so did the four people surrounding her, all at about the same time. Similarly, as the loom workers manipulated the loom, they seemed to know almost before it happened that a drop of sweat would roll down the forehead of one man—each immediately raised an arm, or pulled down a headcloth to wipe off the drop, even if it wasn’t there. She could not tell whether men and women had different roles, because of the way individuals would break off one group and join another, with apparent spontaneity. Just as in speech, their actions had a continuity to them across different individuals, so as one would finish stirring the soup, the other, without a pause, would bring the tasting cup close, as though they had choreographed these movements in advance. As for the working of the loom, it was poetry in motion. Each person seemed to be at the same time independent and yet tightly connected to the others. The archaeologist was already abandoning the hypothesis that this was a community of telepaths, because their interactions did not seem to be as simple as mind reading. They spoke to each other, for one thing, and had names for each individual, complicated by prefixes and suffixes that appeared to change with context. There were a few children running around as well: quick, shy, with eyes as liquid as a gazelle’s. One of them showed the travelers a stone he unwrapped from a cloth, a rare, smooth pebble with a vein of rose quartz shot through it, but when the archaeologist asked how he had come by it they all laughed, as though at an absurdity, and ran off.

It was after a few days of living with these people that the archaeologist decided to remove her metal cap and veil. She told her students that they must on no account ever do so—and that if she were to act strangely they were to forcibly put her cap and veil back on. They were uncomfortable with this—the young man, in particular, longed to return home—but they agreed, with reluctance.

When she removed her protective gear, the villagers near her immediately turned to look at her, as though she had suddenly become visible to them. She was conscious of a feeling akin to drowning—a sudden disorientation. She must have cried out because a woman nearby put her arms around her and held her and crooned to her as though she was a child, and other people took up the crooning. Her two students, looking on with their mouths open, seemed to be delineated in her mind by a clear, sharp boundary, while all the others appeared to leak into each other, like figures in a child’s watercolor painting. She could sense, vaguely, the itch on a man’s arm from an insect bite, and the fact that the women were menstruating, and the dull ache of a healing bone in some other individual’s ankle—but it seemed as though she was simultaneously inhabiting the man’s arm, the women’s bodies, the broken ankle. After the initial fright a kind of wonder came upon her, a feeling she knew originated from her, but which was shared as a secondhand awareness by the villagers.

“I’m all right,” she started to say to her students, anxious to reassure them, although the word “I” felt inaccurate. But as she started to say it, the village woman who had been holding her spoke the next word, and someone else said the next, in their own dialect, so that the sentence was complete. She felt like the crest of a wave in the ocean. The crest might be considered a separate thing from the sequence of crests and troughs behind it, but what would be the point? The impact of such a crest hitting a boat, for example, would be felt by the entire chain. The great loneliness that had afflicted her for so long began, at last, to dissolve. It was frightening and thrilling all at once. She laughed out loud, and felt the people around her possess, lightly, that same complex of fear and joy. Gazing around at the enormous tapestry, she saw it as though for the first time. There was no concept, no language that could express what it was—it was irreducible, describable only by itself. She looked at it and heard her name, all their names, all names of all things that had ever been, spoken out loud without a sound, reverberating in the silence.

She found, over the next few days, that the conjugal groups among the people of the settlement had the same fluidity as other aspects of their lives. The huts in the rest of the compound were used by various groups as they formed and re-formed. It felt as natural as sand grains in a shallow stream that clump together and break apart, and regroup in some other way, and break apart again. The pattern that underlay these groupings seemed obvious in practice but impossible to express in ordinary language. Those related by blood did not cohabit amongst themselves, nor did children with adults—they were like the canvas upon which the pattern was made, becoming part of it and separate from it with as much ease as breathing. On fine nights the people would gather around a fire, and make poetry, and sing, and this was so extraordinary a thing that the archaeologist was moved to ask her students to remove their caps and veils and experience it for themselves. But by this time the young man was worn out by unfamiliarity and hard living—he was desperate to be back home in Bamako, and was seriously considering a career outside academia. The older, female student was worried about the news from town that violence in the region would shortly escalate. So they would not be persuaded.

After a few days, when the archaeologist showed no sign of rejoining her students for the trip home—for enough time had passed by now, and their Tuareg guide was concerned about the impending conflict—the students decided to act according to their instructions. Without warning they set upon the archaeologist, binding her arms and forcing her to wear the cap and veil. They saw the change ripple across her face, and the people nearby turned around, as before. But this time their faces were grim and sad, and they moved as one toward the three visitors. The archaeologist set up a great wailing, like a child locked in an empty room. Terrified, the students pulled her out of the building, dragging her at a good pace, with the villagers following. If the Tuareg guide had not been waiting at the perimeter the visitors would surely have been overtaken, because he came forward at a run and pulled them beyond the boundary.

Thus the archaeologist was forced to return to Bamako.

Some years later, having recovered from her experience, the archaeologist wrote up her notes, entrusted them to her former student, and disappeared from Bamako. She was traced as far as Tessalit. With the fighting having intensified, nobody was able to investigate for over a year. The woman to whom she had left her notes returned to try to find her, guessing that she had gone to the settlement, but where the settlement had been, there were only ruins. The people had vanished, she was told, in the middle of a sandstorm. There was no sign of their belongings, let alone the great tapestry. The only thing she could find in the empty, arid, rocky wasteland was a small, round pebble, shot with a vein of rose quartz.

In the notes she left behind, the archaeologist had written down her conclusions—that the machine generated a field of a certain range, and that this field had the power to dissolve, or at least blur, the boundary between self and other. She wrote in French, and in Arabic, and in her mother tongue, Bambara, but after a while the regularity of her script began to break up, as a sandcastle loses its sharp edges and recognizable boundaries when the tide comes in. Thereafter her notes turned into intricate, indecipherable symbols reminiscent of the great tapestry that had hung in the main chamber of the settlement. These continued for several pages and finally, on the last page, she had written in French: I cannot bear it. I must return.

Thus end the three accounts.

Candidates will observe the requisite moment of contemplation.

The candidate will now consult the Compendium of Machine Anomalies, the Hephaestian Mysteries, and the Yantric Oracle, which will help put these accounts in context. Having completed its perusal, the candidate will make the requisite changes to its own parts in order to generate hypotheses on these questions. Is the negative space of ambiguity machines infinite? Is it continuous? Are the conceptual sub-spaces occupied by each machine connected to each other—by geography, concept, or some other as-yet-undiscovered attribute? What can we make of the relationship between human and machine? If an engineer can dream a machine, can a machine dream an engineer? An artist? A mathematician? An archaeologist? A story? Is the space of ambiguity machines set like a jewel or a braid within the greater expanse of the space of impossible machines? Is it here, in the realm of dream and imagination, that the intelligent machine might at last transcend the ultimate boundary—between machine and non-machine? To take inspiration from human longing, from the organic, syncretic fecundity of nature, the candidate must be willing to consider and enable its own transformation.

Begin.

“Ambiguity Machines: An Examination” copyright © 2015 by Vandana Singh
Art copyright © 2015 by Pascal Campion

The post Read Vandana Singh’s “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination” appeared first on Reactor.

We’re pleased to reprint Kelly Barnhill’s “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch”, originally published on Tor.com in August 2014. The story now appears in Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, a new collection of Barnhill’s short fiction arriving February 20th from Algonquin Books. It will also be featured in Worlds Seen in Passing, an anthology celebrating ten years of Tor.com short fiction, available this September.

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The day she buried her husband—a good man, by all accounts, though shy, not given to drink or foolishness; not one for speeding tickets or illegal parking or cheating on his taxes; not one for carousing at the county fair, or tomcatting with the other men from the glass factory; which is to say, he was utterly unknown in town: a cipher; a cold, blank space—Agnes Sorensen arrived at the front steps of Our Lady of the Snows. The priest was waiting for her at the open door. The air was sweet and wet with autumn rot, and though it had rained earlier, the day was starting to brighten, and would surely be lovely in an hour or two. Mrs. Sorensen greeted the priest with a sad smile. She wore a smart black hat, sensible black shoes, and a black silk shirt belted into a slim crepe skirt. Two little white mice peeked out of her left breast pocket—two tiny shocks of fur with pink, quivering noses and red, red tongues.

The priest, an old fellow by the name of Laurence, took her hands and gave a gentle squeeze. He was surprised by the mice. The mice, on the other hand, were not at all surprised to see him. They inclined their noses a little farther over the lip of her shirt pocket to get a better look. Their whiskers were as pale and bright as sunbeams. They looked at one another and turned in unison toward the face of the old priest. And though he knew it was impossible, it seemed to Father Laurence that the mice were smiling at him. He swallowed.

“Mrs. Sorensen,” he said, clearing his throat.

“Mmm?” she said, looking at her watch. She glanced over her shoulder and whistled. A very large dog rounded the tall hedge, followed by an almost-as-large raccoon and a perfectly tiny cat.

“We can’t—” But his voice failed him.

“Have the flowers arrived, Father?” Mrs. Sorensen asked pleasantly as the three animals mounted the stairs and approached the door.

“Well,” the priest stammered. “N-no . . . I mean, yes, they have. Three very large boxes. But I must say, Mrs. Sorensen—”

“Marvelous. Pardon me.” And she walked inside. “Hold the door open for my helpers, would you? Thank you, Father.” Her voice was all brisk assurance. It was a voice that required a yes. She left a lingering scent of pinesap and lilac and woodland musk in her wake. Father Laurence felt dizzy.

“Of course,” the priest said, as dog, raccoon, and cat passed him by, a sort of deliberation and gravitas about their bearing, as though they were part of a procession that the priest, himself, had rudely interrupted. He would have said something, of course he would have. But these animals had—well, he could hardly explain it. A sobriety of face and a propriety of demeanor. He let them by. He nodded his head to each one as they crossed the threshold of the church. It astonished him. He gave a quick glance up and down the quiet street to reassure himself that he remained unobserved. The last thing he needed was to have the Parish Council start fussing at him again.

(The Parish Council was made up, at this time, of a trio of widowed sisters whose life’s purpose, it seemed to the priest, was to make him feel as though they were in the midst of stoning him to death using only popcorn and lost buttons and bits of yarn. Three times that week he had found himself in the fussy crosshairs of the sisters’ ire—and it was only Wednesday.)

He rubbed his ever-loosening jowls and cleared his throat. Seeing no one there (except for a family of rabbits that was, en masse, emerging from under the row of box elders), Father Laurence felt a sudden, inexplicable, and unbridled surge of joy—to which he responded with a quick clench of his two fists and a swallowed yes. He nearly bounced.

“Are you coming?” Mrs. Sorensen called from inside the Sanctuary.

“Yes, yes,” he said with a sputter. “Of course.” But he paused anyway. A young buck came clipping down the road. Not uncommon in these parts, but the priest thought it odd that the animal came to a halt right in front of the church and turned his face upward as though he was regarding the stained glass window. Could deer see color? Father Laurence didn’t know. The deer didn’t move. It was a young thing—its antlers were hardly bigger than German pretzels and its haunches were sleek, muscular, and supple. It blinked its large, damp eyes and flared its nostrils. The priest paused, as though waiting for the buck to say something.

Deer don’t speak, he told himself. You’re being ridiculous. Two hawks fluttered down and perched on the handrail, while a—Dear God. Was that an otter? Father Laurence shook his head, adjusted the flap of belly hanging uncomfortably over his belt, and slumped inside.

The mourners arrived two hours later and arranged themselves silently into their pews. It was a thin crowd. There was the required representative from the glass factory. A low-level supervisor. Mr. Sorensen was not important enough, apparently, to warrant a mourner from an upper-level managerial position, and was certainly not grand enough for the owner himself to drive up from Chicago and pay his respects.

The priest bristled at this. The man died at work, he thought. Surely . . .

He shook his head and busied himself with the last-minute preparations. The pretty widow walked with cool assurance from station to station, making sure everything was just so. The mourners, the priest noticed, were mostly men. This stood to reason as most of Mr. Sorensen’s coworkers were men as well. Still, he noticed that several of them had removed their wedding rings, or had thought to insert a jaunty handkerchief in their coat pockets (in what could only be described as non-funeral colors), or had applied hair gel or mustache oil or aftershave. The whole church reeked of men on the prowl. Mrs. Sorensen didn’t seem to notice, but that was beside the point. The priest folded his arms and gave a hard look at the backs of their heads.

Really, he thought. But then the widow walked into a brightly colored beam of stained-glass sunlight, and he felt his heart lift and his cheeks flush and his breathing quicken and thin. There are people, he thought, who are easy to love. And that is that.

Mrs. Sorensen had done a beautiful job with the flowers, creating arrangements at each window in perfect, dioramic scenes. In the window depicting the story of the child Jesus and the clay birds that he magicked into feathers and wings and flight, for example, her figure of Jesus was composed of corn husk, ivy, and dried rose petals. The clay birds she had made with homemade dough and affixed to warbled bits of wire. The birds bobbed and weaved unsteadily, as though only just learning how to spread their wings. And her rendition of Daniel in the lion’s den was so harrowing in its realism, so brutally present, that people had to avert their eyes. She had even made a diorama of the day she and her husband met—a man with a broken leg at the bottom of a gully in the middle of a flowery forest; a woman with a broken heart wandering alone, happening by, and binding his wounds. And how real they were! The visceral pain on his face, the sorrow hanging over her body like a cloud. The quickening of the heart at that first, tender touch. This is how love can begin—an act of kindness.

The men in the congregation stared for a long time at that display. They shook their heads and muttered, “Lucky bastard.”

Father Laurence, in his vestments, intoned the mass with all of the feeling he could muster, his face weighted somberly with the loss of a man cut down too soon. (Though not, it should be noted, with any actual grief. After all, the priest hardly knew the man. No one did. Still, fifty-eight is too young to die. Assuming Mr. Sorensen was fifty-eight. In truth, the priest had no idea.) Mrs. Sorensen sat in the front row, straight backed, her delicate face composed, her head floating atop her neck as though it were being pulled upward by a string. She held her chin at a slight tilt to the left. She made eye contact with the priest and gave an encouraging smile.

It is difficult, he realized later, to give a homily when there is a raccoon in the church. And a very large dog. And a cat. Though he couldn’t see them—they had made themselves scarce before the parishioners arrived—he still knew they were there. And it unnerved him.

The white mice squirmed in Mrs. Sorensen’s pocket. They peeked and retreated again and again. Father Laurence tripped on his words. He forgot what he was going to say. He forgot Mr. Sorensen’s name. He remembered the large, damp eyes of the buck outside. Did he want to come in? Father Laurence wondered. And then: Don’t be ridiculous. Deer don’t go to church! But neither, he reasoned with himself, did raccoons. But there was one here somewhere, wasn’t there? So.

Father Laurence mumbled and wandered. He started singing the wrong song. The organist grumbled in his direction. The Insufferable Sisters, who never missed a funeral if they could help it, sat in the back and twittered. They held their programs over their faces and peered over the rim of the paper with hard, glittering eyes. Father Laurence found himself singing “Oh God, Your Creatures Fill the Earth,” though it was not on the program and the organist was unable to play the accompaniment.

“Your creatures live in every land,” he sang lustily. “They fill the sky and sea. Oh Lord you give us your command, To love them tenderly.”

Mrs. Sorensen closed her eyes and smiled. And outside, a hawk opened its throat and screeched—the lingering note landing in harmony with the final bar.

That was October.

Father Laurence did not visit the widow right away. He’d wait, he thought. Let her grieve. The last thing she needed was an old duffer hanging around her kitchen. Besides, he knew that the Insufferable Sisters and their allies on the Improvement League and the Quilters Alliance and the Friends of the Library and the Homebound Helpers would be, even now, fluttering toward that house, descending like a cloud.

In the meantime, the entire town buzzed with the news of the recent Sasquatch sightings—only here and there, and not entirely credible, but the fact of the sightings at all was significant. There hadn’t been any in the entire county for the last thirty years—not since one was reported standing outside of the only hotel in town for hours and hours on a cold November night.

People still talked about it.

The moon was full and the winds raged. The Sasquatch slipped in and out of shadow. It raised its long arms toward the topmost windows, tilted its head back, and opened its throat. The mournful sound it made—part howl, part moan, part long, sad song—is something that people in town still whispered about, now thirty years later. It was the longest time anyone could ever remember a Sasquatch standing in one place. Normally, they were slippery things. Elusive. A flash at the corner of the eye. But here it stood, bold as brass, spilling its guts to whoever would listen. Unfortunately, no one spoke Sasquatch, so no one knew what it was so upset about.

It was, if Father Laurence remembered correctly, Mr. and Mrs. Sorensen’s wedding night.

Sasquatch sightings were fairly common back then, but they ceased after the hotel incident. It was like they all just up and disappeared. No one mentioned it right away—it’s not like the Sasquatch put a notice in the paper. But after a while people noticed the Sasquatch were gone—just gone.

And now, apparently, they were back. Or, at least one was, anyway.

Barney Korman said he saw one picking its way across the north end of the bog, right outside the wildlife preserve. Ernesta Koonig said there was a huge, shaggy something helping itself to the best crop of Cortland apples that her orchard had ever produced. Bernie Larsen said he saw one running off with one of his lambs. There were stick structures on Cassandra Gordon’s hunting land. And the ghostly sound of tree knocking at night.

Eimon Lomas stopped by and asked if there was any ecclesiastic precedence allowing for the baptism of a Bigfoot.

Father Laurence said no.

“Seems a shame, though, don’t it?” asked Eimon, running his tongue over his remaining teeth.

“Never thought about it before,” Father Laurence said. But that was a lie, and he knew it. Agnes Sorensen – before she was married – had asked him the exact same question, thirty years earlier.

And his answer then had made her cry.

On Halloween, Father Laurence, in an effort to avoid the Parish Council and their incessant harping on the subject of holidays—godless or otherwise—and to avoid the flurry of their phone calls and visits and Post-it notes and emails and faxes and, once, horrifyingly, an intervention (“Is it the costumes, Father,” the eldest of the sisters had asked pointedly, “or the unsupervised visits from children that makes you so unwilling to take a stand on the effects of Satanism through Halloween worship?” They folded their hands and waited. “Or perhaps,” the youngest added, “it’s a sugar addiction.”), Father Laurence decided to pay Mrs. Sorensen a visit.

Three weeks had passed, after all, since the death of her husband, and the widow’s freezer and pantry were surely stocked with the remains of the frozen casseroles, and lasagnas, and brown-up rolls, and mason jars filled with homemade chili and chicken soup and wild rice stew and beef consommé. Surely the bustle and cheeping of the flocks of women who descend upon houses of tragedy had by now migrated away, leaving the lovely Mrs. Sorensen alone, and quiet, and in need of company.

Besides. Wild rice stew (especially if it came from the Larson home) didn’t sound half-bad on a cold Halloween night.

The Sorensen farm—once the largest tract in the county—was nothing more than a hobby farm now. Mr. Sorensen had neither the aptitude nor the inclination for farming, so his wife had convinced him to cede his birthright to the Nature Conservancy, retaining a bit of acreage to allow her to maintain a good-sized orchard and berry farm. Mrs. Sorensen ran a small business in which she made small-batch hard ciders, berry wines, and fine jams. Father Laurence couldn’t imagine that her income could sustain her for long, but perhaps Mr. Sorensen had been well insured.

He knocked on the door.

The house erupted with animal sounds. Wet noses pressed at the window and sharp claws worried at the door. The house barked, screeched, groaned, hissed, snuffled, and whined. Father Laurence took a step backward. An owl peered through the transom window, its pale gold eyes unblinking. The priest cleared his throat.

“Mrs. Sorensen?”

A throaty gurgle from indoors.

“Agnes?”

Father Laurence had known Agnes Sorensen since her girlhood (her last name was Dryleesker then)—she was the little girl down the road, with a large, arthritic goose under one arm and a bull snake curled around the other. He would see her playing in front of her house at the end of the dead-end street when he came home for the summers during seminary.

“An odd family,” his mother used to say with a definitive shake of her head. “And that girl is the oddest of them all.”

Laurence didn’t think so then, and he certainly didn’t think so now.

Agnes, in her knee socks and mary janes, in her A-line dresses that her mother had made from old curtains and her pigtails pale as stars, simply had an affinity for animals. In the old barn in their backyard, she housed the creatures that she had found, as well as those that had traveled long distances just to be near her. A hedgehog with a missing foot, a blind weasel, a six-legged frog, a neurotic wren, a dog whose eardrums had popped like balloons when he wandered too near a TNT explosion on his owner’s farm. She once came home with a wolf cub, but her father wouldn’t allow her to keep it. She had animals waiting for her by the back door each morning, animals who would accompany her on her way to school, animals who helped her with her chores, animals who sat on her lap as she did her homework, and animals who curled up on her bed when she slept.

But then she got married. To Mr. Sorensen—good man, and kind. And he needed her. But he was allergic. So their house was empty.

Mr. Sorensen was also, Father Laurence learned from the confessional booth, infertile.

Agnes only came to Confession once a year, and she rarely spoke during her time in the booth. Most of the time she would sit, sigh, and breathe in the dark. The booth was anonymous in theory, but Mrs. Sorensen had a smell about her—crushed herbs and apple cider and pinesap and grass—that he could identify from across the room. Her silence was profound, and nuanced. Like the silence of a pine forest on a windless, summer day. It creaked and rustled. It warmed the blood. Father Laurence would find himself fingering his collar—now terribly tight—and mopping his brow with his hands.

He worried for Mrs. Sorensen. She was young and vibrant and terribly alive. And yet. She seemed in stasis to him somehow. She didn’t seem to age. She had none of the spark she had had as a child. It was as though her soul was hibernating.

There was a time, maybe fifteen years ago, when Mrs. Sorensen had closed the door of the booth behind her and sat for ten minutes in the dark while the priest waited. Finally, she spoke in the darkness. Not a prayer. Indeed, Father Laurence didn’t know what it was.

“When a female wolverine is ready to breed,” Mrs. Sorensen said in the faceless dark, “she spends weeks tracking down potential mates, and weeks separating the candidates. She stalks her unknowing suitors, monitoring their habits, assessing their skills as hunters and trackers. Evaluating their abilities in a fight—do they prefer the tooth or the claw? Are they brave to the point of stupidity? Do they run when danger is imminent? Do they push themselves to greatness?”

Father Laurence cleared his throat. “Have you forgotten the prayer, my child,” he said, his voice a timid whine.

Mrs. Sorensen ignored him. “She does not do this for protection or need. Her mate will be useful for all of two minutes. Then she will never see him again. He will not protect his brood or defend his lover. He will be chosen, hired, used. He will not be loved. His entire purpose is to produce an offspring that will eventually leave its mother; she needs a child that willlive.”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” prompted Father Laurence. “That’s how people usually—”

“Now, in the case of a black bear, when the female becomes aware of the new life in her womb, she makes special consideration to the construction of the den. She is at risk, and she knows it. Pheromones announcing her condition leak from every pore. Her footsteps reek pregnant. Her urine blinks like road signs. Her fertility hangs around her body like a cloud.”

“Agnes—”

“When she digs her den, she moves over a ton of rock and soil. She designs it specially to provide a small mouth that she can stopper up with her back if she needs to.”

“Agnes—”

“She will grow in the dark, and birth in the dark, and suckle her babies in the feminine funk of that tiny space—smelling of mother and baby, and sweat and blood, and milk and breathing and warm earth—hiding under the thick protection of snow.” Her voice caught. She hiccupped.

“Agnes—”

“I thought I was anonymous.”

“And you are. I call all my confessionals Agnes.”

She laughed in the dark.

“I am asleep, Father. I have been asleep for—ever so long. My arms are weak and my breasts are dry and there is a cold dark space within me that smells of nothing.” She sat still for a moment or two. Then: “I love my husband.”

“I know, child,” he whispered.

“I love him desperately.”

What she wanted to say, the priest knew, was “I love him, but . . .” But she didn’t. She said nothing else. After another moment’s silence, she opened the door, stepped into the light, and vanished.

Father Laurence had no doubt that Agnes Sorensen had loved her husband, and that she missed him. They had been married for thirty years, after all. She had cared for him and tended to him every day. His death was sudden. And certainly one must grieve in one’s own way. Still, the sheer number of animals in the house was a cause for concern. The list of possible psychiatric disorders alone was nearly endless.

The priest walked out to the apple barn but no one was there. Just the impossibly sweet smell of cider. It nearly knocked Father Laurence to his knees. He closed his eyes, and remembered picking apples with one of the girls at school when he was a child—sticky fingers, sticky mouths, sticky necks, and sticky trousers. He was eleven then, maybe. Or twelve. He remembered her long hair and her black eyes, and the way they fell from the lowest tree branch—a tangle of arms and legs and torsos. The crush of grass underneath. Her freckles next to his eyelashes, his front tooth chipping against hers (after all those years, the chip was still there), the smell of her breath like honey and wine and growing wheat. So strong was this memory, and so radically pleasant, that Father Laurence felt weak, and shivery. There was a cot in the barn—he didn’t know what it was there for—and he lay upon it.

It smelled of woodland musk and pine. It was covered in hair.

He slept instantly. In his dream he was barefoot and lanky and young. He was on the prowl. He was hungry. He was longing for something that he could not name. Something that had no words (or perhaps he had no words; or perhaps words no longer existed). He was full of juice and vigor and hope. He was watching Agnes Sorensen through a curtain of green, green leaves. She carried a heaping basket of apples. A checkered shirt. Apple-stained dungarees. A bandana covering her hair. Wellington boots up to her knees, each footfall sinking deep into the warm, sweet mud.

When Father Laurence woke, it was fully dark. (Was someone watching? Surely not.) He got up off the cot, brushed the hair from his coat and trousers. His body ached and he felt curiously empty—as though he had been somehow scooped out. He walked out into the moonlit yard. Mrs. Sorensen wasn’t in the barn. She wasn’t in the yard. She wasn’t in the house either. (Was that a shape in the bushes? Were those eyes? Heavens, what am I thinking?) The house had been emptied of its animal sounds, and emptied of its light and smell and being. It was quiet. He knocked. No one answered. He walked over to the car.

There were footprints, he saw, in the mud next to the driveway. Wellington boots sunk deep into the mud and dried along the edges. And another set, just alongside. Bare feet—a man’s, presumably. But very, very large.

Thanksgiving passed with several invitations to take the celebratory meal with neighbors or former coworkers or friends, who would have welcomed Mrs. Sorensen with open arms, but these were all denied.

She said simply that she would enjoy the quiet. But surely that made no sense! There was no one on earth quieter than Mr. Sorensen. The man hardly spoke.

And so her neighbors carved their turkeys and their hams, they sliced pie and drank to one another’s health, but their minds wandered to the pretty widow with hair like starlight, her straight back, her slim skirts and smart belts and her crisp footsteps when she walked. People remembered her lingering smell—the forest and the blooming meadow and some kind of animal musk. Something that clung to the nose and pricked at the skin and set the mouth watering. And they masked their longing with another helping of yams.

(The three sisters on the Parish Council, on the other hand, didn’t see what the big fuss was about. They always thought she was plain.)

Randall Jergen—not the worst drunkard in town, but well on his way to becoming so—claimed that, when he stumbled by the Sorensen house by mistake, he saw the widow seated at the head of the well-laid table, heaped to the point of breaking with boiled potatoes and candied squash and roasted vegetables of every type and description, with each chair filled, not with relatives or friends or even acquaintances, but with animals. He said there were two dogs, one raccoon, one porcupine, one lynx, and an odd-looking bear sitting opposite the pretty widow. A bear who grasped its wine goblet and held it aloft to the smiling Mrs. Sorensen, who raised her own glass in response.

The Insufferable Sisters investigated. They found no evidence of feasting. And while they did see the dogs, the tiny cat, the raccoon, the lynx, and the porcupine, they saw no sign of a wine-drinking bear. Which, they told themselves, they needed to know whether or not was true. Drunk bears, after all, were a community safety hazard. They reported to the stylists at the Clip’n’Curl that Mr. Jergen was, as usual, full of hogwash. By evening, the whole town knew. And the matter was settled.

For a little while.

By Christmas, there had been no less than twenty-seven reports of Sasquatch sightings near, or around, or on the Sorensen farm. Two people claimed to have seen a Sasquatch wearing a seed cap with the glass factory’s logo on it, and one swore that it was wearing Mr. Sorensen’s old coat. The sheriff, two deputies, the game manager at the local private wildlife refuge, and three representatives from the Department of Natural Resources all paid the widow a visit. Each left the farm looking dejected. Mrs. Sorensen was not, apparently, available for drinks, or dinner, or dancing. She answered their questions with crisp answers that could have meant anything. She watched them go with a vague smile on her pale lips.

The Insufferable Sisters investigated as well. They looked for footprints and bootprints. They looked for discarded hats and thrown-off coats. They hunted for evidence of possible suitors. They interviewed witnesses. They found nothing.

By late January, neighbors noticed that Mrs. Sorensen began to walk with a noticeable lightness—despite the parka and the heavy boots, despite the sheepskin mitts and the felted scarf, her feet seemed to float atop the surface of the snow, and her skin appeared to sparkle, even on the most leaden of days.

Bachelors and widowers (and, if honesty prevails, several uncomfortably married men as well) still opened doors for the pretty widow, still tipped their hats in her direction, still offered to carry her groceries or see to her barn’s roof, or check to make sure her pipes weren’t in danger of freezing (this last one was often said suggestively, and almost always returned with a definitive slap). The Insufferable Sisters arrived, unannounced, at the Sorensen farm. They came laden with hotdish and ambrosia salad and bars of every type and description. They sat the poor widow down, put the kettle on, and tapped their long, red talons on the well-oiled wood of the ancient farm table.

“Well?” said Mrs. Ostergaard, the eldest of the sisters.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Sorensen, her cheeks flushing to high color. “The tea is in the top drawer of the far right cabinet.” Her eyes slid to the window, where the snowflakes fell in thick curtains, blurring the blanketed yard, and obscuring the dense thicket of scrub and saplings on the other side of the gully. The corners of her lips buzzed with—something. Mrs. Ostergaard couldn’t tell. And it infuriated her.

Mrs. Lentz, the youngest of the sisters, and Mrs. Ferris, the middle, served the lunch, arranging the food in sensibly sized mounds, each one slick and glistening. They piled the bars on pretty plates and put real cream in the pitcher and steaming tea in the pot. They sat, sighed, smiled, and interrogated the pretty widow. She answered questions and nodded serenely, but every time there was a lull in the conversation (and there were many), her eyes would insinuate themselves toward the window again, and a deepening blush would spread down her throat and edge into the opening of her blouse.

The dogs lounged on the window seat and the raccoon picked at its bowl on the floor of the mudroom. Three cats snaked through the legs of the three sisters, with their backs an insistent arch, their rumps requiring a rub, and all the while an aggressive purr rattling the air around them.

“Nice kitty,” Mrs. Ostergaard said, giving one of the cats a pat on the head.

The cat hissed.

The sisters left in the snow.

“Be careful,” Mrs. Sorensen said as she stood in the doorway, straight backed and inscrutable as polished wood. “It’s coming down all right.” Her eyes flicked toward the back of the yard, a flushed smile on her lips. Mrs. Ostergaard whipped around and glared through the thick tangle of snow.

A figure.

Dark.

Fast.

And then it was gone. Snowflakes clung to her eyelashes and forehead. Cold drops of water crowded her eyes. She shook her head and peered into the chaos of white. Nothing was there.

The sisters piled into their Volvo and eased onto the road, a dense, blinding cloud swirling in their minds.

The next day they called a meeting with Father Laurence. Father Laurence withstood the indignities of their fussing in relative silence, the scent of apples, after all this time, still clinging sweetly in his nostrils.

The day after that, they called a second meeting, this time calling the priest, the mayor, the physician, the dog catcher, and a large animal veterinarian. They were all men, these officials and professionals that the sisters assembled, and all were seated on folding chairs. The sisters stood over them like prison guards. The men hung on to their cold metal chairs for dear life. They said yes to everything.

Three days later, Arnold Fiske—teetotaler since the day he was born—nearly ran Mrs. Sorensen over with his Buick. It was a warm night for February, and the road was clear. The sun was down and the sky was a livid color of orange. On either side of the road, the frozen bog stretched outward, as big as the world. Indeed, it was the bog that distracted Arnold Fiske from the primary task of driving. His eyes lingered on the dappled browns and grays and whites, on the slim torsos of the quaking aspens and the river birches and the Norway pines fluttering like flags on the occasional hillock. He lingered on the fluctuations of color on the snow—orange dappling to pink fading to ashy blue. He returned his gaze to the road only just in time. He saw the face of Mrs. Sorensen (that beautiful face!) lit in the beam of his headlights. And something else too. A hulk of a figure. Like a man. But more than a man. And no face at all.

Arnold Fiske swerved. Mrs. Sorensen screamed. And from somewhere—the frozen bog, the fading sky, the aggressively straight road, or somewhere deep inside Arnold Fiske himself—erupted a ragged, primal howl. It shook the glass and sucked away the air and shattered his bones in his body. His car squealed and spun. Mrs. Sorensen was pulled out of the car’s path by . . . well, by something. And then everything was quiet.

He got out of the car, breathing heavily. His dyspepsia burned bright as road flares. He pressed his left hand to the bottom rim of his ribcage and grimaced. “Oh my god,” he gasped. “Agnes? Agnes Sorensen! Are you all right?” He rounded the broad prow of the Buick, saw the horror on the other side of the car, and felt his knees start to buckle. He fell hard on his rear and scrambled back with a strangled cry.

There was Agnes Sorensen—her long, down coat bunched up around her middle, her hood thrown off, and her starlight-colored hair yanked free of its bun and rippling toward the ground, curled in the long arms of a man. A man covered in hair.

Not a man.

Her voice was calm. Her hands were on the man’s face. No. Not a man’s face. And not a face either. It was a thicket of fur and teeth and red, glowing eyes. Arnold Fiske’s breath came in hot, sharp bursts.

“What is that thing?” he choked. He could barely breathe. His chest hurt. He pressed his hands to his heart to make sure it wasn’t going out on him. The last thing he needed was to have a heart attack in the presence of a . . . well. He couldn’t say. He couldn’t even think it.

Mrs. Sorensen didn’t notice.

Her voice was a smooth lilt, a lullaby, a gentle insistence. A mother’s voice. A lover’s voice. Or both at once. “I’m all right,” she soothed. “You see? I’m here. I’m not hurt. Everything is fine. Everything is wonderful.”

The man (not a man) bowed its head onto Agnes Sorensen’s chest. It sighed and snuffled. It cradled her body in its great, shaggy arms and rocked her back and forth. It made a series of sounds—part rumble, part hiccup, part gulping sob.

My god, Arnold Fiske thought. It’s crying.

He sat up. Then stood up and took a step away. Arnold shook his head. He tried to hold his breath, but small bursts still erupted, unbidden, from his throat, as though his soul and his fear and his sorrow were all escaping in sighs. In any case, he felt neither his fear nor his sorrow as he looked at the widow and her . . . erm . . . companion. (He had never felt his soul. He wasn’t even sure that he had one.)

He cleared his throat. “Would you,” he said. And faltered. He started again. “Would you and your, um, friend . . .” He paused again. Wrinkled his brow. Muscled through. “Need a ride?”

Mrs. Sorensen smiled and wrapped her arms around the Sasquatch’s neck.

Because that, Arnold Fiske realized, is what I’m seeing. A Sasquatch. Well. My stars.

“No, thank you, Mr. Fiske,” Agnes Sorensen said, extricating herself from the Sasquatch’s arms and helping it to its feet. “The night is still fine, and the stars are just coming out. And they say the auroras will be burning bright later on. I may stay out all night.”

And with that, she and the Sasquatch walked away, hands held, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. And perhaps it was. In any case, Arnold Fiske couldn’t shut up about it.

By noon the next day, the whole town knew.

A Sasquatch. The widow and a Sasquatch. Good gracious. What will they think of next?

Two days later, the pair were spotted in public, walking along the railroad tracks.

And again, picking their way across the bog.

And again, standing in the back of the crowd at a liquidation auction. The Sasquatch sometimes wore Mr. Sorensen’s old seed hat and boots (he had cut out holes for his large, flexible toes), and sometimes wore the dead man’s scarf. But never his pants. Or some kind of shorts. Or, dear god, at least some swimming trunks. The Sasquatch was in possession, thankfully, of a bulbous thicket of fur, concealing the area of concern, but everyone knew what was behind that fur, and they knew it would only take a stiff breeze, or a sudden movement, or perhaps the presence of a female Sasquatch to cause a, how would you say—a shaking of the bushes, as it were. Or a parting of the weeds. People kept their eyes averted, just to be safe.

And the sisters were enraged.

Mrs. Sorensen was spotted walking with a Sasquatch past the statues and artistic sculptures of Armistice Park.

(“Children play at that park!” howled the sisters.)

They called Father Laurence at home nineteen times, and left nineteen messages with varying levels of vitriol. Fool of a priest was a phrase they used. And useless.

Father Laurence, for his part, went to the woods, alone. He walked the same paths he had followed in his boyhood. He remembered the rustle of ravens’ wings, and the silent pounce of an owl, and the snuffling of bears, and the howling of wolves, and the scamper of rabbits, and the slurping of moose. He remembered something else, too. A large, dark figure in the densest places of the wood and the tangled thickets of the bog. A pair of bright eyes and sharp teeth and a long, loose-limbed, lumbering gait that went like a shot over the prairie.

He was eleven years old when he last saw a Sasquatch. And now all he had to do was pick up the phone and invite Mrs. Sorensen over for dinner. Huh, he thought. Imagine that.

The meal, though quiet, was pleasant enough. The Sasquatch brought a bowl of wildflowers, which the priest ate. They were delicious.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Sorensen brought her Sasquatch to church. She brought her other animals too—her one-eyed hedgehog and her broken-winged hawk and her tiny cat and her raccoon and her three-legged dog and her infant cougar, curled up and fast asleep on her lap. The family arrived early, and sat in the front row. Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch in the middle, and the rest of the brood stretching on either side. Each one sat as straight backed as was possible with the particulars of their physiology, and each one was silent and solemn. The Sasquatch wore nothing other than Mr. Sorensen’s father’s old fedora hat, which was perched at a bit of a saucy angle. It held Mrs. Sorensen’s hand in its great, left paw and closed its large, bright eyes.

Father Laurence did his pre-Mass preparations and ministrations with the sacristy door locked. The sisters hovered on the other side, pecking at the door and squawking their complaints. Father Laurence was oblivious. He was a great admirer of the inventor of earplugs, and made it a habit to stash an emergency set wherever he might find the need to surreptitiously insert a pair at a moment’s notice—at his desk, at the podium, in his car, in the confessional, and in the sacristy.

“A sacrilege!” Mrs. Ostergaard hissed.

“Do something!” came Mrs. Lentz’s strangled gasp.

“GET THAT DEER OUT OF THE CHURCH,” Mrs. Ferris roared, followed by a chaos of hooves and snorting and the shouting of women and men, and the hooting of an owl and the cry of a peregrine and the snarl of—actually, Father Laurence wasn’t sure if it was a coyote or a wolf.

Agnes Sorensen was too old to have children. Everyone knew that. But she had always wanted a family. And now she was so happy. Didn’t she deserve to be happy? The sisters pecked and screeched. He imagined their fingers curling into talons, their imperious lips hardening to beaks. He imagined their appliquéd cardigans and their floral skirts rustling into feathers and wings. He imagined their bright bead eyes launching skyward with a wild, high kee-yar of a hawk on the hunt for something small and brown and wriggling.

The priest stood in the sacristy, his eyes closed. “O God, your creatures fill the earth with wonder and delight,” he sang.

“Doris,” he heard Mrs. Ferris say. “Doris, do not approach that cougar. Doris, it isn’t safe.”

“And every living thing has worth and beauty in your sight.”

“Oh, god. Not sheep. Anything but sheep. GET THOSE ANIMALS OUT OF HERE.”

“So playful dolphins dance and swim; Your sheep bow down and graze.”

“Father, get out here this minute. Six otters just came out of the bathroom. Six! And with rabies!”

“Your songbirds share a morning hymn, To offer you their praise.”

There was a snarl, a screech, a cry of birds. A hiss and a bite and several rarely used swears in the mouths of the Parish Council. Father Laurence heard the clatter of their pastel heels and the oof of their round bottoms as they tripped on the stairs, and the howl of their voices as they ran down the street.

Several men waited at the mouth of the sanctuary, looking sadly at the pretty widow next to her hulking companion. The men reeked of mustache oil and pomade. Their shoulders slumped and their bellies bulged and their cheeks went slack and flaccid.

“Eh, there, Father?” Ernie Jergen—Randall’s sober brother—inclined his head toward the stoic family in the front row. “So that’s it, then?” He cleared his throat. “She’s . . . not single. She’s attached, I mean.”

Father Laurence clapped his hands on the shoulders of the men, sucked in his sagging belly as tight as he could.

“Yep,” he said. “Seems so.” Family is family, after all. The dead have buried the dead, and the living scramble and struggle as best they can. They press their shoulder against the rock and urge forward, even when all hope is lost. Agnes Sorensen was happy, and Agnes Sorensen was alive. So be it.

He nodded at the organist to start the processional. The red-tailed hawk opened up its throat, and the young buck nosed the back of Father Laurence’s vestments. A pair of solemn eyes. A look of gravitas. Father Laurence wondered if he should step aside. If he was interrupting something. Two herons waited at the altar and a pine marten sat on the lectionary.

The organist sat under a pile of cats, and made a valiant effort to pluck out the notes of the hymn. The congregation—both human and animal—opened their throats and began to sing, each in their own language, their own rhythm, their own time.

The song deepened and grew. It shook the walls and rattled the glass and set the light fixtures swinging. The congregation sang of the death of loved ones. A life eclipsed too soon. They sang of the waters of the bog and of the creak of trees and of padded feet on soft forest trails. Of meals shared. And families built. Seeds in the ground. The screech of flight, the joy of a wriggling morsel in a sharp beak. The roar of pursuit and the gurgles of satiation. The murmur of nesting. The smell of a mate. The howl of birthing and the howl of loss, and howl and howl and howl.

Father Laurence processed in. Open mouthed. A dark yodel tearing through his belly.

I am lost, he sang. And I am found. My body is naked in the muck. It has always been naked. I hope; I rage; I despair; I yearn; I long; I lust; I love. These strong hands that built, this strong back that carried, all must wither to dust. Indeed, I am dust already.

Mrs. Sorensen and her Sasquatch watched him process down the aisle. They smiled at his song. He paused at their pew, let his hand linger on the rail. They reached out, and touched the hem of his garment.

It was, people remarked later, the prettiest Mass they’d ever heard.

Mrs. Sorensen and her family left after Communion. They did not stay for rolls or coffee. They did not engage in conversation. They walked, en masse, into the bog. The tall grasses opened for a moment to allow them in and closed like a curtain behind. The world was birdsong and quaking mud and humming insects. The world was warm and wet and green.

They did not come back.

“Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch” copyright © 2014 by Kelly Barnhill
Illustration copyright © 2014 by Chris Buzelli

The post Read Kelly Barnhill’s “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch” appeared first on Reactor.

Originally published in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells (Tor, 2013) “The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown” is also found in Yolen’s new collection, The Emerald Circus, available from Tachyon Publications.

The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown

June 1875

Why, they are quite barbaric,” the queen said to her prime minister, making small talk since she wasn’t actually certain where Zululand was. Somewhere in deepest, darkest Africa. That much at least she was certain. She would have to get out the atlas. Again. She had several of Albert’s old atlases, and the latest American one, a Swinton.

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Thinking about the problem with an atlas, and how—unlike the star charts, which never varied—it kept changing with each new discovery on the dark continent, she sniffed into her dainty handkerchief. She was not sniffing at Mr Disraeli, though, and she was quite careful to make that distinction by glancing up at him and dimpling. It was important that he never know how she really felt about him. Truth to tell, she was unsure herself.

“Barbaric in our eyes, certainly, ma’am,” he said, his dark eyes gazing back at her.

She did not trust dark eyes. At least not that dark. Give her good British blue any day. Or Albert’s blue. But those dark eyes… she shuddered. A bit of strangeness in the prime minister’s background for all that she’d been assured he was an Anglican.

“What do you mean, Mr Disraeli?” she asked. She thought she knew, but she wanted to hear him say it. Best to know one’s enemies outright. She considered all prime ministers the enemy. After all, they always wanted something from her and only seemed to promise something in return. Politics was a nasty business and the Crown had to seem to be above it while controlling it at all times.

A tightrope, really.

She thought suddenly of the French tightrope walker at Astley’s Amphitheatre who could stand on one foot on a wire suspended high overhead and dangle the other foot into the air. She and Albert had taken the children to see the circus several times, and it had occurred to her then that speaking with a prime minister felt just like that. She was dangling again today with only the smallest of wire between herself and disaster.

Disraeli was master of the circus now, and he frightened her as had her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who had been careful to try and put her at her ease. It took her a long time to find him amusing.

She thought dismally, It will take even longer with Disraeli even though this is his second tour of duty. She barely remembered that first time. It had been only seven years after dear Albert’s death and she was still so deep in mourning nothing much registered, not even—she was ashamed to admit—the children.

“To the Zulus,” Disraeli answered carefully, “what they do, how they live their lives, makes absolute sense, ma’am. They have been at it for centuries the same way. Each moment a perfection. Perhaps to them, we are the barbarians!” He smiled slowly at her over the flowered teacup.

I am no barbarian, she thought testily. You might be one. She sniffed again and this time cared little if he guessed she was sniffing at him. All Jews are barbarians. Even if they—like Mr Disraeli—have been baptized.

There, she had said it! Well, only in her head. And having made the pronouncement, she went on silently, It is something they are born with. Eastern, oily, brilliant, full of unpronounceable magic, like that Rumplety fellow who spun straw into gold in the story Albert used to tell the children at bedtime.

Part of her knew that what she was thinking was as much a fairy tale as the Rumplety one. Her mama used to say that Jews had horns, if you felt the tops of their heads. But now she knew that Jews had no such thing as horns, just hair. Albert had taught her that. It was an old story, long discredited, unless you were some sort of peasant. Which I am certainly not!

She looked directly at Disraeli, which was another thing dear Albert had taught her. It always disarmed the politicians. No one expected the queen to look directly at a mere jumped-up nobody.

But Disraeli seemed to be paying her no mind, looking instead at his polished nails rather than at her, his ruler, which was rude in the extreme. She recalled suddenly how attentive he had been the first time he was prime minister. What had he said? Something about “We authors… ,” comparing his frothy romantic novels to her much more serious writing. She remembered that she had not been amused then. Or now.

She glared at him, willing him to look up. Those silly tangles of curls hung greasily almost to his shoulders. That arch of nose. Those staring eyes. She gave a little shudder, then quickly thought better of it and rang the bell for the server.

When the girl arrived, the queen said, “I have caught a chill, please bring me a shawl.” Then she leaned back against the chair as if she did, indeed, feel a bit ill.

Disraeli finally looked up briefly, then looked at his nails again and did not ask if there was something he might do for her.

Jews! the queen thought. No matter how long they have lived in England, converted, learned English, they remain a people apart, unknowable. She did not trust him. She dared not trust him. Even though he was her minister. Prime. Primo. First. But she would never say so. She would never let him know, never let them know. Instead, she would make everyone think she actually liked him. It was for the best.

He may be prime minister now, she thought fiercely, but soon he will be gone. All prime ministers disappear in time. Only I go on. Only I am England. It was an agreeable thought and made her face soften, seeming to become younger.

“Ma’am?” he inquired, just as if he could read her mind.

“More tea, Mr Disraeli?” She was careful to pronounce all the syllables in his name just as the archbishop—who knew Hebrew as if it were his mother tongue—had taught her.

Just then the girl came back with the shawl, curtsied, gave it to the queen, and left.

Disraeli smiled an alarmingly brilliant smile, his lips too wet. Those wet lips made her shiver. He looked as if he were preparing to eat her up, like some creature out of a tale. An ogre? A troll? A Tom Tit Tot? She could not remember.

“Yes, please, ma’am.” He was still smiling.

She served the tea. It was a homey gesture she liked to make when sitting with her gentlemen. Her PMs. It was to put them at ease in her presence. If they were comfortable, they were easier to manipulate. Albert didn’t teach her that. Long before they’d met, she had figured it out, though she was only a girl at the time.

Disraeli sat back in his chair, crossed his grasshopper-like legs, and took a long, deep sip of the Indian tea.

Does she really think, his mind whirling like a Catherine wheel shooting out sparks, that I do not know about her atlas with all its scribbles along the sides of the pages? Or the pretence at being the hausfrau entertaining her “gentlemen callers”? Or what she thinks of my people? He knew that in the queen’s eyes—in all their eyes—he would always be tarred by the Levant.

He thought about an article he’d recently read in Punch, that rag, something about a furniture sale, that outlandishly mocked Jews: their noses like hawks’, their money-hungry ways. He remembered one line of it where the good English Anglican buyer wrote, “Shall I escape without being inveigled into laying out money on a lot of things I don’t want?”

He made an effort to become calm, breathing deeply and taking another sip of the tea before letting himself return to the moment.

Is the queen really so unaware of all the house spies who report to me? The gossip below stairs? Her son who will tattle on Mama at the slightest provocation? Does she not recognise that I am the master of the Great Game?

Without willing it, his right hand began stroking his left, an actor’s gesture, not a gentleman’s. But his mind never stopped its whirl. He remembered that he and the queen had had this same conversation about the Irish the first time he’d been her minister. And then a similar discussion about the Afghanistan adventure. To her they were all barbarians. Only the English were not.

Well, she may have forgotten what we talked about, but not I. It had been his first climb to the top of the greasy pole of the political world, straight into the Irish situation. There was no forgetting that! He had a marvellous memory for all the details.

Leaning back in the chair, he stared at his monarch, moving his lips silently, but no words—no English words—could be heard.

Across the rosewood table the queen slowly melted like butter in a hot skillet. A few more Kabbalistic phrases and she reformed into a rather large toad dressed in black silk, with garish rings on either green paw.

“Delicious tea, ma’am,” Disraeli said distinctly. “From the Indies, I believe. Assam, I am certain.”

The toad, with a single crown jewel in her head, poured him a third cup of tea. “Ribbet!” she said.

Though, Disraeli mused, that is really what a frog says.

“Oh, I do agree, ma’am,” said Disraeli, “I entirely agree.” With a twist of his wrist, he turned her back into Victoria, monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, before anyone might come in and see her. It was not an improvement. However, such small distractions amused him on these necessary visits. He could not say as much for the sour, little, black-garbed queen.

The queen sat quietly while her lady’s maid pulled the silver brush through her hair. Tangles miraculously smoothed out, since she insisted that the maid put oil of lavender on the bristles.

“No one, ma’am, still uses lavender,” the woman, Martha, had said the first time she’d had the duty of brushing out the queen’s hair.

But Victoria had corrected her immediately. Best to start as one means to go on, she had thought. “I have used oil of lavender since I was a child, and I am not about to change now. I find the very scent soothing. It is almost magic.” She had suffered from the megrims since dear Albert had passed over, and only the lavender worked. Albert would have called that science and explained it to her, but she was quite certain magic was the better explanation.

“What do you think of Mr Disraeli, ma’am? Have you read his novels?”

“I do not have time to read novels, Martha,” the queen scolded, though she had indeed read Vivian Grey and found it lamentably lacking and exceedingly vulgar, and the ending positively brutal.

“But you read people so well, it must be like reading a book,” Martha said, her plain, little face scrunching up as she worked.

“I do indeed read them well,” Victoria said.

“And Mr Disraeli… ?”

“He is a puzzle,” the queen said, a bit distracted. Normally she would never discuss her prime minister with a servant. But she knew that Martha was discreet.

“Puzzles are meant to be solved, ma’am,” Martha ventured.

“Sometimes I think you are less a lady’s maid and more a fool, Martha.” Victoria turned and smiled. “And by that I mean no offence. I use the word in the old sense, like the fools who entertained the kings of England, with their wit and their wisdom.”

“I couldn’t be that kind of a fool, ma’am, being a mere woman.” Martha swiftly braided the queen’s hair and tied it with a band.

“Martha, did you not know that Queen Elizabeth had female fools?”

“No!” Martha’s hand flew up to cover her mouth. “The blessed Elizabeth!”

“And her cousin Mary of Scotland as well. In fact she had three.”

“That baggage!”

“I am tired. It has been a long day,” the queen said. “Leave me.”

“You will solve the puzzle of Mr Disraeli, ma’am,” Martha said, helping the little queen to stand and easing her to the bed.

“Indeed I will,” Victoria said, nodding her head vigorously. “Indeed I will.”

Martha was pleased to see that the band held the braid’s end. Some things she could do well. Even though she was a mere woman. Especially so.

Once home again at Hughenden, Disraeli could finally relax. He got into his writing clothes and headed out into the garden. As he walked the pathways, he nodded at one of the young gardeners, but said not a word. The servants all knew that when he was alone along the garden paths, going in the direction of his writing folly, he was not to be distracted.

No more playing at being the prime minister, he thought, and smiled to himself. I am to be a writer for a fortnight. He stopped, turned, looked back at his house, for once shining in the last rays of the day’s sun.

He cared little that the nearest neighbours had mocked the fanciful pinnacles of his house, calling it witheringly “the little redbrick palace.” It was his comfort and his heart’s home. He’d heard that pitiful epithet for the first time from Mary Anne right after he’d transformed the place. Evidently her lady’s maid had carried the tale to her and she then to him. She admitted it after he’d found her weeping in her beloved garden, sitting alone on a white bench.

Silly Peaches he called her because of her gorgeous skin, even though she was quite a few years older than he. “Silly Peaches, how does it matter what the unwashed masses say of the house. We adore it.” He’d sat down beside her and put his arms around her then. “You know I married you for your money, but would do it again in a moment for love.” In fact, as they both knew, she’d little money of her own. It had all been for love—the courtship, the marriage, the house.

Now that he was prime minister—again—the neighbours were creatively silent about the manor. And darling Mary Anne, dead these three years, couldn’t have carried tales to him about the foofaraw even if the neighbours had still been talking.

But, oh—I’d let them natter on if only you were still here beside me, he thought, brushing away an actual tear, which surprised him as he’d begun the gesture without knowing a tear was falling.

Walking along the twisting paths to his little garden house, the place where he wrote his novels, though not his speeches, he forced himself to stop thinking about Mary Anne. He had planned a fortnight to set down the final draft of a climactic chapter of Endymion that had been giving him the pip. As long as there was no new disaster in the making that he had to deal with, he would surely get it done. But, as he well knew, the prime minister’s vacations were often fraught.

Also, he wanted to read more about a particular sort of kabbalah that Rabbi Lowe had practised a century earlier. It was in a book he’d discovered in his father’s library many years ago, after the old man had passed away. With all the horror about Mary Anne’s death and the fuss about his being raised up again to PM, he’d misplaced the book and only recently rediscovered it.

What he knew about Kabbalah should have been deep enough already. He’d read a great deal about it. He understood the ten Sefirot, the division therein of intellect and emotion. He acknowledged as the Kabbalist did that there were forces that caused change in the natural world as well as corresponding emotional forces that drove people to change both the world and themselves. It was a fascinating idea, and he’d been playing with it for years.

First he had read about Kabbalah as an exercise in understanding where his ancestors had come from, and perhaps where his personal demons had come from as well, after an anti-Semitic taunt by O’Connell in Parliament to which he’d replied, “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the Right Honourable Gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

He’d turned again to Kabbalah when Mary Anne had died, hoping to find solace in his reading. He had even built a Kabbalistic maze in the garden where her gravestone rested, thinking that walking it might give him some measure of peace.

Finally, he’d learned a few small Kabbalistic magics, such as the momentary transformation he’d done on the queen over tea. It was for a distraction, really, not that he put great store in magics. He put more in his ability to change England—and thus the world—by improving the conditions of the British people. As he often told his colleagues in the House of Commons, “The palace is unsafe if the cottage is unhappy.”

But it was only when he’d flung himself back into politics, back into the Great Game, that he realized why he’d really studied the old Hebrew magics.

“If I can learn the great miracles, not just the puny little transformations, I can make England rule the world.” He whispered the thought aloud, in the sure knowledge that no one was near enough to hear him. “And that will be good for the world, for Britain, and for the queen.”

So thinking, remembering, justifying, and planning, he finally got to the little folly he’d claimed for his writing. He stopped a minute, turned his back on the building, and surveyed his land. It still surprised him that he had such a holding having started from so little.

Then he turned, opened the door, and went inside, shutting out the world.

The queen was not amused. The prime minister was late. Very late. No prime minister had ever been late to a meeting with the queen. Neither the death of a spouse or a declaration of war sufficed as an excuse.

She tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair, though she resisted the urge to stand up and pace. It was not seemly for a queen to pace. Not seemly at all.

When Disraeli finally arrived, nearly a half hour after he was supposed to be there, in a flourish of grey morning coat and effete hand waves, she was even less amused. She allowed him to see her fury and was even more furious because of that, especially as he did not seem cowed by her anger.

“And where, Mr Disraeli, have you been?” She pointed imperiously at the clock, whose hands were set on nine twenty-five, in a frown similar to her own. She had already had tea and three small slices of tea cake, two more than were absolutely necessary. Another black mark on his copybook.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m afraid I overslept.” His face was pinched as if he hadn’t slept at all.

“Afraid… you… over… slept?” Each word was etched in ice. She no longer cared that she was showing how much anger she felt. She was the queen after all. “Have you not a man servant to wake you?” It was unheard of, in his position.

“I was writing late into the night, ma’am,” he said by way of explanation, sweat now beading his brow. “In my garden folly. My servants know never to disturb me there. I fell asleep.”

“In… your… garden… folly?” She could not find the words to set this thing aright between them, watching in horror as he took out a silvergrey handkerchief that matched his coat and wiped his brow.

“I could… show you the folly if you like, ma’am. It would be a great honour if you would visit Hughenden.” He took an awkward breath. “There is a superb maze I can commend to you. It is a replica of the Great Maze mentioned in the Bible.”

The queen could not think where in the Bible a maze was mentioned, and her hand went—all unaccountably—to her mouth as she used to do as a child when asked a question she should have been able to answer but couldn’t. This was, of course, before she had become queen. Long before.

“King David’s dancing floor,” he said, as if he saw her confusion and sought to explain it to her.

She remembered King David dancing, but she thought that was simply done before the ark, not on any kind of dancing floor. There was a dancing floor in one of the Greek myths, she distantly recalled. Then she blushed furiously, suddenly remembering that King David had danced naked before the ark. It made her even angrier with Disraeli.

The gall of the man, saying such a thing to a lady. Saying it to the queen! She waved him away with her hand, waited to see him go.

Instead, his own hand described a strange arc in the air. She wondered if he was drawing the maze for her. She wondered why he did not leave. She felt dizzy.

“More tea?” she croaked, at the same moment realizing that he’d had none before. Her hand went a second time to her mouth and she felt sick. If she had been a man, she would have uttered a swear, one of the Scottish ones John Brown had taught her. They were perfect for every occasion.

The only way out of this situation, Disraeli thought, is to go further in. He turned the queen into a toad for a second time. He knew he must never do it a third. She might just stick that way. But at least it would buy him a little time. Time to figure out his next move, a move that—should it prove successful—would be for the glory of England and the queen. Would possibly mean an earldom for himself, though such would be worth so much less without Mary Anne alive to be his lady. Still, a peerage was hardly the reason he was doing this thing.

There is danger of course, he thought. There is always a danger in such grand gestures. And such great magic.

He’d stayed up all night thinking about all the aspects. He’d even written them down, the reasons for and against. The reasons for far outweighed the rest. His plan simply had to work.

The toad looked at him oddly, its green hands wrangling together. The jewel in its head is what had given him the original idea, that moment a week ago when he’d first turned the queen into the creature.

He didn’t regret doing so then nor now. He might, he knew, regret it in the future. But that was part of the chance he had to take, for this was, indeed, the Great Game.

“Ah, Peaches,” he whispered, “in the end it’s all for love.” Love of queen and country, he thought, though goodness knows she was a difficult woman to love, black-garbed Victoria, the Widow of Windsor, as the papers called her. A child and a grandmother at one and the same time. Silly, small in temperament and understanding. Her mind only goes forward or back. Never up and down. Never through the twisting corridors like… like his own mind, he supposed. She simply isn’t interested in… well, everything. His mouth turned down like hers. Albert, at least, had had a more original mind if a bit… he smiled… well, Germanic.

He made another quick hand signal, and the queen became human again. Just in time.

“Fresh tea is here, ma’am,” he said as the girl came in with the pot on a tray. “Shall I pour or will you?” He put a bit of persuasion in her cup, a simple enough bit of magic, along with the two lumps of sugar. He wasn’t certain it would help, but knew it couldn’t hurt, something his mother used to say all the time.

The Queen was a bit uncomfortable at Hughenden Manor. All that red brick, she thought with a shudder. All those strange Gothicisms. Still, she did nothing but compliment the prime minister. His taste was—the redbrick house notwithstanding—actually quite good. Looking back at the house, though, gave her a headache, so she looked ahead at the garden path.

To be fair—she always liked to think of herself as fair—the ground-floor reception rooms with their large plate-glass windows are delightful. And the south-facing terrace, overlooking the grassy parterre, has spectacular views over the valley. She said it to plant the words firmly in mind for when she spoke of the house later to her family. She wondered where Disraeli had made his money, worried that it might have been in trade. It can’t have been from those books. She shuddered.

The day was cool but not cold, the skies overcast but not yet raining.

“A lovely afternoon for a walk in the garden, ma’am,” Disraeli said.

For once she agreed. Though she was used to her black garments, her stays, they made walking in the summer heat unbearable. Usually, she would be tucked up in her bedroom, a lavender pomander close by, ice chips in a glass of lemonade.

“Lovely indeed.” She put her hand on his arm, which allowed him to help her along, he straight-backed and she nodding approvingly at the gardeners and subgardeners busy at work but who stood appropriately and bowed as she passed.

Well done, she thought.

The gardens, while not nearly as extensive as her own, of course, were nicely plotted and cared for, the grass perfectly cut and rolled. The flowers—banks of primroses, and a full complement of bedding plants— were in the formal part of the garden surrounding a great stone fountain. She must remember to ask about the fountain later when Disraeli would certainly introduce her to the head gardener.

There was also a lovely, intimate orchard of apples and pears, only a few of them espaliered, as well as a fine small vinery. None of it was too much. It was rather perfect, and the controlled perfection annoyed her slightly. She wanted to find something to scold him for, or to tease him about, and could not.

Disraeli was in full spate about the gardens, the plants, the hedges and sedges, the blooms. But as they headed toward the folly and the maze beyond, he grew unaccountably silent.

I do hope he has no political agenda on his mind, she thought a bit sniffily. It would not do to spoil a lovely day out of doors with such talk. She simply would not allow it.

She was still thinking about this when the sun came out and she be- gan to perspire. It gave her something else to gnaw on.

Now that he’d enticed the queen into the garden, and they were approaching the maze, Disraeli was suddenly full of apprehensions. What if it is dangerous? Or if not actually dangerous, perhaps wrong? Or if not wrong, perhaps even unsupportable. He had tested the maze many times over the last few weeks, using first an undergardener, then his secretary, even his dog. They were all easily tricked into doing his bidding, by a sort of autosuggestion. Only it wasn’t like that German impostor Mesmer a century earlier. There was real magic in the maze. It made the things he wanted to happen, happen.

But, he thought, the worry turning into a stone in his stomach, this is the queen, not an undergardener or a secretary. He felt the pressure of her hand on his arm and turned to give her his most brilliant smile. She may be resistant to the magic. She may not be so suggestible. She is possibly…

Then he saw a bead of sweat on her brow and chuckled inwardly. A queen I have twice turned into a toad with a jewel in its head, he reminded himself. She is as human as I. “Ma’am?”

“Are we almost there, Mr Disraeli?” she asked, like a child in a carriage agonizing about the rest of a long trip.

He wondered if the heat was getting too much for her. All that black silk. And she is no longer a slender, young thing.

“Just on the other side of that small rise,” he said, pointing with his left hand, past the folly that commanded the top of the little hill. “There is a bench at the centre of the maze that will make the perfect garden throne. You shall rule my garden, ma’am, and my heart from there.”

“Then I shall have to solve the maze quickly, to get to that throne.” She smiled winningly up at him, almost as if they were a courting pair.

“All thrones in England belong to you, ma’am. And in the Empire as well.” There, his plan was begun.

He recalled saying to a friend long ago, during his first turn as prime minister, that the way to handle the queen was that one must, first of all, remember that she is a woman. He had all but forgotten his own advice over the past few years, so he added, “If I had my way, you would rule the world.” Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel. Step two in his plan. He wondered if he was succeeding in planting the seed.

She patted his hand. “Perhaps that would overreaching, even for you, Mr Disraeli.” But she said it lightly, as if she hadn’t dismissed the notion entirely, nor should he. “To the maze then.”

“You are, ma’am, the quickest woman at puzzles I have ever known. I think you will have no trouble at all with my little maze.” He knew he had, indeed, laid it on with a trowel, but evidently he had said the exact right thing for she was grinning broadly.

“So I have been told, and recently. Though you are the maze, dear sir.”

He had no idea what she meant and no reason at all to follow up the conversation.

They walked on, she clinging even more tightly to his arm.

At the top of the rise, she stopped as if to admire the view, which was quite lovely. But really, it was so she could catch her breath. Below, where the hillock smoothed out once again, was the maze. It did not look particularly difficult to her. She could see immediately straight into the heart of it.

Lightly, as if she were once more the girl she had been when she ascended the throne, she let go of Disraeli’s arm and began to run down the hill, a kind of giddiness sending her forward.

She gave no thought to the man behind her. She never gave any thought to the men behind her. Not even dear Albert. Or dear Mr Brown.

Her delighted laughter trailed behind her like the tail of a kite.

Disraeli was overcome with fear, and it almost riveted him to the top of the hill. The queen, corseted and bonneted, was bouncing along like an errant ball let loose by a careless boy. Any moment she might come crashing down, and with it, all his dreams.

He was the careless boy, letting the ball go. What had he been thinking! This was madness. All his calculations for naught. The maze all by itself was exerting a gravitational pull on the queen, and neither he—nor God, he supposed—knew how it was going to end.

He pulled himself loose of his fear and began to run after her. “Ma’am!” he cried. “Take care. The stones… the hill… the…”

But he needn’t have worried. She reached the bottom without misstep and threaded through the maze as if it were a simple garden walk. Before he was down at the hill’s bottom himself, she was already sitting on the stone bench, huffing a bit from the run, her face flushed, a tendril of greying hair having escaped from the bonnet and now caressing her right cheekbone.

“Ma’am,” he said when he got to the centre, “are you all right?”

“Never better.” She looked, somehow, years younger, lighter, happier.

She held out her hand and he knelt.

He realized then how foolish he had been, playing about with kab- balistic magic. She was the royal here, as high as King David. He knew now that he was only a minor rabbi in this play. Of course she can command the magic, whether or not she knows it is here.

“What you will, ma’am.”

“I will be an empress.” She smiled down at him. “But I will not ask to be higher, not like the foolish old woman in the story Albert used to tell the children.”

“I can make you an empress, ma’am. But will you allow me one question?”

“Of course I will allow it.”

Still kneeling, he asked, “What story, ma’am?” He wondered if he would ever understand this woman.

“She wanted to be God,” the queen mused.

“Why would anyone want to be God? It’s a terrible occupation.”

“Ah—that is two questions, dear man. And that I will not allow.” But she was joking, he could tell, for a coy smile hesitated at the corners of her mouth.

He felt he was back in familiar territory and grinned at her. “I will make you Empress of India, ma’am. It will be the jewel in your crown.” He dismissed the toad out of mind. It was as if the toad had never happened. “Forti nihil difficle.”

“Nothing is difficult to the strong. That will be a fine start,” she answered. “Now get off your knees, man, we have work to do.”

The queen looked at Disraeli, at his sweet curls, his liquid eyes. She thought that she liked him best of any of her prime ministers. And if he did somehow manage to make her Empress of India, pushing it through a recalcitrant House of Commons, why, she was certain that she could find him his just reward.

He has, she thought, a most original mind. Funny, I have only now noticed. It’s just like Albert’s, if a tiny bit more… more…

She could not think what, until finally it came to her… more Jewish.

That made her laugh.

And he, standing up at last, laughed, too, though whether he quite understood the joke was another matter altogether.

About “The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown”

My interest in Disraeli and Queen Victoria began a number of years ago when I included the scene of his turning Victoria into a toad within a much longer story called “The Barbarian and the Queen, Thirteen Views.” I always wanted to revisit, rewrite, and reimagine those few short paragraphs in a longer story, so when the invitation came for this anthology, I jumped at the chance.

In 1876, Disraeli did make Victoria Empress of India, and India became known as the Jewel in the Crown. She conferred upon him the title of first Earl of Beaconsfield that same year, a title he held until his death five years later, though in private she called him Dizzy. As he lay dying, Victoria asked to come and see him. But he wrote back saying, “No, it is better not.” To his secretary he said, “She would only ask me to take a note to Albert.” When he died, Victoria sent a wreath “from his grateful and affectionate Sovereign and friend, Victoria R.I.,” the I standing for “India.” She lived for twenty more years after Disraeli and never forgot him. If that odd friendship came out of mutual admiration, mutual interests, or magic, it is not for me to say. I only speculate.

“The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown” copyright © 2013 by Jane Yolen

The post Read Jane Yolen’s “The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown” appeared first on Reactor.

Of the story, Beagle says it “comes out of a lifelong fascination with Asian legendry—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian—all drawn from cultures where storytelling, in one form of another, remains a living art. As a young writer I loved everything from Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries to Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of Japanese fairytales and many lesser-known fantasies. Like my story ‘The Tale of Junko and Sayuri,’ ‘The Story of Kao Yu’ is a respectful imitation of an ancient style, and never pretends to be anything else. But I wrote it with great care and love, and I’m still proud of it.”

There was a judge once in south China, a long time ago—during the reign of the Emperor Yao, it was—named Kao Yu. He was stern in his rulings, but fair and patient, and all but legendary for his honesty; it would have been a foolish criminal—or, yes, even a misguided Emperor—who attempted to bribe or coerce Kao Yu. Of early middle years, he was stocky and wideshouldered, if a little plump, and the features of his face were strong and striking, even if his hairline was retreating just a trifle. He was respected by all, and feared by those who should have feared him—what more can one ask from a judge even now? But this is a story about a case in which he came to feel—rightly or no—that he was the one on trial.

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Kao Yu’s own wisdom and long experience generally governed his considerations in court, and his eventual rulings. But he was uniquely different from all other judges in all of China, in that when a problem came down to a matter of good versus evil—in a murder case, most often, or arson, or rape (which Kao Yu particularly despised), he would often submit that problem to the judgment of a unicorn.

Now the chi-lin, the Chinese unicorn, is not only an altogether different species from the white European variety or the menacing Persian karkadann; it is also a different matter in its essence from either one. Apart from its singular physical appearance—indeed, there are scholars who claim that the chi-lin is no unicorn at all, but some sort of mystical dragon-horse, given its multicolored coat and the curious configuration of its head and body—this marvelous being is considered one of the Four Superior Animals of Good Omen, the others being the phoenix, the turtle, and the dragon itself. It is the rarest of the unicorns, appearing as a rule only during the reign of a benign Emperor enjoying the Mandate of Heaven. As a result, China has often gone generation after weary generation without so much as a glimpse of a chi-lin. This has contributed greatly to making the Chinese the patient, enduring people they are. It has also toppled thrones.

But in the days of Judge Kao Yu, at least one chi-lin was so far from being invisible as to appear in his court from time to time, to aid him in arriving at certain decisions. Why he should have been chosen—and that at the very beginning of his career—he could never understand, for he was a deeply humble person, and would have regarded himself as blessed far beyond his deserving merely to have seen a chi-lin at a great distance. Yet so it was; and, further, the enchanted creature always seemed to know when he was facing a distinctly troublesome problem. It is well known that the chi-lin, while wondrously gentle, will suffer no least dishonesty in its presence, and will instantly gore to death anyone whom it knows to be guilty. Judge Kao Yu, it must be said, always found himself a little nervous when the sudden smell of a golden summer meadow announced unmistakably the approach of the unicorn. As righteous a man as he was, even he had a certain difficulty in looking directly into the clear dark eyes of the chi-lin.

More than once—and the memories often returned to him on sleepless nights—he had pleaded with the criminal slouching before him, “If you have any hope of surviving this moment, do not lie to me. If you have some smallest vision of yet changing your life—even if you have lied with every breath from your first, tell the truth now.” But few there—tragically few—were able to break the habit of a lifetime; and Judge Kao Yu would once again see the dragon-like horned head go down, and would lower his own head and close his eyes, praying this time not to hear the soft-footed rush across the courtroom, and the terrible scream of despair that followed. But he always did.

China being as huge and remarkably varied a land as it is, the judge who could afford to spend all his time in one town and one court was in those days very nearly as rare as a unicorn himself. Like every jurist of his acquaintance, Kao Yu traveled the country round a good half of the year: his usual route, beginning every spring, taking him through every village of any size from Guangzhou to YinChuan. He traveled always with a retinue of three: his burly lieutenant, whose name was Wang Da, his secretary, Chou Qingshan, and Hu Longwei, who was both cook and porter—and, as such, treated with even more courtesy by Kao Yu than were his two other assistants. For he believed, judge or no, that the more lowly placed the person, the more respect he or she deserved. This made him much beloved in rather odd places, but not nearly as wealthy as he should have been.

The chi-lin, naturally, did not accompany him on his judicial rounds; rather, it appeared when it chose, most often when his puzzlement over a case was at its height, and his need of wisdom greatest. Nor did it ever stay long in the courtroom, but simply delivered its silent judgment and was gone. Chou Qingshan commented—Kao Yu’s other two assistants, having more than once seen that judgment executed, were too frightened of the unicorn ever to speak of it at all—that its presence did frequently shorten the time spent on a hearing, since many criminals tended to be even more frightened than they, and often blurted out the truth at first sight. On the other hand, the judge just as often went months without a visit from the chi-lin, and was forced to depend entirely on his own wit and his own sensibilities. Which, as he told his assistants, was a very good thing indeed.

“Because if it were my choice,” he said to them, “I would leave as many decisions as I was permitted at the feet of this creature out of Heaven, this being so much wiser than I. I would then be no sort of judge, but a mindless, unreasoning acolyte, and I would not like that in the least.” After a thoughtful moment, he added, “Nor would the chi-lin like it either, I believe.”

Now it happened that in a certain town, where he had been asked on very short notice to come miles out of his way to substitute for a judge who had fallen ill, Kao Yu was asked to pass judgment on an imprisoned pickpocket. The matter was so far below his rank—it would have been more suited for a novice in training—that even such an unusually egalitarian person as Kao Yu bridled at the effrontery of the request. But the judge he was replacing, one Fang An, happened to be an esteemed former teacher of his, so there was really nothing for it but that he take the case. Kao Yu shrugged in his robes, bowed, assented, arranged to remain another night at the wagoners’ inn—the only lodging the town could offer—and made the best of things.

The pickpocket, as it turned out, was a young woman of surpassing, almost shocking beauty: small and slender, with eyes and hair and skin to match that of any court lady Kao Yu had ever seen, all belying her undeniable peasant origins. She moved with a gracious air that set him marveling, “What is she doing before me, in this grubby little courtroom? She ought to be on a tapestry in some noble’s palace, and I…I should be in that tapestry as well, kneeling before her, rather than this other way around.” And no such thought had ever passed through the mind of Judge Kao Yu in his entirely honorable and blameless life.

To the criminal in the dock he said, with remarkable gentleness that did not go unnoticed by either his lieutenant or his secretary, “Well, what have you to say for yourself, young woman? What is your name, and how have you managed to place yourself into such a disgraceful situation?” Wang Da thought he sounded much more like the girl’s father than her judge.

With a shy bow—and a smile that set even the chill blood of the secretary Chou Qingshan racing—the pickpocket replied humbly, “Oh, most honorable lord, I am most often called Snow Ermine by the evil companions who lured me into this shameful life—but my true name is Lanying.” She offered no family surname, and when Kao Yu requested it, she replied, “Lord, I have vowed never to speak that name again in this life, so low have I brought it by my contemptible actions.” A single delicate tear spilled from the corner of her left eye, and left its track down the side of her equally delicate nose.

Kao Yu, known for leaving his own courtroom in favor of another judge if he suspected that he was being in some way charmed or cozened by a prisoner, was deeply touched by her manner and her obvious repentance. He cleared his suddenly hoarse throat and addressed her thus: “Lanying…ah, young woman…this being your first offense, I am of a mind to be lenient with you. I therefore sentence you, first, to return every single liang that you have been convicted of stealing from the following citizens—” and he nodded to Chou Qingshan to read off the list of the young pickpocket’s victims. “In addition, you are hereby condemned”—he saw Lanying’s graceful body stiffen—“to spend a full fortnight working with the night soil collectors of this community, so that those pretty hands may remember always that even the lowest, filthiest civic occupation is preferable to the dishonorable use in which they have hitherto been employed. Take her away.”

To himself he sounded like a prating, pompous old man, but everyone else seemed suitably impressed. This included the girl Lanying, who bowed deeply in submission and turned to be led off by two sturdy officers of the court. She seemed so small and fragile between them that Kao Yu could not help ordering Chou Qingshan, in a louder voice than was strictly necessary, “Make that a week—a week, not a whole fortnight. Do you hear me?”

Chou Qingshan nodded and obeyed, his expression unchanged, his thoughts his own. But Lanying, walking between the two men, turned her head and responded to this commutation of her sentence with a smile that flew so straight to Judge Kao Yu’s heart that he could only cough and look away, and be grateful to see her gone when he raised his eyes again.

To his assistants he said, “That is the last of my master Fang An’s cases, so let us dine and go to rest early, that we may be on our way at sunrise.” And both Wang Da and Chou Qingshan agreed heartily with him, for each had seen how stricken he had been by a thief’s beauty and charm; and each felt that the sooner he was away from this wretched little town, the better for all of them. Indeed, neither Kao Yu’s lieutenant nor his secretary slept well that night, for each had the same thought: “He is a man who has been much alone—he will dream of her tonight, and there will be nothing we can do about that.”

And in this they were entirely correct, for Kao Yu did indeed dream of Lanying the pickpocket, not only that night, but for many nights thereafter, to the point where, even to his cook, Hu Longwei, who was old enough to notice only what he was ordered to notice, he appeared like one whom a lamia or succubus is visiting in his sleep, being increasingly pale, gaunt and exhausted, as well a notably short-tempered and—for the first time in his career—impatient and erratic in his legal decisions. He snapped at Wang Da, rudely corrected Chou Qingshan’s records and transcriptions of his trials, rejected even his longtime favorites of Hu Longwei’s dishes, and regularly warned them all that they could easily be replaced by more accomplished and respectful servants, which was a term he had never employed in reference to any of them. Then, plainly distraught with chagrin, he would apologize to each man in turn, and try once again to evict that maddening young body and captivating smile from his nights. He was never successful at this.

During all this time, the chi-lin made not a single appearance in his various courtrooms, which even his retinue, as much as they feared it, found highly unusual, and probably a very bad omen. Having none but each other to discuss the matter with, often clustered together in one more inn, one more drovers’ hostel, quite frequently within earshot of Kao Yu tossing and mumbling in his bed, Chou Qingshan would say, “Our master has certainly lost the favor of Heaven, due to his obsession with that thieving slut. For the life of me, I cannot understand it—she was pretty enough, in a coarse way, but hardly one to cost me so much as an hour of sleep.”

To which Wang Da would invariably respond, “Well, nothing in this world would do that but searching under your bed for a lost coin.” They were old friends, and, like many such, not particularly fond of each other.

But Hu Longwei—in many ways the wisest of the three — when off duty would quiet the other two by saying, “If you both spent a little more time considering our master’s troubles, and a little less on your own grievances, we might be of some actual use to him in this crisis. He is not the first man to spend less than an hour in some woman’s company and then be ridden sleepless by an unresolved fantasy, however absurd. Do not interrupt me, Wang. I am older than both of you, and I know a few things. The way to rid Kao Yu of these dreams of his is to return to that same town—I cannot even remember what it was called—and arrange for him to spend a single night with that little pickpocket. Believe me, there is nothing that clears away such a dream faster than its fulfillment. Think on it—and keep out of my cooking wine, Chou, or I may find another use for my cleaver.”

The lieutenant and the secretary took these words more to heart than Hu Longwei might have expected, the result being that somehow, on the return leg of their regular route, Wang Da developed a relative in poor health living in a village within easy walking distance of the town where Lanying the pickpocket resided—employed now, all hoped, in some more respectable profession. Kao Yu’s servants never mentioned her name when they went together to the judge to implore a single night’s detour on the long way home. Nor, when he agreed to this, did Kao Yu.

It cannot be said that his mental or emotional condition improved greatly with the knowledge that he was soon to see Snow Ermine again. He seemed to sleep no better, nor was he any less gruff with Wang, Chou, and Hu, even when they were at last bound on the homeward journey. The one significant difference in his behavior was that he regained his calm, unhurried courtroom demeanor, as firmly decisive as always, but paying the strictest attention to the merits of the cases he dealt with, whether in a town, a mere village, or even a scattering of huts and fields that could barely be called a hamlet. It was as though he was in some way preparing himself for the next time the beautiful pickpocket was brought before him, knowing that there would be a next time, as surely as sunrise. But what he was actually thinking on the road to that sunrise…that no one could have said, except perhaps the chi-lin. And there is no account anywhere of any chi-lin ever speaking in words to a human being.

The town fathers were greatly startled to see them again, since there had been no request for their return, and no messages to announce it. But they welcomed the judge and his entourage all the same, and put them up without charge at the wagoners’ inn for a second time. And that evening, without notifying his master, Wang Da slipped away quietly and eventually located Lanying the pickpocket in the muddy alley where she lived with a number of the people who called her “Snow Ermine.” When he informed her that he came from Judge Kao Yu, who would be pleased to honor her with an invitation to dinner, Lanying favored him with the same magically rapturous smile, and vanished into the hovel to put on her most respectable robe, perfectly suitable for dining with a man who had sentenced her to collect and dispose of her neighbors’ night soil. Wang Da waited outside for her, giving earnest thanks for his own long marriage, his five children, and his truly imposing ugliness.

On their way to the inn, Lanying—for all that she skipped along beside him like a child on her way to a puppet show or a party—shrewdly asked Wang Da, not why Kao Yu had sent for her, but what he could tell her about the man himself. Wang Da, normally a taciturn man, except when taunting Chou Qingshan, replied cautiously, wary of her cleverness, saying as little as he could in courtesy. But he did let her know that there had never been a woman of any sort in Kao Yu’s life, not as long as he had worked for him—and he did disclose the truth of the judge’s chi-lin. It is perhaps the heart of this tale that Lanying chose to believe one of these truths, and to disdain the other.

Kao Yu had, naturally, been given the finest room at the inn, which was no great improvement over any other room, but did have facilities for the judge to entertain a guest in privacy. Lanying fell to her knees and kowtowed—knocked head—the moment she entered, Wang Da having simply left her at the door. But Kao Yu raised her to her feet and served her Dragon in the Clouds tea, and after that huangjiu wine, which is made from wheat. By the time these beverages had been consumed—time spent largely in silence and smiles—the dinner had been prepared and brought to them by Hu Longwei himself, who had pronounced the inn’s cook “a northern barbarian who should be permitted to serve none but monkeys and foreigners.” He set the trays down carefully on the low table, peered long and rudely into Lanying’s face, and departed.

“Your servants do not like me,” Lanying said with a small, unhappy sigh. “Why should they, after all?”

Kao Yu answered, bluntly but kindly, “They have no way of knowing whether you have changed your life. Nor did I make you promise to do so when I pronounced sentence.” Without further word he fed her a bit of their roast pork appetizer, and then asked quietly, “Have you done so? Or are you still Lanying the Pickpocket?”

Lanying sighed again, and smiled wryly at him. “No, my lord, these days I am Lanying the Seamstress. I am not very good at it, in truth, but I work cheaply. Sometimes I am Lanying the Cowherd—Lanying the Pig Girl—Lanying the Sweeper at the market.” She nibbled daintily at her dish, plainly trying to conceal her hunger. “But the pickpocket, no, nor the thief, nor…” and here she looked directly into Kao Yu’s eyes, and he noticed with something of a shock that her own were not brown, as he had remembered them, but closer to a kind of dark hazel, with flecks of green coming and going. “Nor have I yet been Lanying the Girl on the market, though it has been a close run once or twice. But I have kept the word I did not give you”—she lowered her eyes then—“perhaps out of pride, perhaps out of gratitude…perhaps…” She let the words trail away unfinished, and they dined without speaking for some while, until Lanying was able to regard Kao Yu again without blushing.

Then it was Kao Yu’s turn to feel his cheeks grow hot, as he said, “Lanying, you must understand that I have not been much in the society of women. At home I dine alone in my rooms, always; when I am traveling I am more or less constantly in the company of my assistants Wang, Chou, and Hu, whom I have known for many years. But since we met, however unfortunately, I have not been able to stop thinking of you, and imagining such an evening as we are enjoying. I am certain that this is wrong, unquestionably wrong for a judge, but when I look at you I cannot breathe, and I cannot feel my heart beating at all. I am too old for you, and you are too beautiful for me, and I think you should probably leave after we finish our meal. I do.”

Lanying began to speak, but Kao Yu took her wrists in his hands, and she—who had some experience in these matters—felt his grip like manacles. He said, “Because, if you never make away with another purse in your life, Lanying the Pickpocket is still there in the back of those lovely eyes. I see her there even now, because although I am surely a great fool, I am also a judge.”

He released his hold on her then, and they sat staring at one another—for how long Kao Yu could never say or remember. Lanying finally whispered, “Your man Wang told me that a unicorn, a chi-lin, sometimes helps you to arrive at your decisions. What do you think it would advise you if it were here now?”

Nor was Kao Yu ever sure how many minutes or hours went by before he was finally able to say, “The chi-lin is not here.” And outside the door, Chou Qingshan held out his open palm and Wang Da and Hu Longwei each grudgingly slapped a coin into it as the three of them tiptoed away.

Lanying was gone when Kao Yu woke in the morning, which was, as it turned out, rather a fortunate thing. He was almost finished tidying up the remains of their meal—several items had been crushed and somewhat scattered, and one plate was actually broken—when Wang Da entered to tell him that his dinner guest had stopped long enough while departing the inn in the deep night to empty the landlord’s money box, leaving an impudent note of thanks before vanishing. And vanish she certainly had: the search that Kao Yu organized and led himself turned up no trace of her, neither in her usual haunts nor in areas where she claimed to have worked, or was known to have friends. Snow Ermine had disappeared as completely as though she had never been. Which, in a sense, she never had.

Kao Yu, being who he was, compensated the landlord in full—over the advice of all three of his assistants—and they continued on the road home. No one spoke for the first three days.

Finally, in a town in Hunan Province, where the four of them were having their evening meal together, Kao Yu broke his silence, saying, “Every one of you is at complete liberty to call me a stupid, ridiculous old fool. You will only be understating the case. I beg pardon of you all.” And he actually kowtowed—knocked head—in front of his own servants.

Naturally, Chou, Wang, and Hu were properly horrified at this, and upset their own dishes rushing to raise Kao Yu to his feet. They assured him over and over that the robbery at the inn could not in any way be blamed on him, even though he had invited the thief to dinner there, and she had spent the night in his bed, taking fullest advantage of his favor…the more they attempted to excuse him of the responsibility, the more guilty he felt, and the angrier at himself for, even now, dreaming every night of the embraces of that same thief. He let his three true friends comfort him, but all he could think of was that he would never again be able to return the gaze of the unicorn in his courtroom with the same pride and honesty. The chi-lin would know the truth, even of his dreams. The chi-lin always knew.

When they returned without further incident to the large southern city that was home to all four of them, Kao Yu allowed himself only two days to rest, and then flung himself back into his occupation with a savage vengeance aimed at himself and no one else. He remained as patient as ever with his assistants—and, for the most part, with the accused brought to him for judgment. Indeed, as culpable as his dreams kept telling him he was, he sympathized more with these petty, illiterate, drink-sodden, hopeless, useless offscourings of decent society than he ever had in his career—in his life. Whether the useless offscourings themselves ever recognized this is not known.

Wang Da, Chou Qingshan, and Hu Longwei all hoped that time and work would gradually free his mind of Snow Ermine—which was the only way they spoke of her from then on—and at first, because they wanted it so much to be true, they believed that it must be. And while they were at home in the city, living the life of a busy city judge and his aides, dining with other officials, advising on various legal matters, speaking publicly to certain conferences, and generally filling their days with lawyers and the law, this did indeed seem to be so. Further, to their vast relief, Kao Yu’s unicorn paid him no visits during that time; in fact, it had not been seen for more than a year. In private, he himself regarded this as a judgment in its own right, but he said nothing about that, considering it his own harsh concern. So all appeared to be going along in a proper and tranquil manner, as had been the case before the mischance that called him to an all-but-nameless town to deal with the insignificant matter of that wretched—and nameless—pickpocket.

Consequently, when it came the season for them to take to the long road once more, the judge’s assistants each had every reason to hope that he would show himself completely recovered from his entanglement with that same wretched pickpocket. Particularly since this time they would have no reason to pass anywhere near that town where she plied her trade, and where Kao Yu might just conceivably be called upon again to pass sentence upon her. It was noted as they set out, not only that the weather was superb, but that their master was singing to himself: very quietly, true—almost wordlessly, almost in a whisper—but even so. The three looked at each other and dared to smile; and if smiles made any sound, that one would have been a whisper too.

At first the journey went well, barring the condition of the spring roads, which were muddy, as always, and sucked tiresomely at the feet of their horses. But there were fewer criminal cases than usual for Kao Yu to deal with, and most of those were run-of-the-mill affairs: a donkey or a few chickens stolen here, a dispute over fishing rights or a right of way there, a wife assaulting her husband—for excellent reasons—over there. Such dull daily issues might be uninteresting to any but the participants, but they had the distinct advantage of taking up comparatively little time; as a rule Kao Yu and his retinue never needed to spend more than a day and a night in any given town. On the rare occasions when they stayed longer, it was always to rest the horses, never themselves. But that suited all four of them, especially Wang Da, who, for all his familial responsibilities, remained as passionately devoted to his wife as any new bridegroom, and was beginning to allow himself sweet visions of returning home earlier than expected. The others teased him rudely that he might well surprise the greengrocer or the fishmonger in his bed, but Kao Yu reproved them sharply, saying, “True happiness is as delicate as a dragonfly’s wing, and it is not to be made sport of.” And he patted Wang Da’s shoulder, as he had never done before, and rode on, still singing to himself, a very little.

But once they reached the province where the girl called Snow Ermine lived—even though, as has been said, their route had been planned to take them as far as possible from her home—then the singing stopped, and Kao Yu grew day by day more silent and morose. He drew apart from his companions, both in traveling and in their various lodgings; and while he continued to take his cases, even the most trifling, as seriously as ever, his entire courtroom manner had become as dry and sour as that of a much older judge. This impressed very favorably most of the local officials he dealt with, but his assistants knew what unhappiness it covered, and pitied him greatly.

Chou Qingshan predicted that he would return to his old self once they were clear of the province that had brought him to such shame and confusion; and to some degree that was true as they rode on from town to village, village to town. But the soft singing never did come again, which in time caused the cook, Hu Longwei, to say, “He is like a vase or a pot that has been shattered into small bits, and then restored, glued back together, fragment by fragment. It will look as good as new, if the work is done right, but you have to be careful with it. We will have to be careful.”

Nevertheless, their progress was so remarkable that they were almost two weeks ahead of schedule when they reached YinChuan, where they were accustomed to rest and resupply themselves for a few days before starting home. But within a day of their arrival Kao Yu had been approached by both the mayor of the town and the provincial governor as well, both asking him if he would be kind enough to preside over a particular case for them tomorrow. A YinChuan judge had already been chosen, of course, and would doubtless do an excellent job; but like every judge available, he had no experience handling such a matter as murder, and it was well-known that Kao Yu—

Kao Yu said, “Murder? This is truly a murder case you are asking me to deal with?”

The mayor nodded miserably. “We know that you have come a long journey, and have a long journey yet before you…but the victim was an important man, a merchant all the way from Harbin, and his family is applying a great deal of pressure on the entire city administration, not me alone. A judge of your stature agreeing to take over…it might calm them somewhat, reassure them that something is being done…”

“Tell me about the case,” Kao Yu interrupted brusquely. Hu Longwei groaned quietly, but Chou and Wang were immediately excited, though they properly made every effort not to seem so. An illegally-established tollgate, a neighbor poaching rabbits on a neighbor’s land, what was that compared to a real murder? With Kao Yu they learned that the merchant—young, handsome, vigorous, and with, as even his family admitted, far more money than sense—had wandered into the wrong part of town and struck up several unwise friendships, most particularly one with a young woman—

“A pickpocket?” Kao Yu’s voice had suddenly grown tight and rasping.

No, apparently not a pickpocket. Apparently her talents lay elsewhere—

“Was she called…Snow Ermine?”

“That name has not been mentioned. When she was taken into custody, she gave the name ‘Spring Lamb.’ Undoubtedly an alias, or a nickname—”

“Undoubtedly. Describe her.” But then Kao Yu seemed to change his mind, saying, “No…no, do not describe her to me. Have all the evidence in the matter promptly delivered to our inn, and let me decide then whether or not I will agree to sit on the case. You will have my answer tonight, if the evidence reaches the inn before we do.”

It did, as Kao Yu’s assistants knew it would; but all three of them agreed that they had never seen their master so reluctant even to handle the evidence pertaining to a legal matter. There was plenty of it, certainly, from the sworn statements of half a dozen citizens swearing to having seen the victim in the company of the accused; to the proprietor of a particularly disreputable wine shop, who had sold the pair enough liquor, jar on jar, to float a river barge; let alone the silent witness of the young merchant’s slit-open purse, and of the slim silver knife still buried to the hilt in his side when he was discovered in a trash-strewn alley with dogs sniffing at his body. There was even—when his rigor-stiffened left hand was pried open—a crushed rag of a white flower. Judge Kao Yu’s lamp burned all night in his room at the inn.

But in the morning, when Wang Da came to fetch him, he was awake and clear-eyed, and had already breakfasted, though only on green tea and sweetened congee. He was silent as they walked to the building set aside for trials of all sorts, where Hu Longwei and Chou Qingshan awaited them; except to remark that they would be starting home on the day after tomorrow, distinctly earlier than their usual practice. He said nothing further until they reached the courtroom.

There were two minor cases to be disposed of before the matter of the young merchant’s murder: one a suit over a breach of contract, the other having to do with a long-unpaid family debt. Kao Yu settled these swiftly, and then—a little pale, his words a bit slower, but his voice quiet and steady—signaled for the accused murderer to be brought into court.

It was Lanying, as he had known in his heart that it would be, from the very first mention of the case. Alone in his room, he had not even bothered to hope that the evidence would prove her innocent, or, at very least, raise some small doubt as to her guilt. He had gone through it all quickly enough, and spent the rest of the night sitting very still, with his hands clasped in his lap, looking toward the door, as though expecting her to come to him then and there, of her own will, instead of waiting until morning for her trial. From time to time, in the silence of the room, he spoke her name.

Now, as the two constables who had led her to his high bench stepped away, he looked into her calmly defiant eyes and said only, “We meet again.”

“So we do,” Lanying replied equably. She was dressed rakishly, having been seized before she had time to change into garments suitable for a court appearance; but as ever she carried herself with the pride and poise of a great lady. She said to Kao Yu, “I hoped you might be the one.”

“Why is that? Because I let you off lightly the first time? Because I…because it was so easy for you to make a fool of me the next time?” Kao Yu was almost whispering. “Do you imagine that I will be quite as much of a mark today?”

“No. But I did wish to apologize.”

“Apologize?” Kao Yu stared at her. “Apologize?”

Lanying bowed her head, but she looked up at him from under her long dark eyelashes. “Lord, I am a thief. I have been a thief all my life. A thief steals. I knew the prestige of your invitation to dine would give me a chance at the inn’s money box, and I accepted it accordingly, because that is what a thief does. It had nothing to do with you, with my…liking for you. I am what I am.”

Kao Yu’s voice was thick in his throat. “You are what you have become, which is something more than a mere thief and pickpocket. Now you are a murderer.”

The word had not been at all hard to get out when he was discussing it with the mayor, and with his three assistants, but now it felt like a thornbush in his throat. Lanying’s eyes grew wide with fear and protest. “I? Never! I had nothing to do with that poor man’s death!”

“The knife is yours,” Kao Yu said tonelessly. “It is the same one I noticed at your waist when you dined with me. Nor have I ever seen you without a white flower in your hair. Do not bother lying to me any further, Lanying.”

“But I am not lying!” she cried out. “I took his money, yes—he was stupid with wine, and that is what I do, but killing is no part of it. The knife was stolen from me, I swear it! Think as little of me as you like—I have given you reason enough—but I am no killer, you must know that!” She lowered her voice, to keep the words that followed from the constables. “Our bodies tell the truth, if our mouths do not. My lord, my judge, you know as much truth of me as anyone does. Can you tell me again that I am a murderer?”

Kao Yu did not answer her. They looked at each other for a long time, the judge and the lifelong thief, and it seemed to Chou Qingshan that there had come a vast weariness on Kao Yu, and that he might never speak again to anyone. But then Kao Yu lifted his head in wonder and fear as the scent of a summer meadow drifted into the room, filling it with the warm, slow presence of wild ginger, hibiscus, lilacs, and lilies—and the chi-lin. The two constables fell to their knees and pressed their faces to the floor, as did his three assistants, none of them daring even to look up. The unicorn stood motionless at the back of the courtroom, and Kao Yu could no more read its eyes than he ever could. But in that moment he knew Lanying’s terrible danger for his own.

Very quietly he said to her, “Snow Ermine, Spring Lamb, thief of my foolish, foolish old heart…nameless queen born a criminal…and, yes, murderer—I am begging you now for both our lives. Speak the truth, if you never do so again, because otherwise you die here, and so do I. Do you hear me, Lanying?”

Just for an instant, looking into Lanying’s beautiful eyes, he knew that she understood exactly what he was telling her, and, further, that neither he nor the chi-lin was in any doubt that she had slain the merchant she robbed. But she was, as she had told him, what she was; and even with full knowledge of the justice waiting, she repeated, spacing the words carefully, and giving precise value to each, “Believe what you will. I am no killer.”

Then the judge Kao Yu rose from his bench and placed himself between Lanying and the unicorn, and he said in a clear, strong voice, “You are not to harm her. Everything she says is a lie, and always will be, and still you are not to harm her.” In the silence that followed, his voice shook a little as he added, “Please.”

The chi-lin took a step forward—then another—and Lanying closed her eyes. But it did not charge; rather, it paced across the courtroom to face Kao Yu, until they were standing closer than ever they had before, in all the years of their strange and wordless partnership. And what passed between them then will never be known, save to say that the chi-lin turned away and was swiftly gone—never having once glanced at Lanying—and that Kao Yu sat down again and began to weep, without ever making a sound.

When he could speak, he directed the trembling constables to take Lanying away, saying that he would pass sentence the next day. She went, this time, without a backward glance, as proudly as ever, and Kao Yu did not look after her but walked away alone. Wang Da and Chou Qingshan would have followed him, but Hu Longwei took them both by the arms and shook his head.

Kao Yu spent the night alone in his room, where he could be heard pacing constantly, sometimes talking to himself in ragged, incomprehensible tatters of language. Whatever it signified, it eliminated him as a suspect in Lanying’s escape from custody that same evening. She was never recaptured, reported, or heard of again—at least, not under that name, nor in that region of China—and if each of Kao Yu’s three friends regarded the other two skeptically for a long time thereafter, no one accused anyone of anything, even in private. Indeed, none of them ever spoke of Lanying, the pickpocket, thief, and murderer for whom their master had given up what they knew he had given up. They had no words for it, but they knew.

For the chi-lin never came again, and Kao Yu never spoke of that separation either. The one exception came on their silent road home, when darkness caught them between towns, obliging them to make camp in a forest, as they were not unaccustomed to doing. They gathered wood together, and Hu Longwei improvised an excellent dinner over their fire, after which they chatted and bantered as well as they could to cheer their master, so silent now for so many days. It was then that Kao Yu announced his decision to retire from the bench, which shocked and dismayed them all, and set each man entreating him to change his mind. In this they were unsuccessful, though they argued and pleaded with him most of the night. It was nearer to dawn than to midnight, and the flames were dwindling because everyone had forgotten to feed them, when Chou Qingshan remarked bitterly, “So much for justice, then. With you gone, so much for justice between Guangzhou and YinChuan.”

But Kao Yu shook his head and responded, “You misunderstand, old friend. I am only a judge, and judges can always be found. The chi-lin…the chi-lin is justice. There is a great difference.”

He did indeed retire, as he had said, and little is known of the rest of his life, except that he traveled no more, but stayed in his house, writing learned commentaries on curious aspects of common law and, on rare occasions, lecturing to small audiences at the local university. His three assistants, of necessity, attached themselves to other circuit-riding judges, and saw less of one another than they did of Kao Yu, whom they never failed to visit on returning from their journeys. But there was less and less to say each time, and each admitted—though only to himself—a kind of guilt-stricken relief when he died quietly at home, from what his doctors termed a sorrow of the soul. China is one of the few countries where sadness has always been medically recognized.

There is a legend that after the handful of mourners at his funeral had gone home, a chi-lin kept silent watch at his grave all that night. But that is all it is, of course, a legend.

“The Story of Kao Yu” copyright © 2016 by Peter S. Beagle
Art copyright © 2016 by Alyssa Winans

The post Read Peter S. Beagle’s “The Story of Kao Yu” appeared first on Reactor.

Below, we’re pleased to reprint Peter Watt’s “ZeroS”. From the author:

In my last novel, a grizzled old soldier reminisces bitterly about the early days of the military zombie program, of which he was an early recruit. He wasn’t the first recruit, though. The first recruits, some of them at least, were corpses scraped off various battlefields, booted temporarily back to awareness with jumper cables to the brain, and told Hey, you’re actually dead, but we can bring you back to life so long as you’re willing to work for us for a few years. Or if you’d rather, we could just unplug these cables and leave you the way we found you. As contracts go it’s pretty take-it-or-leave-it, but given the alternative would you walk away? […] “ZeroS” is the story of one of those first recruits.

ZeroS

Asante goes out screaming. Hell is an echo chamber, full of shouts and seawater and clanking metal. Monstrous shadows move along the bulkheads; meshes of green light writhe on every surface. The Sāḥilites rise from the moon pool like creatures from some bright lagoon, firing as they emerge; Rashida’s middle explodes in dark mist and her top half topples onto the deck. Kito’s still dragging himself toward the speargun on the drying rack— as though some antique fish-sticker could ever fend off these monsters with their guns and their pneumatics and their little cartridges that bury themselves deep in your flesh before showing you what five hundred unleashed atmospheres do to your insides.

It’s more than Asante’s got. All he’s got is his fists.

He uses them. Launches himself at the nearest Sāḥilite as she lines up Kito in her sights, swings wildly as the deck groans and drops and cants sideways. Seawater breaches the lip of the moon pool, cascades across the plating. Asante flails at the intruder on his way down. Her shot goes wide. A spiderweb blooms across the viewport; a thin gout of water erupts from its center even as the glass tries to heal itself from the edges in.

The last thing Asante sees is the desert hammer icon on the Sāḥilite’s diveskin before she blows him away.

 * * *

Five Years

Running water. Metal against metal. Clanks and gurgles, lowered voices, the close claustrophobic echo of machines in the middle distance.

Asante opens his eyes.

He’s still in the wet room; its ceiling blurs and clicks into focus, plates and struts and Kito’s stupid graffiti (All Tautologies Are Tautologies) scratched into the paint. Green light still wriggles dimly across the biosteel, but the murderous energy’s been bled out of it.

He tries to turn his head, and can’t. He barely feels his own body— as though it were made of ectoplasm, some merest echo of solid flesh fading into nonexistence somewhere around the waist.

An insect’s head on a human body looms over him. It speaks with two voices: English, and an overlapping echo in Twi: “Easy, soldier. Relax.”

A woman’s voice, and a chip one.

Not Sāḥilite. But armed. Dangerous.

Not a soldier he wants to say, wants to shout. It’s never a good thing to be mistaken for any sort of combatant along the west coast. But he can’t even whisper. He can’t feel his tongue.

Asante realizes that he isn’t breathing.

The Insect woman (a diveskin, he sees now: her mandibles an electrolysis rig, her compound eyes a pair of defraction goggles) retrieves a tactical scroll from beyond his field of view and unrolls it a half-meter from his face. She mutters an incantation and it flares softly to life, renders a stacked pair of keyboards: English on top, Twi beneath.

“Don’t try to talk,” she says in both tongues. “Just look at the letters.”

He focuses on the N: it brightens. O. T. The membrane offers up predictive spelling, speeds the transition from sacc’ to script:

NOT SOLDIER FISH FARMER

“Sorry.” She retires the translator; the Twi keys flicker and disappear. “Figure of speech. What’s your name?”

KODJO ASANTE

She pushes the defractors onto her forehead, unlatches the mandibles. They fall away and dangle to one side. She’s white underneath.

IS KITO

“I’m sorry, no. Everyone’s dead.”

Everyone else, he thinks, and imagines Kito mocking him one last time for insufferable pedantry.

“Got him.” Man’s voice, from across the compartment. “Kodjo Asante, Takoradi. Twenty-eight, bog-standard aqua—wait; combat experience. Two years with GAF.”

Asante’s eyes dart frantically across the keyboard: only farmer not

“No worries, mate.” She lays down a reassuring hand; he can only assume it comes to rest somewhere on his body. “Everyone’s seen combat hereabouts, right? You’re sitting on the only reliable protein stock in three hundred klicks. Stands to reason you’re gonna have to defend it now and again.

“Still.” A shoulder patch comes into view as she turns toward the other voice: WestHem Alliance. “We could put him on the list.”

“If you’re gonna do it, do it fast. Surface contact about two thousand meters out, closing.”

She turns back to Asante. “Here’s the thing. We didn’t get here in time. We’re not supposed to be here at all, but our CO got wind of Sally’s plans and took a little humanitarian initiative, I guess you could say. We showed up in time to scare ’em off and light ’em up, but you were all dead by then.”

I WASN’T

“Yeah, Kodjo, you too. All dead.”

YOU BROUGHT ME BA

“No.”

BUT

“We gave your brain a jump start, that’s all. You know how you can make a leg twitch when you pass a current through it? You know what galvanic means, Kodjo?”

“He’s got a Ph.D. in molecular marine ecology,” says her unseen colleague. “I’m guessing yes.”

“You can barely feel anything, am I right? Body like a ghost? We didn’t reboot the rest of you. You’re just getting residual sensations from nerves that don’t know they’re dead yet. You’re a brain in a box, Kodjo. You’re running on empty.

“But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be.”

“Hurry it up, Cat. We got ten minutes, tops.”

She glances over her shoulder, back again. “We got a rig on the Levi Morgan, patch you up and keep you on ice until we get home. And we got a rig there that’ll work goddamn miracles, make you better’n new. But it ain’t cheap, Kodjo. Pretty much breaks the bank every time we do it.”

DON’T HAVE MONEY

“Don’t want money. We want you to work for us. Five-year tour, maybe less depending on how the tech works out. Then you go on your way, nice fat bank balance, whole second chance. Easy gig, believe me. You’re just a passenger in your own body for the hard stuff. Even boot camp’s mostly autonomic. Real accelerated program.”

NOT WESTHEM

“You’re not Hegemon either, not any more. You’re not much of anything but rotting meat hooked up to a pair of jumper cables. I’m offering you salvation, mate. You can be Born Again.”

“Wrap it the fuck up, Cat. They’re almost on top of us.”

“‘Course if you’re not interested, I can just pull the plug. Leave you the way we found you.”

NO PLEASE YES

“Yes what, Kodjo? Yes pull the plug? Yes leave you behind? You need to be specific about this. We’re negotiating a contract here.”

YES BORN AGAIN YES 5 YEAR TOUR

He wonders at this shiver of hesitation, this voice whispering maybe dead is better. Perhaps it’s because he is dead; maybe all those suffocating endocrine glands just aren’t up to the task of flooding his brain with the warranted elixir of fear and desperation and survival at any cost. Maybe being dead means never having to give a shit.

He does, though. He may be dead but his glands aren’t, not yet. He didn’t say no.

He wonders if anyone ever has.

“Glory Hallelujah!” Cat proclaims, reaching offstage for some unseen control. And just before everything goes black:

“Welcome to the Zombie Corps.”

 * * *

Savior Machine

That’s not what they call it, though.

“Be clear about one thing. There’s no good reason why any operation should ever put boots in the battlefield.”

They call it ZeroS. Strangely, the Z does not stand for Zombie.

“There’s no good reason why any competent campaign should involve a battlefield in the first place. That’s what economic engineering and Cloud Control are for.”

The S doesn’t even stand for Squad.

“If they fail, that’s what drones and bots and TAI are for.”

Zero Sum. Or as NCOIC Silano puts it, A pun, right? Cogito ergo. Better than The Spaz Brigade, which was Garin’s suggestion.

Asante’s in Tactical Orientation, listening to an artificial instructor that he’d almost accept as human but for the fact that it doesn’t sound bored to death.

“There’s only one reason you’ll ever find yourselves called on deck, and that’s if everyone has fucked up so completely at conflict resolution that there’s nothing left in the zone but a raging shitstorm.”

Asante’s also running up the side of a mountain. It’s a beautiful route, twenty klicks of rocks and pines and mossy deadfall. There might be more green growing things on this one slope than in the whole spreading desert of northern Africa. He wishes he could see it.

“Your very presence means the mission has already failed; your job is to salvage what you can from the wreckage.”

He can’t see it, though. He can’t see much of anything. Asante’s been blind since Reveille.

“Fortunately for you, economics and Cloud Control and tactical AI fail quite a lot.”

The blindness isn’t total. He still sees light, vague shapes in constant motion. It’s like watching the world through wax paper. The eyes jiggle when you’re a Passenger. Of course the eyes always jiggle, endlessly hopping from one momentary focus to the next— saccades, they’re called— but your brain usually edits out those motions, splices the clear bits together in post to serve up an illusion of continuity.

Not up here, though. Up here the sacc rate goes through the roof and nothing gets lost. Total data acquisition. To Asante it’s all blizzard and blur, but that’s okay. There’s something in here with him that can see just fine: his arms and legs are moving, after all, and Kodjo Asante isn’t moving them.

His other senses work fine; he feels the roughness of the rope against his palms as he climbs the wall, smells the earth and pine needles bedding the trail. Still tastes a faint hint of copper from that bite on the inside of his cheek a couple klicks back. He hears with utmost clarity the voice on his audio link. His inner zombie sucks all that back too, but eardrums don’t saccade. Tactile nerves don’t hop around under the flesh. Just the eyes: that’s how you tell. That and the fact that your whole body’s been possessed by Alien Hand Syndrome.

He calls it his Evil Twin. It’s a name first bestowed by his Dad, after catching eight-year-old Kodjo sleepwalking for the third time in a week. Asante made the mistake of mentioning that once to the squad over breakfast. He’s still trying to live it down.

Now he tries for the hell of it, wills himself to stop for just an instant. ET runs and leaps and crawls as it has for the past two hours, unnervingly autonomous. That’s the retrosplenial bypass they burned into his neocortex a month ago, a little dropgate to decouple mind from self. Just one of the mods they’ve etched into him with neural lace and nanotube mesh and good old-fashioned zap’n’tap. Midbrain tweaks to customize ancient prey-stalking routines. An orbitofrontal damper to ensure behavioral compliance (can’t have your better half deciding to keep the keys when you want them back, as Maddox puts it).

His scalp itches with fresh scars. His head moves with a disquieting inertia, as if weighed down by a kilogram of lead and not a few bits of arsenide and carbon. He doesn’t understand a tenth of it. Hasn’t quite come to grips with life after death. But dear God, how wonderful it is to be so strong. He feels like this body could take on a whole platoon single-handed.

Sometimes he can feel this way for five or ten whole minutes before remembering the names of other corpses who never got in on the deal.

Without warning ET dances to one side, brings its arms up and suddenly Asante can see.

Just for a millisecond, a small clear break in a sea of fog: a Lockheed Pit Bull cresting the granite outcropping to his left, legs spread, muzzle spinning to bear. In the next instant Asante’s blind again, recoil vibrating along his arm like a small earthquake. His body hasn’t even broken stride.

“Ah. Target acquisition,” the instructor remarks. “Enjoy the view.” It takes this opportunity to summarize the basics— target lock’s the only time when the eyes focus on a single point long enough for passengers to look out— before segueing into a spiel on line-of-sight networking.

Asante isn’t sure what the others are hearing. Tiwana, the only other raw recruit, is probably enduring the same 101 monologue. Kalmus might have moved up to field trauma by now. Garin’s on an engineering track. Maddox has told Asante that he’ll probably end up in bioweapons, given his background.

It takes nineteen months to train a field-ready specialist. ZeroS do it in seven.

Asante’s legs have stopped moving. On all sides he hears the sound of heavy breathing. Lieutenant Metzinger’s voice tickles the space between his ears: “Passengers, you may enter the cockpit.”

The switch is buried in the visual cortex and tied to the power of imagination. They call it a mandala. Each recruit chooses their own and keeps it secret; no chance of a master key for some wily foe to drop onto a billboard in the heat of battle. Not even the techs know the patterns, the implants were conditioned on double-blind trial-and-error. Something personal, they said. Something unique, easy to visualize.

Asante’s mandala is a sequence of four words in sans serif font. He summons it now—

ALL TAUTOLOGIES

ARE TAUTOLOGIES

—and the world clicks back into sudden, jarring focus. He stumbles, though he wasn’t moving.

Right on cue, his left hand starts twitching.

They’re halfway up the mountain, in a sloping sunny meadow. There are flowers here. Insects. Everything smells alive. Silano raises trembling arms to the sky. Kalmus flumps on the grass, recovering from exertions barely felt when better halves were in control, exertions that have left them weak and wasted despite twice-normal mito counts and AMPK agonists and a dozen other tweaks to put them in the upper tail of the upper tail. Acosta drops beside her, grinning at the sunshine. Garin kicks at a punky log and an actual goddamn snake slithers into the grass, a ribbon of yellow and black with a flickering tongue.

Tiwana’s at Asante’s shoulder, as scarred and bald as he is. “Beautiful, eh?” Her right eye’s a little off-kilter; Asante resists the impulse to stare by focusing on the bridge of her nose.

“Not beautiful enough to make up for two hours with a hood over my head.” That’s Saks, indulging in some pointless bitching. “Would it kill them to give us a video feed?”

“Or even just put us to sleep,” Kalmus grumbles. They both know it’s not that simple. The brain’s a tangle of wires looping from basement to attic and back again; turn off the lights in the living room and your furnace might stop working. Even pay-per-view’s a nonstarter. In theory, there’s no reason why they couldn’t bypass those jiggling eyes entirely— pipe a camera feed directly to the cortex— but their brains are already so stuffed with implants that there isn’t enough real estate left over for nonessentials.

That’s what Maddox says, anyway.

“I don’t really give a shit,” Acosta’s saying. The tic at the corner of his mouth makes his grin a twitchy, disconcerting thing. “I’d put up with twice the offline time if there was always a view like this at the end of it.” Acosta lives for any scrap of nature he can find; his native Guatemala lost most of its canopy to firestorm carousels back in ’42.

“So what’s in it for you?” Tiwana asks.

It takes a moment for Asante to realize the question’s for him. “Excuse me?”

“Acosta’s nature-boy. Kalmus thinks she’s gonna strike it rich when they declassify the tech.” This is news to Asante. “Why’d you sign up?”

He doesn’t quite know how to answer. Judging by his own experience, ZeroS is not something you sign up for. ZeroS is something that finds you. It’s an odd question, a private question. It brings up things he’d rather not dwell upon.

It brings up things he already dwells on too much.

“Ah—”

Thankfully, Maddox chooses that moment to radio up from Côté: “Okay, everybody. Symptom check. Silano.”

The Corporal looks at his forearms. “Pretty good. Less jumpy than normal.”

“Kalmus.”

“I’ve got, ah, ah…” She stammers, struggles, finally spits in frustration. “Fuck.”

“I’ll just put down the usual aphasia,” Maddox says. “Garin.”

“Vision flickers every five, ten minutes.”

“That’s an improvement.”

“Gets better when I exercise. Better blood flow, maybe.”

“Interesting,” Maddox says. “Tiwan—”

“I see you God I see you!”

Saks is on the ground, writhing. His eyes roll in their sockets. His fingers claw handfuls of earth. “I see!” he cries, and lapses into gibberish. His head thrashes. Spittle flies from his mouth. Tiwana and Silano move in but the audio link crackles with the voice of God, “Stand away! Everyone stand back now!” and everyone obeys because God speaks with the voice of Lieutenant David Metzinger and you do not want to fuck with him. God’s breath is blowing down from Heaven, from the rotors of a medical chopper beating the air with impossible silence even though they all see it now, they all see it, there’s no need for stealth mode there never was it’s always there, just out of sight, just in case.

Saks has stopped gibbering. His face is a rictus, his spine a drawn bow. The chopper lands, its whup whup whup barely audible even ten meters away. It vomits medics and a stretcher and glossy black easter-egg drones with jointed insect legs folded to their bellies. The ZeroS step back; the medics close in and block the view.

Metzinger again: “Okay, meat sacks. Everyone into the back seat. Return to Côté.”

Silano turns away, eyes already jiggling in their sockets. Tiwana and Kalmus go over a moment later. Garin slaps Asante’s back on the way out— “Gotta go, man. Happens, you know?”— and vanishes into his own head.

The chopper lifts Saks into the heavens.

“Private Asante! Now!”

He stands alone in the clearing, summons his mandala, falls into blindness. His body turns. His legs move. Something begins to run him downhill. The artificial instructor, always sensitive to context, begins a lecture about dealing with loss on the battlefield.

It’s all for the best, he knows. It safest to be a passenger at times like this. All these glitches, these— side-effects: they never manifest in zombie mode.

Which makes perfect sense. That being where they put all the money.

 * * *

Station To Station

Sometimes he still wakes in the middle of the night, shocked back to consciousness by the renewed knowledge that he still exists— as if his death was some near-miss that didn’t really sink in until days or weeks afterward, leaving him weak in the knees and gasping for breath. He catches himself calling his mandala, a fight/flight reaction to threat stimuli long-since expired. He stares at the ceiling, forces calm onto panic, takes comfort from the breathing of his fellow recruits. Tries not think about Kito and Rashida. Tries not to think at all.

Sometimes he finds himself in the Commons, alone but for the inevitable drone hovering just around the corner, ready to raise alarms and inject drugs should he suffer some delayed and violent reaction to any of a hundred recent mods. He watches the world through one of CFB Côté’s crippled terminals (they can surf, but never send). He slips through wires and fiberop, bounces off geosynchronous relays all the way back to Ghana: satcams down on the dizzying Escher arcology of the Cape Universitas hubs, piggybacks on drones wending through Makola’s East, marvels anew at the giant gengineered snails— big as a centrifuge, some of them—that first ignited his passion for biology when he was six. He haunts familiar streets where the kenkey and fish always tasted better when the Chinese printed them, even though the recipes must have been copied from the locals. The glorious chaos of the street drummers during Adai.

He never seeks out friends or family. He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s not ready, or because he has already moved past them. He only knows not to awaken things that have barely gone to sleep.

Zero Sum. A new life. Also a kind of game used, more often than not, to justify armed conflict.

Also Null Existence. If your tastes run to the Latin.

 * * *

They loom over a drowning subdivision long-abandoned to the rising waters of Galveston Bay: cathedral-sized storage tanks streaked with rust and ruin, twelve-story filtration towers, masses of twisting pipe big enough to walk through.

Garin sidles up beside him. “Looks like a crab raped an octopus.”

“Your boys seem twitchy,” the Sheriff says. (Asante clenches his fist to control the tremor.) “They hopped on something?”

Metzinger ignores the question. “Have they made any demands?”

“Usual. Stop the rationing or they blow it up.” The Sheriff shakes his head, moves to mop his brow, nearly punches himself in the face when his decrepit Bombardier exoskeleton fratzes and overcompensates. “Everything’s gone to shit since the Edwards dried up.”

“They respond to a water shortage by blowing up a desalination facility?”

The Sheriff snorts. “Folks always make sense where you come from, Lieutenant?”

They reviewed the plant specs down to the rivets on the way here. Or at least their zombies did, utterly silent, borrowed eyes flickering across video feeds and backgrounders that Asante probably wouldn’t have grasped even if he had been able to see them. All Asante knows— by way of the impoverished briefings Metzinger doles out to those back in Tourist Class— is that the facility was bought from Qatar back when paint still peeled and metal still rusted, when digging viscous fossils from the ground left you rich enough to buy the planet. And that it’s falling into disrepair, now that none of those things are true anymore.

Pretty much a microcosm of the whole TExit experience, he reflects.

“They planned it out,” the Sheriff admits. “Packed a shitload of capacitors in there with ’em, hooked ’em to jennies, banked ’em in all the right places. We send in quads, EMP just drops ’em.” He glances back over his shoulder, to where— if you squint hard enough— a heat-shimmer rising from the asphalt might almost assume the outline of a resting Chinook transport. “Probably risky using exos, unless they’re hardened.”

“We won’t be using exos.”

“Far as we can tell some of ’em are dug in by the condensers, others right next to the heat exchangers. We try to microwave ’em out, all the pipes explode. Might as well blow the place ourselves.”

“Firepower?”

“You name it. Sig Saurs, Heckler-Kochs, Maesushis. I think one of ’em has a Skorp. All kinetic, far as we know. Nothing you could fry.”

“Got anything on legs?”

“They’ve got a Wolfhound in there. 46-G.”

“I meant you,” Metzinger says.

The Sheriff winces. “Nearest’s three hours away. Gimped leg.” And at Metzinger’s look: “BoDyn pulled out a few years back. We’ve been having trouble getting replacement parts.”

“What about local law enforcement? You can’t be the only—”

“Half of them are law enforcement. How’d you think they got the Wolfhound?” The Sheriff lowers his voice, although there aren’t any other patriots within earshot. “Son, you don’t think we’d have invited you in if we’d had any other choice? I mean Jayzuz, we’ve got enough trouble maintaining lawnorder as it is. If word ever got out we had to bring in outside help over a goddamn domestic dispute…”

“Don’t sweat it. We don’t wear name tags.” Metzinger turns to Silano. “Take it away, Sergeant-Major.”

Silano addresses the troops as Metzinger disappears into the cloaked Chinook: “Say your goodbyes, everybody. Autopilots in thirty.”

Asante sighs to himself. Those poor bastards don’t stand a chance. He can’t even bring himself to blame them: driven by desperation, hunger, the lack of any other options. Like the Sāḥilites who murdered him, back at the end of another life: damned, ultimately, by the sin of being born into a wasteland that could no longer feed them.

Silano raises one hand. “Mark.”

Asante calls forth his mandala. The world goes to gray. His bad hand calms and steadies on the forestalk of his weapon.

This is going to be ugly.

He’s glad he won’t be around to see it.

 * * *

Heroes

He does afterward, of course. They all do, as soon as they get back to Côté. They’re still learning. The world is their classroom.

“Back in the Cenozoic all anybody cared about was reflexes.” Second-Lieutenant Oliver Maddox— sorcerer’s apprentice to the rarely-seen Major Emma Rossiter, of the Holy Order of Neuroengineering— speaks with the excitement of a nine-year-old at his own birthday party. “Double-tap, dash, down, crawl, observe fire— all that stuff your body learns to do without thinking when someone yells Contact. The whole program was originally just about speeding up those macros. They never really appreciated that the subconscious mind thinks as well as reacts. It analyzes. I was telling them that years ago but they never really got it until now.”

Asante has never met Them. They never write, They never call. They certainly never visit. Presumably They sign a lot of checks.

“Here, though, we have a perfect example of the tactical genius of the zombie mind.”

Their BUDs recorded everything. Maddox has put it all together post-mortem, a greatest-hits mix with remote thermal and PEA and a smattering of extraporential algorithms to fill in the gaps. Now he sets up the game board— walls, floors, industrial viscera all magically translucent— and initializes the people inside.

“So you’ve got eighteen heavily-armed hostiles dug in at all the right choke points.” Homunculi glow red at critical junctures. “You’ve got a jamming field in effect, so you can’t share telemetry unless you’re line-of-sight. You’ve got an EMP-hardened robot programmed to attack anything so much as squeaks, deafened along the whole spectrum so even if we had the backdoor codes it wouldn’t hear them.” The Wolfhound icon is especially glossy: probably lifted from BoDyn’s promotional archive. “And you’ve got some crazy fucker with a deadman switch that’ll send the whole place sky-high the moment his heart stops— or even if he just thinks you’re getting too close to the flag. You don’t even know about that going in.

“And yet.”

Maddox starts the clock. Inside the labyrinth, icons begin to dance in fast-forward.

“Garin’s first up, and he completely blows it. Not only does he barely graze the target— probably doesn’t even draw blood— but he leaves his silencer disengaged. Way to go, Garin. You failed to neutralize your target, and now the whole building knows where you are.”

Asante remembers that gunshot echoing through the facility. He remembers his stomach dropping away.

“Now here comes one of Bubba’s buddies around the corner and— Garin misses again! Nick to the shoulder this time. And here comes the real bad-ass of the bunch, that Wolfhound’s been homing in on Garin’s shots and that motherfucker is armed and hot and…”

The 46-G rounds the corner. It does not target Garin; it lights up the insurgents. Bubba and his buddy collapse into little red piles of pixel dust.

“They did not see that coming!” Maddox exults. “Fragged by their own robot! How do you suppose that happened?”

Asante frowns.

“So two baddies down, Garin’s already up the ladder and onto this catwalk before the robot gets a bead on him but Tiwana’s at the other end, way across the building, and they go LOS for about half a second” —a bright thread flickers between their respective icons— “before Tiwana drops back down to ground level and starts picking off Bubbas over by the countercurrent assembly. And she turns out to be just as shitty a shot as Garin, and just as sloppy with her silencer.”

Gunfire everywhere, from everyone. Asante remembers being blind and shitting bricks, wondering what kind of aboa would make such an idiot mistake until the Rann-Seti came up in his own hands, until he felt the recoil and heard the sound of his own shot echoing like a 130-decibel bullseye on his back. He wondered, at the time, how and why someone had sabotaged everyone’s silencers like that.

Maddox is still deep in the play. “The bad guys have heard the commotion and are starting to reposition. By now Asante and Silano have picked up the shitty-shot bug and the BoDyn’s still running around tearing up the guys on its own side. All this opens a hole that Kalmus breezes through— anyone want to guess the odds she’d just happen to be so perfectly positioned?— which buys her a clean shot at the guy with the deadman switch. Who she drops with a perfect cervical shot. Completely paralyzes the poor bastard but leaves his heart beating strong and steady. Here we see Kalmus checking him over and disabling his now-useless doomsday machine.

“This all took less than five minutes, people. I mean, it was eighteen from In to Out but you’re basically mopping up after five. And just before the credits roll, Kalmus strolls up to the wolfhound calm as you please and pets the fucker. Puts him right to sleep. Galveston PD gets their robot back without a scratch. Five minutes. Fucking magic.”

“So, um.” Garin looks around. “How’d we do it?”

“Show ’em, Kally.”

Kalmus holds up a cuff-link. “Apparently I took this off deadman guy.”

“Dog whistles, Ars and Kays.” Maddox grins. “50KHz, inaudible to pilot or passenger. You don’t put your robot into rabid mode without some way of telling friend from foe, right? Wear one of these pins, Wolfie doesn’t look at you twice. Lose that pin and it rips your throat out in a fucking instant.

“Your better halves could’ve gone for clean, quiet kills that would’ve left the remaining forces still dug-in, still fortified, and not going anywhere. But one of the things that fortified them was BoDyn’s baddest battlebot. So your better halves didn’t go for clean quiet kills. They went for noise and panic. They shot the dog whistles, drew in the dog, let it attack its own masters. Other side changes position in response. You herded the robot, and the robot herded the insurgents right into your crosshairs. It was precision out of chaos, and it’s even more impressive because you had no comms except for the occasional optical sync when you happened to be LOS. Gotta be the messiest, spottiest network you could imagine, and if I hadn’t seen it myself I’d say it was impossible. But somehow you zombies kept updated on each other’s sitreps. Each one knew what it had to do to achieve an optimal outcome assuming all the others did likewise, and the group strategy just kind of— emerged. Nobody giving orders. Nobody saying a goddamn word.”

Asante sees it now, as the replay loops and restarts. There’s a kind of beauty to it; the movement of nodes, the intermittent web of laser light flickering between them, the smooth coalescence of signal from noise. It’s more than a dance, more than teamwork. It’s more like a— a distributed organism. Like the digits of a hand, moving together.

“Mind you, this is not what we say if anyone asks,” Maddox adds. “What we say is that every scenario in which the Galveston plant went down predicted a tipping point across the whole Post-TExit landscape. We point to 95% odds of wide-spread rioting and social unrest on WestHem’s very doorstep— a fate which ZeroS has, nice and quietly, prevented. Not bad for your first field deployment.”

Tiwana raises a hand. “Who would ask, exactly?”

It’s a good question. In the thirteen months since Asante joined Zero Sum, no outsider has ever appeared on the grounds of CFB Côté. Which isn’t especially surprising, given that— according to the public records search he did a few weeks back, anyway— CFB Côté has been closed for over twenty years.

Maddox smiles faintly. “Anyone with a vested interest in the traditional chain of command.”

 * * *

Where Are We Now

Asante awakens in the Infirmary, standing at the foot of Carlos Acosta’s bed. To his right a half-open door spills dim light into the darkness beyond: a wedge of worn linoleum fading out from the doorway, a tiny red EXIT sign glowing in the void above a stairwell. To his left, a glass wall looks into Neurosurgery. Jointed teleops hang from the ceiling in there, like mantis limbs with impossibly fragile fingers. Lasers. Needles and nanotubes. Atomic-force manipulators delicate enough to coax individual atoms apart. ZeroS have gone under those knives more times than any of them can count. Surgery by software, mostly. Occasionally by human doctors phoning it in from undisclosed locations, old-school cutters who never visit in the flesh for all the times they’ve cut into Asante’s.

Acosta’s on his back, eyes closed. He looks almost at peace. Even his facial tic has quieted. He’s been here three days now, ever since losing his right arm to a swarm of smart flechettes over in Heraklion. It’s no big deal. He’s growing it back with a little help from some imported salamander DNA and a steroid-infused aminoglucose drip. He’ll be good as new in three weeks— as good as he’s ever been since ZeroS got him, anyway— back in his rack in half that time. Meanwhile it’s a tricky balance: his metabolism may be boosted into the jet stream but it’s all for tissue growth. There’s barely enough left over to power a trip to the bathroom.

Kodjo Asante wonders why he’s standing here at 0300.

Maddox says the occasional bit of sleepwalking isn’t anything to get too worried about, especially if you’re already prone to it. Nobody’s suffered a major episode in months, not since well before Galveston; these days the tweaks seem mainly about fine-tuning. Rossiter’s long since called off the just-in-case bots that once dogged their every unscripted step. Even lets them leave the base now and then, when they’ve been good.

You still have to expect the occasional lingering side-effect, though. Asante glances down at the telltale tremor in his own hand, seizes it gently with the other and holds firm until the nerves quiet. Looks back at his friend.

Acosta’s eyes are open.

They don’t look at him. They don’t settle long enough to look at anything, as far as Asante can tell. They jump and twitch in Acosta’s face, back forth back forth up down up.

“Carl,” Asante says softly. “How’s it going, man?”

The rest of that body doesn’t even twitch. Acosta’s breathing remains unchanged. He doesn’t speak.

Zombies aren’t big on talking. They’re smart but nonverbal, like those split-brain patients who understand words but can’t utter them. Something about the integration of speech with consciousness. Written language is easier. The zombie brain doesn’t take well to conventional grammar and syntax but they’ve developed a kind of visual pidgin that Maddox claims is more efficient than English. Apparently they use it at all the briefings.

Maddox also claims they’re working on a kind of time-sharing arrangement, some way to divvy up custody of Broca’s Area between the fronto-parietal and the retrosplenial. Someday soon, maybe, you’ll literally be able to talk to yourself, he says. But they haven’t got there yet.

A tacpad on the bedside table glows with a dim matrix of Zidgin symbols. Asante places it under Acosta’s right hand.

“Carl?”

Nothing.

“Just thought I’d— see how you were. You take care.”

He tiptoes to the door, sets trembling fingers on the knob. Steps into the darkness of the hallway, navigates back to his rack by touch and memory.

Those eyes.

It’s not like he hasn’t seen it a million times before. But all those other times his squadmates’ eyes blurred and danced in upright bodies, powerful autonomous things that moved. Seeing that motion embedded in such stillness— watching eyes struggle as if trapped in muscle and bone, as if looking up from some shallow grave where they haven’t quite been buried alive—

Terrified. That’s how they looked. Terrified.

 * * *

We Are the Dead

Specialist Tarra Kalmus has disappeared. Rossiter was seen breaking the news to Maddox just this morning, a conversation during which Maddox morphed miraculously from He of the Perpetually Goofy Smile into Lieutenant Stoneface. He refuses to talk about it with any of the grunts. Silano managed to buttonhole Rossiter on her way back to the helipad, but could only extract the admission that Kalmus has been “reassigned”.

Metzinger tells them to stop asking questions. He makes it an order.

But as Tiwana points out— when Asante finds her that evening, sitting with her back propped against a pallet of machine parts in the loading bay— you can run all sorts of online queries without ever using a question mark.

“Fellow corpse.”

“Fellow corpse.”

It’s been their own private salutation since learning how much they have in common. (Tiwana died during a Realist attack in Havana. Worst vacation ever, she says.) They’re the only ZeroS, so far at least, to return from the dead. The others hold them a little in awe because of it.

The others also keep a certain distance.

“Garin was last to see her, over at the Memory Hole.” Tiwana’s wearing a pair of smart specs tuned to the public net. It won’t stop any higher-ups who decide to look over her shoulder, but at least her activity won’t be logged by default. “Chatting up some redhead with a Hanson Geothermal logo on her jacket.”

Two nights ago. Metzinger let everyone off the leash as a reward for squashing a Realist attack on the G8G Constellation. They went down to Banff for some meatspace R&R. “So?”

Speclight paints Tiwana’s cheeks with small flickering auroras. “So a BPD drone found a woman matching that description dead outside a public fuckcubby two blocks south of there. Same night.”

“Eiiii.” Asante squats down beside her as Tiwana pushes the specs onto her forehead. Her wonky eye jiggles at him.

“Yeah.” She takes a breath, lets it out. “Nicci Steckman, according to the DNA.”

“So how—”

“They don’t say. Just asking witnesses to come forward.”

“Have any?”

“They left together. Deked into an alley. No further surveillance record, which is odd.”

“Is it really,” Asante murmurs.

“No. I guess not.”

They sit in silence for a moment.

“What do you think?” she asks at last.

“Maybe Steckman didn’t like it rough and things got out of hand. You know Kally, she— doesn’t always take no for an answer.”

“No to what? We’re all on antilibidinals. Why would she even be—”

“She’d never kill someone over—”

“Maybe she didn’t,” Tiwana says.

He blinks. “You think she flipped?”

“Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Maybe the augs kicked in on their own somehow, like a, a— reflex. Kally saw an imminent threat, or something her better half interpreted that way. Grabbed the keys, took care of it.”

“It’s not supposed to work like that.”

“It wasn’t supposed to fry Saks’ central nervous system either.”

“Come on, Sofe. That’s ancient history. They wouldn’t deploy us if they hadn’t fixed those problems.”

“Really.” Her bad eye looks pointedly at his bad hand.

“Legacy glitches don’t count.” Nerves nicked during surgery, a stray milliamp leaking into the fusiform gyrus. Everyone’s got at least one. “Maddox says—”

“Oh sure, Maddox is always gonna tidy up. Next week, next month. Once the latest tweaks have settled, or there isn’t some brush fire to put out over in Kamfuckingchatka. Meanwhile the glitches don’t even manifest in zombie mode so why should he care?”

“If they thought the implants were defective they wouldn’t keep sending us out on missions.”

“Eh.” Tiwana spreads her hands. “You say mission, I say field test. I mean, sure, camaraderie’s great— we’re the cutting edge, we can be ZeroS! But look at us, Jo. Silano was a Rio insurgent. Kalmus was up on insubordination charges. They scraped you and me off the ground like road kill. None of us are what you’d call summa cum laude.”

“Isn’t that the point? That anybody can be a super soldier?” Or at least, any body.

“We’re lab rats, Jo. They don’t want to risk frying their West Point grads with a beta release so they’re working out the bugs on us first. If the program was ready to go wide we wouldn’t still be here. Which means—” She heaves a sigh. “It’s the augs. At least, I hope it’s the augs.”

“You hope?”

“You’d rather believe Kally just went berserk and killed a civilian for no reason?”

He tries to ignore a probably-psychosomatic tingle at the back of his head. “Rossiter wouldn’t be talking reassignment if she had,” he admits. “She’d be talking court-martial.”

“She’ll never talk court-martial. Not where we’re concerned.”

“Really.”

“Think about it. You ever see any politician come by to make sure the taxpayer’s money’s being well-spent? You ever see a commissioned officer walking the halls who wasn’t Metzinger or Maddox or Rossiter?”

“So we’re off the books.” It’s hardly a revelation.

“We’re so far off the books we might as well be cave paintings. We don’t even know our own tooth-to-tail ratio. Ninety percent of our support infrastructure’s offsite, it’s all robots and teleops. We don’t even know who’s cutting into our own heads.” She leans close in the deepening gloom, fixes him with her good eye. “This is voodoo, Jo. Maybe the program started small with that kneejerk stuff, but now? You and I, we’re literal fucking zombies. We’re reanimated corpses dancing on strings, and if you think Persephone Q. Public is gonna be fine with that you have a lot more faith in her than I do. I don’t think Congress knows about us, I don’t think Parliament knows about us, I bet SOCOM doesn’t even know about us past some line in a budget that says psychological research. I don’t think they want to know. And when something’s that dark, are they really going to let anything as trivial as a judicial process drag it into the light?”

Asante shakes his head. “Still has to be accountability. Some kind of internal process.”

“There is. You disappear, and they tell everyone you’ve been reassigned.”

He thinks for a bit. “So what do we do?”

“First we riot in the mess hall. Then we march on Ottawa demanding equal rights for corpses.” She rolls her eyes. “We don’t do anything. Maybe you forgot: we died. We don’t legally exist anymore, and unless you got a way better deal than me the only way for either of us to change that is keep our heads down until we get our honorable discharges. I do not like being dead. I would very much like to go back to being officially alive some day. Until then…”

She takes the specs off her head. Powers them down.

“We watch our fucking step.”

 * * *

Ricochet

 Sgt. Kodjo Asante watches his fucking step. He watches it when he goes up against AIRheads and Realists. He watches it when pitted against well-funded private armies running on profit and ideology, against ragged makeshift ones driven by thirst and desperation, against rogue Darwin Banks and the inevitable religious extremists who— almost a quarter-century after the end of the Dark Decade—still haven’t stopped maiming and killing in the name of their Invisible Friends. His steps don’t really falter until twenty-one months into his tour, when he kills three unarmed children off the coast of Honduras.

ZeroS has risen from the depths of the Atlantic to storm one of the countless gylands that ride the major currents of the world’s oceans. Some are refugee camps with thousands of inhabitants; others serve as havens for hustlers and tax dodgers eager to avoid the constraints of more stationary jurisdictions. Some are military, sheathed in chromatophores and radar-damping nanotubes: bigger than airports, invisible to man or machine.

The Caçador de Recompensa is a fish farm, a family business registered out of Brazil: two modest hectares of low-slung superstructure on a donut hull with a cluster of net pens at its center. It is currently occupied by forces loyal to the latest incarnation of Shining Path. The Path thrives on supply lines with no fixed address— and as Metzinger reminded them on the way down, it’s always better to prevent a fight than win one. If the Path can’t feed their troops, maybe they won’t deploy them.

This is almost a mission of mercy.

Asante eavesdrops on the sounds of battle, takes in a mingled reek of oil and salt air and rotten fish, lets Evil Twin’s worldview wash across his eyes in a blur of light and the incomprehensible flicker of readouts with millisecond lifespans. Except during target acquisition, of course. Except for those brief stroboscopic instants when ET locks on, and faces freeze and blur in turn: a couple of coveralled SAsian men wielding Heckler-Kochs. A wounded antique ZhanLu staggering on two-and-a half-legs, the beam from its MAD gun wobbling wide of any conceivable target. Children in life jackets, two boys, one girl; Asante guesses their ages at between seven and ten. Each time the weapon kicks in his hands and an instant later ET is veering toward the next kill.

Emotions are sluggish things in Passenger mode. He feels nothing in the moment, shock in the aftermath. Horror’s still halfway to the horizon when a random ricochet slaps him back into the driver’s seat.

The bullet doesn’t penetrate— not much punches through the Chrysomalon armor wrapped tight around his skin— but vectors interact. Momentum passes from a small fast object to a large slow one. Asante’s brain lurches in its cavity; meat slaps bone and bounces back. Deep in all that stressed gray matter, some vital circuit shorts out.

There’s pain of course, blooming across the side of his head like napalm in those few seconds before his endocrine pumps damp it down. There’s fire in the BUD, a blaze of static and a crimson icon warning of zmode failure. But there’s a little miracle too:

Kodjo Asante can see again: a high sun in a hard blue sky. A flat far horizon. Columns of oily smoke rising from wrecked machinery.

Bodies.

The air cracks a few centimeters to his right. He drops instinctively to a deck slippery with blood and silver scales, gags at the sudden stench wafting from a slurry of bloated carcasses crowding the surface of the holding pen just in front of him. (Coho-Atlantic hybrids, he notes despite himself. Might even have those new Showell genes.) A turret on treads sparks and sizzles on the other side, a hole blown in its carapace.

A shadow blurs across Asante’s forearm. Tiwana leaps across the sky, defractors high on her forehead, eyeballs dancing madly in their sockets. She clears the enclosure, alights graceful as a dragonfly on one foot, kicks the spastic turret with the other. It sparks one last time and topples into the pen. Tiwana vanishes down the nearest companionway.

Asante gets to his feet, pans for threats, sees nothing but enemies laid waste: the smoking stumps of perimeter autoturrets, the fallen bodies of a man with his arm blown off and a woman groping for a speargun just beyond reach. And a small brittle figure almost fused to the deck: blackened sticks for arms and legs, white teeth grinning in a charred skull, a bright half-melted puddle of orange fabric and PVC holding it all together. Asante sees it all. Not just snapshots glimpsed through the fog: ZeroS handiwork, served up for the first time in three-sixty wraparound immersion.

We’re killing children…

Even the adult bodies don’t look like combatants. Refugees, maybe, driven to take by force what they couldn’t get any other way. Maybe all they wanted was to get somewhere safe. To feed their kids.

At his feet, a reeking carpet of dead salmon converge listlessly in the wake of the fallen turret. They aren’t feeding anything but hagfish and maggots.

I have become Sāḥilite, Asante reflects numbly. He calls up BUD, ignores the unreadable auras flickering around the edges of vision, selects GPS.

Not off Honduras. They’re in the Gulf of Mexico.

No one in their right mind would run a fish farm here. The best parts of the Gulf are anoxic; the worst are downright flammable. Caçador must have drifted up through the Yucatan Channel, got caught in an eddy loop. All these fish would have suffocated as soon as they hit the dead zone.

But gylands aren’t entirely at the mercy of the currents. They carry rudimentary propulsion systems for docking and launching, switching streams and changing course. Caçador‘s presence so deep in the Gulf implies either catastrophic equipment failure or catastrophic ignorance.

Asante can check out the first possibility, anyway. He stumbles toward the nearest companionway—

—as Tiwana and Acosta burst onto deck from below. Acosta seizes his right arm, Tiwana his left. Neither slows. Asante’s feet bounce and drag. The lurching acceleration reawakens the pain in his temple.

He cries out: “The engines…”

New pain, other side, sharp and recurrent: an ancient weight belt swinging back and forth across Acosta’s torso, a frayed strip of nylon threaded through an assortment of lead slugs. It’s like being hammered by a tiny wrecking ball. One part of Asante wonders where Acosta found it; another watches Garin race into view with a small bloody body slung across his shoulder. Garin passes one of the dismembered turrets, grabs a piece with his free hand and keeps running.

Everyone’s charging for the rails.

Tiwana’s mouthpiece is in, her defractors down. She empties a clip into the deck ahead, right at the water’s edge: gunfire shreds plastic and whitewashed fiberglass, loosens an old iron docking cleat. She dips and grabs in passing, draws it to her chest, never loosening her grip on Asante. He hears the soft pop of a bone leaving its socket in the instant before they all go over the side.

They plummet head-first, dragged down by a hundred kilograms of improvised ballast. Asante chokes, jams his mouthpiece into place; coughs seawater through the exhaust and sucks in a hot lungful of fresh-sparked hydrox. Pressure builds against his eardrums. He swallows, swallows again, manages to keep a few millibars ahead of outright rupture. He has just enough freedom of movement to claw at his face and slide the defractors over his eyes. The ocean clicks into focus, clear as acid, empty as green glass.

Green turns white.

Seen in that flash-blinded instant: four thin streams of bubbles, rising to a surface gone suddenly incandescent. Four dark bodies, falling from the light. A thunderclap rolls through the water, deep, downshifted, as much felt as heard. It comes from nowhere and everywhere.

The roof of the ocean is on fire. Some invisible force shreds their contrails from the top down, tears those bubbles into swirling silver confetti. The wave-front races implacably after them. The ocean bulges, recoils. It squeezes Asante like a fist, stretches him like rubber; Tiwana and Acosta tumble away in the backwash. He flails, stabilizes himself as the first jagged shapes resolve overhead: dismembered chunks of the booby-trapped gyland, tumbling with slow majesty into the depths. A broken wedge of deck and stairwell passes by a few meters away, tangled in monofilament. A thousand glassy eyes stare back from the netting as the wreckage fades to black.

Asante scans the ocean for that fifth bubble trail, that last dark figure to balance Those Who Left against Those Who Returned. No one overhead. Below, a dim shape that has to be Garin shares its mouthpiece with the small limp thing in his arms. Beyond that, the hint of a deeper dark against the abyss: a shark-like silhouette keeping station amid a slow rain of debris. Waiting to take its prodigal children home again.

They’re too close to shore. There might be witnesses. So much for stealth ops. So much for low profiles and no-questions-asked. Metzinger’s going to be pissed.

Then again, they are in the Gulf of Mexico.

Any witnesses will probably just think it caught fire again.

 * * *

Lady Grinning Soul

“In your own words, Sergeant. Take your time.”

We killed children. We killed children, and we lost Silano, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know if you do either.

But of course, that would involve taking Major Emma Rossiter at her word.

“Did the child…?” Metzinger had already tubed Garin’s prize by the time Asante had reboarded the sub. Garin, of course, had no idea what his body had been doing. Metzinger had not encouraged discussion.

That was okay. Nobody was really in the mood anyhow.

“I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.” Rossiter waits for what she probably regards as a respectful moment. “If we could focus on the subject at hand…”

“It was a shitstorm,” Asante says. “Sir.”

“We gathered that.” The Major musters a sympathetic smile. “We were hoping you could provide more in the way of details.”

“You must have the logs.”

“Those are numbers, Sergeant. Pixels. You are uniquely— if accidentally— in a position to give us more than that.”

“I never even got below decks.”

Rossiter seems to relax a little. “Still. This is the first time one of you has been debooted in mid-game, and it’s obviously not the kind of thing we want to risk repeating. Maddox is already working on ways to make the toggle more robust. In the meantime, your perspective could be useful in helping to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

“My perspective, sir, is that those forces did not warrant our particular skill set.”

“We’re more interested in your experiences regarding the deboot, Sergeant. Was there a sense of disorientation, for example? Any visual artifacts in BUD?”

Asante stands with his hands behind his back— good gripping bad— and says nothing.

“Very well.” Rossiter’s smile turns grim. “Let’s talk about your perspective, then. Do you think regular forces would have been sufficient? Do you have a sense of the potential losses incurred if we’d sent, say, WestHem marines?”

“They appeared to be refugees, sir. They didn’t pose—”

“One hundred percent, Sergeant. We would have lost everyone.”

Asante says nothing.

“Unaugged soldiers wouldn’t even have made it off the gyland before it went up. Even if they had, the p-wave would’ve been fatal if you hadn’t greatly increased your rate of descent. Do you think regular forces would have made that call? Seen what was coming, run the numbers, improvised a strategy to get below the kill zone in less time than it would take to shout a command?”

“We killed children.” It’s barely more than a whisper.

“Collateral damage is an unfortunate but inevitable—”

“We targeted children.”

“Ah.”

Rossiter plays with her tacpad: tap tap tap, swipe.

“These children,” she says at last. “Were they armed?”

“I do not believe so, sir.”

“Were they naked?”

“Sir?”

“Could you be certain they weren’t carrying concealed weapons? Maybe even a remote trigger for a thousand kilograms of CL-20?”

“They were— sir, they couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you about child soldiers, Sergeant. They’ve been a fact of life for centuries, especially in your particular—at any rate. Just out of interest, how young would someone have to be before you’d rule them out as a potential threat?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Yes you do. You did. That’s why you targeted them.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Of course. It was your— evil twin. That’s what you call it, right?” Rossiter leans forward. “Listen to me very carefully, Sergeant Asante, because I think you’re laboring under some serious misapprehensions about what we do here. Your twin is not evil, and it is not gratuitous. It is you: a much bigger part of you than the whiny bitch standing in front of me right now.”

Asante clenches his teeth and keeps his mouth shut.

“This gut feeling giving you so much trouble. This sense of Right and Wrong. Where do you think it comes from, Sergeant?”

“Experience. Sir.”

“It’s the result of a calculation. A whole series of calculations, far too complex to fit into the conscious workspace. So the subconscious sends you— an executive summary, you might call it. Your evil twin knows all about your sense of moral outrage; it’s the source of it. It has more information than you do. Processes it more effectively. Maybe you should trust it to know what it’s doing.”

He doesn’t. He doesn’t trust her, either.

But suddenly, surprisingly, he understands her.

She’s not just making a point. This isn’t just rhetoric. The insight appears fully formed in his mind, a bright shard of unexpected clarity. She thought it would be easy. She really doesn’t know what happened.

He watches her fingers move on the ‘pad as she speaks. Notes the nervous flicker of her tongue at the corner of her mouth. She glances up to meet his eye, glances away again.

She’s scared.

 * * *

Look Back in Anger

Asante awakens standing in the meadow up the mountain. The sky is cloudless and full of stars. His fatigues are damp with sweat or dew. There is no moon. Black conifers loom on all sides. To the east, a hint of pre-dawn orange seeps through the branches.

He has read that this was once the time of the dawn chorus, when songbirds would call out in ragged symphony to start the day. He has never heard it. He doesn’t hear it now. There’s no sound in this forest but his own breathing—

— and the snap of a twig under someone’s foot.

He turns. A gray shape detaches itself from the darkness.

“Fellow corpse,” Tiwana says.

“Fellow corpse,” he responds.

“You wandered off. Thought I’d tag along. Make sure you didn’t go AWOL.”

“I think ET’s acting up again.”

“Maybe you’re just sleepwalking. People sleepwalk sometimes.” She shrugs. “Probably the same wiring anyway.”

“Sleepwalkers don’t kill people.”

“Actually, that’s been known to happen.”

He clears his throat. “Did, um…”

“No one else knows you’re up here.”

“Did ET disable the pickups?”

“I did.”

“Thanks.”

“Any time.”

Asante looks around. “I remember the first time I saw this place. It was— magical.”

“I was thinking more ironic.” Adding, at Asante’s look: “You know. That one of the last pristine spots in this whole shit-show owes its existence to the fact that WestHem needs someplace private to teach us how to blow shit up.”

“Count on you,” Asante says.

The stars are fading. Venus is hanging in there, though.

“You’ve been weird,” she observes. “Ever since the thing with Caçador.”

“It was a weird thing.”

“So I hear.” Shrug. “I guess you had to be there.”

He musters a smile. “So you don’t remember…”

“Legs running down. Legs running back up. My zombie never targeted anything so I don’t know what she saw.”

“Metzinger does. Rossiter does.” He leans his ass against a convenient boulder. “Does it ever bother you? That you don’t know what your own eyes are seeing, and they do?”

“Not really. Just the way it works.”

“We don’t know what we’re doing out there. When was the last time Maddox even showed us a highlight reel?” He feels the muscles clenching in his jaw. “We could be war criminals.”

“There is no we. Not when it matters.” She sits beside him. “Besides. Our zombies may be nonconscious but they’re not stupid; they know we’re obligated to disobey unlawful commands.”

“Maybe they know. Not sure Maddox’s compliance circuit would let them do anything about it.”

Somewhere nearby a songbird clears its throat.

Tiwana takes a breath. “Suppose you’re right— not saying you are, but suppose they sent us out to gun down a gyland full of harmless refugees. Forget that Caçador was packing enough explosives to blow up a hamlet, forget that it killed Silano— hell, nearly killed us all. If Metzinger decides to bash in someone’s innocent skull, you still don’t blame the hammer he used.”

“And yet. Someone’s skull is still bashed in.”

Across the clearing, another bird answers. The dawn duet.

“There must be reasons,” she says, as if trying it on for size.

He remembers reasons from another life, on another continent: retribution. The making of examples. Poor impulse control. Just— fun, sometimes.

“Such as.”

“I don’t know, okay? Big Picture’s way above our pay grade. But that doesn’t mean you toss out the chain of command every time someone gives you an order without a twenty-gig backgrounder to go with it. If you want me to believe we’re in thrall to a bunch of fascist baby killers, you’re gonna need more than a few glimpses of something you may have seen on a gyland.”

“How about, I don’t know. All of human history?”

Venus is gone at last. The rising sun streaks the clearing with gold.

“It’s the deal we made. Sure, it’s a shitty one. Only shittier one is being dead. But would you choose differently, even now? Go back to being fish food?”

He honestly doesn’t know.

“We should be dead, Jo. Every one of these moments is a gift.”

He regards her with a kind of wonder. “I never know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Channel Schopenhauer and Pollyanna at the same time without your head exploding.”

She takes his hand for a moment, squeezes briefly. Rises. “We’re gonna make it. Just so long as we don’t rock the boat. All the way to that honorable fucking discharge.” She turns to the light; sunrise glows across her face. “Until then, in case you were wondering, I’ve got your back.”

“There is no you,” he reminds her. “Not when it matters.”

“I’ve got your back,” she says.

 * * *

Watch That Man

They’ve outsourced Silano’s position, brought in someone none of them have ever seen before. Technically he’s one of them, though the scars that tag him ZeroS have barely had time to heal. Something about him is wrong. Something about the way he moves; his insignia. Not Specialist or Corporal or Sergeant.

“I want you to meet Lieutenant Jim Moore,” Rossiter tells them.

ZeroS finally have a commissioned secco. He’s easily the youngest person in the room.

He gets right to it. “This is the Nanisivik mine.” The satcam wall zooms down onto the roof of the world. “Baffin Island, seven hundred fifty klicks north of the Arctic Circle, heart of the Slush Belt.” A barren fractured landscape of red and ocher. Drumlins and hillocks and bifurcating stream beds.

“Tapped out at the turn of the century.” A brown road, undulating along some scoured valley floor. A cluster of buildings. A gaping mouth in the Earth. “These days people generally stay away, on account of its remote location. Also on account of the eight thousand metric tons of high-level nuclear waste the Canadian government brought over from India for deep-time storage. Part of an initiative to diversify the northern economy, apparently.” Tactical schematics, now: Processing and Intake. Train tracks corkscrewing into the Canadian Shield. Storage tunnels branching like the streets of an underground subdivision. “Project was abandoned after the Greens lost power in ’38.

“You could poison a lot of cities with this stuff. Which may be why someone’s messing around there now.”

Garin’s hand is up. “Someone, sir?”

“So far all we have are signs of unauthorized activity and a JTFN quad that went in and never came out. Our first priority is to identify the actors. Depending on what we find, we might take care of it ourselves. Or we might call in the bombers. Won’t know until we get there.”

And we won’t know even then, Asante muses— and realizes, in that moment, what it is about Moore that strikes him as so strange.

“We’ll be prepping your better halves with the operational details en route.”

It’s not what is, it’s what isn’t: no tic at the corner of the eye, no tremor in the hand. His speech is smooth and perfect, his eyes make contact with steady calm. Lieutenant Moore doesn’t glitch.

“For now, we anticipate a boots-down window of no more than seven hours—”

Asante looks at Tiwana. Tiwana looks back.

ZeroS are out of beta.

 * * *

Subterraneans

The Lockheed drops them at the foot of a crumbling pier. Derelict shops and listing trailers, long abandoned, huddle against the sleeting rain. This used to be a seaport; then a WestHem refueling station back before WestHem was even a word, before the apocalyptic Arctic weather made it easier to just stick everything underwater. It lived its short life as a company town, an appendage of the mine, in the days before Nanisivik was emptied of its valuables and filled up again.

BUD says 1505: less than an hour if they want to be on target by sundown. Moore leads them overland across weathered stone and alluvial washouts and glistening acned Martian terrain. They’re fifteen hundred meters from the mouth of the repository when he orders them all into the back seat.

Asante’s legs, under new management, pick up the pace. His vision blurs. At least up here, in the wind and blinding sleet, it doesn’t make much difference.

A sound drifts past: the roar of some distant animal, perhaps. Nearer, the unmistakable discharge of an ε-40. Not ET’s. Asante’s eyes remain virtuously clouded.

The wind dies in the space of a dozen steps. Half as many again and the torrent of icy needles on his face slows to a patter, a drizzle. Asante hears great bolts unlatching, a soft screech of heavy metal. They pass through some portal and the bright overcast in his eyes dims by half. Buckles and bootsteps echo faintly against rock walls.

Downhill. A gentle curve to the left. Gravel, patches of broken asphalt. His feet step over unseen obstacles.

And stop.

The whole squad must have frozen; he can’t hear so much as a breath. The supersaccadic tickertape flickering across the fog seems faster. Could be his imagination. Off in some subterranean distance, water drip-drip-drips onto a still surface.

Quiet movement as ZeroS spreads out. Asante’s just a passenger but he reads the footsteps, feels his legs taking him sideways, kneeling. The padding on his elbows doesn’t leave much room for fine-grained tactile feedback but the surface he’s bracing against is flat and rough, like a table sheathed in sandpaper.

There’s a musky animal smell in the air. From somewhere in the middle distance, a soft whuffle. The stirring of something huge in slow, sleepy motion.

Maybe someone left the door open, and something got in…

Pizzly bears are the only animals that come to mind: monstrous hybrids, birthed along the boundaries of stressed ecosystems crashing into each other. He’s never seen one in the flesh.

A grunt. A low growl.

The sound of building speed.

Gunshots. A roar, deafeningly close, and a crash of metal against metal. The flickering tactical halo dims abruptly: network traffic just dropped by a node.

Now the whole network crashes: pawn exchange, ZeroS sacrificing their own LAN as the price of jamming the enemy’s. Moore’s MAD gun snaps to the right. An instant of scorching heat as the beam sweeps across Asante’s arm; Moore shooting wide, Moore missing. ET breaks cover, leaps and locks. For one crystalline millisecond Asante sees a wall of coarse ivory-brown fur close enough to touch, every follicle in perfect focus.

The clouds close in. ET pulls the trigger.

A bellow. The scrape of great claws against stone. The reek is overpowering but ET’s already pirouetting after fresh game and click the freeze-frame glimpse of monstrous ursine jaws in a face wide as a doorway and click small brown hands raised against an onrushing foe and click a young boy with freckles and strawberry blond hair and Asante’s blind again but he feels ET pulling on the trigger, pop pop pop—

Whatthefuck children whatthefuck whatthefuck

— and ET’s changed course again and Click: a small back a fur coat black hair flying in the light of the muzzle flash.

Not again. Not again.

Child soldiers. Suicide bombers. For centuries.

But no one’s shooting back.

He knows the sound of every weapon the squad might use, down to the smallest pop and click: the sizzle of the MAD gun, the bark of the Epsilon, Acosta’s favorite Olympic. He hears them now; those, and no others. Whatever they’re shooting at isn’t returning fire.

Whatever we’re shooting at. You blind murderous twaaaaase. You’re shooting eight-year-olds.

Again.

More gunfire. Still no voices but for a final animal roar that gives way to a wet gurgle and the heavy slap of meat on stone.

It’s a nuclear waste repository at the north pole. What are children even doing here?

What am I?

What am I?

And suddenly he sees the words, All tautologies are tautologies and ET’s back downstairs and the basement door locks and Kodjo Asante grabs frantically for the reins, and takes back his life, and opens his eyes:

In time to see the little freckled boy, dressed in ragged furs, sitting on Riley Garin’s shoulders and dragging a jagged piece of glass across his throat. In time to see him leap free of the body and snatch Garin’s gun, toss it effortlessly across this dimly-lit cave to an Asian girl clad only in a filthy loincloth, who’s sailing through the air toward a bloodied Jim Moore. In time to see that girl reach behind her and catch the gun in midair without so much as a backward glance.

More than a dance, more than teamwork. Like digits on the same hand, moving together.

The pizzly’s piled up against a derelict forklift, a giant tawny thing raking the air with massive claws even as it bleeds out through the hole in its flank. A SAsian child with his left hand blown off at the wrist (maybe that was me) dips and weaves around the fallen behemoth. He’s— using it, exploiting the sweep of its claws and teeth as a kind of exclusion zone guaranteed to maul anyone within three meters. Somehow those teeth and claws never seem to connect with him.

They’ve connected with Acosta, though. Carlos Acosta, lover of sunlight and the great outdoors lies there broken at the middle, staring at nothing.

Garin finally crashes to the ground, blood gushing from his throat.

They’re just children. In rags. Unarmed.

The girl rebounds between rough-hewn tunnel walls and calcified machinery, lines up the shot with Garin’s weapon. Her bare feet never seem to touch the ground.

They’re children they’re just—

Tiwana slams him out of the way as the beam sizzles past. The air shimmers and steams. Asante’s head cracks against gears and conduits and ribbed metal, bounces off steel onto rock. Tiwana lands on top of him, eyes twitching in frantic little arcs.

And stopping.

It’s a moment of pure panic, seeing those eyes freeze and focus— she doesn’t know me she’s locking on she’s locking on— but something shines through from behind and Asante can see that her eyes aren’t target-locked at all. They’re just looking.

“…Sofiyko?”

Whatever happens, I’ve got your back.

But Sofiyko’s gone, if she was ever even there.

 * * *

Blackout

Moore hands him off to Metzinger. Metzinger regards him without a word, with a look that speaks volumes: flips a switch and drops him into Passenger mode. He doesn’t tell Asante to stay there. He doesn’t have to.

Asante feels the glassy pane of a tacpad under ET’s hand. That hand rests deathly still for seconds at a time; erupts into a flurry of inhumanly-fast taps and swipes; pauses again. Out past the bright blur in Asante’s eyes, the occasional cough or murmur is all that punctuates the muted roar of the Lockheed’s engines.

ET is under interrogation. A part of Asante wonders what it’s saying about him, but he can’t really bring himself to care.

He can’t believe they’re gone.

 * * *

No Control

“Sergeant Asante.” Major Rossiter shakes her head. “We had such hopes for you.”

Acosta. Garin. Tiwana.

“Nothing to say?”

So very much. But all that comes out is the same old lie: “They were just…children…”

“Perhaps we can carve that on the gravestones of your squadmates.”

“But who—”

“We don’t know. We’d suspect Realists, if the tech itself wasn’t completely antithetical to everything they stand for. If it wasn’t way past their abilities.”

“They were barely even clothed. It was like a nest…”

“More like a hive, Sergeant.”

Digits on the same hand…

“Not like you,” she says, as if reading his mind. “ZeroS networking is quite— inefficient, when you think about it. Multiple minds in multiple heads, independently acting on the same information and coming to the same conclusion. Needless duplication of effort.”

“And these…”

“Multiple heads. One mind.”

“We jammed the freqs. Even if they were networked—”

“We don’t think they work like that. Best guess is— bioradio, you could call it. Like a quantum-entangled corpus callosum.” She snorts. “Of course, at this point they could say it was elves and I’d have to take their word for it.”

Caçador, Asante remembers. They’ve learned a lot from one small stolen corpse.

“Why use children?” he whispers.

“Oh, Kodjo.” Asante blinks at the lapse; Rossiter doesn’t seem to notice. “Using children is the last thing they want to do. Why do you think they’ve been stashed in the middle of the ocean, or down some Arctic mineshaft? We’re not talking about implants. This is genetic, they were born. They have to be protected, hidden away until they grow up and… ripen.”

“Protected? By abandoning them in a nuclear waste site?”

“Abandoning them, yes. Completely defenseless. As you saw.” When he says nothing, she continues: “It’s actually a perfect spot. No neighbors. Lots of waste heat to keep you warm, run your greenhouses, mask your heatprint. No supply lines for some nosy satellite to notice. No telltale EM. From what we can tell there weren’t even any adults on the premises, they just — lived off the land, so to speak. Not even any weapons of their own, or at least they didn’t use any. Used bears, of all things. Used your own guns against you. Maybe they’re minimalists, value improvisation.” She sacc’s something onto her pad. “Maybe they just want to keep us guessing.”

“Children.” He can’t seem to stop saying it.

“For now. Wait ’til they hit puberty.” Rossiter sighs. “We bombed the site, of course. Slagged the entrance. If any of ours were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be getting out. Then again we’re not talking about us, are we? We’re talking about a single distributed organism with God-know-how-many times the computational mass of a normal human brain. I’d be very surprised if it couldn’t anticipate and counter anything we planned. Still. We do what we can.”

Neither speaks for a few moments.

“And I’m sorry, Sergeant,” she says finally. “I’m so sorry it’s come to this. We do what we’ve always done. Feed you stories so you won’t be compromised, so you won’t compromise us when someone catches you and starts poking your amygdala. But the switch was for your protection. We don’t know who we’re up against. We don’t know how many hives are out there, what stage of gestation any of them have reached, how many may have already— matured. All we know is that a handful of unarmed children can slaughter our most elite forces at will, and we are so very unready for the world to know that.

“But you know, Sergeant. You dropped out of the game— which may well have cost us the mission— and now you know things that are way above your clearance.

“Tell me. If our positions were reversed, what would you do?”

Asante closes his eyes. We should be dead. Every one of these moments is a gift. When he opens them again Rossiter’s watching, impassive as ever.

“I should’ve died up there. I should have died off Takoradi two years ago.”

The Major snorts. “Don’t be melodramatic, Sergeant. We’re not going to execute you.”

“I— what?”

“We’re not even going to court-martial you.”

“Why the hell not?” And at her raised eyebrow: “Sir. You said it yourself: unauthorized drop-out. Middle of a combat situation.”

“We’re not entirely certain that was your decision.”

“It felt like my decision.”

“It always does though, doesn’t it?” Rossiter pushes back in her chair. “We didn’t create your evil twin, Sergeant. We didn’t even put it in control. We just got you out of the way, so it could do what it always does without interference.

“Only now, it apparently— wants you back.”

This takes a moment to sink in. “What?”

“Frontoparietal logs suggest your zombie took a certain— initiative. Decided to quit.”

“In combat? That would be suicide!”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

He looks away.

“No? Don’t like that hypothesis? Well, here’s another: it surrendered. Moore got you out, after all, which was statistically unlikely the way things were going. Maybe dropping out was a white flag, and the hive took pity and let you go so you could— I don’t know, spread the word: don’t fuck with us.

“Or maybe it decided the hive deserved to win, and switched sides. Maybe it was— conscientiously objecting. Maybe it decided it never enlisted in the first place.”

Asante decides he doesn’t like the sound of the Major’s laugh.

“You must have asked it,” he says.

“A dozen different ways. Zombies might be analytically brilliant but they’re terrible at self-reflection. They can tell you exactly what they did but not necessarily why.”

“When did you ever care about motive?” His tone verges on insubordination; he’s too empty to care. “Just— tell it to stay in control. It has to obey you, right? That orbitofrontal thing. The compliance mod.”

“Absolutely. But it wasn’t your twin who dropped out. It was you, when it unleashed the mandala.”

“So order it not to show me the mandala.”

“We’d love to. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us what it looks like?”

It’s Asante’s turn to laugh. He sucks at it.

“I didn’t think so. Not that it matters. At this point we can’t trust you either— again, not entirely your fault. Given the degree to which conscious and unconscious processes are interconnected, it may have been premature to try and separate them so completely, right off the bat.” She winces, as if in sympathy. “I can’t imagine it’s much fun for you either, being cooped up in that skull with nothing to do.”

“Maddox said there was no way around it.”

“That was true. When he said it.” Eyes downcast now, saccing the omnipresent ‘pad. “We weren’t planning on field-testing the new mod just yet, but with Kalmus and now you— I don’t see much choice but to advance implementation by a couple of months.”

He’s never felt more dead inside. Even when he was.

“Haven’t you stuck enough pins in us?” By which he means me, of course. By process of elimination.

For a moment, the Major almost seems sympathetic.

“Yes, Kodjo. Just one last modification. I don’t think you’ll even mind this one— because next time you wake up, you’ll be a free man. Your tour will be over.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

Asante looks down. Frowns.

“What is it, Sergeant?”

“Nothing,” he says. And regards his steady, unwavering left hand with distant wonder.

 * * *

Lazarus

Renata Baermann comes back screaming. She’s staring at the ceiling, pinned under something— the freezer, that’s it. Big industrial thing. She was in the kitchen when the bombs hit. It must have fallen.

She thinks it’s crushed her legs.

The fighting seems to be over. She hears no small-arms fire, no whistle of incoming ordnance. The air’s still filled with screams but they’re just gulls, come to feast in the aftermath. She’s lucky she was inside; those vicious little air rats would have pecked her eyes out by now if she’d been—

—Blackness—

¡Joder! Where am I? Oh, right. Bleeding out at the bottom of the Americas, after…

She doesn’t know. Maybe this was payback for the annexation of Tierra del Fuego. Or maybe it’s the Lifeguards, wreaking vengeance on all those who’d skip town after trampling the world to mud and shit. This is a staging area, after all: a place where human refuse congregates until the pressure builds once again, and another bolus gets shat across the Drake Passage to the land of milk and honey and melting glaciers. The sphincter of the Americas.

She wonders when she got so cynical. Not very seemly for a humanitarian.

She coughs. Tastes blood.

Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside, quick, confident, not the shell-shocked stumble you’d expect from anyone who’s just experienced apocalypse. She fumbles for her gun: a cheap microwave thing, barely boils water but it helps level the field when a fifty kg woman has to lay down the law to a man with twice the mass and ten times the entitlement issues. Better than nothing.

Or it would be, if it was still in its holster. If it hadn’t somehow skidded up against a table leg a meter and a half to her left. She stretches for it, screams again; feels like she’s just torn herself in half as the kitchen door slams open and she—

—blacks out—

—and comes back with the gun miraculously in her hand, her finger pumping madly against the stud, mosquito buzz-snap filling her ears and—

—she’s wracked, coughing blood, too weak keep firing even if the man in the WestHem uniform hadn’t just taken her gun away.

He looks down at her from a great height. His voice echoes from the bottom of a well. He doesn’t seem to be speaking to her: “Behind the mess hall—”

—English—

“—fatal injuries, maybe fifteen minutes left in her and she’s still fighting—”

When she wakes up again the pain’s gone and her vision’s blurry. The man has changed from white to black. Or maybe it’s a different man. Hard to tell through all these floaters.

“Renata Baermann.” His voice sounds strangely— unused, somehow. As if he were trying it out for the first time.

There’s something else about him. She squints, forces her eyes to focus. The lines of his uniform resolve in small painful increments. No insignia. She moves her gaze to his face.

“Coño,” she manages at last. Her voice is barely a whisper. She sounds like a ghost. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Renata Baermann,” he says again. “Have I got a deal for you.”

(Profound thanks to Jordan Blanch, Jason Knowlton, Leona Ludderodt, and Steve Perry for their patience and expertise—PW.)

“ZeroS” by Peter Watts, reprinted from Infinity Wars, copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Strahan.

The post ZeroS appeared first on Reactor.

Franny Travers is a cartographer of exceptional ability. From her house high above the cascading hills of San Francisco, she creates maps that, when folded properly, can transform space. This is her gift. These temporary new alignments of the world open improbable passages, a last resort when politics or geography make escape impossible.

If you like this story, join Franny and her friends for more adventures on the borders of magic and science in Klages’ Passing Strange, available from Tor.com Publishing.

“Caligo Lane”

Even with the Golden Gate newly bridged and the ugly hulks of battleships lining the bay, San Francisco is well-suited to magic. It is not a geometric city, but full of hidden alleys and twisted lanes. Formed by hills and surrounded by water, its weather transforms its geography, a fog that erases landmarks, cloaking and enclosing as the rest of the world disappears.

That may be an illusion; most magic is. Maps of the city are replete with misdirection. Streets drawn as straight lines may in fact be stairs or a crumbling brick path, or they may dead end for a block or two, then reappear under another name.

Caligo Lane is one such street, most often reached by an accident that cannot be repeated.

In Barbary Coast bars, sailors awaiting orders to the Pacific hear rumors. Late at night, drunk on cheap gin and bravado, they try walking up Jones Street, so steep that shallow steps are cut into the middle of the concrete sidewalk. Near the crest of the hill, the lane may be on their right. Others stumble over to Taylor until they reach the wooden staircase that zigzags up a sheer wall. Caligo Lane is sometimes at the top ― unless the stairs have wound around to end at the foot of Jones Street again. A lovely view of the bay is a consolation.

When it does welcome visitors, Caligo Lane is a single block, near the crest of the Bohemian enclave known as Russian Hill. Houses crowd one edge of a mossy cobblestone path; they face a rock-walled tangle of ferns and eucalyptus, vines as thick as a man’s arm, moist earth overlaid with a pale scent of flowers.

Number 67 is in the middle, a tall, narrow house, built when the rest of the town was still brawling in the mud. It has bay windows and a copper-domed cupola, although the overhanging branches of a gnarled banyan tree make that difficult to see. The knocker on the heavy oak door is a Romani symbol, a small wheel wrought in polished brass.

Franny has lived here since the Great Fire. She is a cartographer by trade, a geometer of irregular surfaces. Her house is full of maps.

A small woman who favors dark slacks and loose tunics, she is one of the last of her line, a magus of exceptional abilities. Her hair is jet-black, cut in a blunt bob, bangs straight as rulers, a style that has not been in vogue for decades. She smokes odiferous cigarettes in a long jade-green holder.

The ground floor of number 67 is unremarkable. A small entryway, a hall leading to bedrooms and a bath. But on the right, stairs lead up to a single, large room, not as narrow as below. A comfortable couch and armchairs with their attendant tables surround intricate ancient rugs. A vast library table is strewn with open books, pens and calipers, and scrap paper covered in a jumble of numbers and notations.

Facing north, a wall of atelier windows, reminiscent of Paris, angles in to the ceiling. Seven wide panes span the width of the room, thin dividers painted the green of young spinach. Beyond the glass, ziggurats of stone walls and white houses cascade vertically down to the bay and Alcatraz and the blue-distant hills.

Visitors from more conventional places may feel dizzy and need to sit; it is unsettling to stand above a neighbor’s roof.

Bookshelves line two walls, floor-to-ceiling. Many titles are in unfamiliar alphabets. Tall art books, dense buckram treatises, mathematical apocrypha: swaths of cracked, crumbling leather spines with gilt letters too worn to decipher. Four flat cases hold maps, both ancient and modern, in a semblance of order.

Other maps are piled and folded, indexed or spread about willy-nilly. They are inked on scraps of parchment, cut from old textbooks, acquired at service stations with a fill-up of gas. They show Cape Abolesco and Dychmygol Bay and the edges of the Salajene Desert, none of which have ever been explored. On a cork wall, round-headed pins stud a large map of Europe. Franny moves them daily as the radio brings news of the unrelenting malignance of the war.

At the far end of the room, a circular staircase helixes up. Piles of books block easy access, less a barricade than an unrealized intent to reshelve and reorganize.

There will be much to do before the fog rolls in.

The stairs lead to the center of the cupola, an octagonal room with a hinged window at each windrose point. Beneath them is a sill wide enough to hold an open newspaper or atlas, a torus of horizontal surface that circles the room, the polished wood stained with ink, scarred in places by pins and tacks and straight-edged steel, scattered with treasured paperweights: worn stones from the banks of the Vistula, prisms, milleflora hemispheres of heavy Czech glass.

Even in a city of hills, the room has unobstructed views that allow Franny to work in any direction. A canvas chair on casters sits, for the moment, facing southwest. On the sill in front of it, a large square of Portuguese cork lies waiting.

Downstairs, on this clear, sunny afternoon, Franny sits at the library table, a postcard from her homeland resting beside her teacup. She recognizes the handwriting; the postmark is obscured by the ink of stamps and redirections. Not even the mailman can reliably find her house.

She glances at the card one more time. The delayed delivery makes her work even more urgent. She opens a ledger, leafing past pages with notes on scale and symbol, diagrams and patterns, and arcane jottings, turning to a blank sheet. She looks again at the postcard, blue-inked numbers its only message:

50°-02’-09” N 19°-10’-42” E

Plotting this single journey will take weeks of her time, years from her life. But she must. She glances at the pin-studded map. When geography or politics makes travel or escape impossible, she is the last resort. Each life saved is a mitzvah.

Franny flexes her fingers, and begins. Each phase has its own timing and order; the calculations alone are byzantine. Using her largest atlas she locates the general vicinity of the coordinates, near the small village of Oświecim. It takes her all night to uncover a chart detailed enough to show the topography with precision. She walks her calipers from point to point like a two-legged spider as she computes the progressions that will lead to the final map.

For days she smokes and mutters as she measures, plotting points and rhumb lines that expand and shrink with the proportions of the landscape. The map must be drawn to the scale of the journey. She feels the weight of time passing, but cannot allow haste, sleeping only when her hands begin to shake, the numbers illegible. Again and again she manipulates her slide rule, scribbles numbers on a pad, and traces shapes onto translucent vellum, transferring the necessary information until at last she has a draft that accurately depicts both entrance and egress.

She grinds her inks and pigments ― lampblack and rare earths mixed with a few drops of her own blood — and trims a sheet of white linen paper to a large square. For a week, the house is silent save for the whisper of tiny sable brushes and the scritch of pens with thin steel nibs.

When she has finished and the colors are dry, she carries the map upstairs and lays it on the cork. Using a round-headed steel pin, she breaches the paper’s integrity twice: a single, precise hole at the village, another at Caligo Lane. She transfers the positions onto gridded tissue, and pulls the map free, weighting its corners so that it lies flat on the varnished sill.

She has done what she can. She allows herself a full night’s rest.

In the morning she makes a pot of tea and toast with jam, then clears the library table, moving her map-making tools to one side, and opens a black leather case that contains a flat, pale knife made of bone, and a portfolio with dozens of squares of bright paper. She looks around the room. What form must this one take?

Scattered among the dark-spined tomes are small angular paper figurines. Some are geometric shapes; others resemble birds and animals, basilisks and chimeras. Decades before he was exiled to Manzanar, a Japanese calligrapher and amateur conjuror taught her the ancient art of ori-kami, yet unknown in this country.

The secret of ori-kami is that a single sheet of paper can be folded in a nearly infinite variety of patterns, each resulting in a different transformation of the available space. Given any two points, it is possible to fold a line that connects them. A map is a menu of possible paths. When Franny folds one of her own making, instead of plain paper, she creates a new alignment of the world, opening improbable passages from one place to another.

Once, when she was young and in a temper, she crumpled one into a ball and threw it across the room, muttering curses. A man in Norway found himself in an unnamed desert, confused and over-dressed. His journey did not end well.

The Japanese army might call this art ori-chizu, “map folding,” but fortunately they are unaware of its power.

Franny knows a thousand ori-kami patterns. Finding the correct orientation for the task requires a skilled eye and geometric precision. She chalks the position of the map’s two holes onto smaller squares, folding and creasing sharply with her bone knife, turning flat paper into a cup, a box, a many-winged figure. She notes the alignment, discards one pattern, begins again. A map is a visual narrative; it is not only the folds but their sequence that will define its purpose.

The form this one wishes to take is a fortune teller. American children call it a snapdragon, or a cootie-catcher. It is a simple pattern: the square folded in half vertically, then horizontally, and again on the diagonals. The corners fold into the center, the piece is flipped, the corners folded in again. The paper’s two surfaces become many, no longer a flat plane, nor a solid object. A dimension in between.

When she creases the last fold, Franny inserts the index finger and thumb of each hand into the pockets she has created, pushes inward, then moves her fingers apart, as if opening and closing the mouth of an angular bird. Her hands rock outward; the bird’s mouth opens now to the right and left. She rocks again, revealing and concealing each tiny hole in turn.

Franny nods and sets it aside. The second phase is finished. Now the waiting begins. She reads and smokes and paces and tidies. The weather is one element she cannot control.

Four days. Five. She moves the pins on the map, crosses off squares on her calendar, bites her nails to the quick until finally one afternoon she feels the fog coming in. The air cools and grows moist as it is saturated with the sea. The light softens, the world stills and quiets. She calms herself for the ritual ahead, sitting on the couch with a cup of smoky tea, listening to the muffled clang of the Hyde Street cable car a few blocks away, watching as the distant hills dissolve into watercolors, fade into hazy outlines, disappear.

The horizon lowers, then approaches, blurring, then slowly obliterating the view outside her window. The edge of the world grows closer. When the nearest neighbors’ house is no more than an indistinct fuzz of muted color, she climbs the spiral stairs.

She stands before each window, starting in the east. The world outside the cupola is gone; there are no distances. Where there had once been landmarks ― hillsides and buildings and signs ― there is only a soft wall, as if she stands inside a great gray pearl.

San Francisco is a different city when the clouds come to earth. Shapes swirl in the diffused cones of street lamps, creating shadows inside the fog itself. Not flat, but three-dimensional, both solid and insubstantial.

When all the space in the world is contained within the tangible white darkness of the fog, Franny cranks open the northeast window and gently hangs the newly painted map on the wall of the sky. She murmurs archaic syllables no longer understood outside that room, and the paper clings to the damp blankness.

The map is a tabula rasa, ready for instruction.

The fog enters through the disruption of the pinholes.

The paper’s fibers swell as they draw in its moisture.

They draw in the distance it has replaced.

They draw in the dimensions of its shadows.

Franny dares not smoke. She paces. Transferring the world to a map is both magic and art, and like any science, the timing must be precise. She has pulled a paper away too soon, before its fibers are fully saturated, rendering it useless. She has let another hang so long that the fog began to retreat again; that one fell to earth as the neighbors reappeared.

She watches and listens, her face to the open window. At the first whisper of drier air, she peels this map off the sky, gently easing one damp corner away with a light, deft touch. There can be no rips or tears, only the two perfect holes.

Paper fibers swell when they are wet, making room for the fog and all it has enveloped. When the fibers dry, they shrink back, locking that in. Now the map itself contains space. She murmurs again, ancient sounds that bind with intent, and lays the map onto the sill to dry. The varnish is her own recipe; it neither absorbs nor contaminates.

Franny closes the window and sleeps until dawn. When she wakes, she is still weary, but busies herself with ordinary chores, reads a magazine, listens to Roosevelt on the radio. The map must dry completely. By late afternoon she is ravenous. She walks down the hill into North Beach, the Italian section, and dines at Lupo’s, where she drinks raw red wine and devours one of their flat tomato pies. Late on the third night, when at last the foghorn lows out over the water, she climbs the spiral stairs.

She stands over the map, murmuring now in a language not used for conversation, and takes a deep breath. When she is as calm as a still pond, she lights a candle and sits in her canvas chair. She begins the final sequence, folding the map in half, aligning the edges, precise as a surgeon, burnishing the sharp creases with her pale bone knife. The first fold is the most important. If it is off, even by the tiniest of fractions, all is lost.

Franny breathes, using the knife to move that flow through her fingers into the paper. Kinesis. The action of a fold can never be unmade. It fractures the fibers of the paper, leaving a scar the paper cannot forget, a line traversing three dimensions. She folds the map again on the diagonal, aligning and creasing, turning and folding until she holds a larger version of the angular bird’s beak.

When the fog has dissolved the world and the cupola is cocooned, Franny inserts her fingers into the folded map. She flexes her hands, revealing one of the tiny holes, and opens the portal.

Now she stands, hands and body rigid, watching from the open window high above Caligo Lane. She sees nothing; soon sounds echo beneath the banyan tree. Shuffling footsteps, a whispered voice.

Motionless, Franny holds her hands open. She looks down. Beneath the street lamp stands an emaciated woman, head shorn, clad in a shapeless mattress-ticking smock, frightened and bewildered.

“Elzbieta?” Franny calls down.

The woman looks up, shakes her head.

Three more women step into view.

Beyond them, through a shimmer that pierces the fog, Franny sees other faces. More than she anticipated. Half a dozen women appear, and Franny feels the paper begin to soften, grow limp. There are too many. She hears distant shots, a scream, and watches as a mass of panicked women surge against the portal. She struggles to maintain the shape; the linen fibers disintegrate around the holes. Three women tumble through, and Franny can hold it open no longer. She flexes her trembling hands and reveals the other hole, closing the gate.

After a minute, she calls down in their language. “Jestes teraz bezpieczna.” You are safe now. She reverses the ori-kami pattern, unfolding and flattening. This work goes quickly. A fold has two possibilities, an unfolding only one.

The women stand and shiver. A few clutch hands.

Franny stares at the place where the shimmer had been. She sees her reflection in the darkened glass, sees tears streak down a face now lined with the topography of age.

“Znasz moją siostrę?” she asks, her voice breaking. Have you seen my sister? She touches the corner of the depleted map to the candle’s flame. “Elzbieta?”

A woman shrugs. “Tak wiele.” She holds out her hands. So many. The others shrug, shake their heads.

Franny sags against the window and blows the ash into the night air. “Idź,” she whispers. Go.

The women watch the ash fall through the cone of street light. Finally one nods and links her arm with another. They begin to walk now, their thin cardboard shoes shuffling across the cobbles.

Slowly, the others follow. One by one they turn the corner onto Jones Street, step down the shallow concrete steps, and vanish into the fog.

“Caligo Lane” © Ellen Klages, 2015
Reprinted from Wicked Wonders.

The post Caligo Lane appeared first on Reactor.

Franny Travers is a cartographer of exceptional ability. From her house high above the cascading hills of San Francisco, she creates maps that, when folded properly, can transform space. This is her gift. These temporary new alignments of the world open improbable passages, a last resort when politics or geography make escape impossible.

If you like this story, join Franny and her friends for more adventures on the borders of magic and science in Klages’ Passing Strange, a queer/pulp/noir- inspired novella coming from Tor.com Publishing in January of 2017.

“Caligo Lane”

Even with the Golden Gate newly bridged and the ugly hulks of battleships lining the bay, San Francisco is well-suited to magic. It is not a geometric city, but full of hidden alleys and twisted lanes. Formed by hills and surrounded by water, its weather transforms its geography, a fog that erases landmarks, cloaking and enclosing as the rest of the world disappears.

That may be an illusion; most magic is. Maps of the city are replete with misdirection. Streets drawn as straight lines may in fact be stairs or a crumbling brick path, or they may dead end for a block or two, then reappear under another name.

Caligo Lane is one such street, most often reached by an accident that cannot be repeated.

In Barbary Coast bars, sailors awaiting orders to the Pacific hear rumors. Late at night, drunk on cheap gin and bravado, they try walking up Jones Street, so steep that shallow steps are cut into the middle of the concrete sidewalk. Near the crest of the hill, the lane may be on their right. Others stumble over to Taylor until they reach the wooden staircase that zigzags up a sheer wall. Caligo Lane is sometimes at the top ― unless the stairs have wound around to end at the foot of Jones Street again. A lovely view of the bay is a consolation.

When it does welcome visitors, Caligo Lane is a single block, near the crest of the Bohemian enclave known as Russian Hill. Houses crowd one edge of a mossy cobblestone path; they face a rock-walled tangle of ferns and eucalyptus, vines as thick as a man’s arm, moist earth overlaid with a pale scent of flowers.

Number 67 is in the middle, a tall, narrow house, built when the rest of the town was still brawling in the mud. It has bay windows and a copper-domed cupola, although the overhanging branches of a gnarled banyan tree make that difficult to see. The knocker on the heavy oak door is a Romani symbol, a small wheel wrought in polished brass.

Franny has lived here since the Great Fire. She is a cartographer by trade, a geometer of irregular surfaces. Her house is full of maps.

A small woman who favors dark slacks and loose tunics, she is one of the last of her line, a magus of exceptional abilities. Her hair is jet-black, cut in a blunt bob, bangs straight as rulers, a style that has not been in vogue for decades. She smokes odiferous cigarettes in a long jade-green holder.

The ground floor of number 67 is unremarkable. A small entryway, a hall leading to bedrooms and a bath. But on the right, stairs lead up to a single, large room, not as narrow as below. A comfortable couch and armchairs with their attendant tables surround intricate ancient rugs. A vast library table is strewn with open books, pens and calipers, and scrap paper covered in a jumble of numbers and notations.

Facing north, a wall of atelier windows, reminiscent of Paris, angles in to the ceiling. Seven wide panes span the width of the room, thin dividers painted the green of young spinach. Beyond the glass, ziggurats of stone walls and white houses cascade vertically down to the bay and Alcatraz and the blue-distant hills.

Visitors from more conventional places may feel dizzy and need to sit; it is unsettling to stand above a neighbor’s roof.

Bookshelves line two walls, floor-to-ceiling. Many titles are in unfamiliar alphabets. Tall art books, dense buckram treatises, mathematical apocrypha: swaths of cracked, crumbling leather spines with gilt letters too worn to decipher. Four flat cases hold maps, both ancient and modern, in a semblance of order.

Other maps are piled and folded, indexed or spread about willy-nilly. They are inked on scraps of parchment, cut from old textbooks, acquired at service stations with a fill-up of gas. They show Cape Abolesco and Dychmygol Bay and the edges of the Salajene Desert, none of which have ever been explored. On a cork wall, round-headed pins stud a large map of Europe. Franny moves them daily as the radio brings news of the unrelenting malignance of the war.

At the far end of the room, a circular staircase helixes up. Piles of books block easy access, less a barricade than an unrealized intent to reshelve and reorganize.

There will be much to do before the fog rolls in.

The stairs lead to the center of the cupola, an octagonal room with a hinged window at each windrose point. Beneath them is a sill wide enough to hold an open newspaper or atlas, a torus of horizontal surface that circles the room, the polished wood stained with ink, scarred in places by pins and tacks and straight-edged steel, scattered with treasured paperweights: worn stones from the banks of the Vistula, prisms, milleflora hemispheres of heavy Czech glass.

Even in a city of hills, the room has unobstructed views that allow Franny to work in any direction. A canvas chair on casters sits, for the moment, facing southwest. On the sill in front of it, a large square of Portuguese cork lies waiting.

Downstairs, on this clear, sunny afternoon, Franny sits at the library table, a postcard from her homeland resting beside her teacup. She recognizes the handwriting; the postmark is obscured by the ink of stamps and redirections. Not even the mailman can reliably find her house.

She glances at the card one more time. The delayed delivery makes her work even more urgent. She opens a ledger, leafing past pages with notes on scale and symbol, diagrams and patterns, and arcane jottings, turning to a blank sheet. She looks again at the postcard, blue-inked numbers its only message:

50°-02’-09” N 19°-10’-42” E

Plotting this single journey will take weeks of her time, years from her life. But she must. She glances at the pin-studded map. When geography or politics makes travel or escape impossible, she is the last resort. Each life saved is a mitzvah.

Franny flexes her fingers, and begins. Each phase has its own timing and order; the calculations alone are byzantine. Using her largest atlas she locates the general vicinity of the coordinates, near the small village of Oświecim. It takes her all night to uncover a chart detailed enough to show the topography with precision. She walks her calipers from point to point like a two-legged spider as she computes the progressions that will lead to the final map.

For days she smokes and mutters as she measures, plotting points and rhumb lines that expand and shrink with the proportions of the landscape. The map must be drawn to the scale of the journey. She feels the weight of time passing, but cannot allow haste, sleeping only when her hands begin to shake, the numbers illegible. Again and again she manipulates her slide rule, scribbles numbers on a pad, and traces shapes onto translucent vellum, transferring the necessary information until at last she has a draft that accurately depicts both entrance and egress.

She grinds her inks and pigments ― lampblack and rare earths mixed with a few drops of her own blood — and trims a sheet of white linen paper to a large square. For a week, the house is silent save for the whisper of tiny sable brushes and the scritch of pens with thin steel nibs.

When she has finished and the colors are dry, she carries the map upstairs and lays it on the cork. Using a round-headed steel pin, she breaches the paper’s integrity twice: a single, precise hole at the village, another at Caligo Lane. She transfers the positions onto gridded tissue, and pulls the map free, weighting its corners so that it lies flat on the varnished sill.

She has done what she can. She allows herself a full night’s rest.

In the morning she makes a pot of tea and toast with jam, then clears the library table, moving her map-making tools to one side, and opens a black leather case that contains a flat, pale knife made of bone, and a portfolio with dozens of squares of bright paper. She looks around the room. What form must this one take?

Scattered among the dark-spined tomes are small angular paper figurines. Some are geometric shapes; others resemble birds and animals, basilisks and chimeras. Decades before he was exiled to Manzanar, a Japanese calligrapher and amateur conjuror taught her the ancient art of ori-kami, yet unknown in this country.

The secret of ori-kami is that a single sheet of paper can be folded in a nearly infinite variety of patterns, each resulting in a different transformation of the available space. Given any two points, it is possible to fold a line that connects them. A map is a menu of possible paths. When Franny folds one of her own making, instead of plain paper, she creates a new alignment of the world, opening improbable passages from one place to another.

Once, when she was young and in a temper, she crumpled one into a ball and threw it across the room, muttering curses. A man in Norway found himself in an unnamed desert, confused and over-dressed. His journey did not end well.

The Japanese army might call this art ori-chizu, “map folding,” but fortunately they are unaware of its power.

Franny knows a thousand ori-kami patterns. Finding the correct orientation for the task requires a skilled eye and geometric precision. She chalks the position of the map’s two holes onto smaller squares, folding and creasing sharply with her bone knife, turning flat paper into a cup, a box, a many-winged figure. She notes the alignment, discards one pattern, begins again. A map is a visual narrative; it is not only the folds but their sequence that will define its purpose.

The form this one wishes to take is a fortune teller. American children call it a snapdragon, or a cootie-catcher. It is a simple pattern: the square folded in half vertically, then horizontally, and again on the diagonals. The corners fold into the center, the piece is flipped, the corners folded in again. The paper’s two surfaces become many, no longer a flat plane, nor a solid object. A dimension in between.

When she creases the last fold, Franny inserts the index finger and thumb of each hand into the pockets she has created, pushes inward, then moves her fingers apart, as if opening and closing the mouth of an angular bird. Her hands rock outward; the bird’s mouth opens now to the right and left. She rocks again, revealing and concealing each tiny hole in turn.

Franny nods and sets it aside. The second phase is finished. Now the waiting begins. She reads and smokes and paces and tidies. The weather is one element she cannot control.

Four days. Five. She moves the pins on the map, crosses off squares on her calendar, bites her nails to the quick until finally one afternoon she feels the fog coming in. The air cools and grows moist as it is saturated with the sea. The light softens, the world stills and quiets. She calms herself for the ritual ahead, sitting on the couch with a cup of smoky tea, listening to the muffled clang of the Hyde Street cable car a few blocks away, watching as the distant hills dissolve into watercolors, fade into hazy outlines, disappear.

The horizon lowers, then approaches, blurring, then slowly obliterating the view outside her window. The edge of the world grows closer. When the nearest neighbors’ house is no more than an indistinct fuzz of muted color, she climbs the spiral stairs.

She stands before each window, starting in the east. The world outside the cupola is gone; there are no distances. Where there had once been landmarks ― hillsides and buildings and signs ― there is only a soft wall, as if she stands inside a great gray pearl.

San Francisco is a different city when the clouds come to earth. Shapes swirl in the diffused cones of street lamps, creating shadows inside the fog itself. Not flat, but three-dimensional, both solid and insubstantial.

When all the space in the world is contained within the tangible white darkness of the fog, Franny cranks open the northeast window and gently hangs the newly painted map on the wall of the sky. She murmurs archaic syllables no longer understood outside that room, and the paper clings to the damp blankness.

The map is a tabula rasa, ready for instruction.

The fog enters through the disruption of the pinholes.

The paper’s fibers swell as they draw in its moisture.

They draw in the distance it has replaced.

They draw in the dimensions of its shadows.

Franny dares not smoke. She paces. Transferring the world to a map is both magic and art, and like any science, the timing must be precise. She has pulled a paper away too soon, before its fibers are fully saturated, rendering it useless. She has let another hang so long that the fog began to retreat again; that one fell to earth as the neighbors reappeared.

She watches and listens, her face to the open window. At the first whisper of drier air, she peels this map off the sky, gently easing one damp corner away with a light, deft touch. There can be no rips or tears, only the two perfect holes.

Paper fibers swell when they are wet, making room for the fog and all it has enveloped. When the fibers dry, they shrink back, locking that in. Now the map itself contains space. She murmurs again, ancient sounds that bind with intent, and lays the map onto the sill to dry. The varnish is her own recipe; it neither absorbs nor contaminates.

Franny closes the window and sleeps until dawn. When she wakes, she is still weary, but busies herself with ordinary chores, reads a magazine, listens to Roosevelt on the radio. The map must dry completely. By late afternoon she is ravenous. She walks down the hill into North Beach, the Italian section, and dines at Lupo’s, where she drinks raw red wine and devours one of their flat tomato pies. Late on the third night, when at last the foghorn lows out over the water, she climbs the spiral stairs.

She stands over the map, murmuring now in a language not used for conversation, and takes a deep breath. When she is as calm as a still pond, she lights a candle and sits in her canvas chair. She begins the final sequence, folding the map in half, aligning the edges, precise as a surgeon, burnishing the sharp creases with her pale bone knife. The first fold is the most important. If it is off, even by the tiniest of fractions, all is lost.

Franny breathes, using the knife to move that flow through her fingers into the paper. Kinesis. The action of a fold can never be unmade. It fractures the fibers of the paper, leaving a scar the paper cannot forget, a line traversing three dimensions. She folds the map again on the diagonal, aligning and creasing, turning and folding until she holds a larger version of the angular bird’s beak.

When the fog has dissolved the world and the cupola is cocooned, Franny inserts her fingers into the folded map. She flexes her hands, revealing one of the tiny holes, and opens the portal.

Now she stands, hands and body rigid, watching from the open window high above Caligo Lane. She sees nothing; soon sounds echo beneath the banyan tree. Shuffling footsteps, a whispered voice.

Motionless, Franny holds her hands open. She looks down. Beneath the street lamp stands an emaciated woman, head shorn, clad in a shapeless mattress-ticking smock, frightened and bewildered.

“Elzbieta?” Franny calls down.

The woman looks up, shakes her head.

Three more women step into view.

Beyond them, through a shimmer that pierces the fog, Franny sees other faces. More than she anticipated. Half a dozen women appear, and Franny feels the paper begin to soften, grow limp. There are too many. She hears distant shots, a scream, and watches as a mass of panicked women surge against the portal. She struggles to maintain the shape; the linen fibers disintegrate around the holes. Three women tumble through, and Franny can hold it open no longer. She flexes her trembling hands and reveals the other hole, closing the gate.

After a minute, she calls down in their language. “Jestes teraz bezpieczna.” You are safe now. She reverses the ori-kami pattern, unfolding and flattening. This work goes quickly. A fold has two possibilities, an unfolding only one.

The women stand and shiver. A few clutch hands.

Franny stares at the place where the shimmer had been. She sees her reflection in the darkened glass, sees tears streak down a face now lined with the topography of age.

“Znasz moją siostrę?” she asks, her voice breaking. Have you seen my sister? She touches the corner of the depleted map to the candle’s flame. “Elzbieta?”

A woman shrugs. “Tak wiele.” She holds out her hands. So many. The others shrug, shake their heads.

Franny sags against the window and blows the ash into the night air. “Idź,” she whispers. Go.

The women watch the ash fall through the cone of street light. Finally one nods and links her arm with another. They begin to walk now, their thin cardboard shoes shuffling across the cobbles.

Slowly, the others follow. One by one they turn the corner onto Jones Street, step down the shallow concrete steps, and vanish into the fog.

“Caligo Lane” © Ellen Klages, 2015
Reprinted from The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 9

The post Caligo Lane appeared first on Reactor.

Sense of wonder is the lifeblood of science fiction. When we encounter something on a truly staggering scale—metal spheres wrapped around stars, planets rebuilt and repurposed, landscapes transformed, starships bigger than worlds—we react viscerally. Fear, reverence, admiration – how else are we to react to something so grand? Edited by Jonathan Strahan, Bridging Infinity puts humanity at the heart of these vast undertakings—as builder, as engineer, as adventurer—reimagining and rebuilding the world, the solar system, and even the entire universe.

Seven Birthdays

7:

The wide lawn spreads out before me almost to the golden surf of the sea, separated by the narrow dark tan band of the beach. The setting sun is bright and warm, the breeze a gentle caress against my arms and face.

“I want to wait a little longer,” I say.

“It’s going to get dark soon,” Dad says.

I chew my bottom lip. “Text her again.”

He shakes his head. “We’ve left her enough messages.”

I look around. Most people have already left the park. The first hint of the evening chill is in the air.

“All right.” I try not to sound disappointed. You shouldn’t be disappointed when something happens over and over again, right? “Let’s fly,” I say.

Dad holds up the kite, a diamond with a painted fairy and two long ribbon tails. I picked it out this morning from the store at the park gate because the fairy’s face reminded me of Mom.

“Ready?” Dad asks.

I nod.

“Go!”

I run toward the sea, toward the burning sky and the melting, orange sun. Dad lets go of the kite, and I feel the fwoomp as it lifts into the air, pulling the string in my hand taut.

“Don’t look back! Keep running and let the string out slowly like I taught you.”

I run. Like Snow White through the forest. Like Cinderella as the clock strikes midnight. Like the Monkey King trying to escape the Buddha’s hand. Like Aeneas pursued by Juno’s stormy rage. I unspool the string as a sudden gust of wind makes me squint, my heart thumping in time with my pumping legs.

“It’s up!”

I slow down, stop, and turn to look. The fairy is in the air, tugging at my hands to let go. I hold on to the handles of the spool, imagining the fairy lifting me into the air so that we can soar together over the Pacific, like Mom and Dad used to dangle me by my arms between them.

“Mia!”

I look over and see Mom striding across the lawn, her long black hair streaming in the breeze like the kite’s tails. She stops before me, kneels on the grass, wraps me in a hug, squeezing my face against hers. She smells like her shampoo, like summer rain and wildflowers, a fragrance that I get to experience only once every few weeks.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says, her voice muffled against my cheek. “Happy birthday!”

I want to give her a kiss, and I don’t want to. The kite line slackens, and I give the line a hard jerk like Dad taught me. It’s very important for me to keep the kite in the air. I don’t know why. Maybe it has to do with the need to kiss her and not kiss her.

Dad jogs up. He doesn’t say anything about the time. He doesn’t mention that we missed our dinner reservation.

Mom gives me a kiss and pulls her face away, but keeps her arms around me. “Something came up,” she says, her voice even, controlled. “Ambassador Chao-Walker’s flight was delayed and she managed to squeeze me in for three hours at the airport. I had to walk her through the details of the solar management plan before the Shanghai Forum next week. It was important.”

“It always is,” Dad says.

Mom’s arms tense against me. This has always been their pattern, even when they used to live together. Unasked for explanations. Accusations that don’t sound like accusations.

Gently, I wriggle out of her embrace. “Look.”

This has always been part of the pattern too: my trying to break their pattern. I can’t help but think there’s a simple solution, something I can do to make it all better.

I point up at the kite, hoping she’ll see how I picked out a fairy whose face looks like hers. But the kite is too high up now for her to notice the resemblance. I’ve let out all the string. The long line droops gently like a ladder connecting the Earth to heaven, the highest segment glowing golden in the dying rays of the sun.

“It’s lovely,” she says. “Someday, when things quiet down a little, I’ll take you to see the kite festival back where I grew up, on the other side of the Pacific. You’ll love it.”

“We’ll have to fly then,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to fly. I fly all the time.”

I’m not afraid, but I nod anyway to show that I’m assured. I don’t ask when “someday” is going to be.

“I wish the kite could fly higher,” I say, desperate to keep the words flowing, as though unspooling more conversation will keep something precious aloft. “If I cut the line, will it fly across the Pacific?”

After a moment, Mom says, “Not really … The kite stays up only because of the line. A kite is just like a plane, and the pulling force from your line acts like thrust. Did you know that the first airplanes the Wright Brothers made were actually kites? They learned how to make wings that way. Someday I’ll show you how the kite generates lift—”

“Sure it will,” Dad interrupts. “It will fly across the Pacific. It’s your birthday. Anything is possible.”

Neither of them says anything after that.

I don’t tell Dad that I enjoy listening to Mom talk about machines and engineering and history and other things that I don’t fully understand. I don’t tell her that I already know that the kite wouldn’t fly across the ocean—I was just trying to get her to talk to me instead of defending herself. I don’t tell him that I’m too old to believe anything is possible on my birthday—I wished for them not to fight, and look how that has turned out. I don’t tell her that I know she doesn’t mean to break her promises to me, but it still hurts when she does. I don’t tell them that I wish I could cut the line that ties me to their wings—the tugging on my heart from their competing winds is too much.

I know they love me even if they no longer love each other; but knowing doesn’t make it any easier.

Slowly, the sun sinks into the ocean; slowly, the stars wink to life in the sky. The kite has disappeared among the stars. I imagine the fairy visiting each star to give it a playful kiss.

Mom pulls out her phone and types furiously.

“I’m guessing you haven’t had dinner,” Dad says.

“No. Not lunch either. Been running around all day,” Mom says, not looking up from the screen.

“There is a pretty good vegan place I just discovered a few blocks from the parking lot,” Dad says. “Maybe we can pick up a cake from the sweet shop on the way and ask them to serve it after dinner.”

“Um-hum.”

“Would you put that away?” Dad says. “Please.”

Mom takes a deep breath and puts the phone away. “I’m trying to change my flight to a later one so I can spend more time with Mia.”

“You can’t even stay with us one night?”

“I have to be in D.C. in the morning to meet with Professor Chakrabarti and Senator Frug.”

Dad’s face hardens. “For someone so concerned about the state of our planet, you certainly fly a lot. If you and your clients didn’t always want to move faster and ship more—”

“You know perfectly well my clients aren’t the reason I’m doing this—”

“I know it’s really easy to deceive yourself. But you’re working for the most colossal corporations and autocratic governments—”

“I’m working on a technical solution instead of empty promises! We have an ethical duty to all of humanity. I’m fighting for the eighty percent of the world’s population living on under ten dollars—”

Unnoticed by the colossi in my life, I let the kite pull me away. Their arguing voices fade in the wind. Step by step, I walk closer to the pounding surf, the line tugging me toward the stars.

49:

The wheelchair is having trouble making Mom comfortable.

First the chair tries to raise the seat so that her eyes are level with the screen of the ancient computer I found for her. But even with her bent back and hunched-over shoulders, she’s having trouble reaching the keyboard on the desk below. As she stretches her trembling fingers toward the keys, the chair descends. She pecks out a few letters and numbers, struggles to look up at the screen, now towering above her. The motors hum as the chair lifts her again. Ad infinitum.

Over three thousand robots work under the supervision of three nurses to take care of the needs of some three hundred residents in Sunset Homes. This is how we die now. Out of sight. Dependent on the wisdom of machines. The pinnacle of Western civilization.

I walk over and prop up the keyboard with a stack of old hardcover books taken from her home before I sold it. The motors stop humming. A simple hack for a complicated problem, the sort of thing she would appreciate.

She looks at me, her clouded eyes devoid of recognition.

“Mom, it’s me,” I say. Then, after a second, I add, “Your daughter, Mia.”

She has some good days, I recall the words of the chief nurse. Doing math seems to calm her down. Thank you for suggesting that.

She examines my face. “No,” she says. She hesitates for a second. “Mia is seven.”

Then she turns back to her computer and continues pecking out numbers on the keyboard. “Need to plot the demographic and conflict curves again,” she mutters. “Gotta show them this is the only way…”

I sit down on the small bed. I suppose it should sting—the fact that she remembers her outdated computations better than she remembers me. But she is already so far away, a kite barely tethered to this world by the thin strand of her obsession with dimming the Earth’s sky, that I cannot summon up the outrage or heartache.

I’m familiar with the patterns of her mind, imprisoned in that swiss-cheesed brain. She doesn’t remember what happened yesterday, or the week before, or much of the past few decades. She doesn’t remember my face or the names of my two husbands. She doesn’t remember Dad’s funeral. I don’t bother showing her pictures from Abby’s graduation or the video of Thomas’s wedding.

The only thing left to talk about is my work. There’s no expectation that she’ll remember the names I bring up or understand the problems I’m trying to solve. I tell her the difficulties of scanning the human mind, the complications of recreating carbon-based computation in silicon, the promise of a hardware upgrade for the fragile human brain that seems so close and yet so far away. It’s mostly a monologue. She’s comfortable with the flow of technical jargon. It’s enough that she’s listening, that she’s not hurrying to fly somewhere else.

She stops her calculations. “What day is today?” she asks.

“It’s my—Mia’s birthday,” I say.

“I should go see her,” she says. “I just need to finish this—”

“Why don’t we take a walk together outside?” I ask. “She likes being out in the sun.”

“The sun … It’s too bright …” she mutters. Then she pulls her hands away from the keyboard. “All right.”

The wheelchair nimbly rolls next to me through the corridors until we’re outside. Screaming children are running helter-skelter over the wide lawn like energized electrons while white-haired and wrinkled residents sit in distinct clusters like nuclei scattered in vacuum. Spending time with children is supposed to improve the mood of the aged, and so Sunset Homes tries to recreate the tribal bonfire and the village hearth with busloads of kindergarteners.

She squints against the bright glow of the sun. “Mia is here?”

“We’ll look for her.”

We walk through the hubbub together, looking for the ghost of her memory. Gradually, she opens up and begins to talk to me about her life.

“Anthropogenic global warming is real,” she says. “But the mainstream consensus is far too optimistic. The reality is much worse. For our children’s sake, we must solve it in our time.”

Thomas and Abby have long stopped accompanying me on these visits to a grandmother who no longer knows who they are. I don’t blame them. She’s as much a stranger to them as they’re to her. They have no memories of her baking cookies for them on lazy summer afternoons or allowing them to stay up way past their bedtime to browse cartoons on tablets. She has always been at best a distant presence in their lives, most felt when she paid for their college tuition with a single check. A fairy godmother as unreal as those tales of how the Earth had once been doomed.

She cares more about the idea of future generations than her actual children and grandchildren. I know I’m being unfair, but the truth is often unfair.

“Left unchecked, much of East Asia will become uninhabitable in a century,” she says. “When you plot out a record of little ice ages and mini warm periods in our history, you get a record of mass migrations, wars, genocides. Do you understand?”

A giggling girl dashes in front of us; the wheelchair grinds to a halt. A gaggle of boys and girls run past us, chasing the little girl.

“The rich countries, who did the most polluting, want the poor countries to stop development and stop consuming so much energy,” she says. “They think it’s equitable to tell the poor to pay for the sins of the rich, to make those with darker skins stop trying to catch up to those with lighter skins.”

We’ve walked all the way to the far edge of the lawn. No sign of Mia. We turn around and again swerve through the crowd of children, tumbling, dancing, laughing, running.

“It’s foolish to think the diplomats will work it out. The conflicts are irreconcilable, and the ultimate outcome will not be fair. The poor countries can’t and shouldn’t stop development, and the rich countries won’t pay. But there is a technical solution, a hack. It just takes a few fearless men and women with the resources to do what the rest of the world can’t do.”

There’s a glow in her eyes. This is her favorite subject, pitching her mad scientist answer.

“We must purchase and modify a fleet of commercial jets. In international airspace, away from the jurisdiction of any state, they’ll release sprays of sulfuric acid. Mixed with water vapor, the acid will turn into clouds of fine sulfate particles that block sunlight.” She tries to snap her fingers but her fingers are shaking too much. “It will be like the global volcanic winters of the 1880s, after Krakatoa erupted. We made the Earth warm, and we can cool it again.”

Her hands flutter in front of her, conjuring up a vision of the grandest engineering project in the history of the human race: the construction of a globe-spanning wall to dim the sky. She doesn’t remember that she has already succeeded, that decades ago, she had managed to convince enough people as mad as she was to follow her plan. She doesn’t remember the protests, the condemnations by environmental groups, the scrambling fighter jets and denunciations by the world’s governments, the prison sentence, and then, gradual acceptance.

“…the poor deserve to consume as much of the Earth’s resources as the rich…”

I try to imagine what life must be like for her: an eternal day of battle, a battle she has already won.

Her hack has bought us some time, but it has not solved the fundamental problem. The world is still struggling with problems both old and new: the bleaching of corals from the acid rain, the squabbling over whether to cool the Earth even more, the ever-present finger-pointing and blame-assigning. She does not know that borders have been sealed as the rich nations replace the dwindling supply of young workers with machines. She does not know that the gap between the wealthy and the poor has only grown wider, that a tiny portion of the global population still consumes the vast majority of its resources, that colonialism has been revived in the name of progress.

In the middle of her impassioned speech, she stops.

“Where’s Mia?” she asks. The defiance has left her voice. She looks through the crowd, anxious that she won’t find me on my birthday.

“We’ll make another pass,” I say.

“We have to find her,” she says.

On impulse, I stop the wheelchair and kneel down in front of her.

“I’m working on a technical solution,” I say. “There is a way for us to transcend this morass, to achieve a just existence.”

I am, after all, my mother’s daughter.

She looks at me, her expression uncomprehending.

“I don’t know if I’ll perfect my technique in time to save you,” I blurt out. Or maybe I can’t bear the thought of having to patch together the remnants of your mind. This is what I have come to tell her.

Is it a plea for forgiveness? Have I forgiven her? Is forgiveness what we want or need?

A group of children run by us, blowing soap bubbles. In the sunlight the bubbles float and drift with a rainbow sheen. A few land against my mother’s silvery hair but do not burst immediately. She looks like a queen with a diadem of sunlit jewels, an unelected tribune who claims to speak for those without power, a mother whose love is difficult to understand and even more difficult to misunderstand.

“Please,” she says, reaching up to touch my face with her shaking fingers, as dry as the sand in an hourglass. “I’m late. It’s her birthday.”

And so we wander through the crowd again, under an afternoon sun that glows dimmer than in my childhood.

343:

Abby pops into my process.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” she says.

For my benefit she presents as she had looked before her upload, a young woman of forty or so. She looks around at my cluttered space and frowns: simulations of books, furniture, speckled walls, dappled ceiling, a window view of a cityscape that is a digital composite of twenty-first-century San Francisco, my hometown, and all the cities that I had wanted to visit when I still had a body but didn’t get to.

“I don’t keep that running all the time,” I say.

The trendy aesthetic for home processes now is clean, minimalist, mathematically abstract: platonic polyhedra; classic solids of revolution based on conics; finite fields; symmetry groups. Using no more than four dimensions is preferred, and some are advocating flat living. To make my home process a close approximation of the analog world at such a high resolution is considered a wasteful use of computing resources, indulgent.

But I can’t help it. Despite having lived digitally for far longer than I did in the flesh, I prefer the simulated world of atoms to the digital reality.

To placate my daughter, I switch the window to a real-time feed from one of the sky rovers. The scene is of a jungle near the mouth of a river, probably where Shanghai used to be. Luxuriant vegetation drape from the skeletal ruins of skyscrapers; flocks of wading birds fill the shore; from time to time, pods of porpoises leap from the water, tracing graceful arcs that land back in the water with gentle splashes.

More than three hundred billion human minds now inhabit this planet, residing in thousands of data centers that collectively take up less space than old Manhattan. The Earth has gone back to being wild, save for a few stubborn holdouts who still insist on living in the flesh in remote settlements.

“It really doesn’t look good when you use so much computational resources by yourself,” she says. “My application was rejected.”

She means the application to have another child.

“I think two thousand six hundred twenty-five children is more than enough,” I say. “I feel like I don’t know any of them.” I don’t even know how to pronounce many of the mathematical names the digital natives prefer.

“Another vote is coming,” she says. “We need all the help we can get.”

“Not even all your current children vote the same way you do,” I say.

“It’s worth a try,” she says. “This planet belongs to all the creatures living on it, not just us.”

My daughter and many others think that the greatest achievement of humanity, the re-gifting of Earth back to Nature, is under threat. Other minds, especially those who had uploaded from countries where the universal availability of immortality had been achieved much later, think it isn’t fair that those who got to colonize the digital realm first should have more say in the direction of humanity. They would like to expand the human footprint again and build more data centers.

“Why do you love the wilderness so much if you don’t even live in it?” I ask.

“It’s our ethical duty to be stewards for the Earth,” she says. “It’s barely starting to heal from all the horrors we’ve inflicted on it. We must preserve it exactly as it should be.”

I don’t point out that this smacks to me of a false dichotomy: Human vs. Nature. I don’t bring up the sunken continents, the erupting volcanoes, the peaks and valleys in the Earth’s climate over billions of years, the advancing and retreating icecaps, and the uncountable species that have come and gone. Why do we hold up this one moment as natural, to be prized above all others?

Some ethical differences are irreconcilable.

Meanwhile, everyone thinks that having more children is the solution, to overwhelm the other side with more votes. And so the hard-fought adjudication of applications to have children, to allocate precious computing resources among competing factions.

But what will the children think of our conflicts? Will they care about the same injustices we do? Being born in silico, will they turn away from the physical world, from embodiment, or embrace it even more? Every generation has its own blind spots and obsessions.

I had once thought the Singularity would solve all our problems. Turns out it’s just a simple hack for a complicated problem. We do not share the same histories; we do not all want the same things.

I am not so different from my mother after all.

2,401:

The rocky planet beneath me is desolate, lifeless. I’m relieved. That was a condition placed upon me before my departure.

It’s impossible for everyone to agree upon a single vision for the future of humanity. Thankfully, we no longer have to share the same planet.

Tiny probes depart from Matrioshka, descending toward the spinning planet beneath them. As they enter the atmosphere, they glow like fireflies in the dusk. The dense atmosphere here is so good at trapping heat that at the surface the gas behaves more like a liquid.

I imagine the self-assembling robots landing at the surface. I imagine them replicating and multiplying with material extracted from the crust. I imagine them boring into the rock to place the mini-annihilation charges.

A window pops up next to me: a message from Abby, light-years away and centuries ago.

Happy birthday, Mother. We did it.

What follows are aerial shots of worlds both familiar and strange: the Earth, with its temperate climate carefully regulated to sustain the late Holocene; Venus, whose orbit has been adjusted by repeated gravitational slingshots with asteroids and terraformed to become a lush, warm replica of Earth during the Jurassic; and Mars, whose surface has been pelted with redirected Oort cloud objects and warmed by solar reflectors from space until the climate is a good approximation of the dry, cold conditions of the last glaciation on Earth.

Dinosaurs now roam the jungles of Aphrodite Terra, and mammoths forage over the tundra of Vastitas Borealis. Genetic reconstructions have been pushed back to the limit of the powerful data centers on Earth.

They have recreated what might have been. They have brought the extinct back to life.

Mother, you’re right about one thing: We will be sending out exploration ships again.

We’ll colonize the rest of the galaxy. When we find lifeless worlds, we’ll endow them with every form of life, from Earth’s distant past to the futures that might have been on Europa. We’ll walk down every evolutionary path. We’ll shepherd every flock and tend to every garden. We’ll give those creatures who never made it onto Noah’s Ark another chance, and bring forth the potential of every star in Raphael’s conversation with Adam in Eden.

And when we find extraterrestrial life, we’ll be just as careful with them as we have been with life on Earth.

It isn’t right for one species in the latest stage of a planet’s long history to monopolize all its resources. It isn’t just for humanity to claim for itself the title of evolution’s crowning achievement. Isn’t it the duty of every intelligent species to rescue all life, even from the dark abyss of time? There is always a technical solution.

I smile. I do not wonder whether Abby’s message is a celebration or a silent rebuke. She is, after all, my daughter.

I have my own problem to solve. I turn my attention back to the robots, to breaking apart the planet beneath my ship.

16,807:

It has taken a long time to fracture the planets orbiting this star, and longer still to reshape the fragments into my vision.

Thin, circular plates a hundred kilometers in diameter are arranged in a lattice of longitudinal rings around the star until it is completely surrounded. The plates do not orbit the star; rather, they are statites, positioned so that the pressure from the sun’s high-energy radiation counteracts the pull of gravity.

On the inner surface of this Dyson swarm, trillions of robots have etched channels and gates into the substrate, creating the most massive circuits in the history of the human race.

As the plates absorb the energy from the sun, it is transformed into electric pulses that emerge from cells, flow through canals, commingle in streams, until they gather into lakes and oceans that undulate through a quintillion variations that form the shape of thought.

The backs of the plates glow darkly, like embers after a fierce flame. The lower-energy photons leap outward into space, somewhat drained after powering a civilization. But before they can escape into the endless abyss of space, they strike another set of plates designed to absorb energy from radiation at this dimmer frequency. And once again, the process for thought-creation repeats itself.

The nesting shells, seven in all, form a world that is replete with dense topography. There are smooth areas centimeters across, designed to expand and contract to preserve the integrity of the plates as the computation generates more or less heat—I’ve dubbed them seas and plains. There are pitted areas where the peaks and craters are measured by microns, intended to facilitate the rapid dance of qubits and bits—I call them forests and coral reefs. There are small studded structures packed with dense circuitry intended to send and receive beams of communication knitting the plates together—I call them cities and towns. Perhaps these are fanciful names, like the Sea of Tranquility and Mare Erythraeum, but the consciousnesses they power are real.

And what will I do with this computing machine powered by a sun? What magic will I conjure with this matrioshka brain?

I have seeded the plains and seas and forests and coral reefs and cities and towns with a million billion minds, some of them modeled on my own, many more pulled from Matrioshka’s data banks, and they have multiplied and replicated, evolved in a world larger than any data center confined to a single planet could ever hope to be.

In the eyes of an outside observer, the star’s glow dimmed as each shell was constructed. I have succeeded in darkening a sun just as my mother had, albeit at a much grander scale.

There is always a technical solution.

117,649:

History flows like a flash flood in the desert: the water pouring across the parched earth, eddying around rocks and cacti, pooling in depressions, seeking a channel while it’s carving the landscape, each chance event shaping what comes after.

There are more ways to rescue lives and redeem what might have been than Abby and others believe.

In the grand matrix of my matrioshka brain, versions of our history are replayed. There isn’t a single world in this grand computation, but billions, each of them populated by human consciousnesses, but nudged in small ways to be better.

Most paths lead to less slaughter. Here, Rome and Constantinople are not sacked; there, Cuzco and Vĩnh Long do not fall. Along one timeline, the Mongols and Manchus do not sweep across East Asia; along another, the Westphalian model does not become an all-consuming blueprint for the world. One group of men consumed with murder do not come to power in Europe, and another group worshipping death do not seize the machinery of state in Japan. Instead of the colonial yoke, the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia decide their own fates. Enslavement and genocide are not the handmaidens of discovery and exploration, and the errors of our history are averted.

Small populations do not rise to consume a disproportionate amount of the planet’s resources or monopolize the path of its future. History is redeemed.

But not all paths are better. There is a darkness in human nature that makes certain conflicts irreconcilable. I grieve for the lives lost but I can’t intervene. These are not simulations. They cannot be if I respect the sanctity of human life.

The billions of consciousnesses who live in these worlds are every bit as real as I am. They deserve as much free will as anyone who has ever lived and must be allowed to make their own choices. Even if we’ve always suspected that we also live in a grand simulation, we prefer the truth to be otherwise.

Think of these as parallel universes if you will; call them sentimental gestures of a woman looking into the past; dismiss it as a kind of symbolic atonement.

But isn’t it the dream of every species to have the chance to do it over? To see if it’s possible to prevent the fall from grace that darkens our gaze upon the stars?

823,543:

There is a message.

Someone has plucked the strings that weave together the fabric of space, sending a sequence of pulses down every strand of Indra’s web, connecting the farthest exploding nova to the nearest dancing quark.

The galaxy vibrates with a broadcast in languages known, forgotten, and yet to be invented. I parse out a single sentence.

Come to the galactic center. It’s reunion time.

Carefully, I instruct the intelligences guiding the plates that make up the Dyson swarms to shift, like ailerons on the wings of ancient aircraft. The plates drift apart, as though the shells in the matrioshka brain are cracking, hatching a new form of life.

Gradually, the statites move away from one side of the sun and assume the configuration of a Shkadov thruster. A single eye opens in the universe, emitting a bright beam of light.

And slowly, the imbalance in the solar radiation begins to move the star, bringing the shell-mirrors with it. We’re headed for the center of the galaxy, propelled upon a fiery column of light.

Not every human world will heed the call. There are plenty of planets on which the inhabitants have decided that it is perfectly fine to explore the mathematical worlds of ever-deepening virtual reality in perpetuity, to live out lives of minimal energy consumption in universes hidden within nutshells.

Some, like my daughter Abby, will prefer to leave their lush, life-filled planets in place, like oases in the endless desert that is space. Others will seek the refuge of the galactic edge, where cooler climates will allow more efficient computation. Still others, having re-captured the ancient joy of living in the flesh, will tarry to act out space operas of conquest and glory.

But enough will come.

I imagine thousands, hundreds of thousands of stars moving toward the center of the galaxy. Some are surrounded by space habitats full of people who still look like people. Some are orbited by machines that have but a dim memory of their ancestral form. Some will drag with them planets populated by creatures from our distant past, or by creatures I have never seen. Some will bring guests, aliens who do not share our history but are curious about this self-replicating low-entropy phenomenon that calls itself humanity.

I imagine generations of children on innumerable worlds watching the night sky as constellations shift and transform, as stars move out of alignment, drawing contrails against the empyrean.

I close my eyes. This journey will take a long time. Might as well get some rest.

A very, very long time later:

The wide silvery lawn spreads out before me almost to the golden surf of the sea, separated by the narrow dark band that is the beach. The sun is bright and warm, and I can almost feel the breeze, a gentle caress against my arms and face.

“Mia!”

I look over and see Mom striding across the lawn, her long black hair streaming like a kite’s tails.

She wraps me in a fierce hug, squeezing my face against hers. She smells like the glow of new stars being born in the embers of a supernova, like fresh comets emerging from the primeval nebula.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says, her voice muffled against my cheek.

“It’s okay,” I say, and I mean it. I give her a kiss.

“It’s a good day to fly a kite,” she says.

We look up at the sun.

The perspective shifts vertiginously, and now we’re standing upside down on an intricately carved plain, the sun far below us. Gravity tethers the surface above the bottoms of our feet to that fiery orb, stronger than any string. The bright photons we’re bathed in strike against the ground, pushing it up. We’re standing on the bottom of a kite that is flying higher and higher, tugging us toward the stars.

I want to tell her that I understand her impulse to make one life grand, her need to dim the sun with her love, her striving to solve intractable problems, her faith in a technical solution even though she knew it was imperfect. I want to tell her that I know we’re flawed, but that doesn’t mean we’re not also wondrous.

Instead, I just squeeze her hand; she squeezes back.

“Happy birthday,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to fly.”

I relax my grip, and smile at her. “I’m not. We’re almost there.”

The world brightens with the light of a million billion suns.

“Seven Birthdays”  Ken Liu, 2016
Reprinted from Bridging Infinity, ed. by Jonathan Strahan

The post Seven Birthdays appeared first on Reactor.

First-time readers will gain a glimpse of the fascinating world and its complex magic system, while longtime readers of the series will be treated to glimpses into the history of the world. Modesitt’s essay “Behind the ‘Magic’ of Recluce” gives insight into his thoughts on developing the magical system that rules the Island of Recluce and its surrounding lands, while “The Vice Marshal’s Trial” takes the reader back to the first colonists on Recluce. Old favorites “Black Ordermage” and “The Stranger” stand side-by-side with thrilling new stories. Below, we’re excited to share “The Forest Girl,” a  new story about a historical figure before he became a legend to be feared… and respected.

THE FOREST GIRL

Under the Rational Stars, far, far away,
There lie the lands of Cyad, cold without fey
Under the Rational Stars, well within day,
There wait in chill light words no druid should say.

I

“Alyiakal… have you finished your studies?” The majer looks into the small library after supper on a spring evening.

“Yes, ser.” The youth straightens in the chair behind the writing desk.

“What have you learned?”

“That chaos must be directed by the least amount of order possible. The greater the order, the more likely it is to weaken the force of chaos.”

“What does that mean?”

“Mean, ser?”

“If you’re going to aspire to the Magi’i, boy, you can’t just parrot the words.”

“So what do the words mean, ser?” Alyiakal is careful to keep his tone polite. He doesn’t want another beating.

“You tell me.” The majer’s voice is hard. “Magus Triamon says that you can sense order and chaos. Your mother would have been disappointed by such sophistry.”

Alyiakal holds the wince within himself at the reference to his mother. “Chaos has no order. It will go where it will. Order is necessary to direct chaos, but order reduces chaos. The skill is to direct chaos without reducing the power of chaos.”

“Alyiakal… you understand. From now on, every stupid question will merit a blow with a switch or lash.”

“Yes, ser.”

“Your supper should have settled. It’s time for your blade exercises and lessons.”

“Yes, ser.” While Alyiakal is almost as tall as his father, he is barely fifteen, and slender, lacking the physical strength of his father. Until the last season, he had dreaded the blade lessons. Although they practiced with wooden wands, he had always ended up with painful bruises. Now, as he walks to the rear terrace of the quarters, he is merely resigned to what may be. He understands all too well that if he fails to satisfy the Magi’i he will follow his father into the Mirror Lancers.

The practice wands—wooden replicas of Mirror Lancer sabres—hang on the rack by the door. As Alyiakal eases his wand from the rack, he considers his lesson. Order must direct chaos, but it also must direct a blade, for an undirected blade cannot be effective. Can he use his slight skills at sensing order to determine where his father’s blade must go? He takes a deep breath. It is worth the effort. He cannot be more badly bruised than he has been in the past. He makes his way to the terrace and waits.

He does not wait long, for the majer appears in a moment, his own wand in hand. “Ready?”

“Yes, ser.”

Instead of concentrating on his father’s eyes, he tries to sense where his father’s wand will go before it does. For the first few moments, he is scrambling, dancing back, allowing touches—but not hard strikes. Then… slowly, he begins to feel the patterns and to anticipate them.

He slides his father’s wand, and then comes over the top to pin it down, but he cannot hold the wand against Kyal’s greater strength, and he has to jump back.

“Good technique… but you have to finish!” The majer is breathing hard. “Keep at it!”

By the end of half a glass, Alyiakal can slip, parry, or avoid almost every attack his father brings to bear, but he is sweating heavily, and his eyes are blurring when Kyal abruptly says, “That’s enough for this evening.”

Alyiakal lowers the wand.

“You worked hard, and your defense is much better. Just apply yourself that hard to your studies, and you shouldn’t have that much trouble.”

“I’m still bruised in places, ser.”

“At your age, that’s to be expected.” His father nods. “You’re free to do what you will until dark. Don’t go too far. If you’re going to walk the wall road, don’t forget your sabre.”

“Yes, ser. I won’t.” Alyiakal is sore enough that he isn’t certain he wants to go anywhere. At the same time, being free for a glass or so is a privilege not to be wasted. Still…

He decides to at least take a walk, if only to show that he appreciates and will use the privilege. He follows his father inside and carefully racks the wand, then goes to wash up and cool down.

Less than a quarter glass later, he walks out the front door, the ancient Mirror Lancer cupridium blade in the scabbard at his waist. He does not breathe easily until the officers’ quarters at Jakaafra are more than a hundred yards behind him. Before long he is walking southeast along the white stone road paralleling the white stone wall that contains the northeast side of the Accursed Forest. That wall is five cubits high and extends ninety-nine kays southeast to that corner tower where it joins the southeast wall.

He glances to his right. Between the wall and road, there is neither vegetation nor grass, just bare salted ground. To the left are fields and orchards, and a few cots and barns, fewer with each kay from Jakaafra… until the next town, kays away.

He keeps walking along the road flanking the white wall, glancing back, but he sees no one, and no Lancer patrols, not that he expects any. While his eyes remain alert for any movement, especially near the wall, his thoughts consider what had happened during his blade practice… and how he had not previously thought of using order to help in using a sabre.

How else might I use order? He doesn’t have an answer to that question, but he does not have time to pursue it because, some fifty yards ahead, at the base of the sunstone wall is a black beast, a chaos panther, lowering itself, as if to spring and charge him. He draws the antique Lancer sabre, knowing that its usefulness against such a massive beast is limited at best.

Then… the black predator is gone, and a girl—a young woman, he realizes—stands beside the wall. He starts to walk toward her… and as suddenly as she was there, she is gone. He looks around, bewildered, but the salted ground between the patrol road and the wall is empty—for as far as he can see. Carefully, if unwisely, he knows, he moves toward where both the black catlike creature and the young woman had been. Once there, he studies the ground. There are boot prints, but no paw prints, and the boot prints lead to the wall, not away from it, as if someone had walked from the road to the wall. He can find no boot prints leading away from the wall.

A concealing illusion? It had to be, but he can sense neither the heavy blackness of order nor the whitish red of chaos.

Finally, he turns and begins to walk back home, thinking.

II

Alyiakal blots the dampness from his forehead as he steps into the coolness of the quarters. The walk from the dwelling of Magus Triamon in Jakaafra proper was not short, and the summer day had been warmer than usual… and summer around the Accursed Forest was sweltering on the best of days. After standing for a moment in the small entry, he walks into the library, takes down two night candles in their holders and sets them side by side on the writing desk. Then he uses a striker to light one, an effort that takes more than a few attempts.

Following Triamon’s instructions, he concentrates on the lit candle, as much with his senses and thoughts as with his eyes. In time, he begins to get what is almost an image of golden reddish white around the tip of the candle wick… as well as a faint blackish mist above the point of the flame. Yet he sees neither the white nor the black with his eyes. Of that, he is certain… but they are there.

Next, he concentrates on replicating the pattern of golden whiteness around the tip of the wick of the unlit candle. Sweat beads on his forehead. Nothing happens.

“You must not be doing it right,” he murmurs to himself.

He shakes his head, then closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. Finally, he concentrates once more. The wick of the unlit candle remains dark.

Do you need to look at the candle?

This time, he closes his eyes and tries to visualize the dark wick, and the pattern of golden whiteness around it. He opens his eyes quickly, only to see a tiny point of redness, visible to his eyes, wink out.

“You can do it,” he says quietly, redoubling his efforts.

Sweat is running into his eyes a quarter glass later when the candle flickers alight… and stays lit. Alyiakal only allows himself a brief smile and a moment of rest before he blows out the candle and repeats the effort. After a deep breath, he once more blows out the candle… and relights it—just by focusing order on chaos.

He hears the door open, and the heavy footsteps of his father, steps seemingly far too ponderous for a man as small as the majer.

“What are you doing with the candles?” asks Kyal, not quite brusquely.

“Practicing an exercise that Magus Triamon showed me.

He told me to work on it until I could do it instantly.”

“Lighting a candle?”

“Lighting it without a striker, ser. He says it’s the first step in mastering chaos.”

Slowly, Kyal nods, as if he is not certain about the matter.

At that moment, there is a series of knocks on the front door, followed by a loud voice. “Majer! Ser!”

The majer turns and walks swiftly from the archway to the front door, which he opens.

Alyiakal does not follow, but listens intently.

“Majer Kyal… ser… it’s happened again.”

“What?” snaps the majer, whose voice is far larger than his stature.

“Another dispatch rider is gone. The morning patrol found his mount and the dispatches. There’s no sign of him. The men claim they saw a black chaos cat, one of the big ones. It was prowling outside the wall, just to the southwest of the northern point.”

“Send a squad with fully charged firelances. I’d like a report of what they find. Or what they don’t.”

“Yes, ser.”

Kyal closes the door and walks back to the archway into the small library. “We’d best eat early. There’s no telling when we’ll get another chance.” He pauses. “Are you finished with the exercises?”

Alyiakal nods. “I did what the magus wanted.”

“You can tell me about it at supper. We need to wash up. I’ll tell Areya to get the plates ready.”

When the two are finally seated at the table, Areya sets a platter of mutton slices covered with cheese and a yellow-green glaze of ground rosemary. One smaller platter holds lace potatoes, and another thinly sliced pearapples.

Kyal serves himself, then passes each platter to Alyiakal. “What about the exercises?”

“Every flame holds both chaos and order, but there’s much more chaos. Magus Triamon taught me how to sense both order and chaos in the flame. He says that’s the easiest way to sense them at first. Once I could sense them, and he made sure of that by swirling the patterns, he made me try to move the chaos myself. Then he sent me home with the exercise. That was to light a candle, and then learn to light another one by duplicating the pattern of chaos around the wick. It took a while, but I did it three times in a row. Next, I have to light a candle without using another candle as a pattern.”

“Do you think you’ll ever be able to match a full magus?” asks the majer.

“Magus Triamon thinks I can… if I keep working.”

Kyal nods slowly. “I’d advise you to work very hard, son.”

“I will, ser.” After a silence, Alyiakal looks at his father. “Is that because I will not match you in might, ser?”

Kyal laughs. “Oh… you’ll be able to do that in another year or so. It looks like you’ll be taller and broader than me. No… it’s because too many Mirror Lancers are being killed fighting the barbarians who swarm across the grass hills. We need better weapons. Perhaps you’ll be able to become a great enough magus to create them. Even if you don’t, the Magi’i are the ones who keep our weapons charged.”

“You don’t want me to be a Lancer officer like you?”

“I’d like it very much. But the son of a Lancer majer from Jakaafra is likely to do no better than his sire, if his talents are limited to the blade and skill at arms alone. Why do you think I insist on your reading about tactics and logistics?”

“But… Magus Triamon…”

“You may become a great magus. You may not, but a Lancer has three weapons—his sabre, his firelance, and his mind. Firelances are powered by chaos. If you do follow in my steps, the more you know and the more you can do with chaos, the better you will be with your weapons. The more you study with the magus, the more you will know what I cannot teach you, and that will sharpen your mind even more.” Kyal clears his throat. “There is one more thing. All the senior Mirror Lancer officers come from the great families of Cyad. If you wish to rise farther than I have, you must become more capable than all of them. You must be so clearly so superior that none can contest you.” Kyal smiles wryly. “That, you will find, is true in all areas where a man must make his way.” His words turn sardonic. “At times, even that is not sufficient.”

Alyiakal sits, silent. Never has his father talked so bluntly.

“It’s time you began to learn more of how the world works… really works. Now… eat your supper. I’ll have to leave soon to see what that squad has found. You can walk a bit tonight, but go the southeast way.”

“Yes, ser.”

“And be careful.”

“Yes, ser.”

Once they finish eating and the majer leaves the quarters, Alyiakal fastens on the old swordbelt and scabbard, checks the sabre, and then slips out into the early evening air, still steaming, but not quite so unbearable as it had been several glasses earlier. Once he is away from the quarters buildings of the Mirror Lancer outpost, he studies the wall even more closely, but he sees no sign of anyone or anything on the road or near it.

Then, in the early twilight, when his eyes move from the small stead on his left to the cleared and salted strip of land on his right, he sees a large black panther cat crouched at the base of the sunstone wall. Where did that come from?

He stops and studies the beast. While his hand rests on the top of the hilt of his sabre, he does not attempt to draw the weapon. The black panther cat’s eyes remain fixed on him. There is something… something he cannot fathom… yet he has no doubt that his sabre will likely not suffice against such a creature. What will?

Fire! All wild animals fear—or are wary of—flame. Can you create a flame large enough to startle it? He smiles. It cannot hurt to try.

He looks directly at the panther cat, then concentrates on replicating the flame pattern of a candle—a very large candle.

A flare of light flashes up in front of the creature… then vanishes.

Alyiakal feels as though his head has been cleft in two, and for several moments he cannot move.

Abruptly… the giant cat vanishes. A black-haired young woman, scarcely more than a girl, he thinks, stands there. She laughs. “Fair enough!”

“Who are you?” he asks, moving forward, if slowly.

“A girl of the forest and the town,” she replies. “Nothing more.”

He laughs softly. “Nothing more? When you can take on the semblance of a giant black panther and then vanish?”

She frowns.

Now that he is closer, he sees that her eyes are as black as her hair, for all that her skin is a lightly tanned creamy color. “I saw you do that eightdays ago. You didn’t really vanish, did you? You just made it seem so.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I followed your boot prints, and you climbed over the sunstone wall into the Accursed Forest.”

“It’s not cursed. It’s just different.”

“You’ve actually been in the… forest… and you’re alive?”

“You sound so surprised. Why?”

“Lancers die every season from attacks by the black cats or the stun lizards.”

“That’s because they consider the cats and lizards enemies, and the cats and lizards can feel that.”

“I think it’s more than that,” says Alyiakal, looking directly at her. Up close it is clear she must be at least several years older than he is; it is also obvious that she is striking. Not pretty, but something beyond. What that might be, he is far from certain.

“Can you use that blade?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Then you must be Alyiakal.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Magus Triamon said it was a pity you were already so proficient with such a weapon. No one else near Jakaafra uses a blade and can also sense both black and white.”

“You’re obviously far better at that than am I.”

“I’m older.”

“Not that much,” he protests.

“You’re young, and you’re kind. Trust me. I am older.”

“What do you do in the forest?”

“You don’t have to do anything in the forest.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

She smiles. “No, I didn’t.”

“Then show me.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“If anything happened to you, your father would seek those responsible. Magus Triamon would have to flee or die, and I could never see my parents again—if they survived your father’s wrath.”

Alyiakal thinks, then says, “Could you show me some of the forest from the wall?”

A smile that becomes a wide grin crosses her lips. “You’d do that after all the Lancers your father has lost?”

“How do you… how much do you know about me… and my father?”

“He’s in charge of the Mirror Lancers here in Jakaafra, and you live with him in the quarters, and you study with Master Triamon.” She shrugs. “Other than that… very little, except that you have courage and are willing to look beyond walls.”

“Will you show me?” he asks again.

“Since you’re asking. But you must promise not to enter the forest.”

“You said it wasn’t dangerous.” He offers an impish grin.

“It isn’t… if you know what you’re doing. You don’t.”

Alyiakal can accept that. “I won’t.”

“Then climb up.” She turns and scrambles up the sunstone so quickly that she is looking down at him before he even begins.

He discovers that the stone is smoother than it looks. He almost loses his grip twice, but soon he is perched on the flat surface of the wall beside her, looking into the part of the Accursed Forest that cannot be seen from the wall road.

Less than thirty yards from the base of the wall beneath Alyiakal is the rounded end of a pool, whose still waters look to be a clear deep green in the gloom created by the high canopy of the taller trees and the lower canopy formed by the undergrowth, trees still taller than any Alyiakal has seen anywhere outside the Accursed Forest. A long greenish log lies half-in, half-out of the water, except that when the log moves, Alyiakal realizes that it is a stun lizard, not that he has ever seen one, but only drawings of the beasts.

“The stun lizard… are they all so big?”

“That’s a small one. Some of them are more than ten yards from snout to tail, and they can stun an entire squad of Lancers.”

“How do you know that?”

“Shhhh… watch.”

An enormous black panther cat pads along the side of the pond opposite the stun lizard, which freezes back into resembling a log. A cream-colored crane with silver-green wings alights at the far end of the pond, standing motionless for the longest time. Then, suddenly, the long beak stabs into the water and comes up with a squirming flash of silver.

“Try to see the order and the chaos in each of them,” she suggests.

Alyiakal had not thought of that, and even as he wonders why he should, he attempts what she has suggested. At first, all he can sense is swirling flows of order and chaos… but as he keeps watching, he can soon discern that the order and chaos within each of the forest creatures is locked in a tight pattern, and that while the patterns are different, there is something about them that is the same.

“You need to go,” the woman who looks like a girl says quietly. He glances to the west. While he cannot see the sun, the angles of the shadows tell him that it is far later than he realized. Has that much time passed? He looks to her. “Thank you.”

After he drops to the salted ground beneath the wall, he looks back up. She is still there, looking at him.

“You didn’t tell me your name,” he says.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s better that way.”

“Why don’t you want me to know your name?”

“I don’t care if you learn my name… just so long as you don’t discover it from me.”

Then she smiles… and vanishes.

For several moments, Alyiakal can sense a web of darkness on the wall, but he sees nothing. Then the darkness drops away, leaving the top of the wall empty of order… and her.

He turns and begins the walk back toward Jakaafra, walking quickly and hoping he will not be so late that Areya will tell his father.

III

When Alyiakal arrives at the small square dwelling under the canopy of the overarching oak trees on twoday, as often occurs, he has to wait for Magus Triamon to open the door and admit him. Rather than sit on the bench on the porch, he finds himself pacing back and forth until Triamon opens the door and appears.

“You seem eager this morning,” says the gray-haired magus as he ushers Alyiakal into the study.

“I came across another student of yours, Master Triamon.”

“Oh? Which one?”

“The black-haired young woman.”

The gray-haired magus nods and smiles. “How did you meet her?”

“She gave the image of herself as a great black panther cat. I created an image of a large flame. She dropped the image and laughed.”

“You must have amused her. Otherwise, you never would have seen her.”

“Who is she?”

“That, my young pupil, you will have to discover for yourself.”

“She said the same thing. Are you both so frightened of my father?”

The magus shakes his head. “Your father is but an officer, a strong and honest one. But he is a Mirror Lancer, and one does not anger the Mirror Lancers.”

“Why would telling me her name upset anyone?”

“She has the gift of the Magi’i, and the powers of altage and those of the Magi’i would be less than pleased if I facilitated any acquaintance between the two of you.”

“But I’ve already met—” Alyiakal breaks off the remainder of what he had been about to say as the import of what Triamon said sinks in. Then he asks, “Because you are of the Magi’i?”

“Exactly. There are… agreements…”

“That’s absurd. I don’t intend to consort her.”

“Consorting is not precisely the problem.”

“Then why are you teaching me?”

“To determine if you can become a magus. If the Magi’i accept you, then the Mirror Lancers will not want you. If your talent is only minor, such as lighting candles and healing, then you will never become a magus, and you are acceptable to the Mirror Lancers.”

“Just acceptable?”

“They prefer Lancers who have no talent with order or chaos, but limited ability, especially healing, is acceptable in junior officers.”

“Then why should I study with you?”

“Why indeed?” Triamon smiles.

“Another answer I must find for myself?”

“In the end, we all must find our own answers.” Triamon’s smile vanishes. “Do you wish to proceed with your lessons?”

“Why would I not?”

“Good. Today, we will begin work on the importance of focus…”

After his glass of instruction and practice with Triamon, Alyiakal makes his way to the market square, rather than return immediately to his quarters.

He begins his inquiries with the woman who sells grass and reed baskets.

“Good woman… would you know the black-eyed young woman with black hair?”

“The child of forest and night?”

“Yes… I believe so.”

“No… I have seen her. I do not know her.”

“Do you know her name?”

“No. It would not be wise to ask.”

“Thank you.” Alyiakal makes his way to the next stall.

He visits more than a score of carts and stalls before he comes to the one-eyed beggar propped against the wall. He has always avoided the beggar before, but ashamed of himself for his lack of compassion in the past, he places a copper in the near-empty bowl.

“Heard your question of the weaver, boy. They all fear her, you know?”

“You don’t, I think,” replies Alyiakal with a half-smile.

“What’s to fear? Her name is Adayal, and her father is a carpenter. Her mother… who knows?”

“Thank you.” Alyiakal puts another copper in the bowl.

“Just be careful in what you’ll be wanting, young fellow. Great wants call to great danger.” With that, the old beggar closes his one good eye.

Great wants call to great danger? How could wanting to know Adayal’s name be a great want?

With a smile he turns and heads back toward the quarters, hoping to arrive before his father.

IV

Despite all his walks along the wall, and his forays into the town, the summer days pass, and his instruction from Magus Triamon widens, so that he can call up a limited concealment and more illusions than merely flames. Even so, Alyiakal does not see Adayal, or any large panther cats, either. Often he climbs the wall of the Accursed Forest and perches or sits there, watching what goes on beyond, trying to hold a concealment as he does, but when he does, he finds he cannot see, and can only sense through his limited use of order. But for all his efforts, he does not encounter the forest girl. He thinks of her as such, even though it is clear that she is truly a woman.

At breakfast on threeday of the seventh eightday of summer, the majer clears his throat. “I received a dispatch late last evening. You were not around.”

“You said I could walk so long as I was careful.”

Kyal continues without addressing Alyiakal’s observation. “I’m going to have to leave this morning and accompany Third Company to Geliendra. Commander Waasol wants to see all the majers posted to duty near the Accursed Forest. Areya will come in to fix your dinner. You’re to fix your own breakfasts and keep up with your lessons. I’ll likely be gone an eightday. I’ve sent word to Magus Triamon. You’re to see him both morning and afternoon. I’ve told him to keep you challenged and busy. You’re to do exactly what he tells you.”

“Yes, ser.” Alyiakal does not point out that he has never not followed the instructions of the magus. He also does not mention the times when he has done things that would have been forbidden, had he asked.

After breakfast, Alyiakal bids his father good-bye and then practices perceiving order. Two glasses later, he leaves to walk to his morning lesson with Magus Triamon. On this day, he does not have to wait, and Triamon ushers him into his study almost at once.

“There are many shades to chaos,” begins Triamon. “To be even the lowest of healers, you need to know the shades and what each signifies.”

“Why do I need to know about healing? Are not the most valuable talents of a magus those that can be used to store and channel chaos?”

“They are… but you are more grounded in order, and order suits healing. If the Magi’i accept you for training, the more you know the better, and because many Magi’i deal more with chaos than is healthy, you should know your limits. Without understanding healing, you will not. If you do not become a magus, then you will be a Lancer, and it will help if you can aid healing of your men. That will keep you from losing too many rankers and give them cause to support you when you need it.”

Alyiakal frowns.

“Mirror Lancer officers will always need the support of their men at least once, if not more often. The ones who don’t get it generally die before they make majer.” Triamon’s words are delivered in a dry sardonic tone that emphasizes their verity.

Alyiakal starts to protest, then closes his mouth. His father does know field healing, even if he does not have the skill of even a beginning healer magus.

“The lowest and least focused chaos is a dull red, infused with gray. Sometimes, even a bad bruise will show this…”

Alyiakal forces himself to concentrate.

V

Even with two lessons a day for close to two eightdays, Alyiakal has more than enough time to continue his walks along the wall, but he sees neither Adayal, nor any large panther cats, either. He still studies the creatures of the Accursed Forest from the wall, and he can now distinguish most of them by their patterns of order and chaos, or rather chaos held in patterns by order. But summer gives way to harvest, and Alyiakal has yet to see Adayal, even though he now knows her dwelling… yet she is never there… or she has created a concealment so perfect that his order senses cannot penetrate it. How is he to know which it might be, or both… or neither.

On the second threeday of harvest, early on another evening when his father is away, Alyiakal has removed himself from the quarters to a place on the wall from which he can watch one end of the pool some thirty yards away, the same pool that Adayal had shown him the first time he had looked into the Accursed Forest. He can barely make out the stun lizard half-concealed by a fallen log, although it is small, from what he has seen over the past season, only two and a half yards from nose to tail. That is more than large enough to stun a man and a large horse.

He hears a rustling and the faintest of scrapings on the stone… and Adayal sits on the wall beside him.

“You have grown,” she says. “There is an order about you.”

“Magus Triamon has been teaching me how to use order to manipulate chaos so that the chaos does not break down the order of my body.”

“You’ve learned well.”

“I’ve been looking for you all summer and since.”

“I know. Would you like to walk through a little part of the Accursed Forest with me?”

“Have I learned enough to be safe?”

“Enough so that I can keep you safe. Perhaps more.”

“I would like that.”

“Then let us go…” She slips down from the wall onto the mossy ground beside the sunstone.

Alyiakal follows, and when he stands beside her, she reaches out and takes his hand. “This way.”

“Should I hold a concealment?”

“There is no need of that.” Her voice is throaty yet warm.

She leads him down a path. “Look carefully, beyond that fallen trunk…”

He studies where she has pointed, then sees a tortoise, or perhaps it is a turtle, whose shell stretches two full yards with a pattern of light and dark green diamonds that hold the faintest light of their own. Farther on, he sees two gold-and-black birds perched on a limb, the like of which he has never seen.

Adayal stretches a hand out. “Wait.”

Alyiakal waits. His mouth opens as a giant serpent slithers across the path some fifteen yards ahead of them, its scales a mixture of greens and browns that blend so well into the forest that he can only make out the part of its body crossing the darker path.

In time, after she has shown him more creatures than he ever would have believed existed in such a small part of the Forest, they come to a tree whose trunk contains a small door. Adayal opens the door and gestures for him to enter.

He senses nothing within and follows her gesture. Once inside, after she closes the door, he can still see, because of a faint greenish illumination that somehow surrounds them.

“There is something else you need to learn, Alyiakal,” she says gently, turning to him. “I would not have you too innocent or too unlearned about women… or learning from rough Lancers.” She reaches up and draws his head down, and her lips are warm upon his.

“Slowly… ,” she murmurs drawing him down onto the soft pallet he had not noticed. “Slowly… let me show you.”

Alyiakal, surprised beyond belief, does… so afraid that the moments that follow will end, but they do not, not for glasses.

Finally, she draws her garments back on and around her. “I shouldn’t keep you any longer. Try to keep some of that sweetness.”

He dresses slowly, not wanting the night to end.

After a time, they both stand at the base of the wall, outside the Forest. Alyiakal looks through the darkness, sensing Adayal as much as seeing her. He remains stunned by both the warmth and the fire Adayal had shown, and touched by the gentleness behind both.

“That is how it should be between a man and a woman,” she says softly. “Never forget.”

“How could I?” Abruptly, he adds, “You’re not leaving Jakaafra and the Forest, are you?”

“No. I am part of the Forest, and it is part of me. I will always be here.”

For all of her words, he can sense a sadness and a regret.

“You must go,” she says. “It is late.”

Too late, he thinks as they separate and leave the wall in different directions.

It is well past midnight when Alyiakal slips back into the quarters, only to find too many lamps lit. He sighs, if silently, and makes his way into the study.

“Where have you been?” asks the majer.

Alyiakal inclines his head politely, hoping his father will answer the question himself, as he sometimes does.

“Out walking the wall road, no doubt, and peering into the forest.” The majer shakes his head. “No matter.”

Alyiakal tries not to stiffen at the resigned tone of voice.

“I’ve been talking to Master Triamon. He says that you have some talent. He also says that you’re not suited to the Magi’i. You are too ordered, and your interests lie elsewhere. He feels that you’d never be more than the lowest of the Magi’i, if that.”

Alyiakal does not sigh in relief, although relief is indeed what he feels. “Yes, ser.”

“That being so… young man, next oneday you’re leaving for Kynstaar.”

“Kynstaar, ser?”

“That’s where they take the sons of Lancer officers and see if they can train them to be officers. Some of what they teach, you already know. Much you don’t. It’s time to see what you can be. There’s nothing more you can learn here.”

“Yes, ser,” replies Alyiakal, although he has his doubts about that, given what he has learned earlier in the evening, but there is little point in protesting. Already, he knows to pick his battles. That much he has learned from his father, from watching the Accursed Forest… and from Adayal.

VI

On fourday, Alyiakal searches Jakaafra for Adayal, but can find no trace of her. Nor can he do so on fiveday, or sixday. On sevenday, he leaves the quarters just after dawn, determined to find her.

She is not at her parents’ house, nor anywhere along the wall.

Finally, he walks to where she had found him on threeday. She is not there. He looks to the wall, then nods. He quickly climbs the wall and stops on the top. Does he dare to enter the Forest without her protection?

Do you dare not to?

He takes some time to create a concealment around himself, not one like he has raised before, but one more like the interlocked patterns of the great Forest creatures. Hoping that it will suffice, he eases himself down into the forest and onto the shorter path, the one Adayal had led him back to the wall along at the end of their evening. He cannot see, not with his eyes, but must rely on his senses. He walks as quietly as he can, not wishing to alarm any creature needlessly, but he must see Adayal one more time.

He slips around the last curve in the path before her tree bower… and senses that she stands by the door, as if she has expected him.

He hurries to her, dropping the concealment, then stops as he sees the sad smile. “Adayal… I have to leave.”

“I know. I knew then.” She smiles more happily. “You can walk the Forest now, whenever you wish.”

“I learned it from you.” Quickly, he adds, “I have to go to be trained as a Mirror Lancer officer… if I can be.”

“You will be, if that is what you want.”

“Will you be here when I finish training? I want you to be with me.”

“Alyiakal, you have seen me. I cannot be far from the Forest, and you are meant for one kind of greatness. I cannot share that greatness. Nor would you be happy if I were by your side, because I would be but half there.”

He finds he can say nothing.

“I will walk back to the wall with you,” she says gently. “I cannot tell you how it moved me that you would enter the Forest for me.”

Alyiakal’s eyes burn, but he nods. He does not trust himself to speak.

She takes his hand in hers, and they begin to walk.

Two large tawny cougars, perhaps half the size of the great black panther cats, appear and walk before them.

“They… they do your bidding.”

“No… they are here to honor you. For your courage and your understanding of the Forest.”

Alyiakal has his doubts, but he does not voice them.

When they reach the wall, there is a flicker, and Adayal appears as the great black panther cat and springs to the top of the wall. Alyiakal studies her with his senses, but she is indeed what he sees. He climbs to the top of the wall, where Adayal has returned to being the black-haired, black-eyed, beautiful woman who has loved him.

“Do you see now?” she asks softly. He nods.

“Do great deeds, honest deeds, and do them with all your heart. You can.”

Now. After a long moment, he slips down the wall and then steps back to look at her once more.

The two tawny cougars have joined her on the top of the sunstone wall, flanking her. She looks down at him, then speaks softly, as if to a beloved, yet her words are clear in his ears and thoughts. “You are a part of the Forest, and part of it will always be with you.”

“Because of you.”

“And you,” she replies.

She stands there for a moment, then reappears as the great panther, framed by the two smaller tawny cougars. An instant later, the top of the wall is vacant.

Alyiakal just stares for long moments that seem to last forever, her words reverberating in his thoughts. Finally, he takes a deep breath.

After a last look at the empty wall, Alyiakal turns and begins the walk back to Jakaafra.

North of the Rational Stars, far, far away
There lie the lands of Naclos, warm and so fey
North of the Rational Stars, well beyond day,
There wait in tall trees words no altage dare say.

“The Forest Girl” © L. E. Modesitt, Jr., 2017

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Edited by Paula Guran, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu collects tales of cosmic horror that traverse terrain created by Lovecraft and create new eldritch geographies to explore—available now from Running Press!

Those Who Watch

On my third full day, the library marked me. I should have been holding down the desk—I’d been hired for reference—but instead I was shelving. After a year with an MLIS and no prospects, you don’t whine. Deep in the narrow aisles of the back stacks, the AC struggled against the sticky Louisiana heat outside. I gave up on my itchy suit jacket, draped it over the cart, and tucked Cults and Sects of Eastern Bavaria under my arm while I hooked a rolling stool with my ankle. And felt a piercing sting against the inside of my elbow.

I screamed, almost dropped the book, caught it but lost my balance. My ass is pretty well padded, but now I felt a nasty bruise start up to go along with whatever mutant mosquito had snuck in from the swamps to assault me. I set Cults and Sects gently on floor and examined my arm. The skin swelled, red and inflamed, around a tiny spiral galaxy of indigo and scarlet flame.

I’ve never so much as pierced my ears. I hate pain. A lot of days I hate my body too, but it’s mine and I don’t expect it’d improve anything to ink it up or poke extra holes in it. But I’ve got braver friends, so I could tell this was unmistakably a tattoo, right about the point some people take off the Band-Aid—a little too early—and send you close-up selfies to make you wince in sympathy. I touched it and shrieked again, a little muffled because I expected the pain this time.

I prodded the book, turned it carefully with the tip of my finger. No needles hidden between pages by urban legend psychopaths, or protruding from the spine like some literary assassin’s poison ring. An ordinary book, cloth bound and stamped along the page ends with “Crique Foudre Community College.”

“Elaine! Are you all right?” My boss hurried around the end of the row. I scrambled to my feet, nearly tripping again, left hand clapped over the evidence of whatever screw-up I’d managed.

“Sorry, Sherise,” I managed. “Sherise,” she’d made clear when I started, not Sherry or Miss Nichols or any of the other variants people had tried—she liked her name and she used it.

“Let me see,” she said. When I didn’t move, she pried my fingers away from the offending spot. She hummed as she traced the swollen area. “Better get the first aid kit to be safe. Come on.”

She strode confidently through the stacks, a maze I’d already gotten lost in twice that morning. Florescent light gleamed off her brown skin and the darker maps winding around her arms—hers were probably from an actual tattoo parlor. Her hair puffed over her ears; big gold rings strung with lapis beads dangled underneath. I struggled to keep up.

A few more turns, and we’d come all the way around the shelf-lined halls that surrounded the library’s central reading room, back to the staff office with its institutional carpet and laminate desks. Sherise’s, in the corner, stood out by being bigger and uglier than the others, and topped by sort of an old style wooden card catalog, dozens of tiny drawers with brass pulls. She opened one, pulled out a box of what looked like alcohol wipes. She tore open a sealed pack, labeled in an alphabet I didn’t recognize. It smelled of wintergreen and ashes. She rubbed the cool pad over my arm, and stinging gave way to a softer tingle.

“There, that should keep it from spreading. Be careful with the religion books. Powers want respect, and so do the words around them.”

“Okay.” My last semester at Rutgers I’d applied to jobs all around the country—and the same for a year afterward. It was August now, and plenty of hungry new graduates would be glad to move to rural Louisiana if I didn’t work out.

CFCC had been a miracle of double-scheduling, tacked onto a disastrous interview at the smallest and most obscure branch of Louisiana State University. The LSU staff started by asking whether I had any family in the area and what church I liked. Their library was a disaster too: a modern brick monstrosity that turned off the climate control at night to keep under budget, and never mind if mold ate away their skimpy collection. After that, just about anywhere would have been an easy sell. The CFCC library, endowed by an alumnus-made-good with distinctly non-modern architectural tastes, about made me cry with gratitude.

At CFCC, they didn’t ask about my family. They threw a dozen weird-ass reference queries at me in rapid succession, and seemed pleased by my sample class on databases. They did ask my religion, but “sort of an agnostic Neopagan”—I was through being coy after LSU—seemed like an acceptable answer. By the time they brought out an old leather-bound tome from their rare books collection and wanted to know if the font gave me a headache, I didn’t much care. I was past wanting a job, any job—I wanted to work somewhere that actually cared about being a good library for their visitors. I wanted a space that cared, and never mind if outside the doors waited mosquitoes and killing humidity and drive-through liquor stores.

Sherise didn’t send me home, which I kind of thought might have been justified. On the other hand she didn’t yell at me, which would probably have been justified too. I’d been disrespectful to Sects and Cults, after all, whatever that meant. I retreated to the reading room.

The circular, high-domed room at the library’s heart was a legacy of the generous alumnus. According to Sherise, this benefactor had traveled the world collecting antiquities, and decided that American education neglected the values that had made the ancient world great. “By ancient he meant Greece,” she’d said. “Maybe Baghdad if he was feeling really broad-minded. But still, you won’t find another building this pretty closer than New Orleans.” And she was right: in the middle of a campus of shoebox buildings, the library stood out like a dandelion breaking through a sidewalk.

Each door to the reading room was crowned by cherubim bearing a motto on a banner—in this case: “The temple of knowledge shapes the mind within.” Actual cherubim, not putti; I had to look up the original descriptions before I believed it. Inside, the room went up three stories. The center held the shelves and work stations and computers you’d expect, but allegorical sculptures of Cosmology and Determination and Wisdom, Agriculture and Epiphany and Curiosity, gazed down over the doors. Above them a bas relief ribbon detailed stories related to these virtues. Some I recognized: Oedipus and the sphinx, Archimedes in his bath. In others, humans and fabulous monsters played out less familiar myths. A tromp l’oeil thunderstorm stood over all, making the room feel dim and cool even with the lamps turned up bright. A few professors bent over oak desks, and I felt self-conscious as I craned my neck.

The sculptures had been a definite selling point for the school, one that helped me work up the guts to come out as Neopagan—though it’s not always a trustworthy sign; a guy screamed at me one time for pointing out Minerva’s owls atop the Chicago Public Library. People don’t like admitting they’re taking advantage of other people’s temples, maybe even worshipping just by walking through.

It was Determination I wanted—to get through the day, to do my work right so I’d still have a job and an apartment and insurance when David’s visiting professorship in Chicago ended. There was a little spot between two shelves where I could get near her with no one watching. I sat heavily on a stool, looked up. She wore armor, and aimed her spear down at my seat. In her other arm, she clasped a book protectively, and she gazed with narrowed eyes, daring anyone to come up and try something. But someone had: carven blood spilled from a wound in her side, the only spot of color on the white marble.

When I first saw her, I assumed she got that wound from some enemy’s weapon. But it was awfully close to the book. I opened my mouth to whisper a prayer, and couldn’t get anything out.

The advantage of being agnostic is that you can pray to whatever you like. A stream, a statue, an abstract concept, a fictional character—if it feels like it ought to be a god, if it does you some good to think about how it might see your problems, you can just go ahead and babble. But I couldn’t doubt the muddy multichromatic swirl pressed into my skin. Some power, aware or otherwise, had decided that was a good idea.

I knew enough stories. Gods, if they actually exist and don’t mind letting you see the evidence, are scary fucks. No damn way was I praying to one. My arms slipped up to wrap around my chest and I scooted to the side. I felt ridiculous, but I also felt like at any moment Determination might shift her spear. Maybe she wanted to make sure I didn’t misuse another precious book. My heart sped, and I started to feel dizzy. I pushed the stool farther back, checked the aisle behind me and saw Epiphany, globe upheld in one hand and wings spread, other hand on her robe. But her eyes—like Determination’s—focused on me, mocking. I scrambled up, kicking the stool against the shelf, flinching as it banged into the wood. Backed away, then fled through Wisdom’s door to the staff room, not daring to look either at her or at the professors who might’ve noticed my outburst.

I shouldn’t have taken the prayer break in any case. I should’ve gone to work the reference desk—in the middle of the reading room—or back to the pre-semester reshelving. But I still didn’t know what I’d done wrong, and after a few minutes trying to swallow a growing lump of nausea, knew that I couldn’t face either today. Sherise had left the staff room and I’d only get lost looking for her. I scribbled a note: “I’m feeling sick and need to go home early—I’ll make it up later in the week. Sorry for the short notice.”

As I gathered up my things, I imagined her reading the note. I had no idea what rare sequelae might result from book tattoos—would she call an ambulance? I went back and added: “It’s a problem with the dose on my medication; I’ll get it fixed.” She knew I was on meds; I’d deliberately let her see the sertraline when I took my morning pills. Another thing I didn’t feel like being coy about. And it was true about the dosage problem. After a year with no insurance, my new doctor wanted to start slowly; the amount I was taking now might work for an anxious supermodel, but for a big girl like me it barely made a dent.

Outside, heat slammed my lungs. I squinted against the blinding afternoon sun, trying to catch my breath. Halfway to the parking lot, sweat soaked my shirt; just walking felt disgusting. Skin and cloth stuck to each other and peeled away, again and again. By the time I got to the car, my legs were shaking and my heart still hadn’t slowed. I felt short of breath, and couldn’t tell whether I was hyperventilating or just having trouble with the humidity.

The first blast of AC cleared my head enough for me to realize that no way in hell should I drive like this. After a minute of circling the need-to-get-home/can’t-go-home paradox, I gave in and called David. Skyped, actually—still just in range of the campus wi-fi, I needed to see him more desperately than I needed him not to see me in sweat-stained dishabille.

The phone sang its reassuring trying-to-connect melody, less reassuring as it went on and I wondered if I’d misremembered his class schedule. Or he could be with a student, or in a meeting, or just too busy. But finally, with a satisfied plink, the video came through.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Hey, pretty boy.” It was ritual exchange, but at least my end of it was true. My fiancé was a beautiful red-haired Nordic type who could rock a Viking helmet or a slinky dress with equal aplomb. What he saw in me was still a mystery. I tried to explain what was going on, managed only: “I hate Louisiana.”

“I don’t blame you.” He leaned closer. “Are you having a panic attack?”

I shook my head, then nodded, then shook it again.

“Okay. Take a deep breath. I’m right here, I’m holding you. Let it out. Breathe in.”

I imagined his arms around me, imagined lying together in the shitty little apartment we’d shared near Rutgers. It made me feel lonely, but it gave me something to think about besides the heat and the tattoo and my boss and the job that might be too weird for me to handle. The breathing helped. My head cleared further, and keeping the car on the right side of the road no longer seemed like an overwhelming prospect.

“Thanks, that helps.” I wanted to show him the tattoo—but the thought made my mouth feel dry again. What if he demanded I quit my job and come to Chicago right away? Or worse, what if he couldn’t see it at all? Hallucination isn’t supposed to be a symptom of generalized anxiety disorder, but it was actually the most rational explanation I could think of. “What do you do when your job gets weird?” I asked instead.

He leaned back, obviously pleased to have been of use. “Research, mostly. Or diagnose my colleagues’ personality disorders on insufficient evidence, depending on the brand of weirdness. Is someone being nasty?”

“No. Just, um, trying to figure out campus culture.”

“Lots of alcohol and not enough drugs, probably.”

We chatted a little longer, and then he had to get back to course prep. I let him go, and didn’t tell him I’d called in sick. Nothing bad happened on my drive home.

Outside my apartment complex, I found the heat still intense, but now that I was calmer (and before I hit the barricade of smokers by the door) I took a moment to breathe. I can’t stand the way Louisiana looks or feels, but the smell is amazing. Silt and decay like endless autumn, overlain with orchids and citrus and cypress and a million other trees and vines and roots bursting from every available surface. I can’t face the swamp in person. Giant bugs to bite you or leap in your face, mud to slip on, alligators just lying around hoping you’re weak enough to be worth a sprint. But I love the smell.

I drowned my sorrows in chocolate and a Criminal Minds marathon, and it helped. Sherise sent an email to say she hoped I’d feel better, and I stared at it for five minutes trying to figure out whether she believed me before giving up and going back to the TV.

* * *

But calling out sick only works for so long, and I’ve learned the hard way that if I let myself do it two days in a row it’s easy to get inertia and stretch it for a week. So the next morning, lying in bed, I tried to put my thoughts in order.

The tattoo remained, stubbornly, on my arm. It still felt tender, but the dim light filtering through the blinds showed that the swelling had gone down. So I would go with the assumption that I wasn’t hallucinating, if nothing else because I wasn’t checking into any hospital without David there to look respectable for the doctors.

If the tattoo was real… then I still wasn’t sure about the statues. I’d been spiraling, and I couldn’t even trust my judgment of live people when that happened. How the hell was I supposed to predict allegorical virtues? But the tattoo, all by itself, meant I didn’t understand how books worked. Probably it meant I didn’t understand how the world worked at all, but I’d always known that. Books, though, I thought I had down.

When his job got weird, David did research. For him that meant digging through sociology databases and endless stacks of journal articles. I didn’t know what database covered this situation—but if the library had untrustworthy books, it ought to have resources to tell you about them.

“Imagine it’s someone else’s reference question,” I said aloud. Talking to myself feels stupid, but never speaking aloud at home feels a lot worse. “Miss, I’ve got a report about book attacks due in three hours. Can you find everything for me? Yes, damn straight I can.”

* * *

Sherise nodded when I dropped my lunch in the staff room, and asked casually after my health. I told her I was fine today, tried to parse what she was thinking. Probably I ought to have gone ahead and asked about the book. But she hadn’t told me when she cleaned the tattoo, and maybe there was a reason for that. Either it wasn’t the sort of thing she could explain properly, or she assumed I already knew.

One of David’s psych grad friends, a year ahead of him, figured out—halfway through his postdoc—that they’d hired him thinking he’d studied under a different professor from the same department. They’d never asked, he’d never told them, and he’d struggled to keep up the whole year. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could come out and say. Suppose one of the Rutgers library science professors was secretly a Predatory Books specialist? Or more plausibly, suppose Sherise assumed this was something Neopagans just knew about? Either way, I didn’t want to make her feel stupid—or like hiring me had been a mistake. I’d just have to paw through the databases myself until I found what I needed.

Walking into the reading room was hard. My body believed, even if I wasn’t sure, that I’d faced a threat here. Bodies like to preserve themselves; mine wanted me to go back to my cave where it was safe. I told my body that it was stupid, and went in. I couldn’t help glancing at Determination. She didn’t seem about to spear me, but I still sensed something watching. The sense of attention seemed to pervade the room, all the allegories judging our choices of study. I shivered, tried to ignore what was probably just my neurotic imagination, and turned on the ancient reference computer.

The library’s generous funder wasn’t nearly as fond of technology as of architecture or hard copy, so I had far too long to sit in the crossfire of allegorical gazes without the screen to distract me. When I finally got the browser running, I looked over the library’s scant list of databases. Medline? Likely to support the hallucination hypothesis. PsycInfo? Worse. Maybe JSTOR or the always over-general Academic Search Premier? Eventually I decided to start with databases I’d never heard of—if a community college with a lousy budget for online services subscribed to something really obscure, there was probably a reason.

I found a few, in fact. Mostly the weird ones claimed space in world mythology and folklore, though there was one in biology and another in physics. MythINFO turned out to be perfectly pedestrian, though kind of awesome: it let you search by a drop-down menu of Stith Thompson Motif Index entries. Several looked relevant—various “transformation” archetypes, magical books—but turned up only articles on fairy tales, drowned in the deep jargon of literary analysis.

PYTHIAS, though, seemed more promising. Various combinations of “book” and “tattoo,” suitably modified by “AND” one thing and “-” another, got me nowhere. But an exasperated “bibliogenic illness” turned up a long list of books in the Zs. I scribbled down call numbers for those available locally, took a deep breath, and fled the reading room for whatever lurked in the stacks.

My first few days in the library, I could get lost by blinking. The stacks wound back in all directions, and I could never quite figure out how straight rows added up to a circular building—except that the rows seemed to curve subtly, sometimes, and the turns weren’t always right angles. Today for the first time, a map stretched out in my mind; I couldn’t see the edges, but could feel the shape and logic of how the rows spread from where I stood. Beneath my skin, the tattoo pulsed with soft heat. I touched it, gingerly, but felt nothing from outside.

I hadn’t been back to the Zs—the “index” section whose self-referential topic is books and libraries—since the whirlwind tour during my interview. But the warmth in my arm seemed to increase along what I vaguely recalled was the right path. I gave in and followed it, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing.

The AC was managing better today, at least as far as temperature. The stacks felt cool and shadowy. But in the corner of my eye fog seeped from below the shelves, never there when I turned to look though I felt it against my skin. It sometimes seemed about to coalesce into more solid form and draw me to a particular shelf, a particular volume—but it never did.

My map grew as I walked; at last I saw that the stacks were not so much neat rows as a galactic spiral, linear only to the cursory glance. And at the far end of the western arm, I found an alcove lit by buzzing fluorescents and lined with tightly packed mahogany bookshelves. Tiny paperbacks pressed against oversized leather-bound tomes, and the half-imagined fog cleared in favor of archival dryness. A circular stained-glass window, wider than the span of my hands, filtered light through an abstract pattern of magenta and midnight blue. The colors shifted as shadows moved beyond—probably leaves from the grand row of hollies and live oaks between library and parking lot. My arm burned, pain flaring as I stepped into the coruscating illumination. I whimpered and bit my lip.

I wanted to move away from the window and get my books. Instead, unwilled, I knelt. As in the reading room, I felt again the attention of some presence. This one seemed less judgmental, more curious. Not friendly curiosity: a biologist examining a noisy DNA sequence, perhaps, or me with a particularly recalcitrant new database. The attention sharpened, and I felt uncomfortably aware of my body: not only fat ass and weak ankles, but heart thudding and guts clenching and nerves struggling to keep up. All pus and blood and static, acid and slime and brittle bone.

And I felt the examination grow more active, as whatever attended through the window started to prod at my flaws and cracks.

The tattoo had been quick, done before I knew what was happening. Not so, here. This thing wanted to change me, though it clearly didn’t care about my opinion on the specifics—probably didn’t even consider that I might have one. I gasped, but still couldn’t rise from where it held me bent almost to the floor, stomach compressing uncomfortably and legs cramping and falling asleep. Worse, a part of me didn’t want to. I’ve never liked my body, not the ass and ankles and skin and face I deal with every day, and not the inside bits now suddenly forced into my awareness. Any change might be for the better—at the very least wouldn’t be anything I could be blamed for.

But the part that knelt willingly was all conscious. A wave of revulsion and fear surged up to overwhelm any other reaction; My whole body shook and my pulse came so fast it hurt. In the throes of the panic attack, my instincts broke through whatever held me down, as they did everything that might have intent about it. I threw myself from the illuminated circle and scuttled backward until my back pressed against the nearest shelf. If the books wanted to bite me, I’d be ink all over.

Slowly—no Sherise to interrupt my reactions, no David to talk me down—I started to think in words again. I stared at dust motes floating in the light from the window, made swirling nebulae by the colors. The light hadn’t moved while I curled frozen beside it. I’d lost track of time, but sunlight ought to have shifted across the floor. Maybe there was another room beyond this one, even if my unlikely map told me otherwise.

If I got up and went closer, I might be able to glimpse whatever lay on window’s other side. That seemed like a bad idea.

Maybe the books could tell me.

I pulled myself to my feet, terrified every moment of toppling back into the light. My arm still ached with heat. In the panic’s aftermath I felt washed out emotionally, just numb enough to actually consider sticking around for what I’d come to get.

The Nature of the Word was bound in calf skin, fine yellow-edged pages typeset save for hand-illuminated letters at the start of chapters. I winced at the yellowing; this ought to be in the rare book room, not the ordinary stacks. Palaces of History was library bound but looked like a reprint of something much earlier, each page imaged from a neatly handwritten monograph with intricate—if disturbing—illustrations. The simply named Libris looked like a Penguin Classics paperback, except that it came from Sarkomand Translations, a publisher and imprint I’d never heard of.

I found a library cart lurking in a back corner, odd reassurance that the alcove existed for other people too. Maybe they all knew to avoid the window, or maybe it liked them better. Or maybe I ought to report it—like telling someone when you spot a leaking pipe. I trundled the cart back toward the galactic core.

I ducked my head at Determination and her companions as I settled at my desk. Powers want respect, Sherise had said, and until I knew what I was doing it was probably safer to give them at least a little. Epiphany’s gaze stood higher now, no longer focused on those of us below. I caught myself staring at her left hand, the one holding her robe. It wasn’t just a pose, I realized: she stood ready to bare her chest to Determination’s spear, and it was her opposite’s eye that she sought to attract.

I shivered, and forced my attention back to the books. I started with The Nature of the Word: at any minute, I expected someone to come along and tell me it needed to go into protective storage until I could prove my need to touch its fragile pages. Selfish but not sociopathic, I did snag a pair of nitrile gloves from the check-out counter.

Those who believe the universe was created, believe it was created with words. Those who know it for an accident still understand that language, once created, becomes a force in its own right. Fifteen million years before humanity’s birth, the Tay-yug claimed that miserly gods hid favored words in the hearts of stars, making them unstable and scouring life from worlds that spun too close.

I sat back, breathing hard. It was a story, of course it was a story, a myth I’d never heard before. A myth of gamma ray bursts, in a book that looked older than the phenomenon’s discovery—but how much did I know about the history of physics? I ought to keep reading. Would, in a moment.

When I was a kid, for a while I got really into urban legends. Even though I knew better, I’d sit up late reading about chupacabras and the Loch Ness monster. The one that really got to me was the Mothman. It was sort of a humanoid with big bug wings, and people would look out their windows and it would just be hovering there, staring at them. That was it—it never broke the window or hurt anyone, at least not who reported it later. But I’d pull my shades down tight, eyes squeezed shut so that if anything was out there, I wouldn’t see it. Knowing that if I hadn’t read about it, if I hadn’t known it was out there to look for, the windows would have been perfectly safe.

Of course I already knew, now, that there was something outside.

I scanned, sampled, turning pages cautiously but skimming as quickly as I could, looking for what I needed—something that would explain what had happened to me. Instead, I learned about books that started plagues or imprisoned their readers, and others that, read in the right place and at the right time, would let you cast your mind out to travel the stars. Stories that could leave your mind a husk colonized by parasitic characters, single words that could rewrite memory.

I did not slam the book shut. I closed it, carefully, like the rare archival volume that it was. I could not give up reading, wouldn’t blind myself to what it offered, just because there might be monsters inside.

I hadn’t found anything about tattoos, or stained glass windows—maybe another book would be more relevant. You’ve got to focus when you’re doing research, can’t just let yourself get sucked in by whatever seems shiniest. And “terrifying” is a lot like “shiny.” Libris, with its two-tone paper cover, looked reassuringly pragmatic.

“How did you get a-hold of that?” Sherise’s voice, sharp and angry, froze me with my hand on the cover. My eyes shifted toward The Nature of the Word and I felt my cheeks grow hot. But it was Libris that she snatched from my desk.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I found it in the Zs. I was trying to look up something about—” I pushed up my sleeve to show the galaxy tattoo. It was, I realized, the same shape as the stacks, the same colors as the window. And I’d just made my ignorance obvious, too. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“I’m not mad at you.” She ran a finger across the cover, frowning. “But this shouldn’t have been shelved in the regular stacks. A bit past anything you need to be handling, right now.”

“Does it eat your brain?” I felt my cheeks flare again, worse for the knowledge that it showed like a beacon.

She smiled. “Not this one, no. But it’s not translated from any human language, and it’s safer to know what to expect before you get into it.” She tucked it under her arm, though not against bare skin.

At this point, she could tell anyway that I didn’t know what I was doing. Still, it took a few dry swallows before I could get the words out. They were angrier than I’d intended. “Am I supposed to ask? Or am I supposed to figure it out all on my own and hope I don’t unleash a plague on the whole Gulf Coast?”

She leaned against the edge of my desk, put Libris back down, patted the offending volume a couple of times as if to reassure herself that it was still closed. Then she pushed her cloud of hair away from one ear. The whole outer curve had been sculpted into tiny scallops, like waves of flesh, and faded to cheap newsprint gray. It stood like a scar against the warm brown of the rest of her skin. She let the hair spring back.

“Happened my first day at Crique Foudre. I can hear the books, and hear people and other things thinking when they mean to do harm. Prophecies, sometimes. And people arguing in whispers down the block when I’m trying to sleep. The gifts have sharp edges. There’s no way to know beforehand who can handle it all and who can’t, and we’ve learned the hard way that you have to find out most of it for yourself. If someone explains everything straight up, it always ends badly.”

“Suppose I quit?” I swallowed, because again I hadn’t meant to speak so bluntly, and because I knew the answer. I’d show up at David’s studio, and he’d support me as best he could—no one in Chicago was hard up for librarians—and he wouldn’t criticize me for not being able to cut it in the real world.

“You could do that. The lady before you left at two months—that’s why we were hiring so late in the summer.” Nothing about how I’d leave them in the lurch if I quit just before the semester started, though it didn’t really need saying. “This is riskier than holding down a desk just about anywhere else. The best I can offer is that if you stick around, you’ll become something special. We all do. Whether that special is more like yourself, or less, depends on luck. And on your own choices, at least a little.”

I didn’t know whether I ought to be tempted by the “more” or the “less”—or whether I was even crazier than usual to be tempted by either. “What can you tell me? Without things ending badly?”

She sighed, fidgeted the beads on her earring. I wondered if they drowned out the voices of the books. “That’s always a gamble, but I’ll give it a shot. You know about our patron.”

“Yeah. Although no one’s told me his name. Or her name. I’d think there’d be a plaque or something—is this one of the things it’s dangerous to know?”

“No, he just likes to keep a low profile. You might meet him, one of these days.” She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply. “Maybe that’s not the place to start. I’m sorry. I don’t feel like I’ve explained this right to anyone, yet. Maybe this’ll be the time—unless you want me to shut up and let you track it all down for yourself.”

I shook my head, a bit spooked by her uncertainty.

“Well. The universe is a dangerous place. It’s not trying to be dangerous, and it’s full of things that have never heard of humans and wouldn’t much care if they did—but not caring can do at least as much harm as hatred, from things that can break you just passing by. The safest way, for a species that wants time to grow up, is to make a few places that can focus the strangeness, draw it away from everywhere else, and help keep it from getting out of control. People have been doing that on earth for millions of years, maybe longer, each learning from fragments left by those who came before, and doing just a little better as a result. This library is one of those places for humans.”

“Out in—” I just stopped myself from asking what—if she wasn’t just making this up—a vital shield against extinction was doing out in the middle of nowhere, in a state that most of the country couldn’t even bother to protect from floods.

She smiled wryly, making me think I’d been pretty transparent. “Safer this way. Crique Foudre is heir to Zaluski Library in Warsaw. Our patron traveled there in the 1920s, and when the Nazis destroyed it he knew we’d need another one. He thought, a place that isn’t the capital of anywhere or the center of anything—it would be a lot safer from other humans.”

“So we’re the quiet heroes who protect the world from terrible cosmic monsters?” I’d seen that show; I would have been happier to leave it on the screen.

“You’ve been to the edge of the stacks. It’s not that simple. Sometimes we just keep the monsters happy, or distract them, or find a use for them, or study them to learn what else is out there. Sometimes we’re bait. Sometimes we can’t do a damn thing other than watch. And eventually we’ll lose the fight—either to other humans, like Zaluski, or altogether, like the three other species on this world that we know about before us.”

I shivered. “One more thing to worry about.”

“That’s one way to handle it, sure.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I go for distraction, personally. There are so many things to learn here, that you’ll never find in another library that isn’t doing the same work. Things to become. As long as you’re doing your job, the larger cosmic picture kind of takes care of itself, whether or not you grieve over it.”

* * *

“Do you ever worry about asteroids?” I asked David. I was home, curled up with my laptop on the couch, insufficiently distracted by my pretty boyfriend.

“Like the one that got the dinosaurs?” he asked. “Not really. It doesn’t seem like something that happens very often, and I’m not in a position to do anything about it in any case.”

“Very logical.” I drew up my knees, watched him pass back and forth across the screen as he made French toast. “Suppose you could do something. Or thought you could?”

“You mean like a desperate space mission to steer a comet away from Earth? Yeah, I would worry about that. I worry when there’s something I can try, and it matters if I screw up.” He smiled gently. “You’ve got to pick your battles—there’s only so much worry to go around.”

“Unless you’re me.”

“Even for you, gorgeous.”

Later, I realized that I hadn’t asked if he’d rather be in a position to try something, even if he thought he’d screw up, or whether he’d rather do work he was better at, and not have to look.

* * *

On the first day of classes, humidity spilled over the banks of the sky into a spectacular thunderstorm. I eased my car around puddles half-grown into lakes, breathing slowly through the constant strobe of lightning. I arrived ten minutes late, suit soaked through in spite of my umbrella. The AC set me shivering, but Sherise and the other librarians were talking and laughing in the staff room and one of them tossed me a giant beach towel.

Sherise nodded at me and said, “We’re gonna get slammed even with the rain, so you know. And there are still a dozen professors who need pinned to the wall ’til they hand over their reserve lists.” By the time I got the last math professor to confess the identity of his textbook, and started on the English department, umbrellas filled the foyer and students swirled through the reading room.

Most of the morning’s reference questions were about what I’d expected. Students wanted their course reserves and panicked about their first day’s homework and didn’t know how to manage the catalogue. But a lot of them seemed to realize they were in sacred space. I saw a dozen conflicting rituals. People blew kisses to the statues, or stood under the trompe l’oeil ceiling with arms raised. One student fussed at my desk for five minutes while I grew increasingly exasperated, then asked hesitantly if I could leave her offering “for the loa Epiphany” after the library closed. She slipped me a sandwich bag filled with cookies and tiny slips of calligraphed poetry, then wanted to know whether we’d fixed the PYTHIAS bugs over the summer.

After the students cleared out at last, I stayed at my desk for a few minutes trying to catch my breath. Even the allegories seemed tired. Determination’s spear might have drooped a little, unless it just pointed at where some student had annoyed her. I got up and started to put the reference section back in order, then went to give Epiphany her cookies. In the wall below each statue, just above eye level, were little niches that I’d never noticed before. They were easier to spot now, as plenty of people hadn’t bothered with an intermediary for their offerings. There were flowers and pebbles, photos, cupcakes, a thankfully unlit candle, tiny jars of liquor that I was just going to assume came from faculty. I stuck the baggie in the appropriate spot.

“Hey,” I told Epiphany. I still wasn’t sure about talking with them, but ignoring them didn’t seem wise, and the students knew the place better than I did. “Long day. Keep safe, okay?” I felt her attention on me, and knew that safety didn’t interest her at all—not to give, and not to receive. I trembled: equal parts awe and anxiety, both uncomfortable. Her companions seemed to perk up, their notice sharpening. The air brightened with storm-tinged ozone, and my ears ached as if I’d gone up too fast in an elevator. I felt again the urge to kneel. But I’d spent the day doing my job, and doing it mostly right.

I looked around, found myself alone in the reading room. “I’m not just going to do what you want,” I said. No response. I shivered.

“I’m not ignoring you,” I went on. Then, swallowing. “I’m not running away, yet. But we’re going to work together on this, or it’s all going to fall apart.”

Still no response—maybe Sherise would have been able to hear one—but the pressure lifted a little. My ears popped, painfully.

“That’s better,” I said. I kept the shakes out of my voice, knowing I would pay later—if not through some screw-up here, then through breaking down when I got home and thought too hard about the whole thing. But then, I’d have paid that price whatever I did. “All right. Was there something you wanted to show me?”

I left through Epiphany’s door, and followed the pulse of my little galaxy out into the stacks.

“Those Who Watch” © Ruthanna Emrys, 2016
Reprinted from The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, ed. by Paula Guran

The post Those Who Watch appeared first on Reactor.

We’re pleased to reprint Joan Aiken’s short story, “The Cold Flame.” The People in the Castle—available April 12th from Small Beer Press—collects this and 19 other wildly inventive, darkly lyrical stories from Aiken’s impressive career.

“The Cold Flame”

I was asleep when Patrick rang up. The bell sliced through a dream about this extraordinary jampot factory, a kind of rose-red brick catacomb, much older than time, sunk deep on top of the Downs, and I was not pleased to be woken. I groped with a blind arm and worked the receiver in between my ear and the pillow.

“Ellis? Is that you?”

“Of course it is,” I snarled. “Who else do you expect in my bed at three a.m.? Why in heaven’s name ring up at this time?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding muffled and distant and apologetic. “Where I am it’s only half-past something.” A sort of oceanic roar separated us for a moment, and then I heard him say, “. . . rang you as soon as I could.”

“Well, where are you?”

Then I woke up a bit more and interrupted as he began speaking again. “Hey, I thought you were supposed to be dead! There were headlines in the evening papers—a climbing accident. Was it a mistake then?”

“No, I’m dead right enough. I fell into the crater of a volcano.”

“What were you doing on a volcano, for goodness’ sake?”

“Lying on the lip writing a poem about what it looked like inside. The bit I was lying on broke off.” Patrick sounded regretful. “It would have been a good poem too.”

Patrick was a poet, perhaps I should explain. Had been a poet. Or said he was. No one had ever seen his poetry because he steadfastly refused to let anyone read his work, though he insisted, with a quiet self-confidence not otherwise habitual to him, that the poems were very good indeed. In no other respect was he remarkable, but most people quite liked Patrick; he was a lanky, amusing creature with guileless blue eyes and a passion for singing sad, randy songs when he had had a drink or two. For some time I had been a little in love with Patrick. I was sorry to hear he was dead.

“Look, Patrick,” I began again. “Are you sure you’re dead?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Where are you then?”

“Lord knows. I’ve hardly had time to look round yet. There’s something on my mind; that’s why I contacted you.”

The word contacted seemed inappropriate. I said, “Why ring up?”

“I could appear if you prefer it.”

Remembering the cause of his death, I said hastily, “No, no, let’s go on as we are. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s my poems, Ellis. Could you get them published, do you think?”

My heart sank a bit, as anybody’s does at this sort of request from a friend, but I said, “Where are they?”

“At my flat. A big thick stack of quarto paper, all handwritten. In my desk.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do. But listen, love—I don’t want to sound a gloomy note, but suppose no publisher will touch them—what then? Promise you won’t hold me responsible? Keep hanging around, you know, haunting, that kind of thing?”

“No, of course not,” he said quickly. “But you needn’t worry. Those poems are good. There’s a picture at the flat as well, though, behind the wardrobe, with its face to the wall. As a matter of fact, it’s a portrait of my mother. It’s by Chapdelaine—done before he made his name. About seven years ago I got him to paint her for her birthday present (this was before I quarreled with Mother, of course). But she didn’t like it—said it was hideous—so I gave her a bottle of scent instead. Now, of course, it’s worth a packet. You can get Sowerby’s to auction it, and the proceeds would certainly pay for the publication of the poems, if necessary. But only in the last resort, mind you! I’m convinced those poems can stand on their own. I’m only sorry I didn’t finish the volcano one—maybe I could dictate it—”

“I really must get some sleep,” I broke in, thinking what a good thing it was they hadn’t got direct dialing yet between this world and the next. “I’ll go round to your flat first thing tomorrow. I’ve still got the key. Good-bye, Patrick.”

And I clonked back the receiver on its rest and tried to return to my lovely deep-hidden jampot factory among the brooding Downs. Gone beyond recall.

Next day at Patrick’s flat I found I had been forestalled. The caretaker told me that a lady, Mrs. O’Shea, had already called there and taken away all her son’s effects.

I was wondering how to inform Patrick of this development—he hadn’t left a number—when he got through to me again on his own phone. At the news I had to relate he let out a cry of anguish.

“Not Mother!” God, what’ll we do now? Ellis, that woman’s a vulture. You’ll have the devil’s own job prising the poems out of her.”

“Why not just get in touch with her direct—the way you did with me—and tell her to send the poems to a publisher” I said.”Suggest trying Chatto first.”

“You don’t understand! For one thing, I couldn’t get near her. For another, she has this grudge against me; when I gave up going home it really dealt her a mortal blow. It’d give her the most exquisite pleasure to thwart me. No, I’m afraid you’ll have to use all your tact and diplomacy, Ellis; you’d better drive down to Clayhole tomorrow—”

“But look here! Suppose she won’t—”

No answer Patrick had disconnected.

So next afternoon found me driving down to Clayhole. I had never been to Patrick’s home—nor had Patrick since the quarrel with his mother. I was quite curious to see her, as a matter of fact; Patrick’s descriptions of her had been so conflicting. Before the breach she was the most wonderful mother in the world, fun, pretty, sympathetic, witty—while after it, no language had been too virulent to describe her, a sort of female Dracula, tyrannical, humourless, blood-sucking.

One thing I did notice as I approached the house—up a steep, stony, unmetalled lane—the weather had turned a bit colder. The leaves hung on the trees like torn rags, the ground was hard as iron, the sky leaden.

Mrs. O’Shea received me with the utmost graciousness. But in spite of this I retained a powerful impression that I had arrived at an awkward moment; perhaps she had been about to bathe the dog, or watch a favorite programme, or start preparing a meal. She was a small, pretty Irishwoman, her curling hair a beautiful white, her skin a lovely tea-rose pink, her eyes the curious opaque blue that goes with a real granite obstinacy. One odd feature of her face was that she appeared to have no lips; they were so pale they disappeared into her powdered cheeks. I could see why Patrick had never mentioned his father. Major O’Shea stood beside his wife, but he was a nonentity: a stooped, watery-eyed, dangling fellow, whose only function was to echo his wife’s opinions.

The house was a pleasant Queen Anne manor, furnished in excellent taste with chintz and Chippendale, and achingly, freezingly cold. I had to clench my teeth to stop them chattering. Mrs. O’Shea, in her cashmere twinset and pearls, seemed impervious to the glacial temperature, but the Major’s cheeks were blue; every now and then a drop formed at the tip of his nose which he carefully wiped away with a spotless silk handkerchief. I began to understand why Patrick had been keen on volcanoes.

They stood facing me like an interview board while I explained my errand. I began by saying how grieved I had been to hear of Patrick’s death, and spoke of his lovable nature and unusual promise. The Major did look genuinely grieved, but Mrs. O’Shea was smiling, and there was something about her smile that irritated me profoundly.

I then went on to say that I had received a communication from Patrick since his death, and waited for reactions. They were sparse. Mrs. O’Shea’s lips tightened fractionally, the Major’s lids dropped over his lugubrious milky tea-coloured eyes; that was all.

“You don’t seem surprised,” I said cautiously. “You were expecting something of the kind perhaps?”

“No, not particularly,” Mrs. O’Shea said. She sat down, placed her feet on a footstool, and picked up a circular embroidery frame. “My family is psychic, however; this kind of thing is not unusual. What did Patrick want to say?”

“It was about his poems.”

“Oh, yes?” Her tone was as colourless as surgical spirit. She carefully chose a length of silk. Her glance flickered once to the object she was using as a footstoll: a solid pile of papers about a foot thick, wrapped up clumsily in an old grey cardigan which looked as if it had once lined a dog basket; it was matted with white terrier hairs.

My heart sank.

“I believe you have his poems now? Patrick is most anxious that they should be published.”

“And I’m not at all anxious they should be published,” Mrs. O’Shea said with her most irritating smile.

“Quite, quite,” the Major assented.

We argued about it. Mrs. O’Shea had three lines of argument: first, that no one in her family had ever written poetry, therefore Patrick’s poems were sure to be hopeless; second, that no one in her family had ever written poetry and, even in the totally unlikely event of the poems being any good, it was a most disreputable thing to do; third, that Patrick was conceited, ungrateful, and self-centered, and it would do him nothing but harm to see his poems in print. She spoke as if he were still alive.

“Besides,” she added, “I’m sure no publisher would look at them.”

“You have read them?”

“Heavens, no!” She laughed. “I’ve no time for such rubbish.”

“But if a publisher did take them?”

“You’d never get one to risk his money on such a venture.”

I explained Patrick’s plans regarding the Chapdelaine portrait. The O’Sheas looked skeptical. “You perhaps have it here?” I asked.

“A hideous thing. Nobody in their senses would give enough money for that to get a book published.”

“I’d very much like to see it, all the same.”

“Roderick, take Miss Bell to look at the picture,” Mrs. O’Shea said, withdrawing another strand of silk.

The picture was in the attic, face down. I saw at once why Mrs. O’Shea had not liked it. Chapdelaine had done a merciless job of work. It was brilliant—one of the best examples of his early Gold Period. I imagined it would fetch even more than Patrick hoped. When I explained this to the Major, an acquisitive gleam came into his eye.

“Surely that would more than pay for the publication of the poems.”

“Oh, certainly,” I assured him.

“I’ll see what my wife has to say.”

“Mrs. O’Shea was not interested in cash. She had a new line of defence. Of course you’ve no actual proof that you come from Patrick, have you? I don’t really see why we should take your word in the matter.”

Suddenly I was furious. My rage and the deadly cold were simultaneously too much for me. I said, as politely as I could, “Since I can see you are completely opposed to my performing this small service for your son, I won’t waste any more of our time,” and left them abruptly. The Major looked a little taken aback, but his wife calmly pursued her stitchery.

It was good to get out of that icy, lavender-scented morgue into the fresh, windy night.

My car limped down the lane pulling to the left, but I was so angry that I had reached the village before I realized I had a flat tyre. I got out and surveyed it. The car was slumped down on one haunch as if Mrs. O’Shea had put a curse on it.

I went into the pub for a hot toddy before changing the wheel, and while I was in there the landlord said, “Would you be Miss Bell? There’s a phone call for you.”

It was Patrick. I told him about my failure and he cursed, but he did not seem surprised.

“Why does your mother hate you so, Patrick?”

“Because I got away from her. That’s why she can’t stand my poetry—because it’s nothing to do with her. Anyway she can hardly read. If my father so much as picks up a book, she gets it away from him as soon as she can and hides it. Well, you can see what he’s like. Sucked dry. She likes to feel she knows the whole contents of a person’s mind, and that it’s entirely focused on her. She’s afraid of being left alone; she’s never slept by herself in a room in her life. If ever he had to go away, she’d have my bed put in her room.

I thought about that.

“But as for your authority to act for me,” Patrick went on, “we can easily fix that. Have a double whisky and get a pen and paper. Shut your eyes.”

Reluctantly I complied. It was an odd sensation. I felt Patrick’s light, chill clutch on my wrist moving my hand. For a moment, the contrast with the last time I had held his hand made a strangling weight of tears rise in my throat; then I remembered Mrs. O’Shea’s icy determination and realized that Patrick resembled her in this; suddenly I felt free of him, free of sorrow.

When I opened my eyes again, there was a message in Patrick’s odd, angular script, to the effect that he authorized me to sell his Chapdelaine picture and use the proceeds to pay for the publication of his poems, if necessary.

The drinks had fortified me, so I got a garage to change my wheel and walked back up the lane to Clayhole. The O’Sheas had just finished their supper. They invited me civilly, but without enthusiasm, to drink coffee with them. The coffee was surprisingly good, but stone cold, served in little gold-rimmed cups the size of walnut shells. Over it Mrs. O’Shea scanned Patrick’s message. I glanced round—we were in the arctic dining room—and noticed that Chapdelaine’s picture now hung on the wall. It smiled at me with Mrs. O’Shea’s own bland hostility.

“I see; very well,” she said at last. “I suppose you must take the picture then.”

“And the poems too, I hope.”

“Oh no. Not yet,” she said. “When you’ve sold the picture, for this large sum you say it will fetch, then I’ll see about letting you have the poems.”

“But that’s not—” I began, and then stopped. What was the use? She was not a logical woman, no good reasoning with her. One step at a time was fast as one could go.

* * *

The sale of an early Chapdelaine portrait made quite a stir, and the bidding at Sowerby’s began briskly. The picture was exhibited on an easel on the auctioneer’s dais. From my seat in the front row I was dismayed to notice, as the bids rose past the four-figure mark, that the portrait was beginning to fade. The background remained, but by the time twenty-five hundred had been reached, Mrs. O’Shea had vanished completely. The bidding faltered and came to a stop; there were complaints. The auctioneer inspected the portrait, directed an accusing stare at me, and declared the sale null. I had to take the canvas ignominiously back to my flat, and the evening papers had humorous headlines: WHERE DID THE COLOURS RUN TO? NO BID FOR CHAPDELAINE’S WHITE PERIOD.

When the telephone rang, I expected that it would be Patrick and picked up the receiver gloomily, but it was a French voice.

“Armand Chapdelaine here. Miss Bell?”

“Speaking.”

“We met, I think, once, a few years ago, in the company of young Patrick O’Shea. I am ringing from Paris about this odd incident of his mother’s portrait.”

“Oh, yes?”

“May I come and inspect the canvas, Miss Bell?”

“Of course,” I said, slightly startled. “Not that there’s anything to see.”

“That is so kind of you. Till tomorrow, then.”

Chapedelaine was a French Canadian: stocky, dark, and full of loup-garou charm.

After carefully scrutinising the canvas, he listened with intense interest to the tale about Patrick and his mother.

“Aha! This is a genuine piece of necromancy,” he said, rubbing his hands. “I always knew there was something unusually powerful about that woman’s character. She had a most profound dislike for me; I recall it well.”

“Because you were her son’s friend.”

“Of course.” He inspected the canvas again and said,” I shall be delighted to buy this from you for two thousand five hundred pounds, Miss Bell. It is the only one of my pictures that has been subjected to black magic, up to now.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Entirely sure.” He gave me his engagingly wolfish smile. “Then we will see what shot Madame Mére fetches out of her locker.”

Mrs. O’Shea was plainly enjoying the combat over Patrick’s poems. It had given her a new interest. When she heard the news that two thousand five hundred pounds were lodged in a trust account, ready to pay for the publication of the poems, if necessary, her reaction was almost predictable.

“But that wouldn’t be honest!” she said. “I suppose Mr. Chapdelaine bought the canvas out of kindness, but it can’t be counted as a proper sale. The money must be returned to him.” Her face set like epoxy, and she rearranged her feet more firmly on the footstool.

“On no account will I have it back, madame,” Chapdelaine riposted. He had come down with me to help persuade her; he said he was dying to see her again.

“If you won’t, then it must be given to charity. I’m afraid it’s out of the question that I should allow money which was obtained by what amounts to false pretences to be used to promote that poor silly boy’s scribblings.”

“Quite, quite,” said the Major.

“But it may not be necessary—” I began in exasperation. An opaque blue gleam showed for an instant in Mrs. O’Shea’s eye. Chapdelaine raised a hand soothingly and I subsided. I’d known, of course, that I too was an object of her dislike, but I had not realised how very deep it went; the absolute hatred in her glance was a slight shock. It struck me that, unreasonably enough, this hate had been augmented by the fact that Chapdelaine and I were getting on rather well together.

“Since madame does not approve of our plan, I have another proposition,” said Chapdelaine, who seemed to be taking a pleasure in the duel almost equal to that of Mrs. O’Shea. I felt slightly excluded. “May I be allowed to do a second portrait, and two thousand five hundred shall be the sitter’s fee?”

“Humph,” said Mrs. O’Shea. “I’d no great opinion of the last one ye did.”

“Hideous thing. Hideous,” said the Major.

“Oh, but this one, madame, will be quite different!” Chapdelaine smiled, at his most persuasive. “In the course of seven years, after all, one’s technique alters entirely.”

She demurred for a long time, but in the end, I suppose, she could not resist this chance of further entertainment. Besides, he was extremely well known now.

“You’ll have to come down here though, Mr. Chapdelaine; at my age I can’t be gadding up to London for sittings.”

“Of course,” he agreed, shivering slightly; the sitting room was as cold as ever. “It will be a great pleasure.”

“I think the pub in the village occasionally puts up visitors,” Mrs. O’Shea added. “I’ll speak to them.” Chapdelaine shuddered again. “But they only have one bedroom, so I’m afraid there won’t be room for you, Miss Bell.” Her tone expressed volumes.

“Thank you, but I have my job in London,” I said coldly. “Besides, I’d like to be getting on with offering Patrick’s poems; may I take them now, Mrs. O’Shea?”

“The?—Oh, gracious, no—not till the picture’s finished! After all,” she said with a smile of pure, chill malice, “I may not like it when it’s done, may I?”

“It’s a hopeless affair, hopeless!” I raged as soon as we were away from the house. “She’ll always find some way of slipping out of the bargain; she’s utterly unscrupulous. The woman’s a fiend! Really I can’t think how Patrick could ever have been fond of her. Why do you bother to go on with this?”

“Oh, but I am looking forward to painting this portrait immensely!” Chapdelaine wore a broad grin. “I feel convinced this will be the best piece of work I ever did. I shall have to get that house warmed up though, even if it means myself paying for a truckload of logs; one cannot work inside of a deep freeze.”

Somehow he achieved this; when I took down a photographer to get a story, with pictures, for the magazine on which I work, we found the sitting room transformed, littered with artists’ equipment and heated to conservatory temperature by a huge roaring fire. Mrs. O’Shea, evidently making the most of such unaccustomed sybaritism, was seated close by the fire, her feet, as ever, firmly planted on the blanket-wrapped bundle. She seemed in high spirits. The Major was nowhere to be seen; he had apparently been banished to some distant part of the house. Chapdelaine, I thought, did not look well; he coughed from time to time, complained of damp sheets at the pub, and constantly piled more logs on the fire. We took several shots of them both, but Mrs. O’Shea would not allow us to see the uncompleted portrait.

“Not till it’s quite done!” she said firmly. Meanwhile it stood on its easel in the corner, covered with a sheet, like some hesitant ghost.

During this time I had had numerous calls from Patrick, of course; he was wildly impatient about the slow progress of the painting.

“Do persuade Armand to go a bit faster, can’t you, Ellis?” He used to be able to dash off a portrait in about four sittings.”

“Well, I’ll pass on your message, Patrick, but people’s methods change, you know.”

When I rang Clayhole the next day, however, I was unable to get through; the line was out of order apparently, and remained so; when I reported this to the local exchange, the girl said,” Double four six three… wait a minute; yes, I thought so. We had a nine-nine-nine call from them not long ago. Fire brigade. No, that’s all I can tell you, I’m afraid.”

With my heart in my suede boots I got out the car and drove down to Clayhole. The lane was blocked by police trucks, fire engines, and appliances; I had to leave my car at the bottom and walk up.

Clayhole was a smoking ruin; as I arrived they were just carrying the third blackened body out to the ambulance.

“What began it?” I asked the fire chief.

“That’ll be for the insurance assessors to decide, miss. But it’s plain it started in the lounge; spark from the fire, most likely. Wood fires are always a bit risky, in my opinion. You get that green applewood—”

A spark, of course; I thought of the jersey-wrapped pile of poems hardly a foot distant from the crackling logs.

“You didn’t find any papers in that room?”

“Not a scrap, miss; that being where the fire started, everything was reduced to powder.”

When Patrick got through to me that evening, he was pretty distraught.

“She planned the whole thing!” he said furiously. “I bet you, Ellis, she had it all thought out from the start. There’s absolutely nothing that woman won’t do to get her own way. Haven’t I always said she was utterly unscrupulous? But I shan’t be beaten by her, I’m just as determined as she is—Do pay attention, Ellis!”

“Sorry, Patrick. What were you saying?” I was very low-spirited, and his next announcement did nothing to cheer me.

“I’ll dictate you the poems; it shouldn’t take more than a month or so if we keep at it. We can start right away. Have you a pen? And you’ll want quite a lot of paper. I’ve finished the volcano poem, so we may as well start with that—ready?”

“I suppose so.” I shut my eyes. The cold clutch on my wrist was like a fetter. But I felt that having gone so far, I owed this last service to Patrick.

“Right—here we go.” There followed a long pause. Then he said, with a great deal less certainty:

“On each hand the flames

Driven backward slope their pointing spires—”

“That’s from Paradise Lost, Patrick,” I told him gently.

“I know.…” His voice was petulant. “That isn’t what I meant to say. The thing is—it’s starting to get so cold here. Oh, God, Ellis—it’s so cold.…”

His voice petered out and died. The grasp on my wrist became freezing, became numbing, and then, like a melted icicle, was gone.

“Patrick?” I said. “Are you there, Patrick?”

But there was no reply, and, indeed, I hardly expected one. Patrick never got through to me again. His mother had caught up with him at last.

The post The Cold Flame appeared first on Reactor.

Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.

Cold Fires

It was so cold that daggered ice hung from the eaves with dangerous points that broke off and speared the snow in the afternoon sun, only to be formed again the next morning. Snowmobile shops and ski rental stores, filled with brightly polished snowmobiles and helmets and skis and poles and wool knitted caps and mittens with stars stitched on them and down jackets and bright-colored boots, stood frozen at the point of expectation when that first great snow fell on Christmas night and everyone thought that all that was needed for a good winter season was a good winter snow, until the cold reality set in and the employees munched popcorn or played cards in the back room because it was so cold that no one even wanted to go shopping, much less ride a snowmobile. Cars didn’t start but heaved and ticked and remained solidly immobile, stalagmites of ice holding them firm. Motorists called Triple A and Triple A’s phone lines became so congested that calls were routed to a trucking company in Pennsylvania, where a woman with a very stressed voice answered the calls with the curt suggestion that the caller hang up and dial again.

It was so cold dogs barked to go outside, and immediately barked to come back in, and then barked to go back out again; frustrated dog owners leashed their pets and stood shivering in the snow as shivering dogs lifted icy paws, walking in a kind of Irish dance, spinning in that dog circle thing, trying to find the perfect spot to relieve themselves while dancing high paws to keep from freezing to the ground.

It was so cold birds fell from the sky like tossed rocks, frozen except for their tiny eyes, which focused on the sun as if trying to understand its betrayal.

That night the ice hung so heavy from the power lines that they could no longer maintain the electric arc and the whole state went black, followed within the hour by the breakdown of the phone lines. Many people would have a miserable night but the couple had a wood-burning stove. It crackled with flame that bit the dry and brittle birch and consumed the chill air where even in the house they had been wearing coats and scarves that they removed as the hot aura expanded. It was a good night for soup, heated on the cast-iron stove and scenting the whole house with rosemary and onion; a good night for wine, the bottle of red they bought on their honeymoon and had been saving for a special occasion; and it was a good night to sit by the stove on the floor, their backs resting against the couch pillows, watching the candles flicker in the waves of heat while the house cracked and heaved beneath its thick-iced roof. They decided to tell stories, the sort of stories that only the cold and the fire, the wind and the silent dark combined could make them tell.

“I grew up on an island,” she said, “well, you know that. I’ve already told you about the smell of salt and how it still brings the sea to my breath, how the sound of bathwater can make me weep, how before the birds fell from the sky like thrown rocks, the dark arc of their wings, in certain light, turned white, and how certain tones of metal, a chain being dragged by a car, a heavy pan that clangs against its lid become the sound of ships and boats leaving the harbor. I’ve already told you all that, but I think you should know that my family is descended from pirates, we are not decent people, everything we own has been stolen, even who we are, my hair for instance, these blond curls can be traced not to any relatives for they are all dark and swarthy but to the young woman my Great-great-grandfather brought home to his wife, intended as a sort of help-mate but apparently quite worthless in the kitchen, though she displayed a certain fondness for anything to do with strawberries, you understand the same fruit I embrace for its short season; oh, how they taste of summer, and my youth!

“Now that I have told you this, I may as well tell you the rest. This blond maid of my Great-great-grandfather’s house, who could not sew, or cook, or even garden well but who loved strawberries as if they gave her life, became quite adept at rejecting any slightly imperfect fruit. She picked through the bowls that Great-great-grandmother brought in from the garden and tossed those not perfectly swollen or those with seeds too coarse to the dogs, who ate them greedily then panted at her feet and became worthless hunters, so enamored were they with the sweet. Only perfect berries remained in the white bowl and these she ate with such a manner of tongue and lips that Great-great-grandfather who came upon her like that, once by chance and ever after by intention, sitting in the sun at the wooden kitchen table, the dogs slathering at her feet, sucking strawberries, ordered all the pirates to steal more of the red fruit, which he traded unreasonably for until he became quite the laughingstock and the whole family was in ruin.

“But even this was not enough to bring Great-great-grandfather to his senses and he did what just was not done in those days and certainly not by a pirate who could take whatever woman he desired—he divorced Great-great-grandmother and married the strawberry girl who, it is said, came to her wedding in a wreath of strawberry ivy, and carried a bouquet of strawberries from which she plucked, even in the midst of the sacred ceremony, red bulbs of fruit which she ate so greedily that when it came time to offer her assent, she could only nod and smile bright red lips the color of sin.

“The strawberry season is short and it is said she grew pale and weak in its waning. Great-great-grandfather took to the high seas and had many adventures, raiding boats where he passed the gold and coffers of jewels, glanced at the most beautiful woman and glanced away—so that later, after the excitement had passed, these same women looked into mirrors to see what beauty had been lost—and went instead, quite eagerly, to the kitchen where he raided the fruit. He became known as a bit of a kook.

“In the meantime, the villagers began to suspect that the strawberry girl was a witch. She did not appreciate the gravity of her situation but continued to visit Great-great-grandmother’s house as if the other woman was her own mother and not the woman whose husband she had stolen. It is said that Great-great-grandmother sicced the dogs on her but they saw the blond curls and smelled her strawberry scent and licked her fingers and toes and came back to the house with her, tongues hanging out and grinning doggedly at Great-great-grandmother who, it is said, then turned her back on the girl who was either so naïve or so cunning that she spoke in a rush about her husband’s long departures, the lonely house on the hill, the dread of coming winter, a perfect babble of noise and nonsense that was not affected by Great-great-grandmother’s cold back until, the villagers said, the enchantment became perfect and she and Great-great-grandmother were seen walking the cragged hills to market days as happy as if they were mother and daughter or two old friends, and perhaps this is where it would have all ended, a confusion of rumor and memory, were it not for the strange appearance of the rounded bellies of both women and the shocking news that they both carried Great-great-grandfather’s child, which some said was a strange coincidence and others said was some kind of trick.

“Great-great-grandfather’s ship did not return when the others did and the other pirate wives did not offer this strawberry one any condolences. He was a famous seaman, and it was generally agreed that he had not drowned, or crashed his ship at the lure of sirens, but had simply abandoned his witchy wife.

“All that winter Great-great-grandfather’s first and second wives grew suspiciously similar bellies, as if size were measured against size to keep an even girth. At long last the strawberry wife took some minor interest in hearth and home and learned to bake bread that Great-great-grandfather’s first wife said would be more successfully called crackers, and soup that smelled a bit too ripe but which the dogs seemed to enjoy. During this time Great-great-grandmother grew curls, and her lips, which had always seemed a mastless ship anchored to the plane of her face, became strawberry shaped. By spring when the two were seen together, stomachs returned to corset size, and carrying between them a bald, blue-eyed baby, they were often mistaken for sisters. The villagers even became confused about which was the witch and which the bewitched.

“About this time, in the midst of a hushed ongoing debate among the villagers regarding when to best proceed with the witch burning—after the baby, whose lineage was uncertain, had been weaned, seemed the general consensus—Great-great-grandfather returned and brought with him a shipload of strawberries. The heavy scent drove the dogs wild. Great-great-grandfather drove the villagers mad with strawberries and then, when the absolute height of their passion had been aroused, stopped giving them away and charged gold for them, a plan that was whispered in his ears by the two wives while he held his baby, who sucked on strawberries the way other babies sucked on tits.

“In this way, Great-great-grandfather grew quite rich and built a castle shaped like a ship covered in strawberry vines and with a room at the back, away from the sea, which was made entirely of glass and housed strawberries all year. He lived there with the two wives and the baby daughter and nobody is certain who is whose mother in our family line.

“Of course the strawberry wife did not stay but left one night, too cruel and heartless to even offer an explanation. Great-great-grandfather shouted her name for hours as if she was simply lost until, at last, he collapsed in the strawberry room, crushing the fruit with his large body and rolling in the juice until he was quite red with it and as frightening as a wounded animal. His first wife found him there and steered him to a hot bath. They learned to live together again without the strawberry maid. Strangers who didn’t know their story often commented on the love between them. The villagers insisted they were both bewitched, the lit candles in the window to guide her return given as evidence. Of course she never did come back.”

Outside in the cold night, even the moon was frozen. It shed a white light of ice over their pale yard and cast a ghost glow into the living room that haunted her face. He studied her as if she were someone new in his life and not the woman he’d known for seven years. Something about that moonglow combined with the firelight made her look strange, like a statue at a revolt.

She smiled down at him and cocked her head. “I tell you this story,” she said, “to explain if ever you should wake and find me gone, it is not an expression of lack of affection for you, but rather her witchy blood that is to be blamed.”

“What became of her?”

“Oh, no one knows. Some say she had a lover, a pirate from a nearby cove, and they left together, sailing the seas for strawberries. Some say she was an enchanted mermaid and returned to the sea. Some say she came to America and was burned at the stake.”

“Which do you think is true?”

She leaned back and sighed, closing her eyes. “I think she’s still alive,” she whispered, “breaking men’s hearts, because she is insatiable.”

He studied her in repose, a toppled statue while everything burned.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, not opening her eyes, and sounding strangely distant. Was that a tear at the corner of her eye? He turned away from her. He cleared his throat.

“All right then. For a while I had a job in Castor, near Rhome, in a small art museum there. I was not the most qualified for the work but apparently I was the most qualified who was willing to live in Castor, population 954, I kid you not. The museum had a nice little collection, actually. Most of the population of Castor had come through to view the paintings at least once but it was my experience they seemed just as interested in the carpeting, the light fixtures, and the quantity of fish in the river, as they were in the work of the old masters. Certainly the museum never saw the kind of popular attention the baseball field hosted, or the bowling lanes just outside of town.

“What had happened was this. In the 1930s Emile Castor, who had made his fortune on sweet cough drops, had decided to build a fishing lodge. He purchased a beautiful piece of forested property at the edge of what was then a small community, and built his ‘cabin,’ a six-bedroom, three-bath house with four stone-hearth fireplaces, and large windows that overlooked the river in the backyard. Even though Castor had blossomed to a population of nearly a thousand by the time I arrived, deer still came to drink from that river.

“When Emile Castor died in 1989, he stated in his will that the house be converted into a museum to display his private collection. He bequeathed all his estate to the support of this project. Of course, his relatives, a sister, a few old cousins, and several nieces and nephews, contested this for years, but Mr. Castor was a thorough man and the legalities were tight as a rock. What his family couldn’t understand, other than, of course, what they believed was the sheer cruelty of his act, was where this love of art had come from. Mr. Castor, who fished and hunted and was known as something of a ladies’ man, though he never married, smoked cigars—chased by lemon cough drops—and built his small fortune on his ‘masculine attitude,’ as his sister referred to it in an archived letter.

“The kitchen was subdivided. A wall was put up that cut an ugly line right down the middle of what had once been a large picture window that overlooked the river. Whoever made this decision and executed it so poorly was certainly no appreciator of architecture. It was ugly and distorted and an insult to the integrity of the place. What remained of the original room became the employee kitchen: a refrigerator, a stove, a large sink, marble countertops, and a tiled mosaic floor. A small, stained-glass window by Chagall was set beside the remaining slice of larger window. It remained, in spite of the assault it suffered, a beautiful room, and an elaborate employee kitchen for our small staff.

“The other half of the kitchen was now completely blocked off and inaccessible other than by walking through the employee kitchen. That, combined with the large window, which shed too much light to expose any works of art to, had caused this room to develop into a sort of oversized storage room. It was a real mess when I got there.

“The first thing I did was sort through all that junk, unearthing boxes of outdated pamphlets and old stationery, a box of old toilet paper, and several boxes of old Castor photographs, which I carried to my office to be catalogued and preserved. After a week or so of this I found the paintings, box after box of canvasses painted by an amateur hand, quite bad, almost at the level of a schoolchild, but without a child’s whimsy, and all of the same woman. I asked Darlene, who acted as bookkeeper, ticket taker, and town gossip, what she thought of them.

“ ‘That must be Mr. Castor’s work,’ she said.

“ ‘I didn’t know he painted.’

“ ‘Well, he did, you can see for yourself. Folks said he was nuts about painting out here. Are they all like these?’

“ ‘More or less.’

“ ‘Should have stuck to cough drops,’ she pronounced. (This from a woman who once confided in me her absolute glee at seeing a famous jigsaw puzzle, glued and framed, hanging in some restaurant in a nearby town.)

“When all was said and done we had fifteen boxes of those paintings and I decided to hang them in the room that was half of what had once been a magnificent kitchen. Few people would see them there, and that seemed right; they really were quite horrid. The sunlight could cause no more damage than their very presence already exuded.

“When they were at last all hung, I counted a thousand various shapes and sizes of the same dark-haired, gray-eyed lady painted in various styles, the deep velvet colors of Renaissance, the soft pastel hues of Baroque, some frightening bright green reminiscent of Matisse, and strokes that swirled wildly from imitation of van Gogh to the thick direct lines of a grade schooler. I stood in the waning evening light staring at this grotesquerie, this man’s art, his poor art, and I must admit I was moved by it. Was his love any less than that of the artist who painted well? Some people have talent. Some don’t. Some people have a love that can move them like this. One thousand faces, all imperfectly rendered, but attempted nonetheless. Some of us can only imagine such devotion.

“I had a lot of free time in Castor. I don’t like to bowl. I don’t care for greasy hamburgers. I have never been interested in stock car racing or farming. Let’s just say I didn’t really fit in. I spent my evenings cataloguing Emile Castor’s photographs. Who doesn’t like a mystery? I thought the photographic history of this man’s life would yield some clues about the object of his affection. I was quite excited about it actually, until I became quite weary with it. You can’t imagine what it’s like to look through one man’s life like that, family, friends, trips, beautiful women—though none were her. The more I looked at them, the more depressed I grew. It was clear Emile Castor had really lived his life and I, I felt, was wasting mine. Well, I am given to fits of melancholy, as you well know, and such a fit rooted inside me at this point. I could not forgive myself for being so ordinary. Night after night I stood in that room of the worst art ever assembled in one place and knew it was more than I had ever attempted, the ugliness of it all somehow more beautiful than anything I had ever done.

“I decided to take a break. I asked Darlene to come in, even though she usually took weekends off, to oversee our current high school girl, Eileen something or other, who seemed to be working through some kind of teenage hormonal thing, because every time I saw her, she appeared to have just finished a good cry. She was a good kid, I think, but at the time she depressed the hell out of me. ‘She can’t get over what happened between her and Randy,’ Darlene told me. ‘The abortion really shook her up. But don’t say anything to her parents. They don’t know.’

“ ‘Darlene, I don’t want to know.’

“Eventually it was settled. I was getting away from Castor and all things Castor related. I’d booked a room in a B & B in Sundale, on the shore. My duffel bag was packed with two novels, plenty of sunscreen, shorts and swimwear and flip-flops. I would sit in the sun. Walk along the shore. Swim. Read. Eat. I would not think about Emile Castor or the gray-eyed woman. Maybe I would meet somebody. Somebody real. Hey, anything was possible, now that I was getting away from Castor.

“Of course it rained. It started almost as soon as I left town and at times the rain became so heavy that I had to pull over on the side of the road. When I finally got to the small town on the shore, I was pretty wiped out. I drove in circles looking for the ironically named ‘Sunshine Bed and Breakfast’ until in frustration at the eccentricity of small towns, I decided that the pleasant-looking house with the simple sign ‘B & B’ must be it. I sat in the car for a moment hoping the rain would give me a break, and craned my neck at the distant looming steeple of a small chapel on the cliff above the roiling waters.

“It was clear the rain would continue its steady torrent, so I grabbed my duffel bag and slopped through the puddles in a sort of half trot, and entered a pleasant foyer of classical music, overstuffed chairs, a calico asleep in a basket on a table, and a large painting of, you probably already guessed, Emile Castor’s gray-eyed beauty. Only in this rendition she really was. Beautiful. This artist had captured what Emile had not. It wasn’t just a portrait, a photograph with paint if you will, no, this painting went beyond its subject’s beauty into the realm of what is beautiful in art. I heard footsteps, deep breathing, a cough. I turned with reluctance and beheld the oldest man I’d ever seen. He was a lace of wrinkles and skin that sagged from his bones like an ill-fitting suit. He leaned on a walking stick and appraised me with gray eyes almost lost in the fold of wrinkles.

“ ‘A beautiful piece of work,’ I said.

“He nodded.

“I introduced myself and after a few confused minutes discovered that I was neither in Sundale nor at the Sunshine B & B. But I could not have been more pleased on any sunny day, in any location, than I was there, especially when I found out I could stay the night. When I asked about the painting and its subject, Ed, as he told me to call him, invited me to join him in the parlor for tea after I had ‘settled in.’

“My room was pleasant, cozy, and clean without the creepy assortment of teddy bears too often assembled in B & Bs. From the window I had a view of the roiling sea, gray waves, the mournful swoop of seagulls, the cliff with the white chapel, its tall steeple tipped not with a cross but a ship, its great sails unfurled.

“When I found him in the parlor, Ed had a tray of tea and cookies set out on a low table before the fireplace which was nicely ablaze. The room was pleasant and inviting. The cold rain pounded the windows but inside it was warm and dry, the faint scent of lavender in the air.

“ ‘Come, come join us.’ Ed waved his hand, as arthritic as any I’ve ever seen, gnarled to almost a paw. I sat in the green wing chair across from him. An overstuffed rocking chair made a triangle of our seating arrangement but it was empty; not even the cat sat there.

“ ‘Theresa!’ he shouted, and he shouted again in a loud voice that reminded me of the young Marlon Brando calling for Stella.

“It occurred to me he might not be completely sane. But at the same moment I thought this, I heard a woman’s voice and the sound of footsteps approaching from the other end of the house. I confess that for a moment I entertained the notion that it would be the gray-eyed woman, as if I had fallen into a Brigadoon of sorts, a magical place time could not reach, all time-ravaged evidence on Ed’s face to the contrary.

“Just then that old face temporarily lost its wrinkled look and took on a divine expression. I followed the course of his gaze and saw the oldest woman in the world entering the room. I rose from my seat.

“ ‘Theresa,’ Ed said, ‘Mr. Delano of Castor.’

“I strode across the room and offered my hand. She slid into it a small, soft glove of a hand and smiled at me with green eyes. She walked smoothly and with grace, but her steps were excruciatingly small and slow. To walk beside her was a lesson in patience, as we traversed the distance to Ed, who had taken to pouring the tea with hands that quivered so badly the china sounded like wind chimes. How had these two survived so long? In the distance, a cuckoo sang and I almost expected I would hear it again before we reached our destination.

“ ‘Goodness,’ she said, when I finally stood beside the rocking chair, ‘I’ve never known a young man to walk so slowly.’ She sat in the chair swiftly, and without any assistance on my part. I realized she’d been keeping her pace to mine as I thought I was keeping mine to hers. I turned to take my own seat and Ed grinned up at me, offering in his quivering hand a chiming teacup and saucer, which I quickly took.

“ ‘Mr. Delano is interested in Elizabeth,’ Ed said as he extended another jangling cup and saucer to her. She reached across and took it, leaning out of the chair in a manner I thought unwise.

“ ‘What do you know about her?’ she asked.

“ ‘Mr. Emile Castor has made several, many, at least a thousand paintings of the same woman but nothing near to the quality of this one. That’s all I know. I don’t know what she was to him. I don’t know anything.’

“Ed and Theresa both sipped their tea. A look passed between them. Theresa sighed. ‘You tell him, Ed.’

“ ‘It begins with Emile Castor arriving in town, a city man clear enough, with a mustache, and in his red roadster.’

“ ‘But pleasant.’

“ ‘He knew his manners.’

“ ‘He was a sincerely pleasant man.’

“ ‘He drove up to the chapel and like the idiot he mostly was, turns his back on it and sets up his easel and tries to paint the water down below.’

“ ‘He wasn’t an idiot. He was a decent man, and a good businessman. He just wasn’t an artist.’

“ ‘He couldn’t paint water either.’

“ ‘Well, water’s difficult.’

“ ‘Then it started to rain.’

“ ‘You seem to get a lot.’

“ ‘So finally he realizes there’s a church right behind him and he packs up his puddle of paints and goes inside.’

“ ‘That’s when he sees her.’

“ ‘Elizabeth?’

“ ‘No. Our Lady. Oh, Mr. Delano, you really must see it.’

“ ‘Maybe he shouldn’t.’

“ ‘Oh, Edward, why shouldn’t he?’

“Edward shrugs. ‘He was a rich man so he couldn’t simply admire her without deciding that he must possess her as well. That’s how the rich are.’

“ ‘Edward, we don’t know Mr. Delano’s circumstances.’

“ ‘He ain’t rich.’

“ ‘Well, we don’t really—’

“ ‘All you gotta do is look at his shoes. You ain’t, are you?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘Can you imagine being so foolish you don’t think nothing of trying to buy a miracle?’

“ ‘A miracle? No.’

“ ‘Well, that’s how rich he was.’

“ ‘He stayed on while he tried to convince the church to sell it to him.’

“ ‘Idiot.’

“ ‘They fell in love.’

“Ed grunted.

“ ‘They did. They both did.’

“ ‘He offered a couple a barrels full of money.’

“ ‘For the painting.’

“ ‘I gotta say I do believe some on the church board wavered a bit but the women wouldn’t hear of it.’

“ ‘She is a miracle.’

“ ‘Yep, that’s what all the women folk said.’

“ ‘Edward, you know it’s true. More tea, Mr. Delano?’

“ ‘Yes. Thank you. I’m not sure I’m following . . .’

“ ‘You haven’t seen it yet, have you?’

“ ‘Theresa, he just arrived.’

“ ‘We saw some of those other paintings he did of Elizabeth.’

“Ed snorts.

“ ‘Well, he wasn’t a quitter, you have to give him that.’

“Ed bites into a cookie and glares at the teapot.

“ ‘What inspired him, well, what inspired him was Elizabeth, but what kept him at it was Our Lady.’

“ ‘So are you saying, do you mean to imply that this painting, this Our Lady is magical?’

“ ‘Not magic, a miracle.’

“ ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

“ ‘It’s an icon, Mr. Delano, surely you’ve heard of them?’

“ ‘Well, supposedly an icon is not just a painting, it is the holy manifested in the painting, basically.’

“ ‘You must see it. Tomorrow. After the rain stops.’

“ ‘Maybe he shouldn’t.’

“ ‘Why do you keep saying that, Edward? Of course he should see it.’

“Ed just shrugged.

“ ‘Of course we didn’t sell it to him and over time he stopped asking. They fell in love.’

“ ‘He wanted her instead.’

“ ‘Don’t make it sound like that. He made her happy during what none of us knew were the last days of her life.’

“ ‘After she died, he started the paintings.’

“ ‘He wanted to keep her alive.’

“ ‘He wanted to paint an icon.’

“ ‘He never gave up until he succeeded. Finally, he painted our daughter Elizabeth.’

“ ‘Are you saying Emile Castor painted that, in the foyer?’

“ ‘It took years.’

“ ‘He wanted to keep her alive somehow.’

“ ‘But that painting, it’s quite spectacular and his other work is so—’

“ ‘Lousy.’

“ ‘Anyone who enters this house wants to know about her.’

“ ‘I don’t mean to be rude but how did she—I’m sorry, please excuse me.’

“ ‘Die?’

“ ‘It doesn’t matter.’

“ ‘Of course it does. She fell from the church cliff. She’d gone up there to light a candle for Our Lady, a flame of gratitude. Emile had proposed and she had accepted. She went up there and it started raining while she was inside. She slipped and fell on her way home.’

“ ‘How terrible.’

“ ‘Oh, yes, but there are really so few pleasant ways to die.’

“Our own rain still lashed the windows. The fat calico came into the room and stopped to lick her paws. We just sat there, listening to the rain and the clink of china cup set neatly in saucer. The tea was good and hot. The fire smelled strangely of chocolate. I looked at their two old faces in profile, wrinkled as poorly folded maps. Then I proceeded to make a fool of myself by explaining to them my position as curator of the Castor museum. I described the collection, the beautiful house and location by a stream visited by deer, but I did not describe the dismal town, and ended with a description of Emile’s horrible work, the room filled with poor paintings of their daughter, surely, I told them, Elizabeth belonged there, redeemed against the vast assortment of clowns, for the angel she was. When I was finished the silence was sharp. Neither spoke nor looked at me, but even so, as though possessed by some horrible tic, I continued. ‘Of course we’d pay you handsomely.’ Theresa bowed her head and I thought that perhaps this was the posture she took for important decisions until I realized she was crying.

“Ed turned slowly, his old head like a marionette’s on an uncertain string. He fixed me with a look that told me what a fool I was and will always be.

“ ‘Please accept my apology for being so . . .’ I said, finding myself speaking and rising as though driven by the same puppeteer’s hand. ‘I can’t tell you how . . . Thank you.’ I turned abruptly and walked out of the room, angry at my clumsy social skills, in despair, actually, that I had made a mess of such a pleasant afternoon. I intended to hurry to my room and read my book until dinner, when I would skulk down the stairs and try to find a decent place to eat. That I could insult and hurt two such kind people was unforgivable. I was actually almost blind with self-loathing until I entered the foyer and saw her out of the corner of my eye.

“It is really quite impossible to describe that other thing that brings a painting beyond competent, even beyond beauty into the realm of great art. Of course she was a beautiful woman; of course the lighting, colors, composition, brushstroke, all of these elements could be separated and described, but this still did not account for that ethereal feeling, the sense one gets standing next to a masterpiece, the need to take a deep breath as if suddenly the air consumed by one is needed for two.

“Instead of going upstairs I went out the front door. If this other painting was anything like the one of Elizabeth, then I must see it.

“It was dark, the rain only a drizzle now, the town a slick black oil, maybe something by Dali with disappearing ink. I had, out of habit, pocketed my car keys. I had to circle the town a few times, make a few false starts, once finding myself in someone’s driveway, before I selected the road that arched above the town to the white chapel, which even in the rain glowed as though lit from within. The road was winding but not treacherous. When I got to the top and stood on that cliff the wind whipped me, the town below was lost in a haze of fog that only a few yellow lights shone through. I had the sensation of looking down on the heavens from above. The waves crashed and I felt the salt on my face, tasted it on my lips. Up close the chapel was much larger than it looked from below, the steeple that narrowed to a needle point on which its ship balanced into the dark sky, quite imposing. As I walked up those stone steps I thought again of Edward saying he wasn’t sure I should see it. I reached for the hammered iron handle and pulled. For a moment I thought it was locked, but it was just incredibly heavy. I pulled the door open and entered the darkness of the church. Behind me, the door heaved shut. I smelled a flowery, smoky scent, the oily odor of wood, and heard from somewhere a faint drip of water as though there was a leak. I was in the church foyer; there was another door before me, marked in the darkness by the thin line of light that shone beneath it. I walked gingerly, uncertain in the dark. It too was extremely heavy. I pulled it open.”

He coughed and cleared his throat as though suddenly suffering a cold. She opened her eyes just a slit. The heat from the wood stove must have been the reason for the red in his cheeks; how strange he looked, as though in pain or fever! She let her eyes droop shut and it seemed a long time before he continued, his voice raspy.

“All I can say is, I never should have looked. I wish I’d never seen either of those paintings. It was there that I made myself the promise I would never settle for a love any less than spectacular, a love so great that it would take me past my limitations, the way Emile’s love for Elizabeth had taken him past his, that somehow such a love would leave an imprint on the world, the way great art does, that all who saw it would be changed by it, as I was.

“So you see, when you find me sad and ask what’s on my mind, or when I am quiet and cannot explain to you the reason, there it is. If I had never seen the paintings, maybe I would be a happy man. But always, now, I wonder.”

She waited but he said no more. After a long time, she whispered his name. But he did not answer, and when she peeked at him from the squint of her eyes, he appeared to be asleep. Eventually, she fell asleep too.

All that night, as they told their stories, the flames burned heat onto that icy roof, which melted down the sides of the house and over the windows so that in the cold morning when they woke up, the fire gone to ash and cinder, the house was encased in a sort of skin of ice, which they tried to alleviate by burning another fire, not realizing they were only sealing themselves in more firmly. They spent the rest of that whole winter in their ice house. By burning all the wood and most of the furniture and eating canned food even if it was out of date, they survived, thinner and less certain of fate, into a spring morning thaw, though they never could forget those winter stories, not all that spring or summer and especially not that autumn, when the winds began to carry that chill in the leaves, that odd combination of sun and decay, about which they did not speak, but which they knew would exist between them forever.

The post Cold Fires appeared first on Reactor.

Tor.com is pleased to present Seanan McGuire’s short story, “Fiber”, originally published in the Shawn Speakman’s Unbound anthology—available now from Grim Oak Press. Like Unfettered before it, the contributing writers of Unbound were allowed to submit the tales they wished fans of genre to read—without the constraints of a theme. It is an anthology filled with some spectacularly new and wonderful stories, each one as diverse as its creator.

“Fiber”

The trouble began when Laurie discovered that Jamie Lee Curtis yogurt. You know, the stuff that’s marketed at, like, middle-aged moms who want to reclaim their youth, or at least the ability to have regular bowel movements again. Anyway, Laurie loves Jamie Lee Curtis, for reasons that are a mystery to anyone whose taste in popular culture has matured past the early ’90s. Also, Laurie is frequently too lazy to chew. So when Jamie Lee Curtis said “come, my children, and eat of my poop yogurt,” Laurie was first in line.

Well, Laurie’s mom was, on account of Laurie is also too lazy to go to the goddamn store. It’s sort of a miracle that Laurie wasn’t too lazy to go out for the cheerleading squad, except for the part where once you wear the orange and green uniform of a Fighting Pumpkin, you basically have a license to cut class. She became a cheerleader because it allowed her to be even lazier. Now that was dedication.

Anyway, we were driving back from an away game against the Devil’s Spoke Scorpions—a bunch of lazy jerks whose cheer squad was barely deserving of the name, much less their pom-poms—with Jude behind the wheel, Marti in the front, and me, Laurie, and Colleen jammed into the back. The rest of the squad had gone on ahead in the football bus, choosing comfort and efficiency over the freedom of the road and being stacked like cordwood in Jude’s backseat. Which, well. The bus was seeming like a better idea with every mile we drove, since Laurie was slurping down yogurt like it was about to be made illegal, while Colleen balanced her notebook on her knee and scribbled in her weird shorthand. We couldn’t even really have a conversation, since Marti had all the windows down and the radio cranked all the way to “moving noise violation.”

At the same time, I hadn’t had this much fun in ages. Largely because I had been a zombie up until the homecoming game, when the weird girl we’d found in the woods had flung herself into the post-game bonfire, burning up and being forgotten by everyone who wasn’t on the squad in the same instant. There had been no body, no bones; only straw, and the faint scent of singed pumpkin-flesh. And I had come back to life. My heart had started beating, the scars from my autopsy had scabbed over and started to heal, and I had found myself with a lot of explaining to do.
My parents were still sort of in shock, and viewed me as something between a miracle and a test. When I’d explained, very earnestly, that my return from the grave was connected to the cheerleading squad, they had opened their checkbooks, made a substantial donation to the school, and bought me a new uniform. Being alive was pretty cool. Even if Marti did need to learn how to turn the music down.

Then Laurie looked up from her yogurt—strawberry with extra fiber—worried her lower lip between her teeth for a moment, and said, “I need to go.”

Colleen kept writing. Marti kept howling along to a Katy Perry song that had been pretty much incomprehensible before it became a duet with a tone-deaf cheerleader. I blanched, leaning away from her. The worst thing about coming back from the dead: bodily functions. It didn’t matter what it was, if it came out of an orifice, I didn’t want anything to do with it. Doubly so if the orifice it came out of wasn’t my own.

Laurie scowled, guessing—rightly—that Jude hadn’t heard her, and repeated, more loudly, “I have to go.”

The car continued to hurtle down the road as fast as Jude’s commitment to safe driving would allow. The howling of the wind mingled with the howling of pop music and cheerleader, creating an unholy trio that could only be pierced by something even worse.

“I said, I HAVE TO GO!” shouted Laurie. Colleen jumped, her pen drawing a thick black line across the center of the page she’d been scribbling on. Marti swore, loudly enough to be heard over the song. And Jude hit the brakes, slamming us all forward. I gasped, closing my eyes.

To become a zombie, you have to die. That’s just Necromancy 101. And I, well, died in a car crash when my boyfriend-at-the time decided that he wasn’t too drunk to drive. I couldn’t put all the blame on him. I had been too drunk to stop him. End result: while I don’t mind riding in cars, I don’t like it when they swerve, or brake abruptly, or do anything else that feels like losing control.

“Dammit, Laurie, you scared the crap out of Heather,” snapped Marti. I could hear her, which meant she had turned the radio off. That was a nice change.

“No one was listening to me,” said Laurie sullenly. I opened my eyes. Laurie had her arms crossed and was sulking at Marti, who had twisted around in her seat to glare into the back. Jude had pulled off to the side and was also twisted around, although her expression was more concerned than accusatory. Her sleek black hair fell in perfect wings to either side of her face, held back with a pumpkin-shaped hair clip that would have seemed immature, if not for our school mascot. Being a Fighting Pumpkin meant never needing to apologize for shopping at Claire’s.
“What do you need, Laurie?” asked Jude.

“Can we—” began Laurie.

Jude held up a hand, stopping her. “Please don’t,” she said.

We all had our little quirks, like me having been dead for a while, or Marti being allergic to gluten. In Laurie’s case, “quirk” was another way of saying “people generally did what she asked them to do.” She could turn a simple request into an order, just by phrasing it the right way. Jude had been working with her on finding ways to say things without making them an irresistible compulsion for the people around her.

(Laurie’s parents were both perfectly nice, perfectly normal people who didn’t seem to understand why anyone would want to do anything apart from what their daughter asked. But Colleen, who was the squad’s record keeper and had access to all the Fighting Pumpkins handbooks, going back to the foundation of the high school, said that she was pretty sure Laurie’s great-grandmother had been a river nymph of some sort. Some things can skip a generation or two. Like gills, or an irresistible voice.)

“But I need to go,” whined Laurie. “I gotta go bad.”

“Can’t you just piss behind a bush like a normal person?” asked Marti. She sounded annoyed. That was pretty normal. Marti generally sounded annoyed by anything that wasn’t all about Marti, which made her a perfect mean girl attack dog for the rest of us. Any time someone started to question why the Pumpkins did things a certain way, we’d just point Marti at them and run in the opposite direction. After she was done stripping the flesh from their bones with her tongue—metaphorically speaking, anyway; she wasn’t a real flesh-stripper—they were generally way more willing to tolerate the rest of us being a little odd.

“No!” Laurie shot a horrified look at the back of Marti’s head. “I don’t need to go number one. I need to go.”

Colleen looked up from her notes and said, in a surprisingly clinical tone, “She’s been eating yogurt for the last hour. By now, her colon is probably ready to explode. She needs to—”

“I am begging you not to finish that sentence,” said Jude. “We’ll stop at the very next place we see so you can use the bathroom, all right, Laurie? Do you think you can hold it for just a couple of miles?”

“I can try,” said Laurie. She sank deeper in her seat. “Just hurry, okay?”

“I’ll hurry,” said Jude, and hit the gas.

#

One car, five cheerleaders, and a totally disregarded speed limit: these are the things that dreams are made of. Jude drove like a girl who desperately didn’t want to have her upholstery cleaned, until an exit loomed up ahead of us, complete with a large, hand-painted sign advertising JACK’S COFFEE * GAS * HOMEMADE BEEF JERKY.

“I bet they have a bathroom,” said Laurie, with strained enthusiasm.

“I bet they have a man in a hockey mask waiting to carve our faces off and wear them like pretty little masks,” said Marti. “I don’t want to stop here. This looks unhygienic.”

“I gotta go,” said Laurie.

“I don’t know—” began Jude.

And that was when Laurie, sensing that the bathroom was about to slip out of her grasp, did the unforgivable. “Jude, can we please stop? This place seems nice.”

“Sure, Laurie,” said Jude, and swerved for the exit, ignoring the way Marti and Colleen were shouting for her to slow down. I didn’t shout. It wouldn’t do any good now that Jude was on a mission, and I had a better task to perform: glaring at Laurie like I was willing the flesh to melt right off of her bones.

To her extremely slight credit, Laurie grimaced apologetically and whispered, “I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to put the whammy on squad members, but I have to go.”

“You didn’t put the whammy on a squad member, you put it on the squad leader,” I whispered back. “You’re going to be lucky if you don’t spend the rest of the season sitting on the bench as a punishment for treason.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were a totalitarian government,” said Colleen, adjusting her glasses as Jude got the car back onto an even keel. “There’s nothing in the bylaws about treason charges.”

“Shut up, Colleen,” snarled Marti.

Laurie crossed her legs, looked apologetic, and said nothing.

We were approaching the end of the exit, which looked exactly as promising as an area that played host to Jack’s Coffee should. Heavy weeds choked the fields in every direction, broken only by the shapes of twisted, claw-like trees. None of the trees had leaves, naturally; that would have been too friendly, and too welcoming to travelers. It was like we were driving into a bad horror movie from the late 1970s, before anyone had discovered concepts like “production values.”

Then we came around the bend, and things got worse.

Jack’s Coffee, Gas, and Homemade Beef Jerky was a wooden shack with two antique pumps shoved into the cracked concrete out front. One of them was listing to the side at an alarming angle. The other had a sign on it that read “Out of Order.” Completing the picture was a green porta-potty, shoved off to one side with a piece of cardboard declaring “Customers Only” taped to the front.

“Go be customers buy something I don’t care what,” wailed Laurie, launching herself out of the car as soon as it started to slow down. The door slammed shut behind her as Jude brought us to a full stop.

The sound was the trigger: Jude’s hands tightened on the wheel, her shoulders going abruptly stiff, before she leaned forward, attention focused on the fleeing Laurie. “We’ve stopped,” she said.

“Yes,” said Colleen.

“I did not want to stop.”

“True,” said Marti.

Jude made an irritated noise. “She whammied me.”

“Yes,” I said, opening my door. “And then she whammied us all. Excuse me, but I need to be a customer and buy something.”

Grumbling and muttering, the other three cheerleaders followed me as I climbed out of the car. We were an odd streak of color in the blasted landscape: we had changed out of our uniforms after the game, choosing comfort over remaining encased in cotton-poly blend, so we were all in jeans. But our sweatshirts and hair bows were in various permutations of the school colors, orange and green, the high school social structure equivalent of those deep-sea fish that look like rainbows and will poison the shit out of anything that tries to eat them. Even with most of the squad elsewhere, we moved like a pack, smooth and fluid and completely united.

The door was unlocked. That was good. It creaked like a prop from a Vincent Price movie. That was bad. Nothing creaked like that unless it had been abandoned for twenty years, or was being intentionally damaged by a local horror enthusiast.

The interior wasn’t much better, although to be fair, it was precisely the sort of place that had been promised by the exterior. The floor was bare, splintery wood, and looked like it would give way under any but the most cautious of treads. There were shelves, which meant that the place could continue to claim to be a “convenience store,” no matter how inconvenient it actually was, but those shelves were virtually bare, and the boxes and cans they did hold were all brands I didn’t recognize. Judging by the hairstyles and clothing of the grinning kids on the cereal boxes, some of the groceries had been here since my parents were in high school, if not longer. Eating anything sold in this store would probably be a quick ticket to food poisoning.

“I am going to strangle Laurie with my bare hands,” said Marti philosophically, as she looked around. “If anyone wants to dissuade me, feel free, but it’s not going to work. She’s going to die, and I’m not going to be sorry.”

“At least prison jumpsuits are orange,” said Colleen. She took a dainty step forward. The floor creaked, but held. “Maybe they have gum.”

“Does it still count as gum after it’s fossilized?” I asked.

“Can I help you girls?” The voice was calm, clear, and sounded like it belonged on the radio, maybe trying to sell us a new car or something. I jumped anyway, spinning around with Marti, Colleen, and Jude only half a beat behind me. (Coming back from the dead hadn’t changed my reflexes back to human normal, and the horror movies lie about how quickly zombies react to the possibility of a good meal: at my best, I could pluck squirrels out of the trees. These days, I’m just a little quicker than the norm. Which is still uncannily fast, especially when compared to the people around me.)

The man in the doorway matched the voice. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a chin that should have been immortalized in story, song, and the occasional soft-focus photo shoot. Only his clothes spoiled the effect, since I’d never seen a piece of prime beefcake wearing dirty brown zip-up mechanic’s overalls before. They were at least three sizes too big, and still managed to look amazing. The thought that if he looked that good in them, he’d look even better out of them occurred briefly. I shoved it down. This was the time to buy expired sodas and rock-hard gum, not to indulge our carnal natures.

Besides, while I was willing to share most things with my squad, the idea of adding my love life—or lust life, as might have been more accurate—to the list just didn’t sit well with me.

“Hi!” said Jude, falling immediately into her role as leader. She offered the stranger a winning smile. (Literally winning. That smile had put us over the top at cheer camp, twice. When it came to bringing home the gold, the power of Jude’s orthodontist could not be ignored.) “Do you work here?”

“Oh my God what the fuck,” muttered Marti, slapping her forehead with one hand. Louder, she said, “Jude. He’s wearing the logo of this shit-shack on his left boy-boob. If he doesn’t work here, he’s a murder-hobo, and we need to leave.”

“Please forgive my friend; she was raised by wolves, and she doesn’t really understand how to interact with normal people,” said Jude. She glared daggers at Marti before flashing another smile at the stranger. “I was just hoping you could sell us something. Our friend is using your bathroom, and she’s really into following the letter of the law.”

“Ah, the ‘customers only’ sign got another one,” said the man. He looked amused by the whole situation. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. We were sort of a house of horrors once we got going—most people found us less “amusing” and more “terrifying give them whatever they want so they’ll go away.”

I’d say it was because we were a bunch of sometimes semi-supernatural weirdoes who flung each other into the air for fun, but honestly, the semi-supernatural thing didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. Every cheerleading squad had their own version of our repelling field, effective on high school students and high school graduates alike. Once you’ve known the terror of large groups of girls in short skirts and spirit bows, you can never truly be free of it.

Only this fellow didn’t seem to be batting an eye, either out of fear or because he wanted some barely legal cheerleader action (also not uncommon, unfortunately). He was looking at the four of us with an expression of vague amusement, like we were the most adorable things that had ever darkened his doorstep. That made me nervous. No, more than nervous: that made me wary. Never trust anybody who can look at a group of teenage girls in short skirts and not react at all. Those are almost always the people who are hiding something.

“We don’t get much business around here,” he said. “How’d you like some homemade beef jerky?”

“Was it made this decade?” asked Marti.

“Yes,” said the man, looking amused. “It was even made this year. I’m Chuck, by the way.”

“Jude,” said our squad leader. She pointed at the rest of us as she listed, in turn, “Marti, Colleen, and Heather. Our fifth Fighting Pumpkin should be here shortly.”

“If she didn’t fall in,” said Chuck, and laughed at his own joke before starting toward the counter. “Come on. I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

The beef jerky was kept up at the front counter in a variety of old apothecary jars. Anywhere else, they would have looked charmingly antique. Here, they fed right into the overall horror movie décor, making it seem even more likely that a man with a machete was going to spring out at us at any moment.

“Oh, look, teriyaki,” said Colleen happily, and removed the lid from the first jar of jerky.

The smell hit me immediately, blunted by a heavy coating of teriyaki, but unmistakable all the same. I actually moaned, the sound rising involuntarily from the depths of my throat and causing all three of my teammates to whip around and stare at me. Jude, especially, went pale. She extended one hand like she was going to take my arm, only to pause and pull back, unsure of what she was supposed to do.

“Heather?” she said. “Are you . . . feeling all right?”

The man in the overalls raised his eyebrows. “Your friend sounds hungry. She a big fan of jerky?”

“Actually, she’s a vegetarian,” said Marti smoothly. She plucked the lid from Colleen’s unresisting fingers and clamped it back down over the jar. The smell of teriyaki jerky stopped invading the store, although it lingered in my nostrils, dreadful and cloying, like smoke, or permanent marker.

Jude frowned, eyes still locked on my face. “Heather?”

I struggled to make my jaw unclench. My heart was hammering, and my lungs ached—I hadn’t exhaled since the jar had been opened, freeing that terrible, wonderful scent. I tried to focus on my heartbeat. It meant that I was still alive. Living people had choices. They could choose whether to moan or not. They could choose whether they were going to stuff their faces with jerky or kick some terrifying gas station asshole in the balls. They were alive. But in the moment, I didn’t feel like I had any choices at all. I couldn’t move.

The door banged open behind me and footsteps pattered into the room, followed by Laurie demanding mulishly, “Aren’t you guys done yet? The bathroom was way gross. I had to raid the glove compartment for wet wipes. By the way, we’re out of wet wipes. Do they sell those here?”

“Just a second, Laurie,” said Jude. Her eyes remained fixed on me. “Heather? Are you feeling all right? Do we need to step outside? Because we can step outside, if that’s what needs to happen. We can always come back in and make our purchases after you’ve had a chance to take a few deep breaths and maybe sit down.”

“Maybe she just needs to eat some jerky,” said Chuck. “In my experience, most vegetarians are just people who haven’t had enough beef jerky in their lives.”

That was the last straw. My jaw finally obeyed my orders to unclench. As soon as I could move again, I grabbed the nearest arm, which belonged to Jude, and yanked it—along with its owner—further from the jars of jerky. “Human,” I hissed.

Jude, who hadn’t risen to leader of the Fighting Pumpkins cheer squad by being slow on the uptake, gasped. Marti and Colleen looked at me blankly. And Laurie skipped over to the counter and reached for the nearest jar.

“This looks delicious!” she chirped. “Sorry about the, um, you-know from before. I just really had to go.”

Marti’s hand clamped down on Laurie’s wrist before she could take the lid off the jar. “How about you reverse the you-know so that we can all leave, hmm?” she said. “I don’t think Heather’s feeling much like jerky right now.”

Chuck, who had been looking increasingly confused by the ruckus we were making, frowned. “Now, hang on,” he said. “We enforce a strict ‘customers only’ policy with our bathroom facilities.”

“Oh, like what, you’re going to shove it back up her ass?” snapped Marti. “How about we leave a dollar on the counter, and you call it all good?”

“Wait, why is my ass involved?” asked Laurie, sounding alarmed.

I found my voice again. “It’s human,” I said. “The jerky is made from people.”

“Are you sure?” asked Jude.

“I know what human flesh smells like,” I said, letting go of her arm. “I know what it tastes like too. None of you need to know that. We need to leave. Laurie?”

“Um,” she said, pulling away from the jerky jar. Marti released her wrist, enabling her retreat. “No one has to buy anything, let’s just leave.”

“Oh, no, sugar,” said Chuck. His voice had dropped down into his chest, becoming dark and gravelly. I whirled, putting myself between him and the rest of the squad.

His overalls weren’t too large anymore. If anything, they were too small, clinging to his body like they had been painted on, seams threatening to split with every move of his densely muscled arms. Hair covered his neck and hands, and ran up the sides of his face in some of the most impressive muttonchops I had ever seen a man grow in under a minute. His eyes had gone from charming brown to piss-yellow, cold and somehow rancid, like they were windows for a soul that had gone bad.

“No, no, no,” he said, showing a mouthful of jagged teeth. “You agreed to the contract when you used the bathroom. Customers only. If you want to break it, you’re going to pay.”

“Oh, goodie,” said Colleen faintly. “We found a wendigo. I always wondered if they were real.”

Chuck snarled and lunged for her. Marti kicked him in the throat as Jude kicked him in the balls. I elbowed him in the side of the neck for good measure before I grabbed Jude again and hauled ass for the exit, trusting the others to follow. The wendigo, meanwhile, was in the process of folding in half and dropping to his knees, thus proving the old adage that you should never forget to wear a cup to a cheerleader fight. No matter what kind of junk you’re packing in your pants, a good boot to the groin is going to put you down if you don’t have protection.
The door hadn’t latched all the way. I hit it shoulder-first, bursting onto the porch in a shower of splinters and deeply confused termites. All I needed to do was get Jude to the car. The others could look out for themselves, or I could double back for them once I was sure that our captain was safe; saving her meant saving the team, at least symbolically. It was less than twenty yards to safety—

Twenty yards, and three more wendigo, their mouths bristling with teeth and their chins slick with drool. I came skidding to a stop, aided by Jude, who grabbed the doorframe with the hand that wasn’t clutching my shoulder. Her fingers dug in to both the wood and my flesh. We halted.

“What the fuck,” demanded Marti from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Wendigo #1 was still crumpled in a heap on the floor. He was going to be pissed when he recovered. Marti, Colleen, and Laurie were all standing there, ready to run, which gave them a clear line of sight on the new wendigo. “Why are we in a horror movie? I just had my nails done!”

“Because we’re always in a horror movie,” said Jude. She squirmed out of my grasp, grabbed Laurie, and shoved her in front of us. “Tell them to back off,” she ordered.

“Um,” said Laurie. She looked terrified. That showed more of a brain than was normal for her. Clearing her throat, she cupped her hands around her mouth and called, “Hey, monsters! Don’t eat us!”

The wendigo started laughing.

“I don’t think it worked,” said Laurie, dropping her hands. “Why didn’t it work?”

“Maybe because they’re mangy cannibalistic monsters, and not members of the Computer Club,” said Marti.

“It’s not cannibalism if they’re not human,” said Colleen.

“Should we really be standing here discussing this when we’re about to be eaten?” asked Jude, just before the wendigo we had left inside the shop—good old Chuck—slammed into her from behind and sent her sprawling into me. I slammed into Laurie, and all three of us went down in a heap, with the wendigo on top of us.

He didn’t stay there long. There was an enraged scream, and then he was fleeing from Marti, who was attempting to use his head as a kickball. Wendigo #1 fled to the dubious safety of wendigo #2 through #4, falling into place among his pack. He snarled. So did they. I picked myself up from the porch, grabbed Jude and Laurie this time, and fled back inside.

“Barricade the door!” I shouted.

“Way ahead of you,” said Marti, shouldering me out of the way as she hauled a shelf from its place in the middle of the room to prop against the door—which no longer latched, thanks to our earlier exit. “Okay, Colleen, you’re our genius. How the fuck do we get past these things?”

“I’ve never seen a wendigo before!” protested Colleen. “They’re supposed to be mythological!”

“Like zombies, mind-control, and attractive high-waisted jeans, and yet here we are,” said Marti. “Figure something out!”

Jude had picked herself up from the floor. Smoothing her hair with one hand, she asked, “What was that you said about the jerky before, Heather?”

“It’s human,” I said. My mouth flooded with spit. I swallowed it, trying to push back the memory of how delicious people had been, back when I was dead and they were my natural prey. “Teriyaki-flavored human, but still human.”

“Wendigo are cannibals,” said Marti again, shooting a glare at Colleen that dared her to argue the definition of “cannibalism.” Instead, Colleen just looked thoughtful.

“So the jerky is probably other people who stopped here for gas or to use the bathroom,” she said. “That gives me an idea.”

“We’ll try anything,” said Jude.

“Just remember you said that,” said Colleen.

#

Cheerleaders naturally come in two varieties: the ones who throw, and the ones who get thrown. We gussy our roles up with lots of extras, like “who stands on the bottom of the pyramid” and “who does the big tumbling passes,” but at the end of the day, some of us had our feet on the ground so that the rest of us could get our heads as high into the clouds as possible. Jude and Marti were both bases. Colleen and Laurie were fliers. I was a switch—I could fill either role, as needed, although most of the time, I was too busy doing cartwheels for my teammates to fling me around.

Using me as a stabilizer, Marti and Jude knelt down and allowed Colleen and Laurie, respectively, to climb onto their backs, where the two lighter girls locked their knees around the ribcages of their bases. That left Colleen and Laurie with free hands, and the leverage they would need if they had to launch themselves into the air. Jude handed me her car keys. I handed Jude and Marti each a jar of jerky, which they passed up to Colleen and Laurie.

“This is a terrible plan,” I said.

“Go, Pumpkins,” said Jude, and kicked the door open.

The wendigo were still outside—true to Colleen’s supposition, they had decided to wait us out rather than destroy their own shack. It was always nice to deal with responsibly minded monsters. Jude and Marti screamed as they ran. I dove for the space between them, hitting the ground on my hands and going into a tumbling pass that would have been illegal in competition; I was pushing myself high and hard, without pausing to breathe or give my spotters time to adjust for my position. It was the sort of stunt that breaks necks.

Like the neck of the wendigo I landed on halfway across the yard. There was a sickening crunch as he went down, and the smell of blood and piss filled the air. Hitting someone in the base of the skull with a hundred and forty pounds of fast-moving cheerleader will do that. Another of the wendigo howled, swiping at me and drawing four lines of burning pain down the back of my thigh. The smell of my blood—human enough to trigger that maddening hunger, even though it was my own—filled my mouth and nose, obscuring the stink of wendigo. The wendigo howled.

“Now!” shouted Jude.

On cue, Colleen and Laurie opened their jars of jerky and began pelting the wendigo. The wendigo howled and snapped, grabbing the jerky before it could hit the ground. Two wendigo went for the same piece of jerky. Then they went for each other. Colleen spiked her jerky jar, hard, off the remaining wendigo’s head—and then I was too far ahead of the action to see what was happening any more.

Jude hadn’t bothered to lock the car in her rush to get inside and buy things. Thank fuck for that. I wrenched the door open, jammed the keys into the ignition, and hit the gas, sending the car rocketing toward the fray. Jude dove out of the way, taking Colleen with her. Marti and Laurie were a few feet away, still throwing jerky to the wendigo.

“Get in get in get in!” I screeched. Jude threw Colleen onto the roof and dove in through the passenger side door. Marti didn’t bother letting Laurie go; she just shoved her through the open window to the backseat and slung her legs in after her, leaving her own torso hanging over the edge. Reaching up, she grabbed Colleen’s arm, stabilizing them both. I hit the gas again, and we were off, accelerating away from the shack and toward the freeway, with one cheerleader on the roof, one halfway out the window, and three wendigo in pursuit.

“I hate all of you!” I screamed.

Jude put on her seatbelt.

We hit the freeway at just under seventy miles per hour, weaving as I tried to keep the car under control without flinging anyone off into space. Colleen was whooping with glee. Marti was screaming incoherent curses, her meaning clear only from her tone. The wendigo were hot on our trail, which was somehow more terrifying than anything else about our situation. Shapeshifting cannibal monsters were one thing. Shapeshifting cannibal monsters that could run at seventy miles per hour were something entirely different.

A convoy of big rigs was making its lumbering way down the other side of the highway. I said a silent prayer to whatever god looks after cheerleaders and fools, and jerked the wheel hard to the side, sending us careening across three lanes and cutting off the lead truck in the convoy. Horns blared. Tires screeched. Colleen squealed.

Wendigo splashed. Everywhere. Three wendigo could generate a lot of splash. Colleen squealed again, but this time it was in disgust, not delight. “It’s in my hair, it’s in my hair!” she wailed.

“Shut up,” snarled Marti.

I kept pulling on the wheel, steering us onto the shoulder. I turned the hazard lights on, stopped the engine, and slumped backward in my seat, panting.

“Oh my God,” said Jude.

“That sucked,” said Marti, pulling herself in through the window and starting to pick bits of wendigo out of her hair. “Somebody get Colleen off the roof.”

I got out of the car and helped Colleen down as Jude slid into the driver’s seat. Colleen had been right in the path of the bursting wendigo: she was covered in gore, although she wasn’t injured. I was the only one who’d actually been hurt. Marti broke out the first aid kit, and we did some roadside medical care while Colleen toweled herself off. Then it was back into the car and back on the road for home.

#

An hour later, Laurie piped up from the back seat: “I need to go.”

Everyone groaned.

Marti threw the rest of Laurie’s yogurt out the window.

The post Fiber appeared first on Reactor.

From Niall Alexander’s review of Reach For Infinity: “The Fifth Dragon” is about a pair of new moon workers, Achi and Adriana, who find comfort in this alien place in one another’s company, only to learn that their time together is strictly limited. ‘The Fifth Dragon’ flies back and forth between their first days as a pair and their final moments as friends, underscoring that the end of everything is inevitable.

The scan was routine. Every moon worker has one every four lunes. Achi was called, she went into the scanner. The machine passed magnetic fields through her body and when she came out the medic said, you have four weeks left.

We met on the Vorontsov Trans-Orbital cycler but didn’t have sex. We talked instead about names.

“Corta. That’s not a Brazilian name,” Achi said. I didn’t know her well enough then, eight hours out from transfer orbit, to be my truculent self and insist that any name can be a Brazilian name, that we are a true rainbow nation. So I told her that my name had rolled through many peoples and languages like a bottle in a breaker until it was cast up sand-scoured and clouded on the beaches of Barra. And now I was taking it on again, up to the moon.

Achi Debasso. Another name rolled by tide of history. London born, London raised, M.I.T. educated but she never forgot – had never been let forget – that she was Syrian. Syriac. That one letter was a universe of difference. Her family had fled the civil war, she had been born in exile. Now she was headed into a deeper exile.

I didn’t mean to be in the centrifuge pod with Achi. There was a guy; he’d looked and I looked back and nodded yes, I will, yes even as the OTV made its distancing burn from the cycler. I took it. I’m no prude. I’ve got the New Year Barra beach bangles. I’m up for a party and more, and everyone’s heard about (here they move in close and mouth the words) freefall sex. I wanted to try it with this guy. And I couldn’t stop throwing up. I was not up for zero gee. It turned everything inside me upside down. Puke poured out of me. That’s not sexy. So I retreated to gravity and the only other person in the centrifuge arm was this caramel-eyed girl, slender hands and long fingers, her face flickering every few moments into an unconscious micro-frown. Inward-gazing, self-loathing, scattering geek references like anti-personnel mines. Up in the hub our co-workers fucked. Down in the centrifuge pod we talked and the stars and the moon arced across the window beneath our feet.

A Brazilian miner and a London-Syriac ecologist. The centrifuge filled as freefall sex palled but we kept talking. The next day the guy I had puked over caught my eye again but I sought out Achi, on her own in the same spot, looking out at the moon. And the whirling moon was a little bigger in the observation port and we knew each other a little better and by the end of the week the moon filled the whole of the window and we had moved from conversationalists into friends.

Achi: left Damascus as a cluster of cells tumbling in her mother’s womb. And that informed her every breath and touch. She felt guilty for escaping. Father was a software engineer, mother was a physiotherapist. London welcomed them.

Adriana: seven of us: seven Cortas. Little cuts. I was in the middle, loved and adored but told solemnly I was plain and thick in the thighs and would have be thankful for whatever life granted me.

Achi: a water girl. Her family home was near the Olympic pool – her mother had dropped her into water days out of the hospital. She had sunk, then she swam. Swimmer and surfer: long British summer evenings on the western beaches. Cold British water. She was small and quiet but feared no wave.

Adriana: born with the sound of the sea in her room but never learned to swim. I splash, I paddle, I wade. I come from beach people, not ocean people.

Achi: the atoner. She could not change the place or order of her birth, but she could apologise for it by being useful. Useful Achi. Make things right!

Adriana: the plain. Mãe and papai thought they were doing me a favour; allowing me no illusions or false hopes that could blight my life. Marry as well as you can; be happy: that will have to do. Not this Corta. I was the kid who shot her hand up at school. The girl who wouldn’t shut up when the boys were talking. Who never got picked for the futsal team – okay, I would find my own sport. I did Brasilian jujitsu. Sport for one. No one messed with plain Adriana.

Achi: grad at UCL, post-grad at M.I.T. Her need to be useful took her battling desertification, salinisation, eutrophication. She was an -ation warrior. In the end it took her to the moon. No way to be more useful than sheltering and feeding a whole world.

Adriana: university at São Paulo. And my salvation. Where I learned that plain didn’t matter as much as available, and I was sweet for sex with boys and girls. Fuckfriends. Sweet girls don’t have fuckfriends. And sweet girls don’t study mining engineering. Like jujitsu, like hooking up, that was a thing for me, me alone. Then the economy gave one final, apocalyptic crash at the bottom of a series of drops and hit the ground and broke so badly no one could see how to fix it. And the seaside, be-happy Cortas were in ruins, jobless, investments in ashes. It was plain Adriana who said, I can save you. I’ll go to the Moon.

All this we knew by the seventh day of the orbit out. On the eight day, we rendezvoused with the transfer tether and spun down to the new world.

The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.

I was sintering ten kilometres ahead of Crucible when Achi’s call came. I had requested the transfer from Mackenzie Metals to Vorontsov Rail. The forewoman had been puzzled when I reported to Railhead. You’re a dustbunny not a track-queen. Surface work is surface work, I said and that convinced her. The work was good, easy and physical and satisfying. And it was on the surface. At the end of every up-shift you saw six new lengths of gleaming rail among the boot and track prints, and on the edge of the horizon, the blinding spark of Crucible, brighter than any star, advancing over yesterday’s rails, and you said, I made that. The work had real measure: the inexorable advance of Mackenzie Metals across the Mare Insularum, brighter than the brightest star. Brighter than sunrise, so bright it could burn a hole through your helmet sunscreen if you held it in your eye line too long. Thousands of concave mirrors focusing sunlight on the smelting crucibles. Three years from now the rail lines would circle the globe and the Crucible would follow the sun, bathed in perpetual noon. Me, building a railroad around the moon.

Then ting ching and it all came apart. Achi’s voice blocking out my work-mix music, Achi’s face superimposed on the dirty grey hills of Rimae Maestlin. Achi telling me her routine medical had given her four weeks.

I hitched a ride on the construction car back down the rails to Crucible. I waited two hours hunkered down in the hard-vacuum shadows, tons of molten metal and ten thousand Kelvin sunlight above my head, for an expensive ticket on a slow Mackenzie ore train to Meridian. Ten hours clinging onto a maintenance platform, not even room to turn around, let alone sit. Grey dust, black sky… I listened my way through my collection of historical bossanova, from the 1940 to the 1970s. I played Connecto on my helmet hud until every time I blinked I saw tumbling, spinning gold stars. I scanned my family’s social space entries and threw my thoughts and comments and good wishes at the big blue Earth. By the time I got to Meridian I was two degrees off hypothermic. My surface activity suit was rated for a shift and some scramble time, not twelve hours in the open. Should have claimed compensation. But I didn’t want my former employers paying too much attention to me. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to re-pressurise for the train, so I went dirty and fast, on the BALTRAN.

I knew I would vomit. I held it until the third and final jump. BALTRAN: Ballistic Transport system. The moon has no atmosphere – well, it does, a very thin one, which is getting thicker as human settlements leak air into it. Maybe in a few centuries this will become a problem for vacuum industries, but to all intents and purposes, it’s a vacuum. See what I did there? That’s the engineer in me. No atmosphere means ballistic trajectories can be calculated with great precision. Which means, throw something up and you know exactly where it will fall to moon again. Bring in positionable electromagnetic launchers and you have a mechanism for schlepping material quick and dirty around the moon. Launch it, catch it in a receiver, boost it on again. It’s like juggling. The BALTRAN is not always used for cargo. If you can take the gees it can as easily juggle people across the moon.

I held it until the final jump. You cannot imagine what it is like to throw up in your helmet. In free fall. People have died. The look on the BALTRAN attendant’s face when I came out of the capsule at Queen of the South was a thing to be seen. So I am told. I couldn’t see it. But if I could afford the capsule I could afford the shower to clean up. And there are people in Queen who will happily clean vomit out of a sasuit for the right number of bitsies. Say what you like about the Vorontsovs, they pay handsomely.

All this I did, the endless hours riding the train like a moon-hobo, the hypothermia and being sling-shotted in a can of my own barf, because I knew that if Achi had four weeks, I could not be far behind.

You don’t think about the bones. As a Jo Moonbeam, everything is so new and demanding, from working out how to stand and walk, to those four little digits in the bottom right corner of your field of vision that tell you how much you owe the Lunar Development Corporation for air, water, space and web. The first time you see those numbers change because demand or supply or market price has shifted, your breath catches in your throat. Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth any more than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another. Everything – everything – was new and hard.

Everything other than your bones. After two years on the moon human bone structure atrophies to a point where return to Earth gravity is almost certainly fatal. The medics drop it almost incidentally into your initial assessment. It can take days – weeks – for its ripples to touch your life. Then you feel your bones crumbling away, flake by flake, inside your body. And there’s not a thing you can do about it. What it means is that there is a calcium clock ticking inside your body, counting down to Moon Day. The day you decide: do I stay or do I go?

In those early days we were scared all the time, Achi and I. I looked after her – I don’t know how we fell into those roles, protector and defended, but I protected and she nurtured and we won respect. There were three moon men for every moon woman. It was a man’s world; a macho social meld of soldiers camped in enemy terrain and deep-diving submariners. The Jo Moonbeam barracks were exactly that; a grey, dusty warehouse of temporary accommodation cabins barely the safe legal minimum beneath the surface. We learned quickly the vertical hierarchy of moon society: the lower you live – the further from surface radiation and secondary cosmic rays – the higher your status. The air was chilly and stank of sewage, electricity, dust and unwashed bodies. The air still smells like that; I just got used to the funk in my lungs. Within hours the induction barracks self-sorted. The women gravitated together and affiliated with the astronomers on placement with the Farside observatory. Achi and I traded to get cabins beside each other. We visited, we decorated, we entertained, we opened our doors in solidarity and hospitality. We listened to the loud voices of the men, the real men, the worldbreakers, booming down the aisles of cabins, the over-loud laughter. We made cocktails from cheap industrial vodka.

Sexual violence, games of power were in the air we breathed, the water we drank, the narrow corridors through which we squeezed, pressing up against each other. The moon has never had criminal law, only contract law, and when Achi and I arrived the LDC was only beginning to set up the Court of Clavius to settle and enforce contracts. Queen of the South was a wild town. Fatalities among Jo Moonbeams ran at ten percent. In our first week, an extraction worker from Xinjiang was crushed in a pressure lock. The Moon knows a thousand ways to kill you. And I knew a thousand and one.

Cortas cut. That was our family legend. Hard sharp fast. I made the women’s Brazilian jujitsu team at university. It’s hard, sharp, fast: the perfect Corta fighting art. A couple of basic moves, together with lunar gravity, allowed me to put over the most intimidating of sex pests. But when Achi’s stalker wouldn’t take no, I reached for slower, subtler weapons. Stalkers don’t go away. That’s what makes them stalkers. I found which Surface Activity training squad he was on and made some adjustments to his suit thermostat. He didn’t die. He wasn’t meant to die. Death would have been easier than my revenge for Achi. He never suspected me; he never suspected anyone. I made it look like a perfect malfunction. I’m a good engineer. I count his frostbite thumb and three toes as my trophies. By the time he got out of the med centre, Achi and I were on our separate ways to our contracts.

That was another clock, ticking louder than the clock in our bones. I&A was four weeks. After that, we would go to work. Achi’s work in ecological habitats would take her to the underground agraria the Asamoah family were digging under Amundsen. My contract was with Mackenzie Metals; working out on the open seas. Working with dust. Dustbunny. We clung to the I&A barracks, we clung to our cabins, our friends. We clung to each other. We were scared. Truth: we were scared all the time, with every breath. Everyone on the moon is scared, all the time.

There was a party; moon mojitos. Vodka and mint are easy up here. But before the music and the drinking: a special gift for Achi. Her work with Aka would keep her underground; digging and scooping and sowing. She need never go on the surface. She could go her whole career – her whole life – in the caverns and lava tubes and agraria. She need never see the raw sky.

The suit hire was cosmologically expensive, even after negotiation. It was a GP surface activity shell; an armoured hulk to my lithe sasuit spiderwoman. Her face was nervous behind the faceplate; her breathing shallow. We held hands in the outlock as the pressure door slid up. Then her faceplate polarised in the sun and I could not see her any more. We walked up the ramp amongst a hundred thousand boot prints. We walked up the ramp and few metres out on to the surface, still holding hands. There, beyond the coms towers and the power relays and the charging points for the buses and rovers; beyond the grey line of the crater rim that curved on the close horizon and the shadows the sun had never touched; there perched above the edge of our tiny world we saw the full earth. Full and blue and white, mottled with greens and ochres. Full and impossible and beautiful beyond any words of mine. It was winter and the southern hemisphere was offered to us; the ocean half of the planet. I saw great Africa. I saw dear Brazil.

Then the air contract advisory warned me that we were nearing the expiry of our oxygen contract and we turned out backs on the blue earth and walked back down into the moon.

That night we drank to our jobs, our friends, our loves and our bones. In the morning we parted.

We met in a café on the twelfth level of the new Chandra Quadra. We hugged, we kissed, we cried a little. I smelled sweet by then. Below us excavators dug and sculpted, a new level every ten days. We held each other at arms’ length and looked at each other. Then we drank mint tea on the balcony.

I loathe mint tea.

Mint tea is a fistful of herbs jammed in a glass. Sloshed with boiling water. Served scalded yet still flavourless. Effete like herbal thés and tisanes. Held between thumb and forefinger: so. Mint leaves are coarse and hairy. Mint tea is medicinal. Add sugar and it becomes infantile. It is drinking for the sake of doing something with your fingers.

Coffee is a drink for grownups. No kid ever likes coffee. It’s psychoactive. Coffee is the drug of memory. I can remember the great cups of coffee of my life; the places, the faces, the words spoken. It never quite tastes the way it smells. If it did, we would – drink it until out heads exploded with memory,

But coffee is not an efficient crop in our ecology. And imported coffee is more expensive than gold. Gold is easy. Gold I can sift from lunar regolith. Gold is so easy its only value is decorative. It isn’t even worth the cost of shipment to Earth. Mint is rampant. Under lunar gravity, it forms plants up to three metres tall. So we are a nation of mint tea drinkers.

We didn’t talk about the bones at once. It was eight lunes since we last saw each other: we talk on the network daily, we share our lives but it takes face to face contact to ground all that; make it real.

I made Achi laugh. She laughed like soft rain. I told her about King Dong and she clapped her hands to her mouth in naughty glee but laughed with her eyes. King Dong started as a joke but shift by shift was becoming reality. Footprints last forever on the moon, a bored surface worker had said on a slow shift rotation back to Crucible. What if we stamped out a giant spunking cock, a hundred kilometres long? With hairy balls. Visible from Earth. It’s just a matter of co-ordination. Take a hundred male surface workers and an Australian extraction company and joke becomes temptation becomes reality. So wrong. So funny.

And Achi?

She was out of contract. The closer you are to your Moon Day, the shorter the contract, sometimes down to minutes of employment, but this was different. Aka did not want her ideas any more. They were recruiting direct from Accra and Kumasi. Ghanaians for a Ghanaian company. She was pitching ideas to the Lunar Development Corporation for their new port and capital at Meridian – quadras three kilometres deep; a sculpted city; like living in the walls of a titanic cathedral. The LDC was polite but it had been talking about development funding for two lunes now. Her savings were running low. She woke up looking at the tick of the Four Fundamentals on her lens. Oxygen water space coms: which do you cut down on first? She was considering moving to a smaller space.

“I can pay your per diems,” I said. “I have lots of money.”

And then the bones… Achi could not decide until I got my report. I never knew anyone suffered from guilt as acutely as her. She could not have borne it if her decision had influenced my decision to stay with the moon or go back to Earth,

“I’ll go now,” I said. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be here on this balcony drinking piss-tea. I didn’t want Achi to have forced a decision on me. I didn’t want there to be a decision for me to make. “I’ll get the tea.”

Then the wonder. In the corner of my vision, a flash of gold. A lens malfunction – no, something marvellous. A woman flying. A flying woman. Her arms were outspread, she hung in the sky it like a crucifix. Our Lady of Flight. Then I saw wings shimmer and run with rainbow colours; wings transparent and strong as a dragonfly’s. The woman hung a moment, then folded her gossamer wings around her, and fell. She tumbled, now diving heard-first, flicked her wrists, flexed her shoulders. A glimmer of wing slowed her; then she spread her full wing span and pulled up out of her dive into a soaring spiral, high into the artificial sky of Chandra Quadra.

“Oh,” I said. I had been holding my breath. I was shaking with wonder. I was chewed by jealousy.

“We always could fly” Achi said. “We just haven’t had the space. Until now.”

Did I hear irritation in Achi’s voice, that I was so bewitched by the flying woman? But if you could fly why would you ever do anything else?

I went to the Mackenzie Metals medical centre and the medic put me in the scanner. He passed magnetic fields through my body and the machine gave me my bone density analysis. I was eight days behind Achi. Five weeks, and then my residency on the moon would become citizenship.

Or I could fly back to Earth, to Brazil.

There are friends and there are friends you have sex with.

After I&A it was six lunes until I saw Achi again. Six lunes in the Sea of Fertility, sifting dust. The Mackenzie Metals Messier unit was old, cramped, creaking: cut-and-cover pods under bulldozed regolith berms. Too frequently I was evacuated to the new, lower levels by the radiation alarm. Cosmic rays kicked nasty secondary particles out of moon dust, energetic enough to penetrate the upper levels of the unit. Every time I saw the alarm flash its yellow trefoil in my lens I felt my ovaries tighten. Day and night the tunnels trembled to the vibration of the digging machines, deep beneath even those evacuation tunnels, eating rock. There were two hundred dustbunnies in Messier. After a month’s gentle and wary persistence and charm from a 3D print designer, I joined the end of a small amory: my Chu-yu, his homamor in Queen, his hetamor in Meridian, her hetamor also in Meridian. What had taken him so long, Chu-yu confessed, was my rep. Word about the sex pest on I&A with the unexplained suit malfunction. I wouldn’t do that to a co-worker, I said. Not unless severely provoked. Then I kissed him. The amory was warmth and sex, but it wasn’t Achi. Lovers are not friends

Sun Chu-yu understood that when I kissed him goodbye at Messier’s bus lock. Achi and I chatted on the network all the way to the railhead at Hypatia, then all the way down the line to the South. Even then, only moments since I had last spoken to her image on my eyeball, it was a physical shock to see her at the meeting point in Queen of the South station: her, physical her. Shorter than I remembered. Absence makes the heart grow taller.

Such fun she had planned for me! I wanted to dump my stuff at her place but no; she whirled me off into excitement. After the reek and claustrophobia of Messier Queen of the South was intense, loud, colourful, too too fast. In only six lunes it had changed beyond recognition. Every street was longer, every tunnel wider, every chamber loftier. When she took me in a glass elevator down the side of the recently completed Thoth Quadra I reeled from vertigo. Down on the floor of the massive cavern was a small copse of dwarf trees – full-size trees would reach the ceiling, Achi explained. There was a café. In that café I first tasted and immediately hated mint tea.

I built this, Achi said. These are my trees, this is my garden.

I was too busy looking up at the lights, all the lights, going up and up.

Such fun! Tea, then shops. I had had to find a party dress. We were going to a special party, that night. Exclusive. We browsed the catalogues in five different print shops before I found something I could wear: very retro, 1950s inspired, full and layered, it hid what I wanted hidden. Then, the shoes.

The special party was exclusive to Achi’s workgroup and their F&Fs’. A security-locked rail capsule took us through a dark tunnel into a space so huge, so blinding with mirrored light, that once again I reeled on my feet and almost threw up over my Balenciaga. An agrarium, Achi’s last project. I was at the bottom of a shaft a kilometretall, fifty metres wide. The horizon is close at eye level on the moon; everything curves. Underground, a different geometry applies. The agrarium was the straightest thing I had seen in months. And brilliant: a central core of mirrors ran the full height of the shaft, bouncing raw sunlight one to another to another towalls terraced with hydroponic racks. The base of the shaft was a mosaic of fish tanks, criss-crossed by walkways. The air was warm and dank and rank. I was woozy with CO2. In these conditions plants grew fast and tall; potato plants the size of bushes; tomato vines so tall I lost their heads in the tangle of leaves and fruit. Hyper-intensive agriculture: the agrarium was huge for a cave, small for an ecosystem. The tanks splashed with fish. Did I hear frogs? Were those ducks?

Achi’s team had built a new pond from waterproof sheeting and construction frame. A pool. A swimming pool. A sound system played G-pop. There were cocktails. Blue was the fashion. They matched my dress. Achi’s crew were friendly and expansive. They never failed to compliment me on my fashion. I shucked it and my shoes and everything else for the pool. I lolled, I luxuriated, I let the strange, chaotic eddies waft green, woozy air over me while over my head the mirrors moved. Achi swam up beside me and we trod water together, laughing and plashing. The agrarium crew had lowered a number of benches into the pool to make a shallow end. Achi and I wafted blood-warm water with our legs and drank Blue Moons.

I am always up for a party.

I woke up in bed beside her the next morning; shit-headed with moon vodka. I remembered mumbling, fumbling love. Shivering and stupid-whispering, skin to skin. Fingerworks. Achi lay curled on her right side, facing me. She had kicked the sheet off in the night. A tiny string of drool ran from the corner of her mouth to the pillow and trembled in time to her breathing.

I looked at her there, her breath rattling in the back of her throat in drunk sleep. We had made love. I had sex with my dearest friend. I had done a good thing, I had done a bad thing. I had done an irrevocable thing. Then I lay down and pressed myself in close to her and she mumble-grumbled and moved in close to me and her fingers found me and we began again.

I woke in the dark with the golden woman swooping through my head. Achi slept beside me. The same side, the same curl of the spine, the same light rattle-snore and open mouth as that first night. When I saw Achi’s new cabin, I booked us into a hostel. The bed was wide, the air was as fresh as Queen of the South could make and the taste of the water did not set your teeth on edge.

Golden woman, flying loops through my certainties.

Queen of the South never went fully dark – lunar society is 24-hour society. I pulled Achi’s unneeded sheet around me and went out on to the balcony. I leaned on the rail and looked out at the walls of lights. Apts, cabins, walkways and staircases. Lives and decisions behind every light. This was an ugly world. Hard and mean. It put a price on everything. It demanded a negotiation from everyone. Out at Railhead I had seen a new thing among some of the surface workers: a medallion, or a little votive tucked into a patch pocket. A woman in Virgin Mary robes, one half of her face a black angel, the other half a naked skull. Dona Luna: goddess of dust and radiation. Our Lady Liberty, our Britannia, our Marianne, our Mother Russia. One half of her face dead, but the other alive. The moon was not a dead satellite, it was a living world. Hands and hearts and hopes like mine shaped it. There was no mother nature, no Gaia to set against human will. Everything that lived, we made. Dona Luna was hard and unforgiving, but she was beautiful. She could be a woman, with dragonfly wings, flying.

I stayed on the hotel balcony until the roof reddened with sun-up. Then I went back to Achi. I wanted to make love with her again. My motives were all selfish. Things that are difficult with friends are easier with lovers.

My grandmother used to say that love was the easiest thing in the world. Love is what you see every day.

I did not see Achi for several lunes after the party in Queen. Mackenzie Metals sent me out into the field, prospecting new terrain in the Sea of Vapours. Away from Messier, it was plain to me and Sun Chu-yu that the amory didn’t work. You love what you see every day. All the amors were happy for me to leave. No blame, no claim. A simple automated contract, terminated.

I took a couple of weeks furlough back in Queen. I had called Achi about hooking up but she was at a new dig at Twe, where the Asamoahs were building a corporate headquarters. I was relieved. And then was guilty that I had felt relieved. Sex had made everything different. I drank, I partied, I had one night stands, I talked long hours of expensive bandwidth my loved ones back on Earth. They thanked me for the money, especially the tiny kids. They said I looked different. Longer. Drawn out. My bones eroding, I said. There they were, happy and safe. The money I sent them bought their education. Health, weddings, babies. And here I was, on the moon. Plain Adriana, who would never get a man, but who got the education, who got the degree, who got the job, sending them the money from the moon.

They were right. I was different. I never felt the same about that blue pearl of Earth in the sky. I never again hired a sasuit to go look at it, just look at it. Out on the surface, I disregarded it.

The Mackenzies sent me out next to the Lansberg extraction zone and I saw the thing that made everything different.

Five extractors were working Lansberg. They were ugly towers of Archimedes screws and grids and transport belts and wheels three times my height, all topped out by a spread of solar panels that made them look like robot trees. Slow-moving, cumbersome, inelegant. Lunar design tends to the utilitarian, the practical. The bones on show. But to me they were beautiful. Marvellous trees. I saw them one day, out on the regolith, and I almost fell flat from the revelation. Not what they made – separating rare earth metals from lunar regolith – but what they threw away. Launched in high, arching ballistic jets on either side of the big, slow machines.

It was the thing I saw every day. One day you look at the boy on the bus and he sets your heart alight. One day you look at the jets of industrial waste and you see riches beyond measure.

I had to dissociate myself from anything that might link me to regolith waste and beautiful rainbows of dust.

I quit Mackenzie and became a Vorontsov track queen.

I want to make a game of it, Achi said. That’s the only way I can bear it. We must clench our fists behind our backs, like Scissors Paper Stone, and we must count to three, and then we open our fists and in them there will be something, some small object, that will say beyond any doubt what we have decided. We must not speak, because if we say even a word, we will influence each other. That’s the only way I can bear it if it is quick and clean and we don’t speak. And a game.

We went back to the balcony table of the café to play the game. It was now on the 13th level. Two glasses of mint tea. No one was flying the great empty spaces of Chandra Quadra this day. The air smelled of rock dust over the usual electricity and sewage. Every fifth sky panel was blinking. An imperfect world.

Attempted small talk. Do you want some breakfast? No, but you have some. No I’m not hungry. I haven’t seen that top before. The colour is really good for you. Oh it’s just something I printed out of a catalogue… Horrible awful little words to stop us saying what we really had to stay.

“I think we should do this kind of quickly,” Achi said finally and in a breathtaking instant her right hand was behind her back. I slipped my small object out of my bag, clenched it in my hidden fist.

“One two three,” Achi said. We opened our fists.

A nazar: an Arabic charm: concentric teardrops of blue, white and black plastic. An eye.

A tiny icon of Dona Luna: black and white, living and dead.

Then I saw Achi again. I was up in Meridian renting a data crypt and hunting for the leanest, freshest, hungriest law firm to protect the thing I had realised out on Lansberg. She had been called back from Twe to solve a problem with microbiota in the Obuasi agrarium that had left it a tower of stinking black slime.

One city; two friends and amors. We went out to party. And found we couldn’t. The frocks were fabulous, the cocktails disgraceful, the company louche and the narcotics dazzling but in each bar, club, private party we ended up in a corner together, talking.

Partying was boring. Talk was lovely and bottomless and fascinating.

We ended up in bed again, of course. We couldn’t wait. Glorious, impractical 1950s Dior frocks lay crumpled on the floor, ready for the recycler.

“What do you want?” Achi asked. She lay on her bed, inhaling THC from a vaper. “Dream and don’t be afraid.”

“Really?”

“Moon dreams.”

“I want to be a dragon,” I said and Achi laughed and punched me on the thigh: get away. “No, seriously.”

In the year and a half we had been on the moon, our small world had changed. Things move fast on the moon. Energy and raw materials are cheap, human genius plentiful. Ambition boundless. Four companies had emerged as major economic forces: four families. The Australian Mackenzies were the longest established. They had been joined by the Asamoahs, whose company Aka monopolised food and living space. The Russian Vorontsovs finally moved their operations off Earth entirely and ran the cycler, the moonloop, the bus service and the emergent rail network. Most recent to amalgamate were the Suns, who had defied the representatives of the People’s Republic on the LDC board and ran the information infrastructure. Four companies: Four Dragons. That was what they called themselves. The Four Dragons of the Moon.

“I want to be the Fifth Dragon,” I said.

The last things were simple and swift. All farewells should be sudden, I think. I booked Achi on the cycler out. There was always space on the return orbit. She booked me into the LDC medical centre. A flash of light and the lens was bonded permanently to my eye. No hand shake, no congratulations, no welcome. All I had done was decide to continue doing what I was doing. The four counters ticked, charging me to live.

I cashed in the return part of the flight and invested the lump sum in convertible LDC bonds. Safe, solid. On this foundation would I build my dynasty.

The cycler would come round the Farside and rendezvous with the moonloop in three days. Good speed. Beautiful haste. It kept us busy, it kept us from crying too much.

I went with Achi on the train to Meridian. We had a whole row of seats to ourselves and we curled up like small burrowing animals.

I’m scared, she said. It’s going to hurt. The cycler spins you up to Earth gravity and then there’s the gees coming down. I could be months in a wheelchair. Swimming, they say that’s the closest to being on the moon. The water supports you while you build up muscle and bone mass again. I can do that. I love swimming. And then you can’t help thinking, what if they got it wrong? What if, I don’t know, they mixed me up with someone else and it’s already too late? Would they send me back here? I couldn’t live like that. No one can live here. Not really live. Everyone says about the moon being rock and dust and vacuum and radiation and that it knows a thousand ways to kill you, but that’s not the moon. The moon is other people. People all the way up, all the way down; everywhere, all the time. Nothing but people. Every breath, every drop of water, every atom of carbon has been passed through people. We eat each other. And that’s all it would ever be, people. The same faces looking into your face, forever. Wanting something from you. Wanting and wanting and wanting. I hated it from the first day out on the cycler. If you hadn’t talked to me, if we hadn’t met…

And I said: Do you remember, when we talked about what had brought us to the moon? You said that you owed your family for not being born in Syria – and I said I wanted to be a dragon? I saw it. Out in Lansberg. It was so simple. I just looked at something I saw every day in a different way. Helium 3. The key to the post oil economy. Mackenzie Metals throws away tons of helium 3 every day. And I thought, how could the Mackenzies not see it? Surely they must… I couldn’t be the only one… But family and companies, and family companies especially, they have strange fixations and blindesses. Mackenzies mine metal. Metal mining is what they do. They can’t imagine anything else and so they miss what’s right under their noses. I can make it work, Achi. I know how to do it. But not with the Mackenzies. They’d take it off me. If I tried to fight them, they’d just bury me. Or kill me. It’s cheaper. The Court of Clavius would make sure my family were compensated. That’s why I moved to Vorontsov rail. To get away from them while I put a business plan together. I will make it work for me, and I’ll build a dynasty. I’ll be the Fifth Dragon. House Corta. I like the sound of that. And then I’ll make an offer to my family – my final offer. Join me, or never get another cent from me. There’s the opportunity – take it or leave it. But you have to come to the moon for it. I’m going to do this, Achi.

No windows in moon trains but the seat-back screen showed the surface. On a screen, outside your helmet, it is always the same. It is grey and soft and ugly and covered in footprints. Inside the train were workers and engineers; lovers and partners and even a couple of small children. There was noise and colour and drinking and laughing, swearing and sex. And us curled up in the back against the bulkhead. And I thought, this is the moon.

Achi gave me a gift at the moonloop gate. It was the last thing she owned. Everything else had been sold, the last few things while we were on the train.

Eight passengers at the departure gate, with friends, family, amors. No one left the moon alone and I was glad of that. The air smelled of coconut, so different from the vomit, sweat, unwashed bodies, fear of the arrival gate. Mint tea was available from a dispensing machine. No one was drinking it.

“Open this when I’m gone,” Achi said. The gift was a document cylinder, crafted from bamboo. The departure was fast, the way I imagine executions must be. The VTO staff had everyone strapped into their seats and were sealing the capsule door before either I or Achi could respond. I saw her begin to mouth a goodbye, saw her wave fingers, then the locks sealed and the elevator took the capsule up to the tether platform.

The moonloop was virtually invisible: a spinning spoke of M5 fibre twenty centimetres wide and two hundred kilometres long. Up there the ascender was climbing towards the counterbalance mass, shifting the centre of gravity and sending the whole tether down into a surface-grazing orbit. Only in the final moments of approach would I see the white cable seeming to descend vertically from the star filled sky. The grapple connected and the capsule was lifted from the platform. Up there, one of those bright stars was the ascender, sliding down the tether, again shifting the centre of mass so that the whole ensemble moved into a higher orbit. At the top of the loop, the grapple would release and the cycler catch the capsule. I tried to put names on the stars: the cycler, the ascender, the counterweight; the capsule freighted with my amor, my love, my friend. The comfort of physics. I watched the images, the bamboo document tube slung over my back, until a new capsule was loaded into the gate. Already the next tether was wheeling up over the close horizon.

The price was outrageous. I dug into my bonds. For that sacrifice it had to be the real thing: imported, not spun up from an organic printer. I was sent from printer to dealer to private importer. She let me sniff it. Memories exploded like New Year fireworks and I cried. She sold me the paraphernalia as well. The equipment I needed simply didn’t exist on the moon.

I took it all back to my hotel. I ground to the specified grain. I boiled the water. I let it cool to the correct temperature. I poured it from a height, for maximum aeration. I stirred it.

While it brewed I opened Achi’s gift. Rolled paper: drawings. Concept art for the habitat the realities of the moon would never let her build. A lava tube, enlarged and sculpted with faces, like an inverted Mount Rushmore. The faces of the orixas, the Umbanda pantheon, each a hundred metres high, round and smooth and serene, overlooked terraces of gardens and pools. Waters cascaded from their eyes and open lips. Pavilions and belvederes were scattered across the floor of the vast cavern; vertical gardens ran from floor to artificial sky, like the hair of the gods. Balconies – she loved balconies – galleries and arcades, windows. Pools. You could swim from one end of this Orixa-world to the other. She had inscribed it: a habitation for a dynasty.

I thought of her, spinning away across the sky.

The grounds began to settle. I plunged, poured and savoured the aroma of the coffee. Santos Gold. Gold would have been cheaper. Gold was the dirt we threw away, together with the Helium 3.

When the importer had rubbed a pinch of ground coffee under my nose, memories of childhood, the sea, college, friends, family, celebrations flooded me.

When I smelled the coffee I had bought and ground and prepared, I experienced something different. I had a vision. I saw the sea, and I saw Achi, Achi-gone-back, on a board, in the sea. It was night and she was paddling the board out, through the waves and beyond the waves, sculling herself forward, along the silver track of the moon on the sea.

I drank my coffee.

It never tastes the way it smells.

My granddaughter adores that red dress. When it gets dirty and worn, we print her a new one. She wants never to wear anything else. Luna, running barefoot through the pools, splashing and scaring the fish, leaping from stepping stone, stepping in a complex pattern of stones that must be landed on left footed, right-footed, two footed or skipped over entirely. The Orixas watch her. The Orixas watch me, on my veranda, drinking tea.

I am old bones now. I haven’t thought of you for years, Achi. The last time was when I finally turned those drawings into reality. But these last lunes I find my thoughts folding back, not just to you, but to all the ones from those dangerous, daring days. There were more loves than you, Achi. You always knew that. I treated most of them as badly as I treated you. It’s the proper pursuit of elderly ladies, remembering and trying not to regret.

I never heard from you again. That was right, I think. You went back to your green and growing world, I stayed in the land in the sky. Hey! I built your palace and filled it with that dynasty I promised. Sons and daughters, amors, okos, madrinhas, retainers. Corta is not such a strange name to you now, or most of Earth’s population. Mackenzie, Sun, Vorontsov, Asamoah. Corta. We are Dragons now.

Here comes little Luna, running to her grandmother. I sip my tea. It’s mint. I still loathe mint tea. I always will. But there is only mint tea on the moon.

The Fifth Dragon copyright © 2014 Ian McDonald

The post The Fifth Dragon appeared first on Reactor.

The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings returns to the world of Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories, introducing readers to the tales that came before. Stories where coffin-makers work hard to keep the dead beneath; where a plague maiden steals away the children of an ungrateful village; where poison girls are schooled in the art of assassination; where pirates disappear from the seas; where families and the ties that bind them can both ruin and resurrect and where books carry forth fairy tales, forbidden knowledge and dangerous secrets.

St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls

‘They say Lady Isabella Carew, née Abingdon, was married for twenty-two years before she took her revenge,’ breathes Serafine. Ever since we were collected, she, Adia and Veronica have been trading stories of those who went before us—the closer we get to our destination, the faster they come.

Veronica takes up the thread. ‘It’s true! She murdered her own son—her only child!—on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, to wipe out the line and avenge a two-hundred year old slight by the Carews to the Abingdons.’

Adia continues, ‘She went to the gallows, head held high, spirit unbowed, for she had done her duty by her family, and her name.’

On this long carriage journey I have heard many such recountings, of matrimony and murder, and filed them away for recording later on when I am alone, for they will greatly enrich the Books of Lives at the Citadel. The Countess of Malden who poisoned all forty-seven of her in-laws at a single banquet. The Dowager of Rosebery, who burned the ancestral home of her enemies to the ground, before jumping from the sea cliffs rather than submit to trial by her lessers. The Marquise of Angel Down, who lured her father-in-law to one of the castle dungeons and locked him in, leaving him to starve to death—when he was finally found, he’d chewed on his own arm, the teeth marks dreadful to behold. Such have been the bedtime tales of my companions’ lives; their heroines affix heads to the ground with spikes, serve tainted broth to children, move quietly among their marriage-kin, waiting for the right moment to strike. I have no such anecdotes to tell.The carriage slows as we pass through Alder’s Well, which is small and neat, perhaps thirty houses of varied size, pomp, and prosperity. None is a hovel. It seems life for even the lowest on the social rung here is not mean—that St Dymphna’s, a fine finishing school for young ladies as far as the world-at-large is concerned, has brought prosperity. There is a pretty wooden church with gravestones dotting its yard, two or three respectable mausoleums, and all surrounded by a moss-encrusted stone wall. Smoke from the smithy’s forge floats against the late afternoon sky. There is a market square and I can divine shingles outside shops: a butcher, a baker, a seamstress, an apothecary. Next we rumble past an ostlery, which seems to bustle, then a tiny school house bereft of children at this hour. So much to take in but I know I miss most of the details for I am tired. The coachman whips up the horses now we are through the hamlet.

I’m about to lean back against the uncomfortable leather seat when I catch sight of it—the well for which the place is named. I should think more on it, for it’s the thing, the thing connected to my true purpose, but I am distracted by the tree beside it: I think I see a man. He stands, cruciform, against the alder trunk, arms stretched along branches, held in place with vines, which may be mistletoe. Green barbs and braces and ropes, not just holding him upright, but breaching his flesh, moving through his skin, making merry with his limbs, melding with muscles and veins. His head is cocked to one side, eyes closed, then open, then closed again. I blink and all is gone, there is just the tree alone, strangled by devil’s fuge.

My comrades have taken no notice of our surrounds, but continue to chatter amongst themselves. Adia and Serafine worry at the pintucks of their grey blouses, rearrange the folds of their long charcoal skirts, check that their buttoned black boots are polished to a high shine. Sweet-faced Veronica turns to me and reties the thin forest green ribbon encircling my collar, trying to make it sit flat, trying to make it neat and perfect. But, with our acquaintance so short, she cannot yet know that I defy tidiness: a freshly pressed shirt, skirt or dress coming near me will develop wrinkles in the blink of an eye; a clean apron will attract smudges and stains as soon as it is tied about my waist; a shoe, having barely touched my foot, will scuff itself and a beribboned sandal will snap its straps as soon as look at me. My hair is a mass of—well, not even curls, but waves, awkward, thick, choppy, rebellious waves of deepest fox-red that will consent to brushing once a week and no more, lest it turn into a halo of frizz. I suspect it never really recovered from being shaved off for the weaving of Mother’s shroud; I seem to recall before then it was quite tame, quite straight. And, despite my best efforts, beneath my nails can still be seen the half-moons of indigo ink I mixed for the marginalia Mater Friðuswith needed done before I left. It will fade, but slowly.

The carriage gives a bump and a thump as it pulls off the packed earth of the main road and takes to a trail barely discernible through over-long grass. It almost interrupts Adia in her telling of the new bride who, so anxious to be done with her duty, plunged one of her pearl-tipped, steel-reinforced veil-pins into her new husband’s heart before ‘Volo’ had barely left his lips. The wheels might protest at water-filled ruts, large stones and the like in their path, but the driver knows this thoroughfare well despite its camouflage; he directs the nimble horses to swerve so they avoid any obstacles. On both sides, the trees rushing past are many and dense. It is seems a painfully long time before the house shows itself as we take the curved drive at increased speed, as if the coachman is determined to tip us all out as soon as possible and get himself back home to Alder’s Well.

St Dymphna’s School (for Poison Girls) is a rather small-looking mansion of grey-yellow granite, largely covered with thick green ivy. The windows with their leadlight panes are free of foliage. The front door is solid, a scarred dark oak—by its design I’d judge it older than the abode, scavenged from somewhere else—banded with weathered copper that reaches across the wood in curlicues.

Our conveyance slews to halt and the aforementioned front door of the house is opened in short order. Three women step forth. One wears a long black dress, a starched and snowy apron pinned to the front; her hair is ash-coloured and pulled back into a thick bun. The other two move in a stately fashion, ladies these, sedate, precise in their dress, fastidious in their person.

Serafine, too impatient to wait for the coachman, throws back the carriage door; she, Adia and Veronica exit eagerly. I pause a moment to collect my battered satchel, hang it across my chest; it puckers my shirt, adds more creases as if they were needed. I pause on the metal footplate to take everything in. There is a manicured lawn, with a contradictory wild garden ranging across it, then a larger park beyond and the forest beyond that. A little thatched cottage, almost completely obscured by shrubs and vines, hides in one corner, a stable not far from it, and the beds are filled with flowers and herbs. A body of water shimmers to the left—more than a pond, but barely a lake—with ducks and geese and elegant swans seemingly painted on its surface.

‘Welcome, welcome, Serafine, Adia, Veronica and Mercia,’ says one of the Misses, either Fidelma or Orla. I climb down and take my place in line with St Dymphna’s newest crop, examining my teachers while I wait for their warm gazes to reach me. Both are dressed in finery not usually associated with school mistresses—the one in a dress of cloth of gold, the other in a frock of silver and emerald brocade—both wearing heavy gold-set baroque pearl earrings, and with great long loops of rough-cut gems twisted several times about their necks. Then again, were they ordinary school mistresses and this nothing but a finishing school, our families would not have gone to such lengths to enrol us here for a year’s special instruction.

‘Welcome, one and all,’ says the other sister, her heavy-lids sweep great thick lashes down to caress her cheek and then lift like a wing, as a smile blossoms, exposing pearly teeth. In her late forties, I’d say, but well-preserved as is her twin: of the same birthing, but not identical, not the same. As they move closer, strolling along the line we’ve formed… ah, yes. She who spoke first is Orla, her left eye blue, the right citrine-bright. Neither short nor tall, both have trim figures, and peach-perfect complexions, but I can see up close that their maquillage is thick, finely porous, a porcelain shell. The cheeks are lightly dusted with pink, the lashes supplemented with kohl and crushed malachite, mouths embellished with a wet-looking red wax. I think if either face were given a swift sharp tap, the masque might fracture and I would see what lies beneath.

How lined is the skin, I wonder, how spotted with age, how thin the drawn-in brows, how furrowed the lips? And the hair, so thick and raven-dark, caught-up in fine braided chignons, shows not a trace of ash, no sign of coarsening or dryness. Their dresses have long sleeves, high necks, so I can examine neither forearms, nor décolletage, nor throats—the first places where Dame Time makes herself at home. The hands, similarly, are covered in fine white cambric gloves, flowers and leaves embroidered on their backs, with tiny seed-pearl buttons to keep them closed.

Orla has stopped before me and is peering intensely, her smile still in evidence, but somehow dimmed. She reaches out and touches a finger to the spot beneath my right eye where the birthmark is shaped like a tiny delicate port-wine teardrop. She traces the outline, then her smiles blooms again. She steps away and allows Fidelma—left eye yellow, right eye blue—to take her place, to examine me while the other students look on, perplexed and put out. Serafine’s lovely face twists with something she cannot control, a jealousy that anyone other than she might be noticed. Orla’s next words offer a backhanded compliment.

‘This,’ she says severely, indicating the tear, ‘this makes your chosen profession a difficult one—it causes you to stand out even more than beauty does. Any beautiful woman might be mistaken for another, and be easily forgotten, but this marking renders you unique. Memorable. Not all of our alumni are intent upon meeting a glorious and swift demise; some wish to live on after their duty is done—so the ability to slip beneath notice is a valuable one.’

I feel as if I have already failed. Adia laughs heartily until quelled by a glance from Fidelma, who says to me, ‘Never fear, we are mistresses of powders and paints; we can show you how to cover this and no one will even suspect it’s there!’

‘Indeed. You were all chosen for virtues other than your lovely faces,’ says Orla, as if our presence here isn’t simply the result of the payment of a hefty fee.

At last, Fidelma too steps back and bestows her smile on the gathering. ‘We will be your family for the time being. Mistress Alys, who keeps a good house for us, will show you to your rooms, then we’ll sit to an early supper. And Gwern,’ she gestures behind her without looking, ‘will bring your luggage along presently.’

A man leaves the thatched cottage and shambles towards us. Tall but crooked, his right shoulder is higher than his left and his gait is that of someone in constant pain. He is attired in the garb of gardeners and dogsbodies: tan waistcoat, breeches and leggings, a yellow shirt that may have been white, an exhausted-looking flat tweed cap, and thick-soled brown leather boots. A sheathed hunting knife hangs at his waist. His hair is black and shaggy, his eyes blacker still.

In the time it has taken us to arrive and be welcomed, the sun has slid behind the trees, and its only trace is a dying fire against the greying sky. We follow the direction of Orla’s graceful hands and tramp inside, careful to wipe our shoes on the rough stone step. The last in line, I glance back to the garden and find the gaze of the crooked man firmly on me; he is neither young nor old, nor is his a dullard’s stare, but rather calculating, considering, weighing me and judging my worth. I shiver and hope he cannot see inside me.

We troop after the housekeeper along a corridor and she points out where our classrooms are, our training areas. The rooms that are locked, she says, are locked for a reason. Then up a wide staircase, to a broad landing which splits into two thin staircases. We take the one to the right—to the left, we are told, leads to the Misses’ part of the house, and the rooms where visiting tutors will rest their heads. We traipse along more hallways than seem possible in what is a such a compact abode, past statues and paintings, vases on pedestals, flowers in said vases, shiny swords, battleaxes and shields all mounted on the wood panelled walls as if they might be ready to be pulled down and used at a moment’s notice. Yet another staircase, even narrower than the first, rickety and not a little drunk, leading to a room that should be the dusty attic, but is not. It is a large chamber, not unlike the dormitory I am used to, but much smaller, with only four beds, each with a nightstand to the left, a washstand to the right, and a clothes chest at the foot. One wall of the room is entirely made up of leadlight glass, swirling in a complex pattern of trees and limbs, wolves and wights, faeries and frights. The last of the sun-fire lights it up and we are bathed in molten colour.

‘You young ladies must be exhausted,’ fairly sings Mistress Alys in her rich contralto. ‘Choose your beds, and do not fight. Wash up and tidy yourselves, then come down for supper.’ She quietly closes the door behind her.

While my cohorts bicker over which bed covered with which patchwork quilt they shall have, I stand at the transparent wall, looking, taking in the curved backs of men hefting luggage from the top of the carriage, over the gardens, the lake and into the woods—to the place where my inner compass tells me the alder well lies.

*

The igneous colours of the afternoon have cooled and frozen in the moonlight and seem as blown glass across our coverlets. I wait until the others are breathing slowly, evenly; then I wait a little longer so that their sleep is deeper still. Exhausted though I am I will have no peace until I make my pilgrimage. Sitting up, my feet touch the rug, the thick pile soft as a kitten’s fur, and I gather my boots but do not put them on.

One last look at the sleepers around me to make sure there are no tell-tale flickers of lashes, breaths too shallow or even stopped altogether because of being held in anticipation. Nothing, although I think I detect the traces of tears still on Serafine’s face, silvery little salt crystals from where she cried prettily after being reprimanded by the Misses. At supper, I’d exclaimed with delight at one of the dishes laid before us: ‘Hen-of-the-Woods!’ and Serafine had snorted contemptuously.

‘Really, Mercia, if you plan to pass among your betters you must learn not to speak like a peasant. It’s known as Mushrooms of Autumn,’ she said, as if the meal had a pedigree and status. I looked down at my plate, hoping for the moment to simply pass quietly, but both the Meyrick sisters leapt in and explained precisely why Serafine was wrong to make fun of anyone. It was kind but almost made things worse, for it ensured the humiliation endured, stretched agonisingly, was magnified and shared. And it guaranteed that Serafine, at first merely a bully, would become an adversary for me and that might make my true task more difficult.

I tiptoe down the stairs, and slip out the kitchen door which I managed to leave unlocked after doing the evening’s dishes. Fidelma said we must all take turns assisting Mistress Alys with cleaning and cooking—this is no hardship for me, not the unaccustomed activity it is to my companions, whose privileged lives have insulated them from the rigours of housework. Orla instructed it will help us learn to fit in at every level of a household, and doing a servant’s tasks is an excellent way to slip beneath notice—which is a skill we may well be grateful for one day.

Out in the spring air I perch on the steps to pull on my boots, and sniff at the heady aroma of the herbs in the walled kitchen garden; I stand, get my bearings and set off. Do I look like a ghost in my white nightgown, flitting across the landscape? With luck no one else will be abroad at this hour. The moon is crescent, spilling just enough illumination for me to see my way clear along the drive, then to follow the line of the road and, stopping short of the town, to find the well—and the tree, its catkins hanging limp and sad.

There is a small peaked roof of age-silvered timber above a low wall of pale stone and crumbling dark mortar and, on the rim of the well, sits a silver mug attached to the spindle with a sturdy, equally silver chain. Just as they—the Postulants, Novices, Sisters and Blessed Wanderers—said it would be. I drop the cup over the edge, hear it splash, then pull its tether hand over hand until I have a part-filled goblet of liquid argent between my trembling palms.

The vessel feels terribly cold, colder than it should, and my digits tingle as I raise it. I swallow quickly, greedily, then gasp at the taste, the burn in my gullet, the numbness of my mouth as if I’d chewed monkshood leaves. The ice travels down, down, leaching into my limbs, taking my extremities for its own, locking my joints, creeping into my brain like icicles. My fingers are the claws of a raven frozen on a branch; my throat closes over like an icebound stream; my eyes are fogged as glass on a winter’s morn.

For a time I am frost-bitten, a creature of rime and hoar. Still and unbreathing.

They did not say it would be like this.

They did not say it would hurt. That it would make me panic. That I would burn with cold. That I would stay here, dead forever.

They did not say it would be like this.

Then time melts, that which felt like an aeon was but seconds. My body begins to thaw, to warm and I feel new again, freshly born, released from all my ills.

This is what they said it would be like; that, in drinking from the alder well, I would feel renewed and refreshed, that I would view the world with clear vision and an open, receptive mind. And, having drunk of the wellspring, I would be ready, ready to join them—that those who had already partaken here, the Blessed Wanderers, would recognise the flow in me.

My exhaustion is gone, washed away. I stretch upwards, bathe in the moonlight, invincible, invulnerable, eternal—until I hear the crack of a fallen twig and I fold swiftly into a crouch. Trying to make myself small I peer into the gloom, my heart beats painfully, the silver in my blood now all a’bubble, seeming to fizz and pop. Through the trees I see a shape moving calmly, unconcernedly, tall but with one shoulder risen higher than its brother, the hair a shaggy halo around a shadowed face.

Gwern.

I hold my breath. I do not think he has seen me; I do not think myself discovered. He shifts away slowly, continuing on whatever night-time errand is his and his alone. When he is out of sight, I run, as swiftly, as silently as I can, back towards St Dymphna’s. My feet seem to fly.

*

‘While the folding fan may seem the least offensive thing in the world, it has been used in at least thirteen high-profile political and forty-five marital assassinations in the past three hundred years.’ To underline her point, Orla produces a black ebony-wood fan and opens it with a sharp flick of the wrist. The item makes quite a sound as it concertinas out and she beckons us to look closer. The leaves are made of an intricately tatted lace of black and gold, the sticks are wooden, but the ribs, oh, the ribs look slightly different—they are metal, perhaps iron, and with subtly sharpened points. Orla draws our attention to the guardsticks: with a long fingernail she flicks the ends and from each pops a concealed blade. One delicate wave and a throat might be cut, one thrust and a heart pierced. I cannot help but admire the craftsmanship as we sit on the velvet-covered chaises lined against one wall of the practise room, which is located in the basement of the manor, a well-thought-out and thoroughly equipped space.

In front of us is a chalkboard covered with diagrams of innocuous-looking fans of varying designs and substances (iron, wood, reinforced linen, nacre), with the names of all their component parts for us to memorise. To our right stretches the far wall, with four practise dummies made of wood and hessian and straw, red circles painted over the heart of each one. To the left are weapons racks filled with everything one might need, including a cunningly constructed sword that breaks down to its component parts, an orb that with the touch of a button sprouts sharp spikes, and two kinds of parasols—one that has a knife in its handle, the other which converts to a tidy crossbow.

Then there are the display cases which contain all the bespoke appurtenances a lady could desire: silver-backed brushes with opiate-infused needles concealed among the bristles; hairpins and gloves and tortoise-shell hair combs equally imbued with toxins; chokers and pendants, paternosters and sashes and tippets, garters and stockings, all beautifully but solidly made and carefully reinforced so they might make admirable garrottes; boots with short stiletto blades built into both heel and toe; even porous monocles that might be steeped in sleeping solutions or acid or other corrosive liquid; hollowed-out rings and brooches for the surreptitious transport of illicit substances; decorative cuffs with under-structures of steel and whalebone to strengthen wrists required to give killing blows; fur muffs that conceal lethally weighted saps… an almost endless array of pretty deaths.

Fidelma hands us each our own practice fan—simple lightly-scented, lace-carved, sandalwood implements, lovely but not deadly, nothing sharp that might cause an accident, a torn face or a wounded classroom rival—although at the end of our stay here, we will be given the tools of our trade, for St Dymphna’s tuition fees are very grand. Orla instructs us in our paces, a series of movements to develop, firstly, our ability to use the flimsy useless things as devices for flirting: hiding mouths, highlighting eyes, misdirecting glances, keeping our complexions comfortably cool in trying circumstances.

When we have mastered that, Fidelma takes over, drilling us in the lightning fast wrist movements that will open a throat or put out an eye, even take off a finger if done with enough force, speed and the correctly-weighted fan. We learn to throw them, after first having engaged the clever little contrivances that keep the leaves open and taut. When we can send the fans spinning like dangerous discuses, then we begin working with the guardstick blades, pegging them at the dummies, some with more success than others.

There is a knock on the door, and Mistress Alys calls the Misses away. Before she goes, Orla makes us form pairs and gives each couple a bowl of sticky, soft, brightly coloured balls the size of small marbles. We are to take turns, one hurling the projectiles and the other deflecting them with her fan. As soon as the door is closed behind our instructresses, Serafine begins to chatter, launching into a discussion of wedding matters, dresses, bonbonniere, bunting, decoration, the requisite number of accompanying flower girls, honour-maids, and layers of cake. She efficiently and easily distracts Adia, who will need to learn to concentrate harder if she wishes to graduate from St Dymphna’s in time for her own wedding.

‘It seems a shame to go to all the trouble of marrying someone just to kill him,’ muses Adia. ‘All the expense and the pretty dresses and the gifts! What do you think happens to the gifts?’

‘Family honour is family honour!’ says Serafine stoutly, then ruins the effect by continuing with, ‘If you don’t do anything until a year or two after the wedding day, surely you can keep the gifts?’

The pair of them look to Veronica for confirmation, but she merely shrugs then pegs a ball of red at me. I manage to sweep it away with my fine sandalwood construct.

‘What has your fiancé done?’ asks Adia, her violet eyes wide; a blue blob adheres to her black skirt. ‘And how many flower maids will you have?’

‘Oh, his great-great-grandfather cheated mine out of a very valuable piece of land,’ says Serafine casually. ‘Five. What will you avenge?’

‘His grandfather refused my grandmother’s hand in marriage,’ Adia answers. ‘Shall you wear white? My dress is oyster and dotted with seed pearls.’

‘For shame, to dishonour a family so!’ whispers Veronica in scandalised tones. ‘My dress is eggshell, with tiers of gros point lace. My betrothed’s mother married my uncle under false pretences—pretending she was well-bred and from a prosperous family, then proceeded to bleed him dry! When she was done, he took his own life and she moved on to a new husband.’

‘Why are you marrying in now?’

‘Because now they are a prosperous family. I am to siphon as much wealth as I can back to my family before the coup de grace.’ Veronica misses the green dot I throw and it clings to her shirt. ‘What shoes will you wear?’

I cannot tell if they are more interested in marriage or murder.

‘But surely none of you wish to get caught?’ I ask, simply because I cannot help myself. ‘To die on your wedding nights? Surely you will plot and plan and strategise your actions rather than throw your lives away like …’ I do not say ‘Lady Carew’, recalling their unstinting admiration for her actions.

‘Well, it’s not ideal, no,’ says Veronica. ‘I’d rather bide my time and be cunning—frame a servant or ensure a safe escape for myself—but I will do as I’m bid by my family.’

The other two nod, giving me a look that says I cannot possibly understand family honour—from our first meeting it was established that I was not from a suitable family. They believe I am an orphan, my presence at the school sponsored by a charitable donation contributed to by all the Guilds of my city, that I might become useful tool for business interests in distant Lodellan. I’m not like them, not an assassin-bride as disposable as yesterday’s summer frock, but a serious investment. It in no way elevates me in their estimation.

They do not know I’ve never set foot in Lodellan, that I have two sisters living still, that I was raised in Cwen’s Reach in the shadow of the Citadel, yearning to be allowed to be part of its community. That I have lived these past five years as postulant then as novice, that I now stand on the brink of achieving my dearest wish—and that dearest wish has nothing to do with learning the art of murder. That Mater Friðuswith said it was worth the money to send me to St Dymphna’s to achieve her aim, but she swore I would never have to use the skills I learned at the steely hands of the Misses Meyrick. Even then, though, anxious as I was to join the secret ranks, the inner circle of the Little Sisters of St Florian, I swore to her that I would do whatever was asked of me.

As I look at these girls who are so certain they are better than me, I feel that my purpose is stronger than theirs. These girls who think death is an honour because they do not understand it—they trip gaily towards it as if it is a party they might lightly attend. I feel that death in my pursuit would surely weigh more, be more valuable than theirs—than the way their families are blithely serving their young lives up for cold revenge over ridiculous snubs that should have been long-forgotten. I shouldn’t wonder that the great families of more than one county, more than one nation, will soon die out if this tradition continues.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ says Veronica, not unkindly, but lamely. I hide a smile and shrug.

‘My, how big your hands are, Mercia, and rough! Like a workman’s—they make your fan look quite, quite tiny!’ Serafine trills just as the door opens again and Fidelma returns. She eyes the number of coloured dots stuck to each of us; Adia loses.

‘You do realise you will repeat this activity until you get it right, Adia?’ Our teacher asks. Adia’s eyes well and she looks at the plain unvarnished planks at her feet. Serafine smirks until Fidelma adds, ‘Serafine, you will help your partner to perfect her technique. One day you may find you must rely on one of your sisters, whether born of blood or fire, to save you. You must learn the twin virtues of reliance and reliability.’

Something tells me Fidelma was not far from the classroom door while we practised. ‘Mercia and Veronica, you may proceed to the library for an hour’s reading. The door is unlocked and the books are laid out. Orla will question you about them over dinner.’

She leaves Veronica and I to pack our satchels. As I push in the exercise book filled with notes about the art of murder by fan, my quills and the tightly closed ink pot, I glance at the window.

There is Gwern, leaning on a shovel beside a half dug-over garden bed. He is not digging at this moment, though, as he stares through the pane directly at me, a grin lifting the corner of his full mouth. I feel heat coursing up my neck and sweeping across my face, rendering my skin as red as my hair. I grab up my carry-all and scurry from the room behind Veronica, while Serafine and Adia remain behind, fuming and sulking.

*

‘Nothing fancy,’ says Mistress Alys. ‘They like it plain and simple. They’ve often said “Bread’s not meant to be frivolous, and no good comes of making things appear better than they are”, which is interesting considering their business.’ She sighs fondly, shakes her head. ‘The Misses got their funny ways, like everyone else.’

I am taking up one end of the scarred oak kitchen table, elbow-deep in dough, hands (the blue tint almost gone) kneading and bullying a great ball of it, enough to make three loaves as well as dainty dinner rolls for the day’s meals. But I prick up my ears. It’s just before dawn and, although this is Adia’s month of kitchen duties, she is nursing a badly cut hand where Serafine mishandled one of the stiletto-bladed parasols during class.

The housekeeper, stand-offish and most particular at first, is one to talk of funny ways. She has gotten used to me in these past weeks and months, happy and relieved to find I am able and willing to do the dirtiest of chores and unlikely to whinge and whimper—unlike my fellow pupils. I do not complain or carp about the state of my perfectly manicured nails when doing dishes, nor protest that I will develop housewives’ knee from kneeling to scrub the floors, nor do I cough overly much when rugs need beating out in the yard. As a result, she rather likes me and has become more and more talkative, sharing the history of the house, the nearby town, and her own life. I know she lost her children, a girl and a boy, years ago when her husband, determined to cut the number of mouths to feed, led them into the deepest part of the forest and left them there as food for wolves and worms. How she, in horror, ran from him, and searched and searched and searched to no avail for her Hansie and Greta. How, heartbroken and unhinged, she finally gave up and wandered aimlessly until she found herself stumbling into Alder’s Well, and was taken in by the Misses, who by then had started their school and needed a housekeeper.

I’ve written down all she has told me in my notebook—not the one I use for class, but the one constructed of paper scraps and leaves sewn into quires then bound together, the first one I made for myself as a novice—and all the fragments recorded therein will go into a Book of Lives in the Citadel’s Archives. Not only her stories, but those of Adia, Serafine and Veronica, and the tiny hints Alys drops about Orla and Fidelma, all the little remnants that might be of use to someone some day; all the tiny recordings that would otherwise be lost. I blank my mind the way Mater Friðuswith taught me, creating a tabula rasa, to catch the tales there in the spider webs of my memory.

‘Mind you, I suppose they’ve got more reason than most.’

‘How so?’ I ask, making my tone soothing, trustworthy, careful not to startle her into thinking better of saying anything more. She smiles gently down at the chickens she is plucking and dressing, not really looking at me.

‘Poor pets,’ she croons, ‘Dragged from battlefield to battlefield by their father—a general he was, a great murderer of men, their mother dead years before, and these little mites learning nothing but sadness and slaughter. When he finally died, they were released, and set up here to help young women such as you, Mercia.’

I cover my disappointment—I know, perhaps, more than she. This history is a little too pat, a tad too kind—rather different to the one I read in the Archives in preparation for coming here. Alys may well know that account, too, and choose to tell me the gentler version—Mater Friðuswith has often said that we make our tales as we must, constructing stories to hold us together.

I know that their mother was the daughter of a rich and powerful lord—not quite a king, but almost—a woman happy enough to welcome her father’s all-conquering general between her thighs only until the consequences became apparent. She strapped and swaddled herself so the growing bump would not be recognised, sequestered herself away pleading a dose of some plague or other—unpleasant but not lethal—until she had spat forth her offspring and they could be smuggled out and handed to their father in the depths of night, all so their grandfather might not get wind that his beloved daughter had been so stained. This subterfuge might well have worked, too, had it not been for an unfortunate incident at a dinner party to welcome the young woman’s paternally-approved betrothed, when a low-necked gown was unable to contain her milk-filled breasts, and the lovely and pure Ophelia was discovered to be lactating like a common wet nurse.

Before her forced retirement to a convent where she was to pass her remaining days alternatively praying to whomever might be listening, and cursing the unfortunate turn her life had taken, she revealed the name of the man who’d beaten her betrothed to the tupping post. Her father, his many months of delicate planning, negotiating, strategising and jostling for advantage in the sale of his one and only child, was not best pleased. Unable to unseat the General due his great popularity with both the army and the people, the Lord did his best to have him discreetly killed, on and off the battlefield, sending wave after wave of unsuccessful assassins.

In the end, though, fate took a hand and the Lord’s wishes were at last fulfilled by an opportune dose of dysentery, which finished off the General and left the by-then teenage twins, Fidelma and Orla, without a protector. They fled, taking what loot they could from the war chests, crossing oceans and continents and washing up where they might. Alas, their refuges were invariably winkled out by their grandfather’s spies and myriad attempts made on their lives in the hope of wiping away all trace of the shame left by their mother’s misdeeds.

The records are uncertain as to what happened, precisely—and it is to be hoped that the blanks might be filled in one day—but in the end, their grandfather met a gruesome death at the hands of an unknown assassin or assassins. The young women, freed of the spectre of an avenging forebear, settled in Alder’s Well, and set up their school, teaching the thing they knew so well, the only lesson life had ever taught them truly: delivering death.

‘Every successful army has its assassins, its snipers, its wetdeedsmen—its Quiet Men,’ Orla had said in our first class—on the art of garrotting, ‘And when an entire army is simply too big and too unwieldy for a particular task one requires the Quiet Men—or in our case, Quiet Women—to ensure those duties are executed.’

‘One doesn’t seek an axe to remove a splinter from a finger, after all,’ said Fidelma as she began demonstrating how one could use whatever might be at hand to choke the life from some poor unfortunate: scarf, silk stockings, stays, shoe or hair ribbons, curtain ties, sashes both military and decorative, rosaries, strings of pearls or very sturdy chains. We were discouraged from using wire of any sort, for it made a great mess, and one might find one’s chances of escape hindered if found with scads of ichor down the front of a ball or wedding gown. Adia, Seraphine and Veronica had nodded most seriously at that piece of advice.

Mistress Alys knew what her Misses did, as well as did white-haired Mater Friðuswith when she’d sent me here. But perhaps it was easier for the dear housekeeper to think otherwise. She’d adopted them and they her. There was a kind of love between them, the childless woman and the motherless girls.

I did not judge her for we all tell ourselves lies in order to live.

‘There he is!’ She flies to the kitchen window and taps at the glass so loudly I fear the pane will fall out of its leadlight bedding. Gwern, who is passing by, turns his head and gazes sourly at her. She gestures for him to come in and says loudly, ‘It’s time.’

His shoulders slump but he nods.

‘Every month,’ she mutters as if displeased with a recalcitrant dog. ‘He knows every month it’s time but still I have to chase him.’

She pulls a large, tea-brown case with brass fittings from the top of a cupboard and places it at the opposite end of the table to me. Once she’s opened it, I can see sharp, thick-looking needles with wide circular bases; several lengths of flexible tubing made perhaps of animal skin or bladder, with what seem to be weighted washers at each end; strange glass, brass and silver objects with a bell-shaped container at one end and a handle with twin circles at the other, rather like the eye rings of sewing scissors. Alys pulls and pushes, sliding them back and forth—air whooshes in and out. She takes the end of one length of tubing and screws it over a hole in the side of the glass chamber, and to the other end she affixes one of the large gauge needles. She hesitates, looks at me long and hard, pursing her lips, then I see the spark in her eyes as she makes a decision. ‘Mercia, you may stay, but don’t tell the Misses.’

I nod, but ask, ‘Are you sure?’

‘I need more help around here than I’ve got and you’re quiet and accommodating. I’ll have your aid while I can.’

By the time she returns to the cupboard and brings out two dozen tiny crystal bottles, Gwern has stepped into the kitchen. He sits and rolls up his sleeves, high so that the soft white flesh in the crooks of his elbows is exposed. He watches Alys with the same expression as a resentful hound, wanting to bite but refraining in the knowledge of past experience.

Mistress Alys pulls on a pair of brown kid gloves, loops a leather thong around his upper arm, then pokes at the pale skin until a blue-green relief map stands out. She takes the needle and pushes it gently, motherly, into the erect vein. When it’s embedded, she makes sure the bottom of the bell is safely set on the tabletop, and pulls on the pump, up and up and up, slowly as if fighting a battle—sweat beads her forehead. I watch as something dark and slow creeps along the translucent tubing, then spits out into the bottom of the container: green thick blood. Liquid that moves sluggishly of its own accord as the quantity increases. When the vessel is full, Alys begins the process again with the other arm and a new jar which she deftly screws onto the base of the handle.

She pushes the full one at me, nodding towards a second pair of kid gloves in the case. ‘Into each of those—use the funnel,’ she nods her head at the vials with their little silver screw tops, ‘Don’t over-fill and be careful not to get any on yourself—it’s the deadliest thing in the world.’ She says this last with something approaching glee and I risk a glance at Gwern. He is barely conscious now, almost reclining, limbs loose, head lolling over the back of the chair, eyes closed.

‘Is he alright?’ I ask, alarmed. I know that when I lay down to sleep this eve, all I shall see is this man, his vulnerability as something precious is stolen from him. Somehow, witnessing this has lodged the thought of him inside me.

She smiles, pats his cheek gently and nods. ‘He’ll be no good to anyone for the rest of the day; we’ll let him sleep it off—there’s a pallet bed folded in the pantry. You can set that up by the stove when you’ve done with those bottles. Shut them tightly, shine them up nice, the Misses have buyers already. Not that there’s ever a month when we have leftovers.’

‘Who—what—is he?’ I ask.

She runs a tender hand through his hair. ‘Something the Misses found and kept. Something from beneath or above or in-between. Something strange and dangerous and he’s ours. His blood’s kept our heads above water more than once—folk don’t always want their daughters trained to kill, but there’s always call for this.’

I wonder how they trapped him, how they keep him here. I wonder who he was—is. I wonder what he would do if given his freedom. I wonder what he would visit upon those who’ve taken so much from him.

‘Hurry up, Mercia. Still plenty to do and he’ll be a handful to get on that cot. Move yourself along, girl.’

*

When I hear a board creak, I glance at the two hands of glory, and notice that of the seven fingers I lit, only six still burn and my heart ices up.

I have been careful, so careful these past months to quietly pick the lock on the library door, then close it after me, pull the curtains over so no light might be seen in the windows, before I kindle one finger-candle for each inhabitant of the house, then lay out my quills and books, the pounce pot, and open the special volume Mater Friðuswith gave me for this specific duty. Generations of St Florian’s abbesses have asked many, many times for permission to copy The Compendium of Contaminants—rumoured to be the work of the first of us—yet time and again the Misses have refused access.

They guard their secrets jealously and this book is alone of all its kind. Their ownership of the only extant copy is an advantage they will not surrender, even though the Murcianii, the Blessed Wanderers, seek only to record and keep the information. There are to be found fragments of this greatest of poisoners’ bibles, yes; copies with pages missing, edges burned, ink run or faded—but none virgo intacto like this one. None so perfect, so filled with recipes and instructions, magical and medicinal properties and warnings, maps of every manner of plant and where it might be found, how it might best be harvested and then propagated elsewhere, how it might best be used for good or ill, how it might be preserved or destroyed. Without it our Archives are embarrassingly bereft, and with only one single copy in existence, the possibility of its destruction is too great for us to bear.

And this is why I am here; this is my initiation task to earn my place among St Florian’s secret sisters, the Murcianii, the collectors, the recorders, the travelling scribes who gather all manner of esoteric and eldritch knowledge so it might not pass out of the world. Folktales and legends, magic and spells, bestiaries of creatures once here and now long-gone, histories and snippets of lives that have intersected with our efforts, our recordings… and books like these, the dark books, the dangerous books, the books that some would burn but which we save because knowledge, all knowledge, is too important to be lost.

If I bring a copy of this book back to Mater Friðuswith then my position will be assured. I will belong.

But all that will be moot if I am discovered; if my betrayal of two of the most dangerous women of the day—indeed other days, long ago—is found out.

The door opens and Gwern stands there, clothes crumpled from his long sleep, hair askew, the marks of a folded blanket obvious along his jaw line. He sways, still weak from the bloodletting, but his eyes are bright.

‘What are you doing?’ The low voice runs through me. Part of me notes that he seems careful to whisper. He takes in the Compendium, propped on the bookstand, all the tools of my trade neatly lined up on the desk (as untidy as my person may be, I am a conscientious craftswoman), and the hands of glory by whose merrily flickering light I have been working.

And I cannot answer; fear stops my throat and all I can think of is Fidelma and Orla and their lethal ornaments, the choking length of a rosary about my neck, a meal infused with tincture of Gwern’s lifeblood, a down-stuffed pillow over my face as I sleep. He steps into the room, closes the door behind him then paces over to lift me up by the scruff of the neck as if I am a kitten who’s peed in his shoes. Not so weak as he seems, then. He shakes me til I think my head will roll off, until he realises I cannot explain myself if I cannot breathe. He lets me go, pushing me back until I sit on top of the desk and draw in great gasps of air, and he asks me again in that threatening tone, ‘What are you doing?’

And I, in fear of what might happen if two Quiet Women should find out what I’ve been doing, how I’ve been taking from them what they’ve refused—and hoping, perhaps, after what I’d witnessed this morning that he might not have much love for the Misses—I tell him almost everything.

And when I am finished, he does not call out and rouse the Meyrick sisters. He does not bend forward and blow out the gory candles, but rather smiles. He leans so close that I can smell his breath, earthy as freshly mown grass, as he speaks, ‘I knew it. I knew when I saw you that night.’

‘Knew what?’ I demand, momentarily brave.

‘That you were different to them; different to the others who have come here year upon tiresome year. When I saw you in the moonlight, I knew—none of the others ever venture out past the walls at night, certainly don’t wander to the well and drink its contents down so sure and so fast. They don’t make brave girls here—they make cowardly little bits who like blades in the dark, poison in the soup, pillows over faces.’ He straightens, rolls his uneven shoulders. ‘I knew you could help me.’

‘Help you do what?’ I ask, mesmerised by his black gaze.

Instead of answering, he goes to one of the shelves and rummages, finds a slim yellow volume and hands it to me. A Brief History of the Alder Well. He says nothing more, but runs a hand down the side of my face, then leaves, the door closing with a gentle click behind him. I feel his fingers on me long after he’s gone.

*

The alchemy laboratory is situated on the ground floor; it has large windows to let in light and equally large shutters to keep out the selfsame when we work with compounds that prefer the darkness. We each have a workbench, honeycombed with drawers filled with plants, powders, poisons, equipment, mortars, pestles, vials, and the like. On mine this morning, I found a rose, red as blood, its stem neatly sheared on an angle, the thorns thoughtfully removed; my heart beats faster to see it, that kindness. Indeed there’s been a floral offering every day for the past three weeks, roses, peonies, lily of the valley, snowdrops, bluebells, daffodils, all waiting for me in various spots: windowsills, shelves, under my pillow, on the kitchen bench, in the top drawer of my bedside table, hidden among the clothes in my chest. As if I needed anything to keep their giver in my thoughts; as if my dreams have not been haunted. Nothing huge, nothing spectacular, no grand bouquets, but something sweet and singular and strange; something to catch my eye alone—no one else seems to notice them. Not even Serafine with her cruel hawk’s gaze.

We have a new teacher for this sennight, who arrived with many boxes and trunks, cases and carpet bags, and a rectangular item neatly wrapped around with black velvet. When her driver seemed careless with it, she became sharp with him. It must be delicate, perhaps made of glass—mirror? A painting? A portrait?

The poisoner is fascinated by Serafine. In fact, we others may as well not be here. She hovers over the sleek blonde girl’s work-table, helping her to measure powders, cut toxic plants, heat solutions, giving her hints that we may or may not hear and take advantage of. My copying of the Compendium means my cognizance of poisons and their uses is greater than my companions but I cannot show off; cannot appear to have knowledge I should not possess.

We are not working with killing venin today, merely things to cause discomfort—a powder sprinkled over clothing or a few drops of liquid added to someone’s jar of night cream will bring up a rash, afflict the victim with itches and aches that appear to have no logical source. One must be careful, Hepsibah Ballantyne tells us in a rare address to the whole class, not to do things that disrupt a person’s ordinary routine—that is what they will remember, the disruptions: the tinker come to a door selling perfumes, the offer of a special new blend of tea from a recent acquaintance. When you wish to injure someone, do something that rubs along with their habits, their everyday lives—blend into the ordinary flow and simply corrupt one of their accustomed patterns. No fanfare, no drawing of attention to yourself or your acts. Do nothing that someone might later recall as out of the ordinary—it will bring the authorities to you faster than you please.

Mistress Ballantyne arrives once a year to stay with the Misses and impart her venomous wisdom, although Alys tells me this is not her profession proper. She is a coffin-maker and most successful—she travelled here in her own carriage and four (the driver currently making himself at home in Alys’s bed). Years and experience have made her a talented poisoner, although few know it and that’s as it should be. I think she is older than she seems, rather like the Misses; in certain lights her face is as lined as a piece of badly prepared parchment, in others it seems smooth. She has short blonde curls, and brown eyes that watched peachy-pink Serafine too closely from the moment she was introduced.

I take the apple seeds and crush them under the blade of my knife.

‘How did you know to do that?’ Hepsibah’s voice is at my shoulder and I suppress the urge to jump guiltily. The recipe in front of us says to grind the seeds in the mortar and pestle, but the Compendium warns against that as weakening the poison—crush the seeds just once with a sharp hit to crack the carapace and release the toxin. I look into her dark eyes and the lie comes quickly to my lips.

‘My mother. She learned herbcraft to support us after my father died.’ Which is true to some extent: Wulfwyn did learn herblore at St Florian’s after Mater Friðuswith offered her refuge, but our father had been well and truly gone for many years before that—or rather, my sisters’ father. Mine hung around on moonlit nights, watching from the shadows as I grew. ‘She wasn’t a poison-woman, but she knew some things, just enough to help get by.’

Her gaze softens. I’ve touched a nerve; she’s another motherless girl, I suspect. We are legion. She nods and moves away, telling me my labours are good and I show promise. Hepsibah gives Adia and Veronica’s work a quick once-over and shifts her attention back to Serafine, resting a calloused and stained hand in the small of the other’s back. I notice Serafine leans into the touch rather than away, and feel an unaccustomed wave of sympathy for her, to know she longs for something she will not be allowed to have.

*

Standing outside the library door, one hand balancing a platter of sweetmeats, the other preparing to knock and offer the Misses and their guest an evening treat to go with the decanter of winterplum brandy I delivered earlier along with three fine crystal snifters. A terse voice from inside the room stops me. I slow my breathing to almost nothing, stand utterly still; if I’ve learned nothing else here it’s to be undetectable when required.

‘Sweet Jesu, Hepsibah, control yourself!’ Orla’s voice, strangely harsh and raised in an anger none of us have yet witnessed in the classroom no matter how egregious our trespasses.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Mistress Ballantyne answers, her tone airy.

‘I saw you in the garden this afternoon, busy fingers, busy lips, busy teeth,’ hisses Orla.

‘Jealous?’ laughs Hepsibah.

Fidelma breaks in, ‘We have told you that you cannot touch any student in our care.’

‘That one was thoroughly touched and not complaining, besides,’ retorts Hepsibah and I imagine a wolfish grin crossing her lips.

‘Scandals! They follow you! It’s your own fault—one then another, ruined girls, angry families and you must leave a city yet again.’ Orla pauses, and I hear the sound of a decanter hitting the rim of a glass a little too hard. ‘Lord, just find someone who wants your attention, who isn’t already spoken for, and be content.’

Mistress Ballantyne snorts and I imagine she shrugs, raising her thin shoulders, tossing her neat, compact head with its pixie features and upturned nose. She might fidget, too, with those stained fingers and her small square hands; she asks belligerently, ‘Where’s the fun in a willing victim?’

Fidelma fairly shouts, ‘He has been seen. Not two counties away.’

And silence falls as if a sudden winter has breathed over the library and frozen its inhabitants. It lasts until Mistress Ballantyne breaks it, all swagger, all arrogance gone, her voice rises to a shriek, ‘Has he been here? Have you betrayed me?’

Fidelma shushes her. ‘Of course not, you silly bint, but people talk, rumours have wings. Those who live long and do not change as much as others become the target of gossip. Those who do not hide, who do not take care not to draw attention—they are the ones who stand out, Hepsibah.’

Orla sighs. ‘And you know he’s been searching for something, something other than you—in addition to you. We do not live in a large city, Hepsibah, we do not live in a grand house and parade along boulevards in an open-topped landau, begging folk to stare and take note. Few people know who we truly are, fewer still that the wars our father fought ended a hundred years ago.’

Fidelma: ‘It’s a wonder you survived in the days before you knew he was hunting you. You’ve never learned the art of hiding yourself—of putting your safety ahead of your baser desires.’

‘You’ve had good service of me. I’ve shared my secrets with you, helped keep you young, taught your murderous little slatterns who think they’re better than me.’ There’s a pause, perhaps she worries at a thumbnail. ‘But if he’s been seen, then I’m off.’

‘But you’ve still got classes to teach!’ protests Orla.

Hepsibah shrugged. ‘Well, consider that I’m thinking of my own safety before my baser desires,’ she sneers. ‘Get Magnus, she’s a good poisons woman if you can find her. Last I heard she’d berthed in Breakwater.’

There are quick footsteps and the door is wrenched open. I’m almost bowled over by Mistress Ballantyne, who shouts ‘Out of my way, halfwit’ and charges off towards her room. The Misses stare at me and I hold up the tray of sweetmeats, miraculously not thrown to the floor as Hepsibah passed. Orla gestured for me to come in, then turns to her sister. ‘You see if you can talk sense to her. I’m not teaching poisons.’

‘You’re the one who mentioned him. If it comes down to it, sister, you will.’

Fidelma sweeps out, taking a handful of sweetmeats with her. Orla slumps in a chair and, when I ask if there’s anything else she needs, she waves me away, not bothering to answer. On the small table beside her are three discarded vials, red-brown stains in the bottom.

I will not make my nest in the library tonight. Mistress Ballantyne will take a while to pack her trunks and rouse her coachman from the warmth of Alys’s blankets. The household will be in uproar this night and I shall take the chance to have a sleep uninterrupted by late-night forgery at least; there will be no guarantee that I will not dream of Gwern. One night without copying the Compendium will not make much difference.

*

Orla’s grace has deserted her.

All the patience and fine humour she’s displayed in the past is gone, replaced by an uncertain and somewhat foul temper, as if she’s been tainted by the subject she’s forced to teach. The Misses, wedded to their schedule, decided not to try for the woman Magnus, and it is as Fidelma threatened: Orla, having caused the difficulty, must now deal with the consequences.

Open on the desk in front of her is the Compendium as if it might solve all of her problems. I wonder if Mistress Alys with her fondness for herbs wouldn’t have been a better choice. I keep looking at the book, suppressing shudders each time Orla’s hands—filled with a toxic powder, wilted stalk or simple spring water—pass anywhere near it. It is unique, alone in the world and I feel it must be protected. Coiled, I wait to leap forward and save it from whatever careless fate Orla might bestow upon it.

The ingenuity and patience, which is so fully in evidence when teaching us how to kill using unthought-of weapons, has left no trace as Orla makes us mix concoctions, elixirs and philtres to cause subtle death. She forgets ingredients, tells us to stir when we should shake, to grind when we should slice, to chop when we should grate. We are not halfway through the first lesson when our tutor swears loudly and knocks over a potion, which pours into an alabaster mortar and mates with the crushed roots there. The reaction is spectacular, a fizz and a crack and smoke of green then purple fills the alchemy room like a sudden, vitriolic fog.

I throw open the windows, shielding my mouth and nose with the bottom of my skirt, then I find the door and thrust it to—the smoke begins to clear but all I can hear are the rasping coughs of my fellow students and teacher. Squinting against the tears the smoke causes, I find them one by one and herd them out into the corridor, where Mistress Alys and Fidelma, drawn by the noise, are in a flurry. When Orla is the last one out, I dive back into the room and rescue the book—it tore at me not to save it before any mortal, but common sense prevailed and no suspicions are aroused. I hold it tightly to my chest as we are all hustled outside into the fresh air.

‘Well done, Mercia,’ says Fidelma, bending down to pat her sister’s heaving back. Orla vomits on the grass, just a little.

‘There’s no fire, Miss, just the smoke. It should clear out soon—there’s a good enough breeze,’ I say.

‘Indeed.’ She stands and surveys the lilac-tinged vapour gently wafting through the door behind us. ‘We are nothing if not adaptable. I think we shall leave the rest of our poisons classes until such time as Mother Magnus or a suitable substitute might be found—lest my sister kill us all.’

Orla makes an unladylike gesture and continues coughing. Mistress Alys, having braved the smog, reappears with a syrupy cordial of black horehound, to soothe our throats and lungs. We swig from the bottle.

Some time later, order has been restored: the house has been cleared of the foul smelling fumes; pleural barks have been reduced to occasional rattles; Orla’s dignity has been stitched together for the most part; and I have (with concealed reluctance) handed back the Compendium and been given by Fidelma a letter for Mother Magnus and instructed to deliver it to the coachman who resides in Alder’s Well, begging him to deliver it to the poisons woman and wait for her reply—and hopefully her agreement to return with him.

I walk slowly there and even more slowly back, enjoying the air, the quiet that is not interrupted by the prattle of girls too silly to know they will be going to their deaths sooner than they should—too silly to know that now is the time they should begin mourning their lost futures. Or planning to run away, to fade from their lives. Gods know we are taught enough means to hide, to provide for ourselves, to change our appearances, to earn a living in different ways, to disappear. Sometimes I am tempted to tell Veronica about Cwen’s Reach and the Citadel, about the Little Sisters of St Florian and how they offered my family refuge, and how, for a long time, no one found us, not even Cenred’s ghost. How she could just as easily come with me and become one of the sisters or live in the city at the Citadel’s foot as Delling and Halle do, working as jewel-smiths. But I know better. I know she would not want to lose her soft life even for the advantage of longevity; she will play princess while she may, then give it all up not for a lesser lifestyle, but for death. Because she thinks with death, everything stops.

I could tell her otherwise. I could tell her how my mother was pursued by her brother’s shade for long years. How he managed somehow to still touch her, to get inside her, to father me well after he was nothing more than a weaving of spite and moonlight. How I would wake from a dream of him whispering that my mother would never escape him. How, even at her death bed, he hovered. How, until Delling did her great and pious labour, he troubled my sleep and threatened to own me as he had Wulfwyn. I could tell her that dying is not the end—but she will discover it herself soon enough.

I had not thought to go back by the clearing, but find myself there anyway, standing before both well and alder. They look different to that first night, less potent without their cloak of midnight light. Less powerful, more ordinary. But I do not forget the burning of the well’s water; nor my first sight of the alder and the man who seemed crucified against it, wormed through with vines and mistletoe.

‘Have you read it? The little book?’

I did not hear him until he spoke, standing beside me. For a large, limping man he moves more silently than any mortal should. Then again, he is not mortal, but I am unsure if he is what he would have me believe. Yet I have seen his blood. I give credence to things others would not countenance: that my father was a ghost and haunted my dreams; that the very first of the scribes, Murciana, could make what she’d heard appear on her very skin; that the Misses are older than Mater Friðuswith although they look young enough to be her daughters—granddaughters in some lights. So, why not believe him?

I nod, and ask what I’ve been too shy to ask before, ‘How did you come here?’

He taps the trunk of the alder, not casually, not gently, but as if in hope that it will become something more. It disappoints him, I can see. His hand relaxes the way one’s shoulders might in despair.

‘Once upon a time I travelled through these. They lead down, you see, into under-earth. Down to the place I belong. I was looking for my daughter—a whisper said she was here, learning the lessons these ones might teach.’

And I think of the little yellow book, written by some long-dead parson who doubled as the town’s historian. The Erl-King who rules beneath has been sighted in Alder’s Well for many a year. Inhabitants of the town claim to have seen him roaming the woods on moonlit nights, as if seeking someone. Parents are careful to hide their children, and the Erl-King is often used to frighten naughty offspring into doing what they’re bid. My own grand-dam used to threaten us with the words ‘Eat your greens or the Erl-King will find you. And if not him then his daughter who wanders the earth looking for children to pay her fare back home.’ Legend has it he travels by shadow tree.

‘Did you find her? Where is she?’

He nods. ‘She was here then, when I came through. Now, I no longer know. She had—caused me offence long ago, and I’d punished her. But I was tired of my anger and I missed her—and she’d sent me much… tribute. But I did not think that perhaps her anger burned brightly still.’

No one is what they seem at St Dymphna’s. ‘Can’t you leave by this same means?’

He shakes his great head, squeezes his eyes closed. It costs his pride much to tell me this. ‘They tricked me, trapped me. Your Misses pinned me to one of my own shadow trees with mistletoe, pierced me through so my blood ran, then they bound me up with golden bough—my own trees don’t recognise me anymore because I’m corrupted, won’t let me through. My kingdom is closed to me, has been for nigh on fifty years.’

I say nothing. A memory pricks at me; something I’ve read in the Archives… a tale recorded by a Sister Rikke, of the Plague Maiden, Ella, who appeared from an icy lake, then disappeared with all the village children in tow. I wonder… I wonder…

‘They keep me here, bleed me dry for their poison parlour, sell my blood as if it’s some commodity. As if they have a right.’ Rage wells up. ‘Murderous whores they are and would keep a king bound!!’

I know what—who—he thinks he is and yet he has provided no proof, merely given me this book he may well have read himself and taken the myths and legends of the Erl-King and his shadow trees to heart. Perhaps he is a madman and that is all.

As if he divines my thoughts, he looks at me sharply.

‘I may not be all that I was, but there are still creatures that obey my will,’ he says and crouches down, digs his fingers firmly into the earth and begins to hum. Should I take this moment to run? He will know where to find me. He need only bide his time—if I complain to the Misses, he will tell what he knows of me.

So I wait, and in waiting, I am rewarded.

From the forest around us, from behind trees and padding from the undergrowth they come; some russet and sleek, some plump and auburn, some young, some with the silver of age dimming their fur. Their snouts pointed, teeth sharp, ears twitching alert and tails so thick and bushy that my fellow students would kill for a stole made from them. They come, the foxes, creeping towards us like a waiting tribe. The come to him, to Gwern, and rub themselves against his legs, beg for pats from his large calloused hands.

‘Come,’ he says to me, ‘they’ll not hurt you. Feel how soft their fur is.’

Their scent is strong, but they let me pet them, yipping contentedly as if they are dogs—and they are, his dogs. I think of the vision of the crucified man I saw on my first day here, of the halo of ebony hair, of the eyes briefly open and so black in the face so pale. Gwern draws me close, undoes the thick plait of my hair and runs his hands through it. I do not protest.

I am so close to giving up everything I am when I hear voices. Gwern lets me go and I look towards the noise, see Serafine, Adia and Veronica appear, each one trailing a basket part-filled with blackberries, then turn back to find Gwern is gone. The foxes melt quickly away, but I see from the shifting of Serafine’s expression that she saw something.

‘You should brush your hair, Mercia,’ she calls slyly. ‘Oh, I see you already have.’

I walk past them, head down, my heart trying to kick its way out of my chest.

‘I suppose you should have a husband,’ says Serafine in a low voice, ‘but don’t you think the gardener is beneath even you?’

‘I’d thought, Serafine, you’d lost your interest in husbands after Mistress Ballantyne’s instructive though brief visit,’ I retort and can feel the heat of her glare on the back of my neck until I am well away from them.

*

Alys is rolling out pastry for shells and I am adding sugar to the boiling mass of blackberries the others picked, when Fidelma calls from the doorway, ‘Mercia. Follow me.’

She leads me to the library, where Orla waits. They take up the chairs they occupied on the night when their nuncheon with Mistress Ballantyne went so very wrong. Orla gestures for me to take the third armchair—all three have been pushed close together to form an intimate triangle. I do so and watch their hands for a moment: Orla’s curl in her lap, tighter than a new rose; Fidelma’s rest on the armrests, she’s trying hard not to press her fingertips hard into the fabric, but I can see the little dents they make on the padding.

‘It has come to our attention, Mercia,’ begins Fidelma, who stops, purses her lips, begins again. ‘It has come to our attention that you have, perhaps, become embroiled in something… unsavoury.’

And that, that word, makes me laugh with surprise—not simply because it’s ridiculous but because it’s ridiculous from the mouths of these two! The laugh—that’s what saves me. The guilty do not laugh in such a way; the guilty defend themselves roundly, piously, spiritedly.

‘Would you listen to Serafine?’ I ask mildly. ‘You know how she dislikes me.’

The sisters exchange a look then Fidelma lets out a breath and seems to deflate. Orla leans forward and her face is so close to mine that I can smell the odour of her thick make-up, and see the tiny cracks where crows’ feet try to make their imprint at the corners of her particoloured eyes.

‘We know you speak with him, Mercia, we have seen you, but if you swear there is nothing untoward going on we will believe you,’ she says and I doubt it. ‘But be wary.’

‘He has become a friend, it is true,’ I admit, knowing that lies kept closest to the truth have the greatest power. ‘I have found it useful to discuss plants and herbs with him as extra study for poisons class—I speak to Mistress Alys in this wise too, so I will not be lacking if—when—Mother Magnus arrives.’ I drop my voice, as if giving them a secret. ‘And it is often easier to speak with Gwern than with the other students. He does not treat me as though I am less than he is.’

‘Oh, child. Gwern is… in our custody. He mistreated his daughter and as punishment he is indentured to us,’ lies Orla. To tell me this… they cannot know that I know about Gwern’s blood. They cannot know what Mistress Alys has let slip.

‘He’s dangerous, Mercia. His Ella fled and came to us seeking justice,’ says Fidelma urgently. Her fingers drummed on the taut armchair material. Whatever untruths they tell me, I think that this Ella appealed to them because they looked at her and saw themselves so many years before. A girl lost and wandering, misused by her family and the world. Not that they will admit it to me, but the fact she offered them a lifeline—her father’s unique blood—merely sweetened the deal. And, I suspect, this Ella found in the Misses the opportunity for a revenge that had been simmering for many a long year.

‘Promise us you will not have any more to do with him than you must?’ begs Orla and I smile.

‘I understand,’ I say and nod, leaning forward and taking a hand from each and pressing it warmly with my own. I look them straight in the eyes and repeat, ‘I understand. I will be careful with the brute.’

‘Love is a distraction, Mercia; it will divert you from the path of what you truly want. You have a great future—your Guilds will be most pleased when you return to them for they will find you a most-able assassin. And when your indenture to them is done, as one day it shall be, you will find yourself a sought-after freelancer, lovely girl. We will pass work your way if you wish—and we would be honoured if you would join us on occasion, like Mistress Ballantyne does—did.’

The Misses seem overwhelmed with relief and overly generous as a result; the atmosphere has been leeched of its tension and mistrust. They believe me to be ever the compliant, quiet girl.

They cannot know how different I am—not merely from their idea of me, but how different I am to myself. The girl who arrived here, who stole through the night to drink from the alder well, who regularly picked the lock on the library and copied the contents of their most precious possession, the girl who wished most dearly for nothing else in the world but to join the secret sisters. To become one of the wandering scribes who collected strange knowledge, who kept it safe, preserved it, made sure it remained in the world, was not lost nor hidden away. That girl… that girl has not roused herself from bed these past evenings to copy the Compendium. She has not felt the pull and burn of duty, the sharp desire to do what she was sent here to do. That girl has surrendered herself to dreams of a man she at first thought… strange… a man who now occupies her waking and slumbering thoughts.

I wonder that the fire that once burned within me has cooled and I wonder if I am such a fickle creature that I will throw aside a lifetime of devotion for the touch of a man. I know only that the Compendium, that Mater Friðuswith’s approval, that a place among the dusty-heeled wandering scribes are no longer pushing me along the path I was certain I wished to take.

*

‘Here, you do it!’ says Mistress Alys, all exasperation; she’s not annoyed with me, though. Gwern has been dodging her for the past few days. Small wonder: it’s bleeding time again. She pushes the brown case at me and I can hear the glass and metal things inside rattling in protest. ‘Don’t worry about the little bottles, just bring me back one full bell. I’m going in Alder’s Well and I’ll take the Misses Three with me.’

‘But …’ I say, perplexed as to how I might refuse this task of harvesting. She mistakes my hesitation for fright.

‘He’s taken a liking to you, Mercia, don’t you worry. He’ll behave well enough once he sees you. He’s just like a bloody hound, hiding when he’s in trouble.’ Alys pushes me towards the door, making encouraging noises and pouring forth helpful homilies.

Gwern’s cottage is dark and dim inside. Neither foul nor dirty, but mostly unlit to remind him of home, a comfort and an ache at the same time, I think. It is a large open space, with a double bed in one corner covered by a thick eiderdown, a tiny kitchen in another, a wash stand in another and an old, deep armchair and small table in the last. There is neither carpet nor rug, but moss with a thick, springy pile. Plants grow along the skirting boards, and vines climb the walls. Night-flowering blooms, with no daylight to send their senses back to sleep, stay open all the time, bringing colour and a dimly glimmering illumination to the abode.

Gwern sits, unmoving, in the armchair. His eyes rove over me and the case I carry. He shakes his head.

‘I cannot do it anymore.’ He runs shaking hands through his hair, then leans his face into them, speaking to the ground. ‘Every time, I am weaker. Every time it takes me longer to recover. You must help me, Mercia.’

‘What can I do?’

He stands suddenly and pulls his shirt over his head. He turns his back to me and points at the base of his neck, where there is a lump bigger than a vertebrae. I put down the case and step over to him. I run my fingers over the knots, then down his spine, finding more bumps than should be there; my hand trembles to touch him so. I squint in the dim light and examine the line of bone more carefully, fingertips delicately moulding and shaping what lies there, unrelenting and stubbornly… fibrous.

‘It’s mistletoe,’ Gwern says, his voice vibrating. ‘It binds me here. I can’t remove it myself, can’t leave the grounds of the school to seek out a physick, have never trusted any of the little chits who come here to learn the art of slaughter. And dearly though I would love to have killed the Misses, I would still not be free for this thing in me binds me to Alder’s Well.’ He laughs. ‘Until you, little sneak-thief. Take my knife and cut this out of me.’

‘How I can I do that? What if I cripple you?’ I know enough to know that cutting into the body, the spine, with no idea of what to do is not a good thing—that there will be no miraculous regeneration, for mortal magic has its limits.

‘Do not fear. Once it’s gone, what I am will reassert itself. I will heal quickly, little one, in my true shape.’ He turns and smiles; kisses me and when he draws away I find he has pressed his hunting knife into my hand.

‘I will need more light,’ I say, my voice quivering.

He lies, facedown, on the bed, not troubling to put a cloth over the coverlet. I pull on the brown kid gloves from the kit and take up the weapon. The blade is hideously sharp and when I slit him, the skin opens willingly. I cut from the base of the skull down almost to the arse, then tenderly tease his hide back as if flensing him. He lies still, breathing heavily, making tiny hiccups of pain. I take up one of the recently-lit candles and lean over him again and peer closely at what I’ve done.

There it is, green and healthy, throbbing, wrapped around the porcelain column of his spine, as if a snake has entwined itself, embroidered itself, in and out and around, tightly weaving through the white bones. Gwern’s blood seeps sluggishly; I slide the skean through the most exposed piece of mistletoe I can see, careful not to slice through him as well. Dropping the knife, I grasp the free end of the vine, which thrashes about, distressed at being sundered; green sticky fluid coats my gloves as I pull. I cannot say if it comes loose easily or otherwise—I have, truly, nothing with which to compare it—but Gwern howls like a wolf torn asunder, although in between his shouts he exhorts me not to stop, to finish what I’ve started.

And finally it is done. The mistletoe lying in pieces, withering and dying beside us on the bloodstained bed, while I wash Gwern down, then look around for a needle and strand of silk with which to stitch him up. Never mind, he says, and I peer closely at this ruined back once more. Already the skin is beginning to knit itself together; in places there is only a fine raised line, tinged with pink to show where he was cut. He will take nothing for the pain, says he will be well soon enough. He says I should prepare to leave, to pack whatever I cannot live without and meet him at the alder well. He says I must hurry for the doorway will stay open only so long.

I will take my notebook, the quills and inkpots Mater Friðuswith gave me, and the pounce pot Delling and Halle gifted when I entered the Citadel. I lean down, kiss him on his cool cheek, which seems somehow less substantial but is still firm beneath my lips and fingers.

The manor is empty of Alys and the girls and the Misses have locked themselves away in the library to mull over Mother Magnus’s refusal, to work through a list of suitable names that might be invited—begged—to come and teach us poisons. I shall sneak through the kitchen, tiptoe past the library door, snatch up my few possessions and be well on my way before anyone knows I am gone.

All the things I thought I wanted have fallen away. The Compendium, the Citadel, the Murcianii, none of that matters anymore. There is only Gwern, and the ache he causes, and whatever mysteries he might offer me. There is only that.

All well and good, but as I step out from the kitchen passage into the entry hall, I find Orla and Fidelma standing on the landing of the main staircase. They turn and stare at me as if I am at once a ghost, a demon, an enemy. Time slows as they take in the green ichor on my white apron—more than enough to tell a tale—then speeds up again as they begin to scream. They spin and whirl, pulling weapons from the walls and coming towards to me, faces cracked and feral.

‘What have you done?’ screeches the one—Fidelma carries a battleaxe. Orla wields a mace—how interesting to see what is chosen in fear and anger, for slashing and smashing. None of the subtlety we’ve been taught these past months. Not such Quiet Women now. Angry warriors with their blood up.

I turn tail and hare away, back along the passageway, through the kitchen and breaking out into the kitchen garden. I could turn and face them. I still have Gwern’s knife in my pocket, its blade so sharp and shiny, wiped all clean. I could put into practice the fighting skills they’ve taught me these past months. But how many have they put beneath the ground and fed to the worms? I am but a scribe and a thief. And besides: in all they’ve done—to this moment—they’ve been kind, teaching me their art, and I’ve repaid them with deception, no matter what I think of the way they’ve treated Gwern. I would rather flee than hurt them for they have been my friends.

I cross the lawn and launch myself into the woods, ducking around trees, hurdling low bushes and fallen branches, twigs slashing my face. At last, I stumble into the clearing and see the well − and the alder, which is now different in its entirety. The ropes and ribs of mistletoe have withered and shrunk, fallen to the ground, and the tree shines bright as angel wings, its trunk split wide like a dark doorway. And before it stands… before it stands…

Gwern, transformed.

Man-shaped as before, but almost twice as tall as he was. A crown of stripped whistle-wood branches, each finial topped with rich black alder-buckthorn berries, encircles his head. His pitch-hued cloak circles like smoke and his ebony-dark hair moves with a life of its own. His features shift as if made from soot vapour and dust and ash—one moment I recognise him, the next he is a stranger. Then he sees me and smiles, reaching forth a hand tipped with sharp, coal-black nails.

I forget my pursuers. I forget everything. And in the moment where I hesitate to take what Gwern is offering me—what the Erl-King is offering me—in that moment I lose.

I am knocked down by a blow to the back—not weapon-strike, thankfully, but one of the Misses, tackling me, ensuring I don’t have a fast, clean death. That I will be alive while they inflict whatever revenge they choose. I roll over and Fidelma is on me, straddling my waist, hoisting the battleaxe above her head, holding it so the base of the handle will come down on me. I fumble in my pocket, desperate and as she brings her arms down, I jam Gwern’s knife upwards, into her stomach. I am horrified by how easily the flesh parts, sickened by the doing of something that until now has been an academic concern. There is the terror of blood and guts and fear and mortality.

Fidelma’s shock is apparent—has no one ever managed to wound her in all her long years? She falls off me and rolls into a ball. Orla, slower on her feet, shoots out of the trees and makes her way to her sister. The mace and chain swings from one hand as she helps Fidelma to her feet.

I look upwards at the pair of them, past them to the cloudless blue sky.

Fidelma spits her words through blood, ‘Bitch.’

Orla, raises the mace with determination.

I am conscious, so conscious of the feel of the grass beneath me, the twigs poking through the torn fabric of my grey blouse and into the bruised flesh of my back. I turn my head towards the alder tree, to the where the split in the trunk has closed; to the empty spot where Gwern no longer stands. I watch as the trunk seems to turn in on itself, then pulse out, one two three, then in again and out—and out and out and out until finally it explodes in a hail of bright black light, wood, branches and deadly splinters sure as arrows.

When my ears stop ringing and my vision clears I sit up slowly. The clearing is littered with alder and mistletoe shards, all shattered and torn. The well’s roof has been destroyed, the stones have been fractured, some turned into gravel, some blocks fallen into the water. The next Murcianii pilgrim will have difficulty drinking from this source. I look around, searching for Fidelma and Orla.

Oh, Fidelma and Orla.

My heart stops. They have been my teachers, friends, mentors. I came to them with lies and stole from them; they would have killed me, no question, and perhaps I deserved it. They stole from Gwern long before I came, yes, kept him against his will; yet I would not have had them end like this.

Fidelma and Orla are pinned against the trees opposite the ruined alder, impaled like butterflies or bugs in a collection. Look! Their limbs so tidily arranged, arms and legs stretched out, displayed and splayed; heads lolling, lips slack, tongues peeking between carmined lips, eyes rolling slowly, slowly until they come to a complete stop and begin to whiten as true age creeps upon them.

I look back at the broken alder; there is only a smoking stump left to say that once there was a tree, a shadow tree, a doorway for the Erl-King himself.

He is gone, but he saved me. And in saving me, he has lost me. I cannot travel through this gate; it is closed to all who might recognise it.

I will go back to the house.

I will go back to St Dymphna’s and swiftly pack my satchel before Alys finds her poor dead girls. I will take the Compendium from its place in the library—it can be returned to the Citadel now the Meyricks will not pursue it. In the stables I will saddle one of the fine long-necked Arabian mares the Misses keep and be on the road before Alys’s wails reach my ears.

Shadow trees. Surely there are more—there must be more, for how else might the Erl-King travel the land? In the Citadel’s Archives there will be mention of them, surely. There will be tales and hints, if not maps; there will be a trail I can follow. I shall seek and search and I shall find another.

I will find one and let the shadow tree open itself to me. I will venture down to the kingdom of under-earth. I will find him and I will sleep in his arms at last.

The post St. Dymphna’s School For Poison Girls appeared first on Reactor.

Tor.com is honored to reprint “Amicae Aeternum” by Ellen Klages, as featured in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 9—publishing May 12th from Solaris.

It was still dark when Corry woke, no lights on in the neighbors’ houses, just a yellow glow from the streetlight on the other side of the elm. Through her open window, the early summer breeze brushed across her coverlet like silk.

Corry dressed silently, trying not to see the empty walls, the boxes piled in a corner. She pulled on a shirt and shorts, looping the laces of her shoes around her neck and climbed from bed to sill and out the window with only a whisper of fabric against the worn wood. Then she was outside.

The grass was chill and damp beneath her bare feet. She let them rest on it for a minute, the freshly-mowed blades tickling her toes, her heels sinking into the springy-sponginess of the dirt. She breathed deep, to catch it all—the cool and the green and the stillness—holding it in for as long as she could before slipping on her shoes.

A morning to remember. Every little detail.

She walked across the lawn, stepping over the ridge of clippings along the verge, onto the sidewalk. Theirs was a corner lot. In a minute, she would be out of sight. For once, she was up before her practical, morning-people parents. The engineer and the physicist did not believe in sleeping in, but Corry could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in her eleven years that she had seen the dawn.

No one else was on the street. It felt solemn and private, as if she had stepped out of time, so quiet she could hear the wind ruffle the wide canopy of trees, an owl hooting from somewhere behind her, the diesel chug of the all-night bus two blocks away. She crossed Branson St. and turned down the alley that ran behind the houses.

A dandelion’s spiky leaves pushed through a crack in the cement. Corry squatted, touching it with a finger, tracing the jagged outline, memorizing its contours. A weed. No one planted it or planned it. She smiled and stood up, her hand against a wooden fence, feeling the grain beneath her palm, the crackling web of old paint, and continued on. The alley stretched ahead for several blocks, the pavement a narrowing pale V.

She paused a minute later to watch a cat prowl stealthily along the base of another fence, hunting or slinking home. It looked up, saw her, and sped into a purposeful thousand-leg trot before disappearing into a yard. She thought of her own cat, Mr. Bumble, who now belonged to a neighbor, and wiped at the edge of her eye. She distracted herself by peering into backyards at random bits of other people’s lives—lawn chairs, an overturned tricycle, a metal barbecue grill, its lid open.

Barbecue. She hadn’t thought to add that to her list. She’d like to have one more whiff of charcoal, lit with lighter fluid, smoking and wafting across the yards, smelling like summer. Too late now. No one barbecued their breakfast.

She walked on, past Remington Rd. She brushed her fingers over a rosebush—velvet petals, leathery leaves; pressed a hand against the oft-stapled roughness of a telephone pole, fringed with remnants of garage-sale flyers; stood on tiptoe to trace the red octagon of a stop sign. She stepped from sidewalk to grass to asphalt and back, tasting the textures with her feet, noting the cracks and holes and bumps, the faded paint on the curb near a fire hydrant.

“Fire hydrant,” she said softly, checking it off in her mind. “Rain gutter. Lawn mower. Mailbox.”

The sky was just beginning to purple in the east when she reached Anna’s back gate. She knew it as well as her own. They’d been best friends since first grade, had been in and out of each other’s houses practically every day. Corry tapped on the frame of the porch’s screen door with one knuckle.

A moment later, Anna came out. “Hi, Spunk,” she whispered.

“Hi, Spork,” Corry answered. She waited while Anna eased the door closed so it wouldn’t bang, sat on the steps, put on her shoes.

Their bikes leaned against the side of the garage. Corry had told her mom that she had given her bike to Anna’s sister Pat. And she would, in an hour or two. So it hadn’t really been a lie, just the wrong tense.

They walked their bikes through the gate. In the alley, Corry threw a leg over and settled onto the vinyl seat, its shape molded to hers over the years. Her bike. Her steed. Her hands fit themselves around the rubber grips of the handlebars and she pushed off with one foot. Anna was a few feet behind, then beside her. They rode abreast down to the mouth of the alley and away.

The slight grade of Thompson St. was perfect for coasting, the wind on their faces, blowing Corry’s short dark hair off her forehead, rippling Anna’s ponytail. At the bottom of the hill, Corry stood tall on her pedals, pumping hard, the muscles in her calves a good ache as the chain rattled and whirred as fast and constant as a train.

“Trains!” she yelled into the wind. Another item from her list.

“Train whistles!” Anna yelled back.

They leaned into a curve. Corry felt gravity pull at her, pumped harder, in control. They turned a corner and a moment later, Anna said, “Look.”

Corry slowed, looked up, then braked to a stop. The crescent moon hung above a gap in the trees, a thin sliver of blue-white light.

Anna began the lullaby her mother used to sing when Corry first slept over. On the second line, Corry joined in.

I see the moon, and the moon sees me.

The moon sees somebody I want to see.

The sound of their voices was liquid in the stillness, sweet and smooth. Anna reached out and held Corry’s hand across the space between their bikes.

God bless the moon, and God bless me,

And God bless the somebody I want to see.

They stood for a minute, feet on the ground, still holding hands. Corry gave a squeeze and let go. “Thanks,” she said.

“Any time,” said Anna, and bit her lip.

“I know,” Corry said. Because it wouldn’t be. She pointed. The sky was lighter now, palest blue at the end of the street shading to indigo directly above. “Let’s get to the park before the sun comes up.”

No traffic, no cars. It felt like they were the only people in the world. They headed east, riding down the middle of the street, chasing the shadows of their bikes from streetlight to streetlight, never quite catching them. The houses on both sides were dark, only one light in a kitchen window making a yellow rectangle on a driveway. As they passed it, they smelled bacon frying, heard a fragment of music.

The light at 38th St. was red. They stopped, toes on the ground, waiting. A raccoon scuttled from under a hedge, hump-backed and quick, disappearing behind a parked car. In the hush, Corry heard the metallic tick from the light box before she saw it change from red to green.

Three blocks up Ralston Hill. The sky looked magic now, the edges wiped with pastels, peach and lavender and a blush of orange. Corry pedaled as hard as she could, felt her breath ragged in her throat, a trickle of sweat between her shoulder blades. Under the arched entrance to the park, into the broad, grassy picnic area that sloped down to the creek.

They abandoned their bikes to the grass, and walked to a low stone wall. Corry sat, cross-legged, her best friend beside her, and waited for the sun to rise for the last time.

She knew it didn’t actually rise, that it wasn’t moving. They were, rotating a quarter mile every second, coming all the way around once every twenty-four hours, exposing themselves once again to the star they called the sun, and naming that moment morning. But it was the last time she’d get to watch.

“There it is,” Anna said. Golden light pierced the spaces between the trunks of the trees, casting long thin shadows across the grass. They leaned against each other and watched as the sky brightened to its familiar blue, and color returned: green leaves, pink bicycles, yellow shorts. Behind them lights began to come on in houses and a dog barked.

By the time the sun touched the tops of the distant trees, the backs of their legs were pebbled with the pattern of the wall, and it was daytime.

Corry sat, listening to the world waking up and going about its ordinary business: cars starting, birds chirping, a mother calling out, “Jimmy! Breakfast!” She felt as if her whole body was aware, making all of this a part of her.

Over by the playground, geese waddled on the grass, pecking for bugs. One goose climbed onto the end of the teeter-totter and sat, as if waiting for a playmate. Corry laughed out loud. She would never have thought to put that on her list. “What’s next?” Anna asked.

“The creek, before anyone else is there.”

They walked single file down the steep railroad-tie steps, flanked by tall oaks and thick undergrowth dotted with wildflowers. “Wild,” Corry said softly.

When they reached the bank they took off their shoes and climbed over boulders until they were surrounded by rushing water. The air smelled fresh, full of minerals, the sound of the water both constant and never-the-same as it poured over rocks and rills, eddied around logs.

They sat down on the biggest, flattest rock and eased their bare feet into the creek, watching goosebumps rise up their legs. Corry felt the current swirl around her. She watched the speckles of light dance on the water, the darkness under the bank, ten thousand shades of green and brown everywhere she looked. Sun on her face, wind in her hair, water at her feet, rock beneath her.

“How much of your list did you get to do?” asked Anna.

“A lot of it. It kept getting longer. I’d check one thing off, and it’d remind me of something else. I got to most of the everyday ones, ’cause I could walk, or ride my bike. Mom was too busy packing and giving stuff away and checking off her own lists to take me to the aquarium, or to the zoo, so I didn’t see the jellies or the elephants and the bears.”

Anna nodded. “My mom was like that too, when we were moving here from Indianapolis.”

“At least you knew where you were going. We’re heading off into the great unknown, my dad says. Boldly going where nobody’s gone before.”

“Like that old TV show.”

“Yeah, except we’re not going to get anywhere. At least not me, or my mom or my dad. The Goddard is a generation ship. The planet it’s heading for is five light years away, and even with solar sails and stuff, the trip’s going to take a couple hundred years.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It won’t land until my great-great—I don’t know, add about five more greats to that—grandchildren are around. I’ll be old—like thirty—before we even get out of the solar system. Dad keeps saying that it’s the adventure of a lifetime, and we’re achieving humankind’s greatest dream, and blah, blah, blah. But it’s his dream.” She picked at a piece of lichen on the rock.

“Does your mom want to go?”

“Uh-huh. She’s all excited about the experiments she can do in zero-g. She says it’s an honor that we were chosen and I should be proud to be a pioneer.”

“Will you be in history books?”

Corry shrugged. “Maybe. There are around four thousand people going, from all over the world, so I’d be in tiny, tiny print. But maybe.”

“Four thousand?” Anna whistled. “How big a rocket is it?”

“Big. Bigger than big.” Corry pulled her feet up, hugging her arms around her knees. “Remember that humongous cruise ship we saw when we went to Miami?”

“Sure. It looked like a skyscraper, lying on its side.”

“That’s what this ship is like, only bigger. And rounder. My mom keeps saying it’ll be just like a cruise—any food anytime I want, games to play, all the movies and books and music ever made—after school, of course. Except people on cruise ships stop at ports and get off and explore. Once we board tonight, we’re never getting off. I’m going to spend the rest of my whole entire life in a big tin can.”

“That sucks.”

“Tell me about it.” Corry reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper, scribbles covering both sides. She smoothed it out on her knee. “I’ve got another list.” She cleared her throat and began to read:

Twenty Reasons Why Being on a Generation Ship Sucks,

by Corrine Garcia-Kelly

1. I will never go away to college.
2. I will never see blue sky again, except in pictures.
3. There will never be a new kid in my class.
4. I will never meet anyone my parents don’t already know.
5. I will never have anything new that isn’t man human-made. Manufactured or processed or grown in a lab.
6. Once I get my ID chip, my parents will always know exactly where I am.
7. I will never get to drive my Aunt Frieda’s convertible, even though she promised I could when I turned sixteen.
8. I will never see the ocean again.
9. I will never go to Paris.
10. I will never meet a tall, dark stranger, dangerous or not.
11. I will never move away from home.
12. I will never get to make the rules for my own life.
13. I will never ride my bike to a new neighborhood and find a store I haven’t seen before.
14. I will never ride my bikeagain.
15. I will never go outsideagain.
16. I will never take a walk to anywhere that isn’t planned and mapped and numbered.
17. I will never see another thunderstorm. Or lightning bugs. Or fireworks.
18. I will never buy an old house and fix it up.
19. I will never eat another Whopper.
20. I will never go to the state fair and win a stuffed animal.

She stopped. “I was getting kind of sleepy toward the end.”

“I could tell.” Anna slipped her arm around Corry’s waist. “What will you miss most?”

“You.” Corry pulled Anna closer.

“Me, too.” Anna settled her head on her friend’s shoulder. “I can’t believe I’ll never see you again.”

“I know.” Corry sighed. “I like Earth. I like that there are parts that no one made, and that there are always surprises.” She shifted her arm a little. “Maybe I don’t want to be a pioneer. I mean, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. Mom’s always said I could be anything I wanted to be, but now? The Peace Corps is out. So is being a coal miner or a deep-sea diver or a park ranger. Or an antique dealer.”

“You like old things.”

“I do. They’re from the past, so everything has a story.”

“I thought so.” Anna reached into her pocket with her free hand. “I used the metals kit from my dad’s printer, and made you something.” She pulled out a tissue paper-wrapped lump and put it in Corry’s lap.

Corry tore off the paper. Inside was a silver disk, about five centimeters across. In raised letters around the edge it said SPUNK-CORRY-ANNA-SPORK-2065. Etched in the center was a photo of the two of them, arm in arm, wearing tall pointed hats with stars, taken at Anna’s last birthday party. Corry turned it over. The back said: Optimae amicae aeternum. “What does that mean?”

“‘Best friends forever.’ At least that’s what Translator said.”

“It’s great. Thanks. I’ll keep it with me, all the time.”

“You’d better. It’s an artifact.”

“It is really nice.”

“I’m serious. Isn’t your space ship going off to another planet with a whole library of Earth’s art and culture and all?”

“Yeah…?”

“But by the time it lands, that’ll be ancient history and tales. No one alive will ever have been on Earth, right?”

“Yeah…”

“So your mission—if you choose to accept it—is to preserve this artifact from your home planet.” Anna shrugged. “It isn’t old now, but it will be. You can tell your kids stories about it—about us. It’ll be an heirloom. Then they’ll tell their kids, and—”

“—and their kids, and on down for umpity generations.” Corry nodded, turning the disc over in her hands. “By then it’ll be a relic. There’ll be legends about it.” She rolled it across her palm, silver winking in the sun “How’d you think of that?”

“Well, you said you’re only allowed to take ten kilos of personal stuff with you, and that’s all you’ll ever have from Earth. Which is why you made your list and have been going around saying goodbye to squirrels and stop signs and Snickers bars and all.”

“Ten kilos isn’t much. My mom said the ship is so well-stocked I won’t need much, but it’s hard. I had to pick between my bear and my jewelry box.”

“I know. And in twenty years, I’ll probably have a house full of clothes and furniture and junk. But the thing is, when I’m old and I die, my kids’ll get rid of most of it, like we did with my Gramma. Maybe they’ll keep some pictures. But then their kids will do the same thing. So in a couple hundred years, there won’t be any trace of me here—”

“—but you’ll be part of the legend.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then. I accept the mission.” Corry turned and kissed Anna on the cheek.

“You’ll take us to the stars?”

“You bet.” She slipped the disc into her pocket. “It’s getting late.”

She stood up and reached to help Anna to her feet. “C’mon. Let’s ride.”

“Amicae Aeternum” copyright © Ellen Klages, 2014

Ellen Klages is the author of two acclaimed YA historical novels: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Lopez Award; and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book Awards. Her story, “Caligo Lane,” also appears in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine.

The post Amicae Aeternum appeared first on Reactor.

Tor.com is honored to reprint “Scarecrow,” a horror short story by Alyssa Wong. Originally published in Black Static 42 (September 2014), “Scarecrow” has never before been available to read online. Please enjoy this horrific tale of tragic love and corvid loss. This story contains scenes that some readers may find upsetting.

On the morning of his funeral, you wake screaming from nightmares of Jonathan Chin, your mouth crammed full of feathers. A craving for sky sKY SKY electrifies you from pounding heart to fingertips. Your hands are empty and twisted like claws, the body of a ghost boy slipping from your grasp.

You see him as clearly as if he’d been cut from your mind and pasted on the walls in front of you. Jonathan Chin is a fixture in your room, etched into every shadow. Jonathan Chin is in your mouth, your belly.

You choke, stomach heaving, and vomit all over yourself. Blobs of sticky, tarry feathers, the drier bits slicked with a green sheen, spatter your lap and sheets.

Eli, Eli. Your name is a tender caress, mapping your spine with phantom fingers.

You have to get out.

You tear away your blankets and stumble from bed, feathers spilling out onto the floor. Under your pajama top, a budding itch crawls beneath your skin. As you shove the window open, the sweltering night air sweeps in, clinging like a second skin and reeking of magnolias. You haul yourself out the window and onto the roof.

The climb is steep, made harder by the rictus your fingers have locked themselves into over the past three days. You dig your hardening fingertips into the cracks between tiles. The shingles’ edges scrape against your bare feet.

Eli, the dead boy breathes in your ear, but when your head snaps back, he’s nowhere to be found. A laugh hacks its way out of your throat as a sob.

By the time you scrabble to the flat top of the roof, your hands are lanced with needles. You lie down on the flattest part of the roof, tiles digging into your back, arms spread. It’s not comfortable, but you will not sleep again tonight. The dreams of falling, trapped in someone else’s skin and terror, won’t let you.

“Goddammit,” you croak. If your mom heard you, she’d wash your mouth out with soap for blaspheming, never mind your seventeen years of age and your foot and a half of height on her. But she’s sound asleep and won’t be up until five in the morning. She’d been talking last night about leaving early to get lilies for the funeral. “Goddammit! Leave me alone!”

Eli, repeats Jon.

“Go away.” You’re afraid of what you’ll see if you close your eyes. “Please, go away.”

He doesn’t, of course. For the rest of the night, you wait for the sky to brighten, punching your arm to keep from falling asleep and rolling over the edge, and try to ignore the ghost of the pastor’s son muttering in your head.

Long, plastic tables line the lawn outside the church, covered in jugs of sweet tea and an army of home-cooked dishes. A handful of women, fanning themselves with paper bulletins in the July heat, hover around the food to keep the flies away. Each is dressed for the funeral in head-to-toe black, including large, netted Sunday hats.

You trudge past them in your own ill-fitting suit, your father’s old shoes pinching your feet with every step. They would have felt fine on you three days ago. It’s the recent transformations your body has undergone—the sloping curve of your spine, bringing your shoulders forward and making it harder to stand up straight; the gnarling of your hands and feet; the tiny, sharp quills budding all over your skin—that have the suit’s material stretching in some places and sagging in others.

The scent of pulled pork and heating barbecues nauseates you. You haven’t been able to keep food down for the past three days.

A greeter—someone’s kid, too young for you to remember her name—presses a folded leaflet into your hand at the door. “Thanks,” you mutter. There’s a printed lily on the front cover, along with the words MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR JONATHAN CHIN, SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2014.

Inside, the pews are packed with farmers in old suits and their sullen wives. New Hope Baptist Church isn’t big, but the whole town has turned up for the pastor’s son’s funeral. Especially since it was a suicide, how deliciously terrible. A life-sized bronze Jesus, pinned to a cross at the prow of the church, presides over the congregation like a suffering, glowering figurehead. Wreaths of white blossoms festoon the walls, washed in multicolored light from the stained glass windows. A large, hideous arrangement of roses, lilies, and chrysanthemums bound together to form a cross stands at the front of the church, right before the altar and casket.

Jon would have hated it. At the very least, he’d have laughed. That’s my dad, always putting God ahead of me.

Your parents are already there, packed in near the front. It’s the first time in recent memory they’ve stood so close to each other, almost like a unit entire. As you shuffle into their pew, you catch a glimpse of Jon’s parents. Pastor Chin stands a few pews from the first row, next to his sobbing wife. When he turns to comfort her, pressing a tender kiss to her forehead, his eyes are dry and swollen.

“Posture, Eli,” your mother murmurs as you settle in next to her, keeping your head down. She stares straight ahead as the choir filters in. They’re throwing nervous glances at the casket in front. “We should have gotten you a haircut, you’re getting shaggy.”

You catch a glimpse of Randy’s red hair through the crowd. Your friends are up front, crammed in tight among a flock of grandmas; Brett rises above the cloud of white hair and elaborate hats like an awkward skyscraper, and Michael is lost somewhere below. You duck your head as if praying, your stomach churning. If you’re lucky, they haven’t spotted you.

As the choir begins a quavering rendition of Be Thou My Vision, you jam your hands into your pockets, too ashamed to sing along. It’s probably your imagination, but you feel like the bronze Jesus won’t stop staring at you.

That’s when you see him standing in the pews behind his parents, swaying in time to the music with his eyes closed. He’s dressed in the same dark jeans and old black hoodie he used to wear every day to school, his clothes hanging off of his skinny, lanky body. His glasses are shattered. Purple bruises mark his skin, from the ring of finger-shaped stains around his neck to the swollen cheek and eye on the left side of his face. His lips are split down the middle, caked with a thin line of dried blood. His hair is incongruously perfect.

As if he can feel you staring, Jonathan Chin glances back at you, dark eyes flickering with amusement, and mouths words that you hear in your head even across the church.

Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

Your budding feathers bristle, standing on end. You shrink back.

Why have you abandoned me?

“Pay attention,” your mom snaps quietly, elbowing you. The choir moves on to Abide With Me, stumbling over the key change. The organist plows on gamely.

“But Jon’s right there,” you stammer.

For a moment she softens. “Maybe an open-casket funeral wasn’t a good choice.” She squeezes your shoulder. “You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

She thinks you’re talking about the corpse lying in his coffin, not the one grinning at you across the church, his eyes agleam with cruel amusement. Jon crooks his fingers in a sardonic wave, and the music is swallowed by overwhelming shrieking coming from outside the church.

The choir halts, the organ stuttering. Pastor Chin whips around, staring straight through his son as his eyes dart to the sanctuary doors. The windows go dark as large, feathered bodies pelt past, beating their wings against the colored glass. You gasp, your own blood singing with that nighttime craving for open air. Your feathers prickle, pushing further out of your skin. Is the twist in your stomach revulsion or ecstasy? You want to fly. You need to fly, to soar, to peck and tear and shred—

You’re pushing through the crowd, heading for the back of the building. There’s a stairwell there; you need to be up in the air, feeling the wind under you, wiping you clean from all of the disgusting humanity tying you to earth. As if taking your cue, the rest of the congregation stampedes toward the exits in a flurry of hats and panicked people.

Someone opens the door, and a horde of huge, filthy crows explodes into the church. They bang, screaming, into the walls and windows, knocking down the flower arrangements and shitting wildly over everything. Your Sunday School teacher faints and disappears beneath the trampling mass of escaping parishioners.

Someone grabs your arm and you snarl at them without thinking, yanking your limb back. “You’re not getting away that easy,” growls Randy. He’s clawed his way to you, a poisonous look on his face. “We’ve been calling you nonstop since Friday. Why the hell have you been blowing us off these past few days?”

The call of the sky crackles in your veins and you almost bite him. “Why do you think, asshole?”

Dark, violent rage flashes across his face, but Brett and Michael are suddenly there, filtering out of the crowd. “Not now, you guys,” Brett snaps. He focuses on you. He’s gotten paler, lost weight. “We need to talk. All of us.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” your traitor mouth says.

“Someone’s brave today,” sneers Randy. “I liked you better as a fucking coward.”

He’s standing between you and the door, you and the outside—you lunge at him, but Brett grabs you and holds you back. “Calm the fuck down, Eli!”

“Get out of my way!” you shout.

Michael steps in front of you and silently lifts up the edge of his own shirt. The words dry up in your mouth. His stomach is covered in ugly red lines and a darkened rash of budding feathers.

“It’s happening to all of us,” Brett yells, barely audible over the howling crowd. “So you can come and help us sort this shit out, see if we can stop it, or you can keep turning into a fucking bird alone.” He lets go of you. “Your choice. If you’re in, we’re going to Elmo’s Diner in my pickup. If not, you’re on your own.”

You glare at Randy and shove past him to the door. Behind you, Jesus’ face and body are streaked with a patina of crow shit. “I’m in.” You have been from the very start; there’s no turning back now.

Outside, the sky boils with screaming crows, blotting out the clouds, the magnolias. People stream down the front steps, past the picnic tables set up on the lawn. The food is ruined; crows are in the casseroles, gorging themselves on pork belly, tearing through the food and soiling the linens. Discarded programs are strewn like flower petals all over the grass, trampled into the dirt.

Elmo’s Diner is all warm yellow tiles and children’s colored-in menus, but the cheery atmosphere doesn’t make you feel safe.

“I’ve been having nightmares since Friday,” Brett says hoarsely. The four of you are sitting in a booth by the window, keeping an eye on the sullen sky. So far, no birds in sight. “I keep dreaming I’m being buried alive in crows. Just—just suffocating under all the feathers and scratching feet, tearing my lips to pieces. This stinking mass of crows.”

“Do you dream about him?” You fiddle with your straw wrapper. “About Jon visiting you at night?”

“God, no, why would I dream about that?” But his face grays.

“Guilt,” Michael mutters. It’s the first thing he’s said today. He’s always been a quiet, intense kid, even in kindergarten, but never this silent. “Residual guilt.”

You glance around at your three closest friends. Each has told a similar story to yours, displaying the same pinfeathers and body distortion as you. Each has been plagued with nightmares involving crows and falling.

“So what the hell do we do?” Randy slams his hand down on the table, rattling the napkin-holder, but he can’t hide his trembling. “Is this one of those freak diseases, like the one where people turn into trees or rocks or shit?”

“Maybe it’s God,” whispers Michael. “Maybe he’s punishing us for what happened to Jon.”

“Bullshit. Jon didn’t even believe in God.”

“What, you think Jon cursed us or something?” Brett demands.

“No,” Michael retorts. “I think God cursed us.” He’s pale, the dark, sleepless circles around his eyes pressed into his skin. “It’s been known to happen. And Jon was the pastor’s son.”

“Randy’s the one who beat the shit out of him,” you say.

“Yeah, but you pushed him off the roof,” Brett says. “What do you think’s gonna happen to you?”

The straw wrapper crumples in your hands. “That was an accident,” you mutter weakly. “I didn’t mean to do it.” You were just gonna scare him. That was all.

“We all know you were sweet on him,” Randy sneers. “Was it nice to finally get your hands on his candy ass?”

Fury flares hot and white across your vision and you swing at him across the table, clipping his jaw. He snarls and lunges for you, but there’s a loud thunk against the window and you both turn.

A single crow has landed on the sill, beady eyes gleaming. It’s small, barely a fledgling. It doesn’t seem afraid of you, despite how close you all are through the eighth-inch of glass.

Suddenly, it slams its head into the window. Michael shrieks. You recoil, the ghost of your face transposed over the network of blood where the bird keeps hammering against the glass. Its beak splinters, but it doesn’t stop, pounding its skull into the window until it’s a bloody pulp.

“Fuck,” Randy moans, the last of his tough façade melting away. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“It can’t get us in here,” Brett says, trying to reassure you, but his voice is shaking. “It’s going to be okay. It can’t get us.” He glances at you, but you’re watching the crow ram its ruined head into the glass over, and over, and over, until the pulp of its eyes are smears on the window. You think you can hear Jon laughing.

That night you can’t breathe. You dream that you are drowning in your own flesh, becoming smaller and smaller until you are a tiny bird, struggling under the weight of thick, melting folds of a human body.

When you wake, it is raining outside. Jon is sitting on your chest, bruises feathering across his face in the mottled light. “Hello, Eli my love,” he says. “Miss me?”

You wrap your arms around him and pull him toward you. Your world is hazy and disorienting; you need something, someone familiar to anchor you.

He leans down and kisses you, sweet and gentle, slipping his hands up your shirt. Your tongue slides over his split lip, and the sudden tang of iron—of blood—jolts you back into reality. His lips are soft, but his mouth isn’t warm any more. His chest doesn’t rise and fall against yours; it doesn’t move at all. You are kissing a dead boy.

You shove him off of you. “Don’t touch me,” you slur. Your tongue is thick with sleep, growing to a crow’s hard point. “Get away from me, you freak.”

He tips back, laughing, in a fall of black feathers. There’s an alien coldness in his voice, the dark tinge of contempt. “Gee, Eli. A guy dies and his boyfriend—” your stomach twists “—just up and forgets about him—”

“I’m not your boyfriend,” you say, words falling from your lips as heavy as stones. “I never wanted you.”

“You made that very clear to your friends on Friday afternoon.” His smile is a razor’s edge. “You’re a shit liar, Eli. Kissing me two weeks ago was the second biggest mistake of your life, right after pushing me off the roof.”

You were the one who kissed him that first day, up against the chain link fence on the roof of the school. He was talking about something—biology? theology? you can’t remember—and you pressed him back, and he dropped his books, and you covered his mouth with yours to shut him up.

“You were asking for it,” you say weakly, and he barks out a laugh.

“Bullshit. You kissed me because you wanted me.” He grinds down on you, and to your shame, your erection presses painfully against his jeans. “And you still want me, don’t you?”

“Stop,” you moan. This has to be a dream. His fingers brush you through your pajama pants, teasing you with touches too light. You arch under him.

“Do you want me to?” he whispers, biting down on your earlobe. You can hear feathers rustling.

If you could stay locked in this dream forever, with this ghost boy in your arms, you would. “Don’t you fucking dare,” you say, and he rewards you with a squeeze down low. He begins to pump his hand up and down, running his thumb over your tip. A spike of pleasure chased by immediate shame threatens to turn your limbs to jelly, and you moan again. Every feather on your body prickles.

His hand works you over and the kisses he peppers down your neck and chest feel like tiny fireballs, feeding your guilt. But they can’t sear your conscience clean.

“I came here to give you something,” he breathes in your ear, sliding his hands up your body, and you don’t think to resist until he presses his thumbs into your eyes.

You jolt awake, screaming into the darkness. There is only darkness now, no stars outside your window, not even the glowing blue window of your cellphone screen. Your eyes are open, but there’s nowhere left to hide from the nightmares.

You’ve gone blind.

Your cellphone’s harsh buzz cuts through the crows howling in your head. They have started speaking in tongues, in fiery words you don’t understand. You fumble across your dresser, claws scratching the wood. Your hands are hardening, growing thin and scaled. You’ve lost so much weight, you feel like you could float away at any moment. Somehow, you find and press the call button.

“Randy fell down the stairs last night,” Michael says tonelessly. “He broke every bone in his body. Every finger. He even broke his fucking toes.”

You don’t say anything. All of your words are gone, evaporated dream by dream. Your father has barricaded your bedroom door shut and hidden himself away in his study, combing the internet for a cure, a clue, anything; your mom’s constant sobbing is the only human noise your household has heard over the past week.

Your harsh breathing echoes through the cellphone’s mouthpiece, whistling from your elongating beak.

“His mom called me from the hospital,” Michael says. “Brett’s there, too. All of his teeth are falling out.” A sob crackles through the phone. “Oh God, I think we’re gonna die. Everything hurts. My face is bulging, all my bones are stretching—”

He screams then, and a sharp crack! snaps across the receiver. The crows are no longer in your ears; they are on the other end of the line, with Michael, whose cellphone has hit the ground.

You listen until the screams die away. Then you end the call.

You’re pretty sure you know what you need to do.

You open the window and wait, arms extended. When the wings come rushing in, air battering your face, you don’t move. You don’t scream. You don’t fight. “Take me to him,” you croak, using the last of the words left in you.

The crows cackle, whirling about you. They buoy you up, and the loss of the ground beneath your feet is at once terrifying and exhilarating. You are almost flying. Almost, as the wind threatens to tear you to pieces.

Too soon, your feet touch earth again. You stumble and almost fall; your feet are too gnarled to stand on. Your hand-claws catch on an iron bar and feel their way up its slope.

You’re at the base of a fire escape. You recognize the scent of roses, lilies, chrysanthemums, now heavy with decay. The church. You wonder if Jon’s casket is still around, if it’s empty, if it’s ever been full at all.

The grating scratches underfoot as you haul yourself upward, arms flapping ineffectually. It’s hard to balance on the metal stairs, but you soldier on, even when you slip and crack your beak against the railing. Bright explosions of pain blossom in your head, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters now is the climb to sky sKY SKY. You have to get to the roof.

You scrabble onto the shingles, scraping lines into the tiles. Crows wheel above you, their cacophony almost drowning out your friends’ sobs and curses. Though you can’t see them, you can feel them. Brett is screaming. Michael is praying aloud, words mangled by the shape of his own changing face. Randy’s ragged breathing and the squeak of a wheelchair are the only way you know he’s there. But of course he’s here; you all have to be present for the finale.

“Jon,” you try to say, but your beak clacks dumbly. No words. You think it instead, like a prayer. Jon. Jon. Jon.

If you had your words back, you would tell him how sorry you are—for hurting him, for pushing him from the roof. For being too weak to stand up for yourself, and for him. Maybe you would tell him that you loved him. Maybe you would stop lying.

You don’t need convincing, not like your friends do. When the crows rush downward in a tornado of beaks and wings, you are ready. Bunching up your legs, you leap from the edge of the roof. Jon is waiting for you, waiting in the open air.

There is a breath, an intake of pure, cathartic bliss, and you wonder what sound you will make when you hit the ground because you cannot fly.

That’s when you feel a pair of arms wrap around you from behind, wiry and strong. A mouth brushes your ear, whisper reverberating through the flock.

The crows shriek around you, the sheer mass of them crushing you. The noise of them almost swallows up your friends’ screams, the desperate scrabble of claws on tile as they fall, the splintering of Randy’s wheelchair on the pavement below.

You hover in the air, held tight to the chest of a dead boy. You grip back, claws digging into his dead skin-not-skin. After an eternity, you drift back to the roof, and when your feet touch the tiles, they are human feet. Your spine has straightened, bones no longer hollow. You feel a pair of lips touch your eyelids, one at a time, and when you open them again, there is the ghost with black hair standing in front of you, wearing the same black hoodie and dark jeans as he was when he died.

I loved you, you know, says Jonathan Chin. He’s radiant in the light of early dawn, his bruised face streaked with tears, an angel, a corpse. You fucker. I loved you so much. You sob and reach out for him, but he dissolves into a shower of black feathers that burn where they touch your skin.

You scream and scream and scream, clutching fistfuls of them in your ruined human hands. On the ground, the crows begin to feed in a mass flurry of rippling wings, ignoring the creaking of a lone, spinning wheel. “I loved you, too,” you cry. Finally, everything out in the open. But your friends make no sound at all.

“Scarecrow” copyright © 2014 by Alyssa Wong

The post Scarecrow appeared first on Reactor.

Edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios, Kaleidoscope collects fun, edgy, meditative, and hopeful YA science fiction and fantasy with diverse leads. The anthology features twenty original stories focusing on scary futures, magical adventures, and the joys and heartbreaks of teenage life.

Ken Liu’s “Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon,” tells the story of Jing and Yuan, a pair of young women in love for the first time in their lives, who’re about to be parted by circumstances beyond their control. On Qixi, the Festival of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl, the legendary lovers give the young women some help and advice.

“Tell me a story,” said Se. She had changed into her pajamas all by herself and snuggled under the blankets.

Se’s big sister, Yuan, was just about to flip the switch next to the bedroom door. “How about you read a story by yourself? I have to … go see a friend.”

“No, it’s not the same.” Se shook her head vigorously. “You have to tell me a story or I can’t sleep.”

Yuan glanced at her phone. Every minute tonight was precious. Dad was out of town on business, and Mom was working late and wouldn’t be home till midnight. Yuan needed to be home before then, but if she could get her little sister to sleep quickly, she’d still have a couple of hours to see Jing on this, her last night in China.

“Come on, Yuan,” Se begged. “Please!”

Yuan came back to the side of the bed and stroked Se’s forehead gently. She sighed. “All right.”

She texted Jing: Late by half hour. Wait?

The crystal cat charm, a gift from Jing, dangled from her phone. It twirled and glittered in the warm bedroom light as she waited impatiently for the response.

Finally, the phone beeped. Of course. Won’t leave until we meet.

“Tell the story about the Qixi Festival,” said Se, yawning. “That’s tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

Long ago, a beautiful young woman, the granddaughter of the Emperor of Heaven, lived in the sky by the eastern shore of the Silver River—that’s the broad band of light you can sometimes see in the sky at night, when the air is clear.

She was skilled at the loom, and so that’s why people called her—

“You skipped the part where you describe her weaving!”

“But you’ve heard this story a hundred times already. Can’t I just get it over with?”

“You have to tell it right.”

—as I had apparently neglected to mention: her works were displayed proudly by the Heavenly Court in the western sky at every sunset: glorious clouds of crimson, amethyst, periwinkle, and every shade in between. So people called her Zhinü, the Weaver Girl. And though she was the youngest of seven immortal sisters, we mortals addressed her by the honorific Big Sister Seven.

But over time, Zhinü grew wan and thin. Her brows were always tightly knit into a frown, and she did not wash her face or comb out her hair. The sunset clouds she wove were not as lovely as before, and mortals began to complain.

The Emperor of Heaven came to visit. “What ails you, my granddaughter?”

“Haha, you do that voice so well. You sound just like Grandfather.”

“I’m glad you approve. Now stop interrupting.”

“Oh, Gonggong, I’m so lonely. Living all by myself in this hut, my only company are my loom—jiya, jiya, it squeaks all day long—and a few magpies.”

The Emperor took pity on her and found her a good match. The young man tended to cows on the western shore of the Silver River, so people called him Niulang, the Cowherd. He was handsome and kind and full of funny stories, and Zhinü loved him, and he her, the moment they set eyes on each other.

“See, I’m not such a bad matchmaker.” The Emperor of Heaven smiled as he stroked his beard. “Now, I know you’re young, and you should have fun. But now that you have a companion, please don’t neglect your work.”

Zhinü moved to the western shore of the Silver River to be with Niulang, and the two of them married. They had two boys, and there never was a happier family.

“Oh, no, here comes the boring part. You can skip it if you want to.”

“No way! This is the best part. You’ll understand when you’re older. Now pay attention.”

Every morning, as Niulang got up before sunrise to take the cows to their favorite pasture, Zhinü could not bear the thought of being separated from him. So she would come along. She’d put the two babies in two baskets draped on each side of an old, gentle ox, and she would ride on the back of a pure white bull led by Niulang. They’d sing together, tell each other stories from before they met, and laugh at the jokes that only they understood.

Zhinü’s loom sat unused back at the hut, gathering dust.

Sunsets became ugly affairs. The few clouds that remained became tattered, wispy, colorless. The people laboring in the fields lost the beauty that had once lifted up their hearts at the end of a hard day, and their laments rose to the Heavenly Court.

“My maritorious child,” said the Emperor of Heaven—

“What does that word mean?”

“It means loving your husband too much.”

“How can you love someone too much?”

“Good question. I don’t know either. Maybe the Emperor of Heaven didn’t have enough love in his heart to understand. Maybe he was too old.”

—“I warned you about neglecting your duty. For your disobedience and neglect, you must now move back to the eastern shore of the Silver River and never see Niulang and your children again.”

Zhinü begged for reprieve, but the Emperor’s word was as irreversible as the flow of the Silver River.

At the Emperor’s decree, the Silver River was widened and deepened, and Zhinü forever parted from her husband. Today, you can see the star that is Zhinü on one side of the Silver River and the star that is Niulang on the other, their two sons two faint stars on each side of Niulang. They stare at each other across that unbridgeable gap, the longing and regret as endless as the flowing river.

“Why did you stop?”

“It’s nothing. My throat just felt itchy for a bit.”

“Are you sad for Niulang and Zhinü?”

“Maybe … a little bit. But it’s just a story.”

But the magpies that once kept Zhinü company took pity on the lovers. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh moon by the lunar calendar, on Qixi, the day when Zhinü is at her highest position in the sky, all the magpies in the world fly up to the Silver River and make a bridge with their bodies so that the lovers can spend one night together.

This is the day when all the young women in old China would pray to Big Sister Seven for love.

Oh, I know you want to hear more about the bridge of magpies. You love this part. Well, I imagine it’s a lot of work for the birds. They probably have to go to magpie bridge-building school, and those who’re a bit slow have to go to cram school for extra study sessions…

Yuan turned out the light and tiptoed out of her sister’s bedroom.

On my way, she texted.

She made sure the air conditioning was set comfortably low, locked the door of the apartment, and ran down the stairs. And then she was in the hot, humid evening air of Hefei in August.

She biked through the streets, dodging an endless stream of cars beeping their horns. She liked the physicality of the ride, the way it made her body come alive, feel awake. She passed the sidewalks filled with people browsing past stores and kiosks filled with everything imaginable: discount electronics, toys, clothes, fancy European soups and cakes, mouth-watering sweet potatoes baked in tinfoil and fried, smelly tofu. The heat and the exertion stuck her shirt to her skin, and she had to wipe her forehead from time to time to keep the sweat out of her eyes.

And then she was at the coffee shop, and Jing—slender, graceful in a plain white dress and a light jacket (for the air conditioning), a faint whiff of the floral perfume that always made Yuan dizzy—greeted Yuan with that bright smile that she always wore.

As if this wasn’t the night the world ended.

“Are you done packing?” Yuan asked.

“Oh, there’s always more to pack.” Jing’s tone was light, breezy, careless. “But I don’t have to get to the airport till nine in the morning. There’s plenty of time.”

“You should dress in layers, with something long-sleeved on top,” said Yuan—mainly because she feared saying nothing. “It can get cold on the plane.”

“Want to take a walk with me? The next time I walk around at night I’ll be in America. Maybe I’ll miss all this noise.”

Yuan left her bike locked to the light post outside the coffee shop, and they strolled along the sidewalk like the rest of the crowd. They did not hold hands. In Shanghai, perhaps no one would have cared, but in Hefei, there would have been looks, and whispers, and maybe worse.

Yuan imagined Jing walking about the campus of the American high school at night. Jing had shown her pictures of the red brick buildings and immaculate lawns. And the smiling boys and girls: foreigners. Yuan felt out of breath; her heart seemed unable to decide on a steady rhythm.

“Look at that,” said Jing, pointing to the display window of a pastry shop. “They’re selling Qixi Lovers’ Cakes now. So overpriced. And you know some stupid girl is going to throw a fit if her boyfriend doesn’t buy it for her. I want to throw up.”

“Not quite as bad as Valentine’s Day,” Yuan said. “I think the vendors are pretty restrained. Relatively speaking.”

“That’s because people aren’t into Qixi any more. We Chinese always get more enthusiastic for Western imports, even holidays. It’s a national character weakness.”

“I like Qixi,” Yuan said. She said it more emphatically than she meant to.

“What, you want to set out an altar under a melon trellis, offer up a plate of fruits, pray to Big Sister Seven, and hope for a spider to weave a web over the offering by morning so you’ll get a nice husband in the future?”

Yuan’s face grew hot. She stopped. “You don’t have to mock everything Chinese.”

Jing cocked her head, a teasing smile in her eyes. “You suddenly getting all patriotic on me now?”

“Your father has the money to pay for you to go to an American boarding school. That doesn’t make you better than everyone else.”

“Oh, lay off that wounded tone. You’re hardly some migrant worker’s daughter.”

They stared at each other, the neon lights from the nearby stores flickering over their faces. Yuan wanted to kiss Jing and scream at her at the same time. She had always liked Jing’s irreverence, the way she wanted to turn everything into a joke. She knew her anger had nothing to do with this conversation about Qixi at all.

Jing turned and continued down the sidewalk. After a moment, Yuan followed.

When Jing spoke again, her tone was calm, as if nothing had happened. “Remember the first time we went hiking together?”

That had been one of the best days of Yuan’s life. They had skipped their cram school sessions and taken the bus to Emerald Lake, an artificial pond bordering several college campuses. Jing had showed Yuan how to set up her phone so that her mom couldn’t see the messages Jing sent her, and Yuan had showed Jing her baby pictures. They had bought a lamb chuanr from a street vendor and shared it as they walked along the lakeshore. Her heart had beaten faster with each bite of roasted meat off the skewer, thinking that her lips were touching where hers had touched. And then, as they strolled through one of the campuses, Jing had boldly taken her hand: it was a college, after all.

And then that first kiss behind the willow tree, tasting the hot spices from the lamb kebab on Jing’s tongue, the calls of wild geese behind her somewhere…

“I remember,” she said. Her voice still sounded wounded, and she didn’t care.

“I wish we could go there again,” Jing said.

The anger in Yuan disappeared, just like that. Jing always had such a way with her. Yuan felt like putty in her hands.

“We can chat on QQ or Skype,” Yuan said. She hurried to catch up so that she was walking next to Jing. “And you’ll come back for visits. This isn’t like the old days. It will be okay. We can still be together.”

They had wandered off the main thoroughfare onto a less busy side street. The streetlights on one side were out, and looking up they could see a few stars in the sky. Hefei wasn’t as polluted as some of the cities on the coast.

“I’m going to be really busy,” Jing said. Her tone was calm, too calm.

“We can text every day, every hour.”

“It’s different over there. I’ll be living on my own in a dorm. I have to actually study if I want to go to a good college. My family is paying a lot to give me this.”

“Americans don’t study that much.”

“It’s not like watching American TV shows. There aren’t subtitles. I’ll meet lots of new people. I have to make a new life over there, new friends. I’ll need to be thinking, talking, breathing English all the time if I want to make it.”

“I can text you in English,” Yuan said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

“You’re not listening,” Jing said. She stopped again and looked at Yuan.

“What are you trying to say?” As soon as she asked the question, Yuan regretted it. It made her sound so weak, so clingy, like a girl from one of those Korean dramas.

“I’m going away, Yuan. I told you this was going to happen last year, when we … started.”

Yuan looked away so that Jing would not see her eyes. She pushed the image of Jing with someone else out of her mind. She cursed her eyes and told them to behave and stop embarrassing her.

“It will be okay.” Jing’s tone was now comforting, gentle, and that made it worse. “We’ll both be okay.”

Yuan said nothing because she knew she couldn’t control her voice. She licked her lips, tasting the salt from the sweat of her ride. She wanted to wipe her eyes so she could see clearly again, but she didn’t want to do it in front of Jing.

“I want to make this night a happy memory,” Jing said, but her voice finally cracked. She struggled, but failed, to keep her calm mask on. “I’m trying to make this easier. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for those you love?”

Yuan looked up, blinking her eyes hard. She looked for the Silver River, and she remembered that in English it was called the Milky Way—what a graceless and silly name. She looked for Zhinü and Niulang, and she vaguely remembered that in English they were called Vega and Altair, names as cold and meaningless to her as the stars.

Just then, magpies seemed to come out of nowhere and gathered over their heads in a cloud of fluttering wings. While they looked up, stunned, the flock swept out of the night sky, descended over them like a giant spider web, and lifted them into the heavens.

Riding on the wings of magpies, Yuan found, was not like riding a magical carpet.

Not that she knew what riding a magical carpet felt like—but she was sure that it didn’t involve being constantly poked from below by a hundred—no, a thousand—little winged fists.

The magpies would fall a bit below where they were and flap their wings rapidly in an upward burst until they collided with the girls’ bodies. The combined force of all the magpies would push them up until the birds lost their momentum and began to fall away, and then a new wave of upward-thrusting magpies would take their place. The girls resembled two ping-pong balls riding on the water spout from a hose pointing up.

In the maelstrom of wings they found each other and clung together.

“Are you all right?” They each asked at the same time.

“What in the world is happening?” Jing asked, her words jumbled together from fear and excitement.

“This is a dream,” Yuan said. “This must be a dream.”

And then Jing began to laugh.

“It can’t be a dream,” she said. “These magpies carrying us: they tickle!”

And Yuan laughed too. It was so absurd, so impossible; yet it was happening.

Some of the magpies began to sing, a complicated, trilling, lovely chorus. There were magpies of every description: some with white bellies, some with white beaks, some with iridescent, shimmering, blue wings. Yuan felt as if she and Jing were enclosed inside the beating heart of some giant, flying, alien musical instrument.

Arms around each other, gingerly sitting side by side, they peeked out at the world below from between the darting wings of the magpies.

They were floating in a dark sea. The lights of the city of Hefei spread out below them like a pulsing, receding jellyfish.

“It’s getting cold,” said Yuan. She shivered as the wind whipped her hair around her face.

“We’re really high up,” said Jing. She took off her summer jacket and draped it around Yuan’s shoulders. Yuan tucked her nose into the collar of the jacket and breathed in the lingering perfume. It warmed her heart even if the thin fabric did little against the chill.

Then Yuan berated herself. Jing had broken up with her, and she didn’t need to look so needy, so pathetic. It was fine to cling to Jing in a moment of weakness, but now they were safe. Gently, she took her arm from around Jing and shrugged out of her arm as well. She lifted her face into the clear, frosty air, and tried to shift away from Jing, keeping some distance between them.

“Reminds you of Su Shi’s poem, doesn’t it?” Jing whispered. Yuan nodded reluctantly. Jing was the literary one, and she always knew the pretty words, suitable for every occasion.

A half moon, like a half-veiled smile, loomed pale white in the dark sky. It grew brighter and larger as they rose on the backs of the magpies.

Jing began to sing the words of the Song Dynasty poem, set to a popular tune, and after a moment, Yuan joined her:

When did the Moon first appear?

I ask the heavens and lift my wine cup.

I know not whether time passes the same way

In the palace among the clouds.

I’d like to ride up with the wind,

But I’m afraid of the chill from being so high

Among the jade porticos and nephrite beams.

We dance with our shadows.

Are we even on earth any more?

The silver light dapples the window,

Illuminating my sleepless night.

Do you hate us, Moon?

Why are you always waxing just when we’re parting?

Like a dancer and her shadow, the two girls swayed, each separately, to a harmony as young as themselves and as old as the land beneath.

“So, it’s all true,” said Jing.

The magpies had lifted them above the clouds and leveled off. As they glided over the cottony mists, they could see a celestial city of bread loaf-like buildings, punctuated by spiky towers here and there, gleaming in the late summer moonlight in the distance: blue as ice, green as jade, white like ivory. The styles of the buildings were neither Western nor Chinese, but something that transcended them all: heavenly, the Palace of Immortals.

“I wonder if there really are immortals living there,” said Yuan. What she didn’t say out loud was her secret hope: she and Jing had been picked by the magpies for this trip to the heavens because the immortals thought they were as special a pair as Niulang and Zhinü—the thought was tinged with both excitement and sorrow.

And then they were at the Silver River. It was broader than the Yangtze, almost like Taihu Lake, with the other shore barely visible on the horizon. The rushing torrent roared past like stampeding horses, and giant waves as tall as the apartment buildings in Hefei pounded against the shore.

“Hey, don’t carry us over the water!” Jing shouted. But the magpies ignored her and continued to fly towards the river.

“They’re building a bridge,” said Yuan. “It’s Qixi, remember?”

Indeed, more flocks of magpies appeared. Along with the flock carrying the girls, they congregated like rivulets coalescing into a mighty river of wings. The magpies hovered over the water, with newcomers extending the flock’s reach towards the other shore. They were forming an arching bridge over the Silver River.

“I have to take a picture of this,” said Yuan, and she took out her cell phone.

The crystal cat charm dangling from the phone caught the light of the moon and dazzled. The magpies immediately surrounding Yuan trilled and dashed at it, knocking the phone out of her hand. And then it was a free for all as more of the magpies forgot about building the bridge and rushed after the shiny bauble. Even when charged with a magical mission, birds were still just birds.

Or maybe even the birds have realized we’re not such a special pair after all,Yuan thought, and the charm is more interesting.

She gazed after her phone anxiously. If Se woke up from a nightmare, she might try to call her. And if her mom got home before her, she might wonder where she was. She needed that phone back. She hoped the birds would bounce the phone closer to her so she could snatch it.

Then those worries were pushed out of her mind as the magpies that had supported Yuan dropped off to join the chase after the charm, and no new magpies replaced them. Her weight overwhelmed the few magpies that remained on task, and she began to fall. She didn’t even have time to cry out.

But then a strong hand caught her right wrist and arrested her descent. Yuan looked up into Jing’s face. She was lying down on the bridge of magpies, and she strained as she reached out and held onto Yuan with one hand while fumbling in her purse with the other.

“Let go!” shouted Yuan. “You’ll fall, too!” Her world seemed to shrink down to her hands as they clasped around Jing’s hand, around her warm, pale skin. She willed herself to let go, but she could not.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jing, panting.

The magpies continued to fight each other for the shiny charm, causing Yuan’s phone to bob up and down over the flock like a stone skipping over water. They had stopped extending the living bridge over the water.

Jing finally managed to free her own phone from her purse. She paid no attention as her purse almost tumbled over the side of the bridge, where it would have disappeared into the roiling waves below. By feel, she pressed the first button on the dial pad.

Yuan’s phone came to life and began to vibrate and buzz. The shocked magpies backed off in a panic, and the phone stayed still in the air for a second before falling, faster and faster, and finally disappeared into the Silver River without a trace.

Yuan felt her heart sink. That cat charm, the first gift Jing had ever given her, now gone forever.

“Good thing I have you on speed dial,” Jing said.

“How do we still have reception here?”

“After all that, that’s what you are worried about?” Jing laughed, and after a moment, Yuan joined her.

The magpies seemed to have awakened from a bad dream, and they rushed over and lifted Yuan up onto the bridge. Once the girls were safe, the magpies continued to extend their bridge to the other side of the Silver River, leaving the pair at the middle of the bridge, suspended over the endless water and mist.

“We almost caused the magpies to fail to build the bridge,” Yuan said. “It would be so sad if Niulang and Zhinü don’t get to meet this year.”

Jing nodded. “It’s almost midnight.” She saw the look on Yuan’s face. “Don’t worry about not being home. Nothing bad can happen on the night of Qixi.”

“I thought you weren’t into Qixi.”

“Well, maybe just a little bit.”

They sat down on the bridge together, watching the moon rise over the Silver River. This time, Yuan did not let go of Jing’s hand.

“She’s coming,” said Yuan. She jumped up and pointed down the bridge towards the eastern shore. Now that she had spent some time on the bridge of magpies, she was getting pretty good at keeping her footing over the fluttering wings.

In the distance, through the mist that wafted over the bridge from time to time, they could see a small, solitary figure making its way towards them.

“So is he,” said Jing. She pointed the other way. Through the mist they could see another tiny figure slowly creep towards them.

The girls stood up and waited, side by side, looking first one way and then the other. Being in the presence of the annual reunion of this pair of legendary lovers was exciting, maybe even better than meeting TV stars.

The two figures from the opposite ends of the bridge came close enough for Yuan and Jing to see them clearly.

Out of the east, an old woman approached. Yuan thought she looked as old as, maybe even older than, her grandmother. Her back bent, she walked with a cane. But her wrinkled face glowed healthily with the exertion of having traveled all the way here. Wearing a Tang Dynasty dress, she looked splendid to Yuan. Her breath puffed out visibly in the cold air.

Out of the west, an old man emerged from the mist: straight back, long legs, wiry arms swinging freely. His full head of silvery white hair matched the old woman’s, but his face was even more wrinkled than hers. As soon as he saw the old woman, his eyes lit up in a bright smile.

“They’re not—” Jing started to say in a whisper.

“—quite what we expected?” finished Yuan.

“I guess I always pictured immortals as being … well, I guess there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t grow old.”

A wispy tendril of sorrow brushed across Yuan’s heart. She tried to imagine Jing as an old woman, and the tenderness made her almost tear up again. She squeezed Jing’s hand, and Jing squeezed back, turning to smile at her.

The old man and the old woman met in the middle of the bridge, a few paces away from where the girls stood. They nodded at Jing and Yuan politely and then turned their full attention to each other.

“Glad to see you looking so well,” said Zhinü. “Da Lang told me that you were having some trouble with your back the last time he visited with his family. I wasn’t sure you were going to make it here this year.”

“Da Lang always exaggerates,” said Niulang. “When he visits I don’t dare to sneeze or cough, lest he insist that I go to the moon to visit Chang’E for some Osmanthus herbs. This old bag of bones can’t really take any more medicine. I think he’s more upset than you or I that his brother didn’t want to be a doctor.”

They laughed and chatted on, talking about children and friends.

“Why don’t they kiss?” Jing whispered to Yuan.

“That’s a Western thing,” Yuan whispered back. “Niulang and Zhinü are old school.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve seen Internet posts arguing people in ancient China used to kiss—but anyway, they’re standing so far apart!”

“It’s like they’re friends, not lovers.”

“It seems that we have some curious guests,” said Zhinü as she turned around to look at the girls. She didn’t sound angry—more like amused.

“We’re sorry,” said Yuan, feeling her face grow hot. “We didn’t mean to be rude.” She hesitated. It didn’t seem right at all to call this old woman “Big Sister Seven.” So she added, “Grandma Zhinü and Grandpa Niulang.”

“We just thought,” Jing said, “that … um … you’d be more … passionate.”

“You mean less laughing, and more tears and recitation of love poems,” said Niulang, a gentle smile in his eyes.

“Yes,” said Jing. “No,” said Yuan, simultaneously.

Zhinü and Niulang laughed out loud. Niulang said, “It’s okay. The magpies have been building this bridge for thousands of years, and they sometimes bring guests. We’re used to questions.”

Zhinü looked from Yuan to Jing and back again. “You two are together?”

“Yes,” said Jing. “No,” said Yuan, simultaneously. They looked at each other, embarrassed.

“Now that sounds like a story,” said Zhinü.

“We were together,” said Yuan.

“But I’m leaving,” said Jing. “We’ll be parted by the Pacific Ocean.” And they told their story to Niulang and Zhinü. It seemed perfectly right to pour their hearts out to the legendary lovers.

“I understand,” said Zhinü, nodding sympathetically. “Oh, do I understand.”

At first I was inconsolable. I stood on the shore of the Silver River day after day, pining for a glance of my husband and children. I thought the pain in my heart would never go away. I refused to touch my loom. If my grandfather was angry, then let him find someone else to weave the sunsets. I was done.

The first time we met over the bridge of magpies, Niulang and I could not stop crying the whole time. My children were growing up so fast, and I felt so guilty. So, when we had to part again, Niulang came up with a stratagem: he asked the magpies to retrieve two large rocks that were about the weight of my babies and carried them home in two baskets on the ends of a pole over his shoulder, the same way he had carried the boys onto the bridge. And everyone thought they had gone home with him. But unbeknownst to anyone else, I carried the boys home with me on my back.

And after that, every year, as we met on the bridge, we passed the boys back and forth. They’d spend one year with me, one year with Niulang. They would not have their parents together, but they would have both of them.

Each time we met, I told him again and again of the solitude of my hut, the desultory squeak of my loom. And he told me of how he took his herd to the same pastures that we had gone to as a family, to relive the happiness we shared. The grass had grown thin and bare from overgrazing, and his animals were just skin and bones.

And then, one year, when the boys were a little older and could walk on their own, Niulang held me and told me that he didn’t want to see me sad any more.

“We live a whole year for this one day,” he said. “We’re letting our lives pass us by. It’s not right that you should sit by your loom pining from morning till evening. It’s not right that our sons should think our lives are lives of sorrow. It’s not right that we should come to believe that yearning for what we can’t have is what love is all about.”

“What are you saying?” I asked. I was angry, and I didn’t know why. Was he saying that he no longer loved me? I had been faithful to him, but had he been to me?

“We know we cannot be together,” he said. “We know that sometimes things happen to people that keep them apart. But we have refused to look for new happiness. Are we sad because we’re in love? Or are we sad because we feel trapped by the idea of love?”

I thought about what he said, and realized that he was right. I had become so used to the story about us, the idea of us living our whole lives for this once-a-year meeting that I hadn’t really thought about what I wanted. I had become my own legend. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.

“You’re beautiful when you laugh,” he said.

“We’re beautiful when we seek to make ourselves happy,” I said.

And so I went back to my loom and poured my love for Niulang into my weaving. I thought those were some of the most beautiful sunsets I had ever woven.

And then I found that love was not a limited thing, but an endless fount. I found that I loved the laughter of my children, and the chatter of friends new and old. I found that I loved the fresh breeze that brought smells from far away. I found that other young men made my heart beat faster.

And Niulang went and took his herd to new pastures, and he came up with new songs. Young women came and listened to him, and he found that conversation with them gladdened his heart.

We told each other these things the next time we met over the bridge. I was glad for him and he for me. We had been clinging to each other as though we were afraid to drown, but in fact, we had been holding each other back from moving on.

“And so we each went on and had other loves, joys as well as sorrows,” said Zhinü.

“We still meet once a year,” said Niulang, “to catch up on each other’s lives. Old friends are hard to come by.” He and Zhinü looked at each other with affection. “They keep you honest.”

“Are you disappointed?” asked Zhinü.

Jing and Yuan looked at each other. “Yes,” they said together. Then they said “no,” also together.

“Then, are you not in love anymore?” asked Yuan.

“You ask that question because you think if we’re no longer in love, then that means the love we had was somehow not real.” Zhinü turned serious. “But the past does not get rewritten. Niulang was the first man I loved, and that would be true no matter how many times I fell in love after him.”

“It’s time to go,” Niulang said. The magpies under them were getting restless. The eastern sky was brightening.

“You were together, and you’re together now,” said Niulang to the girls. “Whatever comes, that remains a fact.”

“You look lovely together, dears,” said Zhinü.

Niulang and Zhinü embraced lightly and wished each other well. Then they turned and began to walk in opposite directions.

“Look!” said Jing, and gripped Yuan’s hand.

Where the old Niulang and Zhinü had been, there was now a pair of ghostly figures: a young man and a young woman. They embraced tightly, as if Yuan and Jing were not there at all.

“They were such a handsome couple,” said Yuan.

“They still are,” said Jing.

And as the bridge of magpies broke up, carrying the girls down to earth, they looked back at the pair of ghost lovers dissolving gradually in the moonlight.

Miraculously, Yuan found her bike where she’d left it.

The sidewalks were still relatively empty. The first breakfast shops were just getting ready for the day, and the smell of warm soy milk and freshly fried youtiao filled the air.

“Better rush home,” said Yuan. “Don’t miss your flight.”

“And you need to go, too. Your mom will be worried sick!”

Jing pulled her in, wrapping her arms around her. Yuan tried to pull back. “People will see.”

“I don’t care,” Jing said. “I lied that day at Emerald Lake. I told you I had kissed other girls before. But you were the first. I want you to know that.”

They held each other and cried, and some of the passers-by gave them curious looks, but no one stopped.

“I’ll call you every day,” Jing said. “I’ll text you whenever I get a chance.”

Yuan pulled back. “No. I don’t want you to think of it as a chore. Do it if you want to. And if you don’t, I’ll understand. Let whatever will happen, happen.”

A quick kiss, and Yuan pushed Jing away. “Go, go!”

She watched as Jing ran down the street to catch the bus. She watched as the bus pulled into the stream of traffic, a mighty river of steel like the Silver River, and disappeared around the corner.

“I love you,” Yuan whispered. And no matter how the stream of time flowed on, that moment would be true forever.

© 2014 by Ken Liu

The post Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon appeared first on Reactor.

When Andy notices a suspicious character preying on Chinatown smugglers, he follows a path that leads him to horrible, life-threatening discoveries.

“Morph”

To a white boy like me, Chinatown is a movie, an adventure, and a horror show all rolled into one. To my friend John Fong, it’s just home. No matter how often I go there to hang out with him, I’m always amazed by the activity. Everyone is moving, walking, talking, selling, and buying. The whole place seems to vibrate. I’ve heard there are bigger Chinatowns in other cities. Maybe so. But I’d bet there isn’t a busier one.

John’s parents own a bakery right around the corner from their apartment. It’s not the kind of stuff I’m used to—not like the pastries they sell across the river or the fancy breads you can get uptown—but it’s pretty good, especially since everything tastes better when you get it for free. John and I had just stopped by the bakery for a snack, and then headed to the Lucky Pleasure Arcade. We were on our first day of spring break from Washington High, so we were pretty much ready for some serious fun.

As we squeezed through the crowded streets, I scanned the food shops. You never knew what you’d see hanging from a hook or heaped up in a crate.

“Hey, Andy, check out the baby eels,” John said, pointing to the window of a grocery store.

“Whoa, you eat those things?” I leaned over and watched the wriggling black strips in their water-filled pan. They reminded me of living rubber bands.

John shook his head. “My parents might. Not me. Too slithery.”

A flurry of motion in a high-sided enamel tray to the left of the eels caught my eye. My subconscious survival instinct must have taken over because, by the time I realized what was there, I’d already jerked my face away from the window.

“Whoa!” I took a step back and pointed.

“Man, that’s creepy.” John leaned closer, so his forehead was pressed against the window. “I don’t think my parents would eat one of those. Maybe my grandfather.”

Still keeping my distance from the window, I stared at the pan-full of scorpions as they crawled over each other, forming a mass like one living creature with hundreds of claws and stinging tails. “Would you?” I asked.

“Not for a million dollars. But you got to admit you white boys eat some pretty disgusting things, too.”

“Like what?”

“Like rare steak,” John said. “It makes me think of those medical shows on TV. You slice through a slab of quivering meat with the knife and the blood leaks out all over the plate. Nurse! Hand me the steak sauce! Hurry—he’s bleeding out! Disgusting. And what about tuna salad?” He jammed a finger down his throat and made gagging sounds. “Now that’s something no civilized person would eat.”

“It’s still better than eating it raw,” I said.

“You idiot. That’s Japanese, not Chinese. You are so culturally uninformed.”

“Excuse me, you all look alike. What can I say?”

“Not much,” John shot back, “considering you bear an uncanny resemblance to a peeled potato.”

It was a good thing the people passing by weren’t listening. They might have thought we were serious. No way. I’d been friends with John since he moved here back in fourth grade. That was seven years ago.

“Come on,” John said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of quarters. “We’ll settle this like real men—head to head at the arcade.”

As I turned away from the grocery, another motion caught my eye. The storekeeper stepped up to the inside of the window, snatched an angry scorpion from the pan with a pair of wooden tongs, and dropped it into a small cardboard box—the kind they use for takeout food. He handed the box to a customer. That’s where I got my second surprise. From what little I could see through the dirty glass, the man wasn’t Chinese.

Why would anyone buy a scorpion? I waited for the man to walk out so I could get a clearer look.

“Come on, Andy, let’s get going,” John said.

“Just a second.” I had to see what he looked like. Maybe I’d even ask him why he’d bought it. Ever since I was little, I’ve been curious about stuff. I guess that’s a nice way to say “nosey.” Dad used to joke that I’d either end up as a scientist or a spy. Mom hammered me all through my early years with that saying about curiosity killing the cat. I’m pretty sure she’s told me, “It’s not polite to stare,” at least seven thousand times.

It would be seven thousand one if she was here on the sidewalk right now. I couldn’t help staring at the man when he stepped from the store—not because of what he’d bought, but because of what he lacked. His skin was as white as the carton he carried. So was his hair, which he wore long and parted in the middle. His eyes were pink. I’d seen albino animals before, but never a person.

He stared back at me. I was too transfixed by the layers of strangeness to look away. Then he lifted the box and shook it in my face. The hard body of the scorpion rattled against the soft cardboard.

That broke the spell. I jumped aside.

He laughed and moved past me. After a few paces, he looked back over his shoulder, shook the box again, and smiled, revealing yellowed teeth. Then he slithered into the crowd.

“That was pretty much the strangest thing I expect to see this week,” John said. “It’s going to be hard for me to think of you as a white boy after this.”

“You think he’ll eat it?” I shuddered at the thought of him popping the living scorpion in his mouth and crunching it up like a piece of peanut brittle.

John shrugged. “Who knows?”

“What else would he do with it? I mean, he just bought one, so I think it’s safe to say he isn’t having the gang over for a scorpion fry.”

“Maybe some kind of medicine,” John said. “People use all kinds of strange stuff—snake venom, animal claws, just about anything. When my aunt’s shoulder hurts, she rubs this brown liquid on it. She keep the stuff in a jar with a couple huge beetles and all kinds of roots. ”

“That’s really weird,” I said.

“So is using mold to kill bacteria,” John said. “Or tree bark to cure a headache.”

“Okay—you’ve got a point. But at least molds and trees don’t feel pain. I’m not all that worried about beetles, either. But I heard they’re wiping out the rhino just for the horn.”

“It’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac,” John said.

“You mean an Asian-disiac,” I said, trying to make a joke.

John groaned. “Anyhow, that’s what they use it for. They swear it helps them get horny.”

It was my turn to groan. “How appropriate.” As we walked toward the arcade, I thought about the sad state of a world where people would kill a rhinoceros just for the horn. My deep thoughts lasted less than a block and a half. Once we reached the arcade, my whole mind and body were centered on kicking John’s butt at Shock Fighter Deluxe. Unfortunately, John was pretty centered, too. So, as usual, my fighter ended up on the ground while various parts of his body flew in separate paths through the air, leaving crimson trails of veins like dozens of scarlet tadpoles.

“Again?” John asked, grinning at me while the CONTINUE? timer counted down and his player tap-danced a victory celebration on the scattered remains of my inept warrior’s innards.

“Nah, I’d better get home. If I’m late for dinner, Dad will make what we just did look like a pillow fight.”

“Later,” John said, moving off toward the pinball machines.

I left the arcade and cut through an alley toward the bus stop on Third St. That’s when I saw the albino again, just ahead of me. Halfway down the alley, he ducked into a narrow pathway between two buildings. I walked up to the opening and peeked around the wall. The albino was standing by a solid steel door at the end of the path, about fifteen feet away from me. It looked like the back entrance to some sort of business. He opened the carton and reached inside. The scorpion wriggled and slashed as it hung between his right thumb and forefinger.

He dropped the carton, then put the scorpion on his left palm. He stroked it gently with the tips of his first two fingers. I expected it to make a dash for freedom, or plunge it’s stinger into his palm, but it sat where he’d placed it, unmoving.

I watched, as frozen as the scorpion.

For a moment, what I saw was so strange I didn’t realize I was seeing anything at all. The images passed through my eyes and entered my brain. But they hung there like abstract forms—shapes with no meaning. His left hand changed. Somehow, it curved and shrank and drew toward his sleeve. The scorpion on his palm withered and shriveled like a leaf on an unwatered house plant.

My stomach rippled. There was something beyond strange here, something unnatural and evil.

He raised his right hand and knocked at the door.

A minute passed. As much as I was dying to know what this was about, I found myself hoping nobody would answer.

I heard the clack of a bolt sliding open.

Whoever came out would see me. I stepped back into the alley, then squatted down so I could peek around the wall.

A middle aged Chinese man wearing an expensive light grey suit stood in the doorway. He spat out a couple words. I had no idea what he was saying, but he sounded angry.

The albino spoke, also in Chinese. Once or twice he touched the other man with his right hand. He seemed to be trying to calm him down.

The Chinese man spoke again. His face softened a bit and he stepped out from the doorway. He smiled and nodded.

The albino slipped closer and put his left arm on the other man’s shoulder. His hand was still hidden within his sleeve.

I realized I was holding my breath. I exhaled, then inhaled quickly, gasping. To me, the sound was as loud as a shout, but neither of them looked my way.

A pale shaft emerged from the albino’s sleeve. It slid into the other man’s neck like a pump needle into a football.

For an instant, the victim didn’t seem to notice he’d been stabbed. Then his mouth opened as if he wanted to shout. His hands rose toward his neck.

They never got there. His body jerked like he’d grabbed a frayed power cord. His eyes rolled back. His knees buckled. A sigh drifted from his slackening jaw. He would have fallen, had he not been pinned to that dagger. The killer finally lowered his arm and his victim slid free, dropping to the street. His head bounced once against the pavement, the thud echoing between the buildings like an exclamation point.

I had no doubt he was dead.

As the albino turned away from the corpse, I ran out of the alley. People stared at me as I rushed away from Chinatown. The crowds actually parted as I passed among them. I must have stunk with fear. I felt I was leaving a trail.

I kept checking over my shoulder, but I didn’t see the albino. He probably never knew I’d watched him.

Or maybe he didn’t care.

The rest of the day seemed to take place at a distance. I know I ate dinner and went to bed, but part of me never left that alley. My first thought when I woke up was that I’d had some sort of vivid dream.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t explain away my experience that easily. The murder made the paper. Next to last page. But nobody knew it was a murder. The article merely said that Shaoming Li, owner of the Golden Dragon Novelty Supply Company, was found dead of an apparent heart attack. The body was discovered by an employee.

I called John. “We gotta talk.”

“It’s not even noon. Can’t it wait?” He sounded like he was still half asleep.

“No. It’s important.”

“Okay. I’m awake now. Thanks to you. Come on over.”

I thought about the alleys and the scorpions. “How about you come here?”

There was a pause. Then a click. He’d hung up. But that was okay. I knew he was on his way over. That’s the kind of friend he was.

When John got to my place, I showed him the paper. “Did you know this guy?”

“Sure. Everybody knew Li. He’s one of the three main import-export guys.” John winked, then said, “Import-export,” again, as if it was a secret code.

The wink told me nothing. “I don’t have a clue what you mean.”

“Anything you want to bring into the country, Li was the man to see. Tiger paws, bear gall bladders, ivory—you name it. He was deep into all kinds of traffic.”

“How do you know?”

“People talk. And they never pay any attention to me. They act like I’m just a kid. I hear stuff. But it’s no secret. It’s the same all over. Any part of the city, you’ll find a couple of guys doing import-export. Chinese, Russian, Mexican, Irish. Crime is multi-cultural. I’m sure some of your Czech relatives or neighbors are involved in something.”

“I’m not Czech. I’m Polish. And only half that.”

“All you Slavs look alike to me,” John said. “Anyhow, why this sudden interest? And what does any of this have to do with me getting robbed of sleep?”

“I saw something.” That sounded like such an empty description.

“What?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.” I wasn’t sure I really believed it myself.

“I might. Now that I’m awake. You got anyone better to tell?”

He was right. I told him. Sharing it, crazy as the whole thing had been, was a relief.

“You saw this for sure?” John asked after I finished the story. “You weren’t that close, were you?”

“I was close enough.” As I thought back, doubt invaded my memories. “It looked like a scorpion stinger. But maybe he just had something in his hand. I guess it could have been a long needle, or an ice pick. Or maybe some kind of knife.”

“Forget it,” John told me. “That’s best. Just forget it. So what if he was killed? Do you think Li was some innocent business man? I’m sure he had plenty of blood on his hands. Andy, these guys don’t just import animals parts. They bring in guns. They bring in drugs. Maybe someone was just doing the world a favor.”

I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was the only one beside the killer who knew Shaoming Li’s death was a murder. Normally, if you witness a murder, you have to speak out. It’s the right thing to do. They tell us that in school. They tell us that in the movies and on TV. They tell us that in novels and comic books. But, right or wrong, there was no way anyone would believe me. I’m pretty sure John didn’t. And there was no way I wanted the albino to learn that I was a witness. Maybe John was right. It was best for me to forget all about it. Or maybe I was just a coward, looking for an excuse. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to think things over before I made a decision.

I was wrong.

The next murder happened two days later. Hop Ngo was found in the back of his restaurant. This death attracted a bit more attention than Shaoming Li’s, though nobody knew it was a murder. Still, it was a vicious enough death that reporters swarmed all over the story. According to the paper, Hop Ngo had been attacked by his own dogs. The paper mentioned one strange item discovered at the scene. Along with a pair of live pit bulls, police found a third dog. But this one was a dried up husk.

This time, I was disturbed enough to track John down when he didn’t answer his phone. His sister Katie, who was two years older than John, and two light years better looking, let me in. I went up to his room and held up the paper.

“There’s been another killing.”

John pulled the pillow over his face. “Are you going to wake me up every time someone from around here dies? Because if you are, I’m never going to get any sleep.”

I yanked the pillow away and thrust the paper in his face. “Is this guy an importer?”

John sighed and took the paper from me. “Yeah. Hop Ngo was an importer. Different front operation, but he brought in the same kind of stuff as Li. They each had their own territory.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “It wasn’t his own dogs that killed him.”

I could picture everything in my mind like it was a silent movie. It’s late at night. The restaurant is closed, but Ngo is available for other business. The albino comes in. He brings a dog with him. Or maybe he grabs one of Hop Ngo’s dogs. He presses the dog to his face and starts to change. His head becomes —

“Hey, Earth to Andy.”

“Huh?” I realized John had been talking to me. “What?”

“Wow, you were drifting off toward elsewhere,” John said. “Let it go. This has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t even have anything to do with me. These guys live and die by their own rules.”

“No. I can’t let it go. This is about more than murder.” I hated the thought of sharing my universe with a creature like that. “You said there were three importers. We have to warn the third guy.”

“I’m sure he knows something’s going on.” John said. “Everyone in town is going to notice that two importers died.”

“But he doesn’t know about this creature. I have to warn him there’s a killer stalking him.”

“Sam Yung wouldn’t listen to you,” John said.

“Sam Yung,” I said, repeating the name.

John groaned. “Man, forget the name. Please. He won’t see you. You won’t get near him. He’s big trouble. He eats kids like us for snacks.”

“I have to try.” I walked out of John’s bedroom. Behind me, I heard him running to catch up.

“Okay, just wait a sec’ while I throw on some clothes. Maybe I can at least keep you from getting your throat slit while you try to find Sam. You’re already pale enough.”

“Thanks.” I was glad he was coming.

We went into the depths of Chinatown to find the last of the big three importers. Unlike the other two, he didn’t have one main front operation. I let John do the talking. We got yelled at a lot, and even spat at once. I didn’t know if it was because we were asking about Sam Yung or because I was with John. But he was right—nobody takes kids seriously. Even kids old enough to drive and shave never get any respect.

We kept trying. If you knock on enough doors, eventually, you hear an answer. In the end, we didn’t find Sam. It wasn’t necessary. One of Sam’s men found us.

This guy in a cheap brown suit, black shirt, and white tie, slipped up from behind and tapped John on the shoulder. They talked in Chinese. Then John said, “Sam wants to know why we’re looking for him. I told this guy that we had private business to discuss, concerning Sam’s safety. He’s taking us there. He said that if we annoy Sam, we’ll end up tied to a couple of rocks at the bottom of the Naugus River. The fish will eat our eyes and the turtles will dine on our tongues.”

“Thanks for sharing that.” I wondered how many different kinds of monsters I was dealing with. Maybe the ones who never shifted their shape were even worse than the unnatural killers.

It was too late to back out. We followed the guy down a maze of side streets toward an old, rickety building. There was no sign in any language out front—just a street number. We went inside, then climbed stairs that creaked beneath our weight. The bannister was loose under my hand. I could swear I felt the building shifting under me. I smelled stale food on the first floor, but something darker and exotic took over as we moved past the second floor, up to the third.

“This whole place is falling down,” I whispered to John.

The guy glared at me, hissed a couple words at John, then led us down a hallway. It was too narrow to walk side by side. John went first. I was just a couple steps behind him. We moved past several closed doors. There was an open door ahead on the right. John glanced in, then turned his head away like he’d accidentally looked straight at the sun.

I took a longer look. The room was large, but lit by a single lamp on a table. That was enough for me to see more than I wanted. It was like someone had bombed a zoo. There were animal heads, paws, tails, skins, and other parts stacked all over. I saw a pile of elephant tusks, and another pile that looked like rhino horns. An old man at a table was grinding one of the horns into powder with a file. Except for the lamp, the scene could have been set five hundred years ago.

The guy with the cheap suit poked me in the shoulder and grunted out a couple harsh syllables. I didn’t know the words, but I’m sure it was the Chinese equivalent of, “Get moving!”

We walked toward a door at the end of the hall. The upper half was frosted glass with S. Yung, Restaurant Supplies painted on it in black above a row of chinese characters. Behind me, I could hear the rasp of the file on the rhino horn. But the sound was soon covered by the creak of the floor boards as they groaned beneath my weight. I was eager to get this over with as quickly as possible and return to the fresh air of the street.

The guy with the cheap suit opened the door and motioned us inside. He came in behind us, spoke a couple words, then stepped out, leaving John and me alone with Sam Yung, the third importer. Sam was a thin guy in his forties, with the face of someone who’s survived more than a couple knife fights. The phrase You should have seen the other guy flitted through my mind.

“You are inquiring about me?” he asked as the door closed behind us. His English was better than mine.

For a moment, I couldn’t find my voice. I knew this guy could snap his fingers and have me killed. I knew he was a criminal. But someone was planning to murder him, and I refused to keep quiet. “You’re in danger,” I said. My words died in the room like dialogue from a bad movie.

Sam Yung spread his hands. At least he didn’t laugh at me like a villain from a bad movie. “It comes with the job. Half the punks in the city would kill me if they thought they could get away with it. What’s the deal, here? I’m not going to find you amusing for very long.”

“I saw what happened to Shaoming Li,” I told him. “It wasn’t his heart.”

Sam Yung barely reacted, but I noticed a slight ripple of tension flash across his cheeks. “Tell me.”

I told him what I’d seen happen to Shaoming Li, and what I suspected happened to Hop Ngo. When I mentioned the albino, Sam Yung nodded and muttered the name, “Richter.” When I was done, he said, “Has it occurred to you who would have the most to gain from the death of my competitors?”

Not until that instant. Oh, God. I’d never even thought that Sam Yung might be behind the murders. I felt like I’d just been kicked in the gut. I looked at John. He glanced over his shoulder, like he was thinking about making a dash for the door. But we both knew the other guy was right outside the door. I turned my attention back to Sam Yung.

The slightest smile twitched at his lips. “Foolish boy,” he said. “That’s not our way. We don’t hire outsiders to solve our disputes. You know nothing about us.”

I realized he was playing with me. “But you seem to know the man I saw. You called him ‘Richter.’”

“I know of him. He’s tried to benefit from my hard work. He wants what isn’t his. But this other thing you spoke of, this is nothing but a children’s story. My grandmother used to scare me with tales of shape shifters. You have an active imagination. You’re young. You don’t know what you’ve seen. But I thank you for coming to warn me.”

It didn’t matter whether he believed me. All that mattered was I’d done what I had to do. I’d warned him. That might be enough. At least he wouldn’t be easy to surprise, the way Shaoming Li had been. I was ready to leave.

But Sam Yung wasn’t finished. He glanced at John, then back at me. “We have one problem that must be resolved. You’ve seen things you shouldn’t have.”

“We didn’t see anything,” John said. “Neither of us.”

Now I understood why John had looked away from the down the hall room so quickly. There was enough illegal stuff going on in there to send Sam Yung to prison for a very long time.

“Of course I have your silence,” Sam said to John. “You know what would happen to your family if you spoke.” Then he pointed at me, “But I don’t know if your friend he can hold his tongue. Or whether it needs to be removed.”

He stared at me with the cold eyes of a surgeon trying to decide whether to remove a tumor.

I wanted to say something, but I had no idea what sort of words would make any difference to him. I knew it was pointless to beg, or to point out that I’d gone out of my way to warn him. Maybe I could just swear I’d keep silent about what I’d seen. Before I could speak, the glass in the upper half of the door exploded. Something flew past me and thudded to the floor by Sam Yung’s desk.

A head.

It took a moment for me to recognize the guy without his cheap suit. Or his body.

Someone—something—crouched outside the door. His face was all scales and teeth—somewhere between human and reptile. But it shifted back as I watched.

“Richter.” Sam Yung snarled the name.

The albino reached into his coat pocket and drew out a brown, furry claw. He held it to his body.

Across the room, I heard Sam Yung fumbling through a desk drawer.

I heard John whisper something in Chinese.

I heard the roar of a bear.

The albino crashed through the remaining portion of the door. His body was still rippling and changing. He dropped the dried claw on the floor. The lower half of his face was that of a bear. One hand was a claw. His massive shoulders stretched his shirt.

As he ran past us, he threw a backhanded swipe. The blow lifted me off my feet. John and I crashed into the wall.

For an instant, as my head and body struck the plaster, the room went soft and black. I fought the darkness, knowing that if I sank into the comfort of unconsciousness, I would never wake.

My head cleared just in time to see Sam raise a gun. His hand jerked as the gun spat out a small pop, no louder than a cap pistol. A patch of flesh in the Albino’s shoulder explode in a mass of red.

It didn’t slow him.

He crossed the room before Sam Yung could fire again. The claw swipe caught Sam under his chin. With no effort, the albino removed most of the man’s face.

It happened so fast, Sam didn’t seem to realize yet that he was dead. For a moment, as flesh and gore dripped down the splattered wall, and most of his jaw bounced across the floor like a shattered ash tray, he stood in place, a life-sized version of that plastic man in science class, half exposed to the eyes of the curious, brain and muscle and bone revealed for all to see. A bubbling sound rose from the ruins of his throat. His tongue moved, as if searching for teeth.

Then he fell across his desk.

The albino turned toward us.

I staggered to my feet. “John, run!”

John didn’t move. I reached down to help him up, but he was knocked out cold. There was no way I could carry him. There was no way I could protect him. There was nothing I could do for him except try to lure the monster away.

I ran into the hallway.

Heavy footsteps followed me.

Another of Yung’s men rushed up the stairs. He pulled a gun from inside his jacket. It would be the final sick joke of my life if I ended up getting shot by the lesser of two evils while running from the albino. I ducked into an open doorway.

Outside, a single gun shot punched the air. Then I heard a scream overlapped by a wet, ripping sound. A body thudded down the stairs. I knew it was the gunman.

The albino stood at the edge of the doorway, red clots of skin dripping from his claw as it completed its transition back to a hand.

“My curious friend,” he said, nodding toward me, speaking almost in a whisper. He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his hand. “You have been a bit of an inconvenience. An amusing one, but an inconvenience none the less. I can’t allow your continued existence.”

I backed away from him. As the earthy stench of hides and bones hit my nostrils and I realized the full meaning of where I was, I lost hope. I’d truly screwed up. Of all the places to seek shelter, this was the worst imaginable.

“Lovely,” the albino said, his eyes caressing the stacks of animal parts. He patted his coat pocket. “I brought my own supply, but this is truly splendid. What shall it be?”

He reached out to the nearest crate and stroked a wolf’s head. “Our noble pal Canis lupus, perhaps?” His hand, where it met the gray fur, began to change. “I think not. Too swift. Wolves kill quickly, efficiently. They have no instinct for cruelty. You deserve better, my young friend.” He studied me with those pink eyes. “I want you to linger. I want to savor our time together. Now, where would they keep the snakes?” He flicked his tongue like a serpent.

I moved deeper into the room. Beneath my feet, the wood creaked. Behind me, I heard a rasping breath.

The albino took another step. “Or maybe a leopard?” he said, reaching down to stroke a spotted skin. “Yes, that seems right. Cats play with their prey. Sometimes for hours. Thank goodness there’s such a large stockpile. We’re going to have so much fun.”

I could hear the old man, the one with the file. He was crouched under a table, whimpering. I risked a glimpse over my shoulder. One chance… If I was wrong, I was dead. If I was right, I might still be dead. If I was right and very lucky, I’d live to have nightmares about today.

I plunged my hand into the box and scooped up a handful of the chalky powder. I threw it at the albino, trying to believe that this would save me. I threw a second handful, then a third.

He laughed.

“Is that it? Your best effort? Oh my, I truly hope you give me more sport than that.”

He reached to brush the dust from his cheek.

The change began.

For a moment, he seemed puzzled.

His hands grew thick. They grew large and gray, like dense lumps of clay. His face twisted and changed. His shirt split as his chest swelled. A horn thrust from where his nose had been.

He dropped to all fours with a heavy crash, then lowered his head, aiming the horn at me. He took a step with one hulking leg. And then another step. There was less than two yards between me and death.

A scream ripped through the room. But it didn’t come from any living creature. The air filled with shrieks as the ancient wood gave way beneath the weight. One leg crashed through the floor. His chest hit with an ear-numbing boom.

For an instant, that was it. He raised his head toward me and bellowed a cry of rage. The eyes within the rhino’s face were hot coals of hate.

He struggled to pull the leg free of the hole.

I backed up another step.

He fell.

He dropped so suddenly, it was almost as if he’d been sucked through the hole. An instant later, I heard another crash. Then another, fainter. And far away—a thud, a wet smack of flesh against concrete.

That was it. He was in the basement.

I inched toward the hole like I was moving on thin ice, expecting the floor to collapse at any moment. But the floor held. Down, far down, so far I felt dizzy as I looked, lay a crumpled mass of white and red.

Around me, the lifeless eyes of countless animals bore witness to the moment. A sound from down the hall caught my attention. I edged past the hole and went back to Sam Yung’s office.

“How you doing?” I asked John. He’d managed to sit up, with his back against the wall, but still looked pretty dazed.

“Did we win?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I held out a hand and helped him to his feet.

He winced. “Oh, man. My head hurts.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You should see the other guy.”

I walked with John back to his place. As we passed through the streets of Chinatown, I thought about how foreign each of us is when he leaves his small part of the world, and how much there is that none of us will ever understand.

“You know what’s scary?” I asked John when we reached his front door.

“Your face?”

“Beside that.”

“I can’t imagine anything scarier, but go ahead.”

“If Richter was a bigger monster than Sam Yung, I guess it’s possible there’s someone out there who’s a bigger monster than Richter.”

John patted me on the shoulder. “If there is, I’m sure you’ll run into him. And drag me along. But maybe that can wait for another day.”

“Fine with me.”

At least I knew there was a little less evil in the world. It was a small change, but a good change. And that’s something to be glad about.

“Morph” reprinted from Extremities © David Lubar, 2014

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As the first novel to ever win the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards in the same year, it’s no stretch to call Ann Leckie’s debut space opera Ancillary Justice (Orbit, 2013) a phenomenon. While you’re waiting for the sequel, Ancillary Sword, please enjoy this reprint of “Night’s Slow Poison,” a short story by Ann Leckie from the world of the Imperial Radch. “Night’s Slow Poison” is a rich, claustrophobic story of a galactic voyage that forces one guardsmen to confront his uneasy family history through the lens of a passenger with his lost lover’s eyes.

[Read “Night’s Slow Poison,” by Ann Leckie]

The post Read “Night’s Slow Poison,” from the World of Hugo-Winning Novel Ancillary Justice appeared first on Reactor.

War rages on, and Drona is its heart.

Some songs tell of good wars, kind wars, wars where, when the fighting’s over, you sit alone in the woods and breathe and think, this was good, this thing I’ve done. I have saved lives, I have served my king, I am the man I always hoped to be. Drona’s heard these songs; he’s never seen the wars they mean.

This war has lasted fifteen days. Not long, but vicious. Mountains lie broken to shards by warriors’ wrath. No war has been this great since the first one, which gods and demons fought in mortal guise. Cleaner, Drona thinks as he draws his bow. Safer. Gods and demons, each knows the other an enemy. This is war between men, between brothers.

The sun stands one fist’s distance above the eastern horizon. Cries of dead and dying men and elephants, screams of horses and of tortured metal, fill the heavy air. Fifteen days ago there was a jungle here. Now patches of forest stand like tombstones on a blasted heath. There is no word for the world the war has made.

The sun is one fist’s distance above the eastern horizon, and already Drona has killed ten thousand men. He looses an arrow, and a mountain fortress breaks like glass. He feels the men there die. Ten thousand fifty seven.

Two miles away a Pandava chariot swoops low over one of the many wings of the army Drona leads. In the chariot’s wake fire spreads, burning men and fortifications that belong to Drona’s King. Skin flakes and crisps and peels from flesh. Men stagger under that fire as under a weight. A boy runs from the carnage and flame, swift, bearing bow and arrows with him. Brave. No deserter.

Drona looks on the chariot, and sees his student, Arjuna, standing behind the driver. Hair dark as a night without moon, eyes flashing golden and white with the lightning caged inside his body. Arjuna laughs, and Drona remembers the way he laughed as a boy, remembers the day Drona taught him to kneel, to draw sight on a flying eagle, to loose and fix the bird through its eye.

Drona knows he should loose his arrow and kill Arjuna. This is a war between brothers, and brothers die in war.

The stumbling boy turns, nocks arrow, draws and aims at Arjuna’s chariot overhead. But Drona did not train fools, or blind men.

Arjuna has seen the boy. Smooth as poured water, he draws his bow.

Drona could kill him now. Or not. There is a privacy in being the greatest warrior in the world: no one knows your limits. Drona need only kill someone else, somewhere else: any of the chariots dealing death over the battlefield, any of the elephants or tank divisions. His masters might say: “You should have killed Arjuna.” But his masters are not him, and when he strokes his mustache and says, “There were better targets,” who will know if he lies?

Drona himself would know.

He scans the battlefield for an alternative, and tries not to think about the boy he’s leaving to die.

Arjuna changes target.

Curious, Drona follows Arjuna’s new line of aim, adjusts for wind and the chariot’s speed, and sees, sword drawn on a broad broken field, surrounded by corpses of Pandava warriors, his own son. Ashwatthama, strong and tall. Ashwatthama, with his mother’s hair. Ashwatthama, whose sword runs red with blood, Ashwatthama, who has never stepped back from a fight, Ashwatthama, who can stun an elephant with a slap, Ashwatthama, who will die if Arjuna decides to kill him. Drona’s son has trained since youth, but Arjuna is a god’s child, and Drona’s finest pupil.

Arjuna prepares to loose. Ashwatthama does not know he should prepare to die.

Drona does not scream. He does not call out. Ashwatthama is miles away, and could not hear him if he did.

Drona aims for the chariot, for Arjuna, for Arjuna’s eye, for the root of his optic nerve. The arrow will enter the young man’s brain and bounce within his skull, destroying that fine killer’s mind Drona wasted years training.

Arjuna adjusts for wind, and his jaw clenches as it always does before he lets fly. A bad habit, Drona’s told him.

Drona’s arrow springs free of the bow, and hungry. It shines as it flies. If you stood before Drona and looked into his eye you would see a mandala turning, in three dimensions, a palace, a universe in which God lies dreaming of this war.

God is kind, Drona thinks, and cruel.

Arjuna’s chariot turns faster than such chariots can turn. Light twists around it, and space. In his ear, Drona hears laughter and the tinkling of bells.

The arrow strikes the chariot’s undercarriage, splinters its diamond armor, shatters its engines, slags its titanium shell. The carriage falls. Drona reaches out with his soul. He feels many spirits rise to the world above, but none of these belongs to Arjuna. Surely he would burn in death as in life, a beacon among hungry ghosts.

A god has saved Arjuna. But his carriage is broken, and he will fight no more today.

Ashwatthama is safe.

And Drona will not be forced to lie.

He smiles, and knows his smile sick. This thing he does is not glorious. That he saved his son without killing his student is an accident, no more, and it is strange to be glad of such an accidental pause from death.

Drona is no philosopher. His world is bound by duty, and by the range of his bow.

On the battlefield, the stumbling boy escapes into the wood, and is lost.

Drona strides forward on air, draws his bow, and kills again.

War does not stop at day’s end, but changes. Scouts and sentries play their games of seek and find, with knives in place of flags. Sages ride the minds of birds to plot the next day’s raids. Holy men bless certain battlegrounds to hide their soldiers’ footsteps, or blunt the enemy’s weapons. Fighting continues by other means.

The Pandava brothers and their advisors gather in the command tent. Two weeks ago, they prepared for this nightly meeting: they arrived shorn and bathed, hair and skin oiled, clad in fine silks and silver ornament, as befit their rank. Time has passed, and war has crept into their minds. Tonight they wear stark uniforms the colors of dust. Stubble grows on their cheeks and chins. They stink of fire, blood, and sweat.

Still, Yudhisthira the eldest pours them tea. He is the wisest of men, and has never lied. When he walks, his feet do not touch the ground.

Arjuna paces the tent. Since he learned to crawl he never could stay still. Like the storm his father, his life is movement. “Drona would have killed me.”

“You sound,” says Bhima his brother, “as if you are surprised.” Bhima sits like a mountain. Ten days ago he began carrying his great mace with him into the council tent. They all bear their weapons with them now. Yudhisthira has seen that mace break open the earth’s crust, until lava flowed from the wound.

Yudhisthira thinks he may be scared of his brothers.

“We are at war,” Bhima says. “Drona is the finest fighter on the King’s side. Of course he will try to kill us. I am surprised he has not already.”

“He shot at me.” Arjuna steps on the seat of his chair, steps down, turns away, circles the table. “Without warning.”

“How do you know it was him?”

“Would you like to see the chariot? I would show it to you, but I can’t, because the entire thing melted before it hit the ground.”

“He is our teacher,” Yudhisthira says, and Bhima closes his mouth. “He is our teacher, and he is a servant of our enemy. He has not tried to kill us yet because he loves us. He tried to kill you today because he can no longer make excuses for not doing so. The war does not go well for his master the King.”

“It does not go well for us,” says Dhristadyumna, their nephew. The men who cannot fly, who cannot call upon the gods for aid, who know no dharma weapons, no mantras, no deep magics, are under his command. “Four hundred thousand dead today. At least a third of those I lay at your teacher’s feet. More, if we count those he allowed his side to kill by suppressing our air support and artillery. He did not kill Arjuna, but he is slaughtering our men.”

Arjuna and Bhima do not speak. Nakula and Sahadeva, their two youngest brothers, nod. Yudhisthira bows his head, and blows on his tea. Arjuna completes his circuit of the tent, sits in his chair, stands, turns the chair around, sits again. Yudhithira paces. Air cushions his feet. Warm wind blows over and through the dead jungle outside. “Nothing will grow here again,” Yudhisthira says, and because he says it, the others know it is the truth. “I have never seen a weapon like the one Drona used on us today. His arrows consumed the world where they fell, and they traveled faster than sunlight. Arjuna, have you ever seen the like?”

Arjuna tilts his chair forward so its back rests on the table’s lip. “Drona told me once of a weapon used by God to right the world when it goes astray. No man can call upon it more than once and live. If Drona knew the secret, he never taught me. But I could feel his arrow’s strength when it consumed my chariot. If such a weapon exists, he turns it against us now.”

“Could any power resist this weapon?”

Arjuna stops drumming his fingers on the table. He sits as still as Bhima. He shakes his head.

“With all respect, my princes, you are asking the wrong questions.” The voice is new. No one turns to look. They know the speaker, though he stands in shadow. He watches them all, calm, patient, smiling. Bells ring behind and beneath his voice. Krishna is dark and lustrous, as if a glacier-melt ocean rolls within him. Naked from the waist up, slender, a blade made man. Arjuna’s charioteer. A prince in his own right. Not to mention a god.

Arjuna asked Krishna once, before the fighting started, whether it was right to kill friends, brothers, teachers in battle. Their conversation lasted fifteen minutes. Arjuna has not yet told anyone what they said, but when they finished, Arjuna blew his conch and the war began.

Once, when they all were young together, Krishna split himself into a hundred Krishnas to sleep with one hundred cowgirls. In those days, Yudhisthira thought he knew his friend. Since the war began, Yudhisthira has begun to doubt himself.

Yudhisthira turns to Krishna. “What questions should we ask?” No titles between them. They have moved beyond titles.

“You ask what is this weapon. You ask how to guard against it. You should ask: how to kill the man who wields it.” Krishna raises his hand. The fingers are long, and slender, the palm paler than the rest of him. “An armored chariot, drawn by an armored steed: difficult to overcome. But kill the driver, and what does the chariot matter?”

Arjuna lets the rear two legs of his chair fall back; they collide heavily with the floor. In the silence that follows, he stands, stretches his arms behind his head. The joints of his shoulders pop like breaking trees. “The weapon matters, because the man holds it. And while he holds such a weapon, he is invincible. Even without that weapon, I doubt any of us could best him in battle. He was our trainer. He made us. He knows how to break us.”

“The man holds the weapon,” Krishna says, “but the man is not the weapon. Convince him to set that weapon down. Then kill him.”

“He is the finest warrior in the world,” Yudhisthira says. “He will not set his weapon down just because we ask him to do so.”

“He will,” Krishna replies. “If we ask him correctly.”

“If we have a chance,” Dhristadyumna says, “we must take it. Drona has not killed any of you yet, but he is not so forgiving with our men. We cannot fight a war without them.”

Krishna smiles, and somewhere bells ring.

At dawn Yudhisthira meets the elephant. Bhima guides him; Arjuna is elsewhere, darting among the enemy ranks, slaying from above, from below, descending every so often from his chariot to kill by blade, by missile, by bow, by hand. He knows a hundred thousand ways to kill. They all do. They were well taught.

The elephant stands huge and grey and armored in the dark. His long trunk trails in the dust, and his eyes are the size of Yudhisthira’s two fists together. One jewel-tipped tusk rubs against Bhima’s armor, and Bhima laughs, and pats the creature on the forehead.

“A good soldier,” Bhima says. Yudhisthira does not expect it to be more than a good elephant. It smells of musk and earth: new to the lines, it does not yet stink of war. In the distance, the first bombs explode, and the creature pulls away from Bhima. Yudhisthira knows that elephants feel fear. “I call him Ashwatthama.” The beast calms. Its trunk twines around Bhima’s shoulders like a stole, and he hugs the trunk against his neck. He smiles, wickedly.

Yudhisthira does not smile. Yudhisthira gets the joke, and does not find it funny.

Dawn turns to morning, morning to noon. Clouds obscure the battle: dust and smoke, poison gas, magic fog. The fog does not block Drona’s sight, or his arrows. He shines on the mountaintop, a man become a god.

Ashwatthama the soldier, Drona’s son, stands in the thick of the fighting. His advance on this Pandava position, near a stand of dead jungle, has met greater resistance than the place’s limited strategic import would suggest. He has stumbled onto some secret: a cache of supplies, a hidden weapon. Ashwatthama cannot see through the dead trees. The foliage and smoke are too thick. He will press on, and investigate for himself.

Ashwatthama flows through the Pandava soldiers like a flood. His own men follow him, finishing the fallen, guarding his sides and back, but he is the leader of the wedge, and the enemy fears his flashing sword.

Ashwatthama fears, too. He lacks royal blood. He is a great warrior but he is not his father’s equal. In this sixteen days’ war he has gained respect as a fighter who does not fear pain or death, but his exploits have not earned him fame. Men still call him Ashwatthama, Drona’s son.

Ashwatthama is the son of his father, but he is more, too, and he wishes it known.

With a slash he dispatches a giant, eight feet tall with a monkey’s tail, one of the many monsters in each side’s employ. The remaining Pandava soldiers here are men, and they fall back. Ashwatthama catches one beneath the helmet strap and blood unfurls from his throat down his shining armor carapace. Another, turning to flee, is pierced where his armor joins beneath the arm, and falls. The rest retreat toward the stand of trees, and Ashwatthama pursues.

They hold these trees, this forest, important. A prophecy perhaps, that if they hold this hill they will win the war? But there are many prophecies, of victory and defeat, on each side. A weapon, hidden within? Ashwatthama cannot feel the sacred light of any divine power here, but there are ways to conceal the greatest of weapons until it is used.

Movement at the forest’s edge. Ashwatthama recognizes the shape, a man made to a bigger mold than other men, terror of the wrestling field, strongest man alive: Bhima, receding into the bushes. Bhima bears his mace, and smiles. His face is streaked with blood.

Bhima is the strongest of the Pandavas, but he is not their greatest fighter or strategist. Bhima follows the plans of his brothers. When they were children together, Ashwatthama remembers, Bhima would be the last to join any game, watching instead from the sidelines and talking softly to himself as he determined the rules. Only once he understood would he wade into play, sweeping all before him. This attitude is a product of his strength, Ashwatthama thinks. The strongest men stand still, afraid they will break the world by moving.

Bhima would not have come on his own. The others have sent him to some purpose. Ashwatthama will find out what.

Bhima is strong, but Ashwatthama is fierce, and his father has taught him secret skills. If he bests Bhima on the field of battle, the army will sing his name until the end of the world, which may not be far distant.

Ashwatthama leaps, and in spite of his forty pounds of armor he clears ten feet over the Pandava line, and lands light as a cat, sprinting forward. The dead forest embraces him. Branches and leaves ripple when he passes, like the surface of a still pool when a stone’s cast in. Then he is gone.

Drona looses an arrow with God’s power wrapped up inside it, and breaks a cliff face to rubble. An avalanche tumbles down, boulders, dirt, and chips of stone. A column of Pandava cavalry disappears in the collapse, and the falling rocks close a narrow pass through which, he expects, Yudhisthira had hoped to send a pincer movement to strike the left flank of the King’s three-pronged advance. Yudhisthira may be the wisest of men, but Drona is the master of war.

Contentment blooms inside him, as dust blooms from rubble.

Then he hears the cry: “Ashwatthama is dead!”

The dust settles.

Beneath, the war rolls on, flattening the world. Swords meet, and spears. Chariots roar, fire burns, missiles explode, elephants trumpet and warriors blow melodies of advance and retreat on conch shell trumpets. This noise he knows. Over all this a silence hangs, and Drona hears the silence for the first time now, large as the sky, vaster than ever he thought, stretching out to the stars which are not tiny dots of light but great things far away. In this silence, the cry repeats. “Ashwatthama is dead!”

He recognizes the voice.

Bhima.

Drona sweeps the battlefield from right to left and back again, and on his second sweep finds Bhima: stumbling out of a dense copse of trees, spattered in blood, carrying a bloody tunic. Ashwatthama always wore the uniform of his men. The uniform is correct. The blood looks like blood, but Drona does not expect his son’s blood to appear any different from the blood of other men. “Ashwatthama is dead!” That same-colored blood covers Bhima’s hands and face. Tears seep from his eyes and leave clear tracks in gore. His shoulders shake, an earthquake. He sinks to his knees. One of the King’s men sees a chance, runs at Bhima, and Bhima, artless, strikes him in the stomach with a flailing arm and breaks his spine. He sobs, and Drona remembers how Ashwatthama and Bhima wrestled one another as children. “Ashwatthama is dead!”

No other sound can touch the silence, so the words echo there.

Bhima cries. He should have taken Ashwatthama captive. That was his right, and Ashwatthama should have accepted captivity. But they strove always against one another. And Bhima does not know his own strength. And Ashwatthama does not know when to quit, or how.

He wants to make his father proud.

Still the words resound.

Drona cannot see within the copse. The trees are too dense; they have not yet been destroyed. Drona could loose an arrow to burn them from this distance, or break them to splinters, but if his son remains within, or his body…

No.

Bhima grieves, Bhima weeps. But Bhima may lie. Arjuna fights on foot, pressed on all sides, glowing with battle: he moves so fast his armor shines white with the heat of it. He would tell Drona the truth, but would also kill Drona if he approached now. Since the first days of the war, Arjuna has shown little hesitation. He is a good soldier.

Yudhisthira will know. And Yudhisthira will not lie. Yudhisthira is the best of men.

Drona seeks the Pandava command tent. Those three are fake. That fourth is in fact a trap set too close to the lines, inviting an assault that would overextend a hungry commander. There. The fifth tent, neither so far back from the line nor so close as to seem foolhardy, its flags present but not ostentatious, bristling with prayer antennas.

Drona’s bow is in his hand, and righteous fire fills him. He steps forward and the world flexes, kneels. Distance is one, a shadow of the mind. He enters the battlefield like a chess player’s hand enters the board, and stands before the Pandava tent. Men and monsters rush to meet him, but he still holds his bow, and the wheels of God turn about him. He stands within a diamond palace. His assailants quail and fall back.

He steps into the tent, into the shadows.

He expected more within. Screens reflect the light his body sheds. Chairs stand empty. Thick rugs’ thread glints gold. Drona wonders if he has been tricked. But no. Yudthisthira is here, and that is all Drona needs.

Yudhisthira is the son of the Lord of Judgment and a mortal woman. He is wise, and good, and he was never Drona’s favorite student, because there is a limit to how wise and good a man can be in war. And because of his slight sad smile, everpresent, which Drona felt, even when he was a man and Yudhithira a boy, boasted of knowledge he, Drona, would never attain. Yudhisthira has never lied. Drona would believe this of no other man, but Yudhisthira is barely a man: less, and at once more. His feet do not even touch the ground.

Drona steps forward and the light that moves with him, the light of his weapon, casts changing shadows on communications equipment, on maps and charts, on the planes of Yudhisthira’s face. Yudhisthira is not smiling.

“Is my son dead?”

Yudhisthira opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.

Drona realizes he could kill the Pandava with a thought. End the war here. He could have done this at any time, saved lives and stopped slaughter. The thought seems unimportant to him now, distant. But he could have saved—

“Is Ashwatthama dead?” he repeats, and realizes he is sobbing.

Yudhisthira’s throat tightens. “Ashwatthama is dead,” he says, and says something more, but the bellow of a nearby conch trumpet fills Drona’s ears and he falls to his knees and closes his eyes and feels the tears flow.

Souls depart the battlefield, hundreds at a time. They rise to the sky, and rising their color fades, their forms fail and they merge back with light, with God, and emerge again. But some, rising, endure. Their wills gird them in form and heavenly flesh, and shining with the glow of liberated spirit they approach heaven, and walk with gods. Ashwatthama was brave. Ashwatthama knew the secrets of the world. He would walk in heaven wearing his own skin. Drona too knows the secrets of the world, and rises to seek his son. His hands slack, and his bow falls from them. His skin ceases to glow. His fingers float by reflex into a mudra. Drona’s soul flies upward, living, and the gates of heaven open for him.

Ashwatthama hears the cries of his own death, but he cannot tell from what direction they come. The trees here are thick. He strikes one with his sword and it topples, but still he cannot see the sky. The copse is not copse at all but forest, and chasing Bhima he has wandered into its depths. All paths lead in, a spiral with no outer edge. He sprints, he doubles back, he seeks his own tracks and finds none. The marshy ground holds no footprints.

He smells blood, though, and thinking blood must be the battlefield he bears toward the stench. Through the pressing bushes, the thorns that catch in his hair and tear his skin, through the branches every one of which resembles an upraised mace, to the clearing at the forest’s heart. An elephant in Pandava armor lies there, bathed in a spreading pool of its own blood. Flies have found it already, and dart above staring eyes. A mace has caved in the elephant’s skull. A bloody handprint rests on one jeweled tusk, a final pat from its murderer.

Ashwatthama has seen dead animals before, has killed many. But he staggers back, and stumbles into the wood, and does not know why he is afraid.

Yudhisthira looks down on his enemy, his teacher, his friend. Divine power set aside, soul wandering heaven, Drona seems smaller even than other men, and Yudhisthira realizes it has been ten years—more?—since last he saw Drona face to face. Yudhisthira feels an unfamiliar pain.

The tent flap opens, and two men enter: Dhristadyumna and Krishna. Both grin triumph. Krishna holds his conch shell, and Dhristadyumna’s hand rests on his sword. Yudhisthira realizes that Krishna’s was the trumpet that blew, that kept Drona from hearing the second half of his sentence: “Ashwatthama is dead, but I do not know whether it is the man or the elephant.”

Krishna sets his conch shell down on a map table. “I thought,” he says, apologetic, “that you might not be able to carry through your piece. I doubt we needed the trumpet, though, in the end. He had already fallen to his knees.”

“I told the truth,” Yudhisthira says.

“Of course you did.” Krishna places his hand on Yudhisthira’s shoulder. Yudhisthira steps back, and feels the strange new pain sharper than before, and embraces Krishna and so stands entangled with his friend, Arjuna’s charioteer, the smiling god, when Dhristadyumna draws his sword and cuts Drona’s head from his shoulders.

Yudhisthira surges forward, his friend thrown aside, and catches Dhristadyumna’s sword arm before the general can put his blade away. Drona’s head tumbles to the left and rolls, lying on its side, mouth open. Yudhisthira feels the new pain, and his old rage, and a strange warmth. “Why?” He shouts, and the walls of the tent tremble.

Dhristadyumna pulls back, or tries, but his sword arm will not move. Yudhisthira’s grip might as well be forged iron. Dhristadyumna is a brave man, but he feels fear staring into the Pandava lord’s eyes. “What did you plan to do with him, once he’d thrown down his weapons? Did you think this would end with you both alive, and friends?”

“We could have bound him. Tied him. Locked him away.” Yudhisthira’s grip tightens, and Dhristadyumna stumbles. Pain contorts his fingers. The blade falls to the bloodstained carpet.

“You’ve seen him. I’ve seen him. He would laugh at prison walls. What bonds could we tie to hold him?”

“He would not have tried to escape. He is a man of honor.”

Yudhisthira could close his hand and shatter Dhristadyumna’s wrist. The general spits his words through clenched teeth. “He was a butcher. He was a force of nature. And we will win this war because he is dead.”

“Coward.” Yudhisthira releases the other man’s arm, and stumbles back. “Coward.”

“You knew this would happen,” Dhristadyumna says. “You knew. And you went ahead with it, and now you blame me.”

Yudhisthira feels the new pain again, and the new warmth.

He looks down.

He stands on the gold-thread rug, in a pool of his teacher’s blood. He stands, and the rug scrapes his feet, which have not in his many years of life ever touched the ground.

He looks up.

Dhristadyumna’s eyes are wide and dark like those of a scared animal.

Yudhisthira turns, and walks past Krishna, out the rear flap of the tent, into the light and noise and death, trailing bloody footprints.

Heaven is wheels within wheels, and each turning of every wheel a garden, a palace, a tapestry of light and choice and change. Heaven is a flower, opening.

Heaven is empty.

Drona wanders, calling, crying. “Ashwatthama! Ashwatthama, my son!”

Ashwatthama stumbles from the forest onto the broken battlefield. Above him the sky is a maze of contrails and fire. On all sides the poisoned earth stretches. Soldiers of the King and Pandavas alike clash and war, advance and retreat. Men die, and animals, and their dying looks much the same. This is the war of the world. Ashwatthama’s sword is bare, and spotted with dried blood.

He searches the horizon for his father’s light, and sees nothing.

This is the war of the world, and its heart is gone.

The post Drona’s Death appeared first on Reactor.

In the nominating phase of the 2013 Hugo Awards, the audiobook appearance of the story received enough nominations to have been one of the finalists for Best Novelette—in fact, it received the third largest number of nominations. However, the committee overseeing this year’s Hugo process decided that it was ineligible in the “Best Novelette” category but eligible in “Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)”, where, unfortunately, it didn’t actually have enough nominations to be a finalist. It’s our understanding that, without wishing to constrain the committee that will oversee the 2014 Hugo Awards, the people who oversaw the awards in 2013 believe that the author’s 2013 self-publication of the story will make it eligible in 2014.

What we think is that “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” is a fine story, and deserves not merely to be technically eligible for the 2014 Hugo ballot, but also to be read by large numbers of people. So we’re pleased to be presenting it to you here in its definitive, author-preferred text form.

[—Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. She met me, she went on to say, when I was working next door to their farm under the shadow of the rocket gantry for the First Mars Expedition.

I have no memory of this.

She would have been a little girl and, oh lord, there were so many little kids hanging around outside the Fence watching us work. The little girls all wanted to talk to the Lady Astronaut. To me.

I’m sure I spoke to Dorothy because know I stopped and talked to them every day on my way in and out through the Fence about what it was like. It being Mars. There was nothing else it could be.

Mars consumed everyone’s conversations. The programmers sitting over their punchcards. The punchcard girls keying in the endless lines of code. The cafeteria ladies ladling out mashed potatoes and green peas. Nathaniel with his calculations… Everyone talked about Mars.

So the fact that I didn’t remember a little girl who said I talked to her about Mars… Well. That’s not surprising, is it? I tried not to let the confusion show in my face but I know she saw it.

By this point, Dorothy was my doctor. Let me be more specific. She was the geriatric specialist who was evaluating me. On Mars. I was in for what I thought was a routine check-up to make sure I was still fit to be an astronaut. NASA liked to update its database periodically and I liked to be in that database. Not that I’d flown since I turned fifty, but I kept my name on the list in the faint hope that they would let me back into space again, and I kept going to the darn check-ups.

Our previous doctor had retired back to Earth, and I’d visited Dorothy’s offices three times before she mentioned Kansas and the prairie.

She fumbled with the clipboard and cleared her throat. A flush of red colored her cheeks and made her eyes even more blue. “Sorry. Dr. York, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Don’t ‘doctor’ me. You’re the doctor. I’m just a space jockey. Call me Elma.” I waved my hand to calm her down. The flesh under my arm jiggled and I dropped my hand. I hate that feeling and hospital gowns just make it worse. “I’m glad you did. You just took me by surprise, is all. Last I saw you, weren’t you knee-high to a grasshopper?”

“So you do remember me?” Oh, that hope. She’d come to Mars because of me. I could see that, clear as anything. Something I’d said or done back in 1952 had brought this girl out to the colony.

“Of course, I remember you. Didn’t we talk every time I went through that Fence? Except school days, of course.” It seemed a safe bet.

Dorothy nodded, eager. “I still have the eagle you gave me.”

“Do you now?” That gave me a pause.

I used to make paper eagles out of old punchcards while I was waiting for Nathaniel. His programs could take hours to run and he liked to baby sit them. The eagles were cut paper things with layers of cards pasted together to make a three dimensional bird. It was usually in flight and I liked to hang them in the window, where the holes from the punch cards would let specks of light through and make the bird seem like it was sparkling. They would take me two or three days to make. You’d think I would remember giving one to a little girl beyond the Fence. “Did you bring it out here with you?”

“It’s in my office.” She stood as if she’d been waiting for me to ask that since our first session, then looked down at the clipboard in her hands, frowning. “We should finish your tests.”

“Fine by me. Putting them off isn’t going to make me any more eager.” I held out my arm with the wrist up so she could take my pulse. By this point, I knew the drill. “How’s your Uncle?”

She laid her fingers on my wrist, cool as anything. “He and Aunt Em passed away when Orion 27 blew.”

I swallowed, sick at my lack of memory. So she was THAT little girl. She’d told me all the things I needed and my old brain was just too addled to put the pieces together. I wondered if she would make a note of that and if it would keep me grounded.

Dorothy had lived on a farm in the middle of the Kansas prairie with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. When Orion 27 came down in a ball of fire, it was the middle of a drought. The largest pieces of it had landed on a farm.

No buildings were crushed, but it would have been a blessing if they had been, because that would have saved the folks inside from burning alive.

I closed my eyes and could see her now as the little girl I’d forgotten. Brown pigtails down her back and a pair of dungarees a size too large for her, with the legs cuffed up to show bobby socks and sneakers.

Someone had pointed her out. “The little girl from the Williams farm.”

I’d seen her before, but in that way you see the same people every day without noticing them. Even then, with someone pointing to her, she didn’t stand out from the crowd. Looking at her, there was nothing to know that she’d just lived through a tragedy. I reckon it hadn’t hit her yet.

I had stepped away from the entourage of reporters and consultants that followed me and walked up to her. She had tilted her head back to look up at me. I used to be a tall woman, you know.

I remember her voice piping up in that high treble of the very young. “You still going to Mars?”

I had nodded. “Maybe you can go someday too.”

She had cocked her head to the side, as if she were considering. I can’t remember what she said back. I know she must have said something. I know we must have talked longer because I gave her that darned eagle, but what we said… I couldn’t pull it up out of my brain.

As the present day Dorothy tugged up my sleeve and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm, I studied her. She had the same dark hair as the little girl she had been, but it was cut short now and in the low gravity of Mars it wisped around her head like the down on a baby bird.

The shape of her eyes was the same, but that was about it. The soft roundness of her cheeks was long gone, leaving high cheekbones and a jaw that came to too sharp of a point for beauty. She had a faint white scar just above her left eyebrow.

She smiled at me and unwrapped the cuff. “Your blood pressure is better. You must have been exercising since last time.”

“I do what my doctor tells me.”

“How’s your husband?”

“About the same.” I slid away from the subject even though, as his doctor, she had the right to ask, and I squinted at her height. “How old were you when you came here?”

“Sixteen. We were supposed to come before but… well.” She shrugged, speaking worlds about why she hadn’t.

“Your uncle, right?”

Startled, she shook her head. “Oh, no. Mom and Dad. We were supposed to be on the first colony ship but a logging truck lost its load.”

Aghast, I could only stare at her. If they were supposed to have been on the first colony ship, then her parents could not have died long before Orion 27 crashed. I wet my lips. “Where did you go after your aunt and uncle’s?”

“My cousin. Their son.” She lifted one of the syringes she’d brought in with her. “I need to take some blood today.”

“My left arm has better veins.”

While she swabbed the site, I looked away and stared at a chart on the wall reminding people to take their vitamin D supplements. We didn’t get enough light here for most humans.

But the stars… When you could see them, the stars were glorious. Was that what had brought Dorothy to Mars?

When I got home from the doctor’s—from Dorothy’s—the nurse was just finishing up with Nathaniel’s sponge bath. Genevieve stuck her head out of the bedroom, hands still dripping.

“Well, hey, Miss Elma. We’re having a real good day, aren’t we, Mr. Nathaniel?” Her smile could have lit a hangar, it was so bright.

“That we are.” Nathaniel sounded hale and hearty, if I didn’t look at him. “Genevieve taught me a new joke. How’s it go?”

She stepped back into the bedroom. “What did the astronaut see on the stove? An unidentified frying object.”

Nathaniel laughed, and there was only a little bit of a wheeze. I slid my shoes off in the dustroom to keep out the ever present Martian grit, and came into the kitchen to lean against the bedroom door. Time was, it used to be his office but we needed a bedroom on the ground floor. “That’s a pretty good one.”

He sat on a towel at the edge of the bed as Genevieve washed him. With his shirt off, the ribs were starkly visible under his skin. Each bone in his arms poked at the surface and slid under the slack flesh. His hands shook, even just resting beside him on the bed. He grinned at me.

The same grin. The same bright blue eyes that had flashed over the punchcards as he’d worked out the plans for the launch. It was as though someone had pasted his features onto the body of a stranger. “How’d the doctor’s visit go?”

“The usual. Only… Only it turns out our doctor grew up next to the launch facility in Kansas.”

“Dr. Williams?”

“The same. Apparently I met her when she was little.”

“Is that right?” Genevieve wrung the sponge out in the wash basin. “Doesn’t that just go to show that it’s a small solar system?”

“Not that small.” Nathaniel reached for his shirt, which lay on the bed next to him. His hands tremored over the fabric.

“I’ll get it. You just give me a minute to get this put away.” Genevieve bustled out of the room.

I called after her. “Don’t worry. I can help him.”

Nathaniel dipped his head, hiding those beautiful eyes, as I drew a sleeve up over one arm. He favored flannel now. He’d always hated it in the past. Preferred starched white shirts and a nice tie to work in, and a short sleeved aloha shirt on his days off. At first, I thought that the flannel was because he was cold all the time. Later I realized that the thicker fabric hid some of his frailty. Leaning behind him to pull the shirt around his back, I could count vertebra in his spine.

Nathaniel cleared his throat. “So, you met her, hm? Or she met you? There were a lot of little kids watching us.”

“Both. I gave her one of my paper eagles.”

That made him lift his head. “Really?”

“She was on the Williams farm when the Orion 27 came down.”

He winced. Even after all these years, Nathaniel still felt responsible. He had not programmed the rocket. They’d asked him to, but he’d been too busy with the First Mars Expedition and turned the assignment down. It was just a supply rocket for the moon, and there had been no reason to think it needed anything special.

I buttoned the shirt under his chin. The soft wattle of skin hanging from his jaw brushed the back of my hand. “I think she was too shy to mention it at my last visit.”

“But she gave you a clean bill of health?”

“There’s still some test results to get back.” I avoided his gaze, hating the fact that I was healthy and he was… Not.

“It must be pretty good. Sheldon called.”

A bubble of adrenalin made my heart skip. Sheldon Spender called. The director of operations at the Bradbury Space Center on Mars had not called since—No, that wasn’t true. He hadn’t called me in years, using silence to let me know I wasn’t flying anymore. Nathaniel still got called for work. Becoming old didn’t stop a programmer from working, but it sure as heck stopped an astronaut from flying. And yet I still had that moment of hope every single time Sheldon called, that this time it would be for me. I smoothed the flannel over Nathaniel’s shoulders. “Do they have a new project for you?”

“He called for you. Message is on the counter.”

Genevieve breezed back into the room, a bubble of idle chatter preceding her. Something about her cousin and meeting their neighbors on Venus. I stood up and let her finish getting Nathaniel dressed while I went into the kitchen.

Sheldon had called for me? I picked up the note on the counter. It just had Genevieve’s round handwriting and a request to meet for lunch. The location told me a lot though. He’d picked a bar next to the space center that no one in the industry went to because it was thronged with tourists. It was a good place to talk business without talking business. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what he wanted.

I kept chewing on that question, right till the point when I stepped through the doors of Yuri’s Spot. The walls were crowded with memorabilia and signed photos of astronauts. An early publicity still that showed me perched on the edge of Nathaniel’s desk, hung in the corner next to a dusty ficus tree. My hair fell in perfect soft curls despite the flight suit I had on. My hair would never have survived like that if I’d actually been working. I tended to keep it out of the way in a kerchief, but that wasn’t the image publicity had wanted.

Nathaniel was holding up a punch card, as if he were showing me a crucial piece of programming. Again, it was a staged thing, because the individual cards were meaningless by themselves, but to the general public at the time they meant Science with a capital S. I’m pretty sure that’s why we were both laughing in the photo, but they had billed it as “the joy of space flight.”

Still gave me a chuckle, thirty years later.

Sheldon stepped away from the wall and mistook my smile. “You look in good spirits.”

I nodded to the photo. “Just laughing at old memories.”

He glanced over his shoulder, wrinkles bunching at the corner of his eyes in a smile. “How’s Nathaniel?”

“About the same, which is all one can ask for at this point.”

Sheldon nodded and gestured to a corner booth, leading me past a family with five kids who had clearly come from the Space Center. The youngest girl had her nose buried in a picture book of the early space program. None of them noticed me.

Time was when I couldn’t walk anywhere on Mars without being recognized as the Lady Astronaut. Now, thirty years after the First Expedition, I was just another old lady, whose small stature showed my origin on Earth.

We settled in our chairs and ordered, making small talk as we did. I think I got fish and chips because it was the first thing on the menu, and all I could think about was wondering why Sheldon had called.

It was like he wanted to see how long it would take me to crack and ask him what he was up to. It took me awhile to realize that he kept bringing the conversation back to Nathaniel. Was he in pain?

Of course.

Did he have trouble sleeping?

Yes.

Even, “How are you holding up?” was about him. I didn’t get it until Sheldon paused and pushed his rabbit burger aside, half-eaten, and asked point-blank. “Have they given him a date yet?”

A date. There was only one date that mattered in a string of other milestones on the path to death but I pretended he wasn’t being clear, just to make him hurt a little. “You mean for paralyzation, hospice, or death?”

He didn’t flinch. “Death.”

“We think he’s got about a year.” I kept my face calm, the way you do when you’re talking to Mission Control about a flight that’s set to abort. The worse it got, the more even my voice became. “He can still work, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It’s not.” Sheldon broke his gaze then, to my surprise, and looked down at his ice water, spinning the glass in its circle of condensation. “What I need to know is if you can still work.”

In my intake of breath, I wanted to say that God, yes, I could work and that I would do anything he asked of me if he’d put me back into space. In my exhale, I thought of Nathaniel. I could not say yes. “That’s why you asked for the physical.”

“Yep.”

“I’m sixty-three, Sheldon.”

“I know.” He turned the glass again. “Did you see the news about LS-579?”

“The extrasolar planet. Yes.” I was grounded, that didn’t mean I stopped paying attention to the stars.

“Did you know we think it’s habitable?”

I stopped with my mouth open as pieces started to tick like punch cards slotting through a machine. “You’re mounting a mission.”

“If we were, would you be interested in going?”

Back into space? My god, yes. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I—that was why he wanted to know when my husband was going to die. I swallowed everything before speaking. My voice was passive. “I’m sixty-three.” Which was my way of asking why he wanted me to go.

“It’s three years in space.” He looked up now, not needing to explain why they wanted an old pilot.

That long in space? It doesn’t matter how much shielding you have against radiation, it’s going to affect you. The chances of developing cancer within the next fifteen years were huge. You can’t ask a young astronaut to do that. “I see.”

“We have the resources to send a small craft there. It can’t be unmanned because the programming is too complicated. I need an astronaut who can fit in the capsule.”

“And you need someone who has a reason to not care about surviving the trip.”

“No.” He grimaced. “PR tells me that I need an astronaut that the public will adore so that when we finally tell them that we’ve sent you, they will forgive us for hiding the mission from them.” Sheldon cleared his throat and started briefing me on the Longevity Mission.

Should I pause here and explain what the Longevity mission is? It’s possible that you don’t know.

There’s a habitable planet. An extrasolar one and it’s only few light years away. They’ve got a slingshot that can launch a ship up to near light speed. A small ship. Big enough for one person.

But that isn’t what makes the Longevity mission possible. That is the tesseract field. We can’t go faster than light, but we can cut corners through the universe. The physicists described it to me like a subway tunnel. The tessaract will bend space and allow a ship to go to the next subway station. The only trick is that you need to get far enough away from a planet before you can bend space and… this is the harder part… you need a tesseract field at the other end. Once that’s up, you just need to get into orbit and the trip from Mars to LS-579 can be as short as three weeks.

But you have to get someone to the planet to set up the other end of the tesseract.

And they wanted to hide the plan from the public, in case it failed.

So different from when the First Mars Expedition had happened. An asteroid had slammed into Washington D.C. and obliterated the capitol. It made the entire world realize how fragile our hold on Earth was. Nations banded together and when the Secretary of Agriculture, who found himself president through the line of succession, said that we needed to get off the planet, people listened. We rose to the stars. The potential loss of an astronaut was just part of the risk. Now? Now it has been long enough that people are starting to forget that the danger is still there. That the need to explore is necessary.

Sheldon finished talking and just watched me processing it.

“I need to think about this.”

“I know.”

Then I closed my eyes and realized that I had to say no. It didn’t matter how I felt about the trip or the chance to get back into space. The launch date he was talking about meant I’d have to go into training now. “I can’t.” I opened my eyes and stared at the wall where the publicity still of me and Nathaniel hung. “I have to turn it down.”

“Talk to Nathaniel.”

I grimaced. He would tell me to take it. “I can’t.”

I left Sheldon feeling more unsettled than I wanted to admit at the time. I stared out the window of the light rail, at the sepia sky. Rose tones were deepening near the horizon with sunset. It was dimmer and ruddier here, but with the dust, sunset could be just as glorious as on Earth.

It’s a hard thing to look at something you want and to know that the right choice is to turn it down. Understand me: I wanted to go. Another opportunity like this would never come up for me. I was too old for normal missions. I knew it. Sheldon knew it. And Nathaniel would know it, too. I wish he had been in some other industry so I could lie and talk about “later.” He knew the space program too well to be fooled.

And he wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t want to go. He knew how much I missed the stars.

That’s the thing that I think none of us were prepared for in coming to Mars. The natural night sky on Mars is spectacular, because the atmosphere is so thin. But where humans live, under the dome, all you can see are the lights of the town reflecting against the dark curve. You can almost believe that they’re stars. Almost. If you don’t know what you are missing or don’t remember the way the sky looked at night on Earth before the asteroid hit.

I wonder if Dorothy remembers the stars. She’s young enough that she might not. Children on Earth still look at clouds of dust and stars are just a myth. God. What a bleak sky.

When I got home, Genevieve greeted me with her usual friendly chatter. Nathaniel looked like he wanted to push her out of the house so he could quiz me. I know Genevieve said good bye, and that we chatted, but the details have vanished now.

What I remember next is the rattle and thump of Nathaniel’s walker as he pushed it into the kitchen. It slid forward. Stopped. He took two steps, steadied himself, and slid it forward again. Two steps. Steady. Slide.

I pushed away from the counter and straightened. “Do you want to be in the kitchen or the living room?”

“Sit down, Elma.” He clenched the walker till the tendons stood out on the back of his hands, but they still trembled. “Tell me about the mission.”

“What?” I froze.

“The mission.” He stared at the ceiling, not at me. “That’s why Sheldon called, right? So, tell me.”

“I… All right.” I pulled the tall stool out for him and waited until he eased onto it. Then I told him. He stared at the ceiling the whole time I talked. I spent the time watching him and memorizing the line of his cheek, and the shape of the small mole by the corner of his mouth.

When I finished, he nodded. “You should take it.”

“What makes you think I want to?”

He lowered his head then, eyes just as piercing as they had always been. “How long have we been married?”

“I can’t.”

Nathaniel snorted. “I called Dr. Williams while you were out, figuring it would be something like this. I asked for a date when we could get hospice.” He held up his hand to stop the words forming on my lips. “She’s not willing to tell me that. She did give me the date when the paralysis is likely to become total. Three months. Give or take a week.”

We’d known this was coming, since he was diagnosed, but I still had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from sobbing. He didn’t need to see me break down.

“So… I think you should tell them yes.”

“Three months is not a lot of time, they can—”

“They can what? Wait for me to die? Jesus Christ, Elma. We know that’s coming.” He scowled at the floor. “Go. For the love of God, just take the mission.”

I wanted to. I wanted to get off the planet and back into space and not have to watch him die. Not have to watch him lose control of his body piece by piece.

And I wanted to stay here and be with him and steal every moment left that he had breath in his body.

One of my favorite restaurants in Landing was Elmore’s. The New Orleans style cafe sat tucked back behind Thompson’s Grocers on a little rise that lifted the dining room just high enough to see out to the edge of town and the dome’s wall. They had a crawfish étouffée that would make you think you were back on Earth. The crawfish were raised in a tank and a little bigger than the ones I’d grown up with, but the spices came all the way from Louisiana on the mail runs twice a year.

Sheldon Spender knew it was my favorite and was taking ruthless advantage of that. And yet I came anyway. He sat across the table from me, with his back to the picture window that framed the view. His thinning hair was almost invisible against the sky. He didn’t say a word. Just watched me, as the fellow to my right talked.

Garrett Biggs. I’d seen him at the Bradbury Space Center, but we’d exchanged maybe five words before today. My work was mostly done before his time. They just trotted me out for the occasional holiday. Now, the man would not stop talking. He gestured with his fork as he spoke, punctuating the phrases he thought I needed to hear most. “Need some photos of you so we can exploit—I know it sounds ugly but we’re all friends here, right? We can be honest, right? So, we can exploit your sacrifice to get the public really behind the Longevity mission.”

I watched the lettuce tremble on the end of his fork. It was pallid compared to my memory of lettuce on Earth. “I thought the public didn’t know about the mission.”

“They will. That’s the key. Someone will leak it and we need to be ready.” He waved the lettuce at me. “And that’s why you are a brilliant choice for pilot. Octogenarian Grandmother Paves Way for Humanity.”

“You can’t pave the stars. I’m not a grandmother. And I’m sixty-three not eighty.”

“It’s a figure of speech. The point is that you’re a PR goldmine.”

I had known that they asked me to helm this mission because of my age—it would be a lot to ask of someone who had a full life ahead of them. Maybe I was naive to think that my experience in establishing the Mars colony was considered valuable.

How can I explain the degree to which I resented being used for publicity? This wasn’t a new thing by a long shot. My entire career has been about exploitation for publicity. I had known it, and exploited it too, once I’d realized the power of having my uniform tailored to show my shape a little more clearly. You think they would have sent me to Mars if it weren’t intended to be a colony? I was there to show all the lady housewives that they could go to space too. Posing in my flight suit, with my lips painted red, I had smiled at more cameras than my colleagues.

I stared Garrett Biggs and his fork. “For someone in PR, you are awfully blunt.”

“I’m honest. To you. If you were the public, I’d have you spinning so fast you’d generate your own gravity.”

Sheldon cleared his throat. “Elma, the fact is that we’re getting some pressure from a group of senators. They want to cut the budget for the project and we need to take steps or it won’t happen.”

I looked down and separated the tail from one of my crawfish. “Why?”

“The usual nonsense. People arguing that if we just wait, then ships will become fast enough to render the mission pointless. That includes a couple of serious misunderstandings of physics, but, be that as it may…” Sheldon paused and tilted his head, looking at me. He changed what he was about to say and leaned forward. “Is Nathaniel worse?”

“He’s not better.”

He winced at the edge in my voice. “I’m sorry. I know I strong-armed you into it, but I can find someone else.”

“He thinks I should go.” My chest hurt even considering it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the mission. “He knows it’s the only way I’ll get back into space.”

Garrett Biggs frowned like I’d said the sky was green, instead of the pale Martian amber. “You’re in space.”

“I’m on Mars. It’s still a planet.”

I woke out of half-sleep, aware that I must have heard Nathaniel’s bell, without being able to actually recall it. I pulled myself to my feet, putting a hand against the nightstand until I was steady. My right hip had stiffened again in the night. Arthritis is not something I approve of.

Turning on the hall light, I made my way down the stairs. The door at the bottom stood open so I could hear Nathaniel if he called. I couldn’t sleep with him anymore, for fear of breaking him.

I went through into his room. It was full of grey shadows and the dark rectangle of his bed. In one corner, the silver arm of his walker caught the light.

“I’m sorry.” His voice cracked with sleep.

“It’s all right. I was awake anyway.”

“Liar.”

“Now, is that a nice thing to say?” I put my hand on the light switch. “Watch your eyes.”

Every night we followed the same ritual and even though I knew the light would be painfully bright, I still winced as it came on. Squinting against the glare, I threw the covers back for him. The weight of them trapped him sometimes. He held his hands up, waiting for me to take them. I braced myself and let Nathaniel pull himself into a sitting position. On Earth, he’d have been bed-ridden long since. Of course, on Earth, his bone density would probably not have deteriorated so fast.

As gently as I could, I swung his legs to the side of the bed. Even allowing for the gravity, I was appalled anew by how light he was. His legs were like kindling wrapped in tissue. Where his pajamas had ridden up, purple bruises mottled his calf.

As soon as he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, I gave him the walker. He wrapped his shaking hands around the bars and tried to stand. He rose only a little before dropping back to the bed. I stayed where I was, though I ached to help. He sometimes took more than one try to stand at night, and didn’t want help. Not until it became absolutely necessary. Even then, he wouldn’t want it. I just hoped he’d let me help him when we got to that point.

On the second try, he got his feet under him and stood, shaking. With a nod, he pushed forward. “Let’s go.”

I followed him to the bathroom in case he lost his balance in there, which he did sometimes. The first time, I hadn’t been home. We had hired Genevieve not long after that to sit with him when I needed to be out.

He stopped in the kitchen and bent a little at the waist with a sort of grunt.

“Are you all right?”

He shook his head and started again, moving faster. “I’m not—” He leaned forward, clenching his jaw. “I can’t—”

The bathroom was so close.

“Oh, God. Elma…” A dark, fetid smell filled the kitchen. Nathaniel groaned. “I couldn’t—”

I put my hand on his back. “Hush. We’re almost there. We’ll get you cleaned up.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He pushed the walker forward, head hanging. A trail of damp footsteps followed him. The ammonia stink of urine joined the scent of his bowels.

I helped him lower his pajamas. The weight of them had made them sag on his hips. Dark streaks ran down his legs and dripped onto the bathmat. I eased him onto the toilet.

My husband bent his head forward, and he wept.

I remember wetting a washcloth and running it over his legs. I know that I must have tossed his soiled pajamas into the cleaner, and that I wiped up the floor, but those details have mercifully vanished. But what I can’t forget, and I wish to God that I could, is Nathaniel sitting there crying.

I asked Genevieve to bring adult diapers to us the next day. The strange thing was how familiar the package felt. I’d used them on launches when we had to sit in the capsule for hours and there was no option to get out of our space suit. It’s one of the many glamorous details of being an astronaut that the publicity department does not share with the public.

There is a difference, however, from being required to wear one for work and what Nathaniel faced. He could not put them on by himself without losing his balance. Every time I had to change the diaper, he stared at the wall with his face slack and hopeless.

Nathaniel and I’d made the decision not to have children. They aren’t conducive to a life in space, you know? I mean there’s the radiation, and the weightlessness, but more it was that I was gone all the time. I couldn’t give up the stars… but I found myself wishing that we hadn’t made that decision. Part of it was wishing that I had some connection to the next generation. More of it was wanting someone to share the burden of decision with me.

What happens after Nathaniel dies? What do I have left here? More specifically, how much will I regret not going on the Mission?

And if I’m in space, how much will I regret abandoning my husband to die alone?

You see why I was starting to wish that we had children?

In the afternoon, we were sitting in the living room, pretending to work. Nathaniel sat with his pencil poised over the paper and stared out the window as though he were working. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t but I gave him what privacy I could and started on one of my eagles.

The phone rang and gave us both something of a relief, I think, to have a distraction. The phone sat on a table by Nathaniel’s chair so he could reach it easily if I weren’t in the room. With my eyes averted, his voice sounded as strong as ever as he answered.

“Hang on, Sheldon. Let me get Elma for—Oh. Oh, I see.”

I snipped another feather but it was more as a way to avoid making eye contact than because I really wanted to keep working.

“Of course I’ve got a few minutes. I have nothing but time these days.” He ran his hand through his hair and let it rest at the back of his neck. “I find it hard to believe that you don’t have programmers on staff who can’t handle this.”

He was quiet then as Sheldon spoke, I could hear only the distorted tinny sound of his voice rising and falling. At a certain point, Nathaniel picked up his pencil again and started making notes. Whatever Sheldon was asking him to do, that was the moment when Nathaniel decided to say “yes.”

I set my eagle aside and went into the kitchen. My first reaction—God. It shames me but my first reaction was anger. How dare he? How dare he take a job without consulting with me when I was turning down this thing I so desperately wanted because of him. I had the urge to snatch up the phone and tell Sheldon that I would go.

I pushed that down carefully and looked at it.

Nathaniel had been urging me to go. No deliberate action of his was keeping me from accepting. Only my own upbringing and loyalty and… and I loved him. If I did not want to be alone after he passed, how could I leave him to face the end alone?

The decision would be easier if I knew when he would die.

I still hate myself for thinking that.

I heard the conversation end and Nathaniel hung up the phone. I filled a glass with water to give myself an excuse for lingering in the kitchen. I carried it back into the living room and sat down on the couch.

Nathaniel had his lower lip between his teeth and was scowling at the page on top of his notepad. He jotted a number in the margin with a pencil before he looked up.

“That was Sheldon.” He glanced back at the page.

I settled in my chair and fidgeted with the wedding band on my finger. It had gotten loose in the last year. “I’m going to turn them down.”

“What—But, Elma.” His gaze flattened and he gave me a small frown. “Are you… are you sure it’s not depression? That’s making you want to stay, I mean.”

I gave an unladylike snort. “Now what do I have to be depressed about?”

“Please.” He ran his hands through his hair and knit them together at the back of his neck. “I want you to go so you won’t be here when… It’s just going to get worse from here.”

The devil of it was that he wasn’t wrong. That didn’t mean he was right, either, but I couldn’t flat out tell him he was wrong. I set down my scissors and pushed the magnifier out of the way. “It’s not just depression.”

“I don’t understand. There’s a chance to go back into space.” He dropped his hands and sat forward. “I mean… If I die before the mission leaves and you’re grounded here. How would you feel?”

I looked away. My gaze was pointed to the window and the view of the house across the lane. But I did not see the windows or the red brick walls. All I saw was a black and grey cloth made of despair. “I had a life that I enjoyed before this opportunity came up. There’s no reason I shouldn’t keep on enjoying it. I enjoy teaching. There are a hundred reasons to enjoy life here.”

He pointed his pencil at me the way he used to do when he spotted a flaw in reasoning at a meeting, but the pencil quivered in his grip now. “If that’s true, then why haven’t you told them no, yet?”

The answer to that was not easy. Because I wanted to be in the sky, weightless, and watching the impossibly bright stars. Because I didn’t want to watch Nathaniel die. “What did Sheldon ask you to do?”

“NASA wants more information about LS-579.”

“I imagine they do.” I twisted that wedding band around as if it were a control that I could use. “I would… I would hate… As much as I miss being in space, I would hate myself if I left you here. To have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Till death do us part and all that. I just can’t.”

“Well… just don’t tell him no. Not yet. Let me talk to Dr. Williams and see if she can give us a clearer date. Maybe there won’t be a schedule conflict after al—”

“Stop it! Just stop. This is my decision. I’m the one who has to live with the consequences. Not you. So, stop trying to put your guilt off onto me because the devil of it is, one of us is going to feel guilty here, but I’m the one who will have to live with it.”

I stormed out of the room before he could answer me or I could say anything worse. And yes—I knew that he couldn’t follow me and for once I was glad.

Dorothy came not long after that. To say that I was flummoxed when I opened the door wouldn’t do justice to my surprise. She had her medical bag with her and I think that’s the only thing that gave me the power of speech. “Since when do you make house calls?”

She paused, mouth partially open, and frowned. “Weren’t you told I was coming?”

“No.” I remembered my manners and stepped back so she could enter. “Sorry. You just surprised me is all.”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Spender asked me to come out. He thought you’d be more comfortable if I stayed with Mr. York while you were gone.” She shucked off her shoes in the dust room.

I looked back through the kitchen to the living room, where Nathaniel sat just out of sight. “That’s right kind and all, but I don’t have any appointments today.”

“Do I have the date wrong?”

The rattle and thump of Nathaniel’s walker started. I abandoned Dorothy and ran through the kitchen. He shouldn’t be getting up without me. If he lost his balance again—What? It might kill him if he fell? Or it might not kill him fast enough so that his last days were in even more pain.

He met me at the door and looked past me. “Nice to see you, Doc.”

Dorothy had trailed after me into the kitchen. “Sir.”

“You bring that eagle to show me?”

She nodded and I could see the little girl she had been in the shyness of it. She lifted her medical bag to the kitchen table and pulled out a battered shoe box of the sort that we don’t see up here much. No sense sending up packaging when it just takes up room on the rocket. She lifted the lid off and pulled out tissue that had once been pink and had faded to almost white. Unwrapping it, she pulled out my eagle.

It’s strange seeing something that you made that long ago. This one was in flight, but had its head turned to the side as though it were looking back over its shoulder. It had an egg clutched in its talons.

Symbolism a little blunt, but clear. Seeing it I remembered when I had made it. I remembered the conversation that I had had with Dorothy when she was a little girl.

I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. The edges of the paper had become soft with handling over the years so it felt more like corduroy than cardstock. Some of the smaller feathers were torn loose showing that this had been much-loved. The fact that so few were missing said more, about the place it had held for Dorothy.

She had asked me, standing outside the fence in the shadow of the rocket gantry, if I were still going to Mars. I had said yes.

Then she had said, “You going to have kids on Mars?”

What she could not have known—what she likely still did not know, was that I had just come from a conversation with Nathaniel when we decided that we would not have children. It had been a long discussion over the course of two years and it did not rest easy on me. I was still grieving for the choice, even though I knew it was the right one.

The radiation, the travel… the stars were always going to call me and I could ask him to be patient with that, but it was not fair to a child. We had talked and talked and I had built that eagle while I tried to grapple with the conflicts between my desires. I made the eagle looking back, holding an egg, at the choices behind it.

And when Dorothy had asked me if I would have kids on Mars, I put the regulation smile on, the one you learn to give while wearing 160 pounds of space suit in Earth gravity while a photographer takes just one more photo. I’ve learned to smile through pain, thank you. “Yes, honey. Every child born on Mars will be there because of me.”

“What about the ones born here?”

The child of tragedy, the double-orphan. I had knelt in front of her and pulled the eagle out of my bag. “Those most of all.”

Standing in my kitchen, I lifted my head to look at Nathaniel. His eyes were bright. It took a try or two before I could find my voice again. “Did you know? Did you know which one she had?”

“I guessed.” He pushed into the kitchen, the walker sliding and rattling until he stood next to me. “The thing is, Elma, I’m going to be gone in a year either way. We decided not to have children because of your career.”

“We made that decision together.”

“I know.” He raised a hand off the walker and put it on my arm. “I’m not saying we didn’t. What I’m asking is that you make this career decision for me. I want you to go.”

I set the eagle back in its nest of tissue and wiped my eyes. “So you tricked her into coming out just to show me that?”

Nathaniel laughed sounding a little embarrassed. “Nope. Talked to Sheldon. There’s a training session this afternoon that I want you to go to.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“You won’t. Not completely.” He gave a sideways grin and I could see the young man he’d been. “My program will be flying with you.”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s the best I can offer.”

I looked away and caught Dorothy staring at us with a look of both wonder and horror on her face. She blushed when I met her gaze. “I’ll stay with him.”

“I know and it was kind of Sheldon to ask but—”

“No, I mean. If you go… I’ll make sure he’s not alone.”

Dorothy lived in the middle of the great Mars plains in the home of Elma, who was an astronaut, and Nathaniel, who was an astronaut’s husband. I live in the middle of space in a tiny capsule filled with punchcards and magnetic tape. I am not alone, though someone who doesn’t know me might think I appear to be.

I have the stars.

I have my memories.

And I have Nathaniel’s last program. After it runs, I will make an eagle and let my husband fly.

The post The Lady Astronaut of Mars appeared first on Reactor.

These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.

The Monsters of Heaven

For a long time, Brian imagined reunions with his son. In the early days, these fantasies were defined by spectacular violence. He would find the man who stole him and open his head with a claw hammer. The more blood he spilled, the further removed he became from his own guilt. The location would often change: a roach-haunted tenement building; an abandoned warehouse along the Tchoupitoulas wharf; a pre-fab bungalow with an American flag out front and a two-door hatchback parked in the driveway.

Sometimes the man lived alone, sometimes he had his own family. On these latter occasions Brian would cast himself as a moral executioner, spraying the walls with the kidnapper’s blood but sparing his wife and child—freeing them, he imagined, from his tyranny. No matter the scenario, Toby was always there, always intact; Brian would feel his face pressed into his shoulders as he carried him away, feel the heat of his tears bleed into his shirt. You’re safe now, he would say. Daddy’s got you. Daddy’s here.

After some months passed, he deferred the heroics to the police. This marked his first concession to reality. He spent his time beached in the living room, drinking more, working less, until the owner of the auto shop told him to take time off, a lot of time off, as much as he needed. Brian barely noticed. He waited for the red and blue disco lights of a police cruiser to illuminate the darkness outside, to give some shape and measure to the night. He waited for the phone to ring with a glad summons to the station. He played out scenarios, tried on different outcomes, guessed at his own reactions. He gained weight and lost time.

Sometimes he would get out of bed in the middle of the night, careful not to wake his wife, and get into the car. He would drive at dangerous speeds through the city, staring into the empty sockets of unlighted windows. He would get out of the car and stand in front of some of these houses, looking and listening for signs. Often, the police were called. When the officers realized who he was, they were usually as courteous as they were adamant. He’d wonder if it had been the kidnapper who called the police. He would imagine returning to those houses with a gun.

This was in the early days of what became known as the Lamentation. At this stage, most people did not know anything unusual was happening. What they heard, if they heard anything, was larded with rumor and embellishment. Fogs of gossip in the barrooms and churches.This was before the bloodshed. Before their pleas to Christ clotted in their throats.

Amy never told Brian that she blamed him. She elected, rather, to avoid the topic of the actual abduction, and any question of her husband’s negligence. Once the police abandoned them as suspects, the matter of their own involvement ceased to be a subject of discussion. Brian was unconsciously grateful, because it allowed him to focus instead on the maintenance of grief. Silence spread between them like a glacier. In a few months, entire days passed with nothing said between them.

It was on such a night that Amy rolled up against him and kissed the back of his neck. It froze Brian, filling him with a blast of terror and bewilderment; he felt the guilt move inside of him, huge but seemingly distant, like a whale passing beneath a boat. Her lips felt hot against his skin, sending warm waves rolling from his neck and shoulders all the way down to his legs, as though she had injected something lovely into him. She grew more ardent, nipping him with her teeth, breaking through his reservations. He turned and kissed her. He experienced a leaping arc of energy, a terrifying, violent impulse; he threw his weight onto her and crushed his mouth into hers, scraping his teeth against hers. But there immediately followed a cascade of unwelcome thought: Toby whimpering somewhere in the dark, waiting for his father to save him; Amy, dressed in her bedclothes in the middle of the day, staring like a corpse into the sunlight coming through the windows; the playground, and the receding line of kindergarteners. When she reached under the sheets she found him limp and unready. He opened his mouth to apologize but she shoved her tongue into it, her hand working at him with a rough urgency, as though more depended on this than he knew. Later he would learn that it did. Her teeth sliced his lip and blood eeled into his mouth. She was pulling at him too hard, and it was starting to hurt. He wrenched himself away.

“Jesus,” he said, wiping his lip. The blood felt like an oil slick in the back of his throat.

She turned her back to him and put her face into the pillow. For a moment he thought she was crying. But only for a moment.

“Honey,” he said. “Hey.” He put his fingers on her shoulder; she rolled it away from him.

“Go to sleep,” she said.

He stared at the landscape of her naked back, pale in the streetlight leaking through the blinds, feeling furious and ruined.

The next morning, when he came into the kitchen, Amy was already up. Coffee was made, filling the room with a fine toasted smell, and she was leaning against the counter with a cup in her hand, wearing her pink terrycloth robe. Her dark hair was still wet from the shower. She smiled and said, “Good morning.”

“Hey,” he said, feeling for a sense of her mood.

Dodger, Toby’s dog, cast him a devastated glance from his customary place beneath the kitchen table. Amy had wanted to get rid of him—she couldn’t bear the sight of him anymore, she’d said—but Brian wouldn’t allow it. When Toby comes back, he reasoned, he’ll wonder why we did it. What awful thing guided us. So Dodger remained, and his slumping, sorrowful presence tore into them both like a hungry animal.

“Hey boy,” Brian said, and rubbed his neck with his toe.

“I’m going out today,” Amy said.

“Okay. Where to?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. The hardware store. Maybe a nursery. I want to find myself a project.”

Brian looked at her. The sunlight made a corona around her body. This new resolve, coupled with her overture of the night before, struck him as a positive sign. “Okay,” he said.

He seated himself at the table. The newspaper had been placed there for him, still bound by a rubberband. He snapped it off and unfurled the front page. Already he felt the gravitational pull of the Jack Daniels in the cabinet, but when Amy leaned over his shoulder and placed a coffee cup in front of him, he managed to resist the whiskey’s call with an ease that surprised and gratified him. He ran his hand up her forearm, pushing back the soft pink sleeve, and he kissed the inside of her wrist. He felt a wild and incomprehensible hope. He breathed in the clean, scented smell of her. She stayed there for a moment, and then gently pulled away.

They remained that way in silence for some time—maybe fifteen minutes or more—until Brian found something in the paper he wanted to share with her. Something being described as “angelic”— “apparently not quite a human man,” as the writer put it—had been found down by the Gulf Coast, in Morgan City; it had been shedding a faint light from under two feet of water; whatever it was had died shortly after being taken into custody, under confusing circumstances. He turned in his chair to speak, a word already gathering on his tongue, and he caught her staring at him. She had a cadaverous, empty look, as though she had seen the worst thing in the world and died in the act. It occurred to him that she had been looking at him that way for whole minutes. He turned back to the table, his insides sliding, and stared at the suddenly indecipherable glyphs of the newspaper. After a moment he felt her hand on the back of his neck, rubbing him gently. She left the kitchen without a word.

This is how it happened:

They were taking Dodger for a walk. Toby liked to hold the leash—he was four years old, and gravely occupied with establishing his independence—and more often than not Brian would sort of half-trot behind them, one hand held partially outstretched should Dodger suddenly decide to break into a run, dragging his boy behind him like a string of tin cans. He probably bit off more profanities during those walks than he ever did changing a tire. He carried, as was their custom on Mondays, a blanket and a picnic lunch. He would lie back in the sun while Toby and the dog played, and enjoy not being hunched over an engine block. At some point they would have lunch. Brian believed these afternoons of easy camaraderie would be remembered by them both for years to come. They’d done it a hundred times.

A hundred times.

On that day a kindergarten class arrived shortly after they did. Toby ran up to his father and wrapped his arms around his neck, frightened by the sudden bright surge of humanity; the kids were a loud, brawling tumult, crashing over the swings and monkey bars in a gabbling surf. Brian pried Toby’s arms free and pointed at them.

“Look, screwball, they’re just kids. See? They’re just like you. Go on and play. Have some fun.”

Dodger galloped out to greet them and was received as a hero, with joyful cries and grasping fingers. Toby observed this gambit for his dog’s affections and at last decided to intervene. He ran toward them, shouting, “That’s my dog! That’s my dog!” Brian watched him go, made eye contact with the teacher and nodded hello. She smiled at him—he remembered thinking she was kind of cute, wondering how old she was—and she returned her attention to her kids, gamboling like lunatics all over the park. Brian reclined on the blanket and watched the clouds skim the atmosphere, listened to the sound of children. It was a hot, windless day.

He didn’t realize he had dozed until the kindergarteners had been rounded up and were halfway down the block, taking their noise with them. The silence stirred him.

He sat up abruptly and looked around. The playground was empty. “Toby? Hey, Toby?”

Dodger stood out in the middle of the road, his leash spooled at his feet. He watched Brian eagerly, offered a tentative wag.

“Where’s Toby?” he asked the dog, and climbed to his feet. He felt a sudden sickening lurch in his gut. He turned in a quick circle, a half-smile on his face, utterly sure that this was an impossible situation, that children didn’t disappear in broad daylight while their parents were right fucking there. So he was still here. Of course he was still here. Dodger trotted up to him and sat down at his feet, waiting for him to produce the boy, as though he were a hidden tennis ball.

“Toby?”

The park was empty. He jogged after the receding line of kids. “Hey. Hey! Is my son with you? Where’s my son?”

One morning, about a week after the experience in the kitchen, Brian was awakened by the phone. Every time this happened he felt a thrill of hope, though by now it had become muted, even dreadful in its predictability. He hauled himself up from the couch, nearly overturning a bottle of Jack Daniels stationed on the floor. He crossed the living room and picked up the phone.

“Yes?” he said.

“Let me talk to Amy.” It was not a voice he recognized. A male voice, with a thick rural accent. It was the kind of voice that inspired immediate prejudice: the voice of an idiot; of a man without any right to make demands of him.

“Who is this?”

“Just let me talk to Amy.”

“How about you go fuck yourself.”

There was a pause as the man on the phone seemed to assess the obstacle. Then he said, with a trace of amusement in his voice, “Are you Brian?”

“That’s right.”

“Look, dude. Go get your wife. Put her on the phone. Do it now, and I won’t have to come down there and break your fucking face.”

Brian slammed down the receiver. Feeling suddenly light-headed, he put his hand on the wall to steady himself, to reassure himself that it was still solid, and that he was still real. From somewhere outside, through an open window, came the distant sound of children shouting.

It was obvious that Amy was sleeping with another man. When confronted with the call, she did not admit to anything, but made no special effort to explain it away, either. His name was Tommy, she said. She’d met him once when she was out. He sounded rough, but he wasn’t a bad guy. She chose not to elaborate, and Brian, to his amazement, found a kind of forlorn comfort in his wife’s affair. He’d lost his son; why not lose it all?

On television the news was filling with the creatures, more of which were being discovered all the time. The press had taken to calling them angels. Some were being found alive, though all of them appeared to have suffered from some violent experience. At least one family had become notorious by refusing to let anyone see the angel they’d found, or even let it out of their home. They boarded their windows and warned away visitors with a shotgun.

Brian was stationed on the couch, staring at the television with the sound turned down to barely a murmur. He listened to the familiar muted clatter from the medicine cabinet as Amy applied her makeup in the bathroom. A news program was on, and a handheld camera followed a street reporter into someone’s house. The JD bottle was empty at his feet, and the knowledge that he had no more in the house smoldered in him.

Amy emerged from the kitchen with her purse slung over her arm and made her way to the door. “I’m going out,” she said.

“Where?”

She paused, one hand on the doorknob. She wavered there, in her careful makeup and her push-up bra. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her look like this and failed dismally. Something inside her seemed to collapse—a force of will, perhaps, or a habit of deception. Maybe she was just too tired to invent another lie.

“I’m going to see Tommy,” she said.

“The redneck.”

“Sure. The redneck, if that’s how you want it.”

“Does it matter how I want it?”

She paused. “No,” she said. “I guess not.”

“Well well. The truth. Look out.”

She left the door, walked into the living room. Brian felt a sudden trepidation; this is not what he imagined would happen. He wanted to get a few weak barbs in before she walked out, that was all. He did not actually want to talk.

She sat on the rocking chair across from the couch. Beside her, on the television, the camera focused on an obese man wearing overalls smiling triumphantly and holding aloft an angel’s severed head.

Amy shut it off. “Do you want to know about him?” she said.

“Let’s see. He’s stupid and violent. He called my home and threatened me. He’s sleeping with my wife. What else is there to know?”

She appraised him for a moment, weighing consequences. “There’s a little more to know,” she said. “For example, he’s very kind to me. He thinks I’m beautiful.” He must have made some sort of sound then, because she said, “I know it must be very hard for you to believe, but some men still find me attractive. And that’s important to me, Brian. Can you understand that?”

He turned away from her, shielding his eyes with a hand, although without the TV on there was very little light in the room. Each breath was laced with pain.

“When I go to see him, he talks to me. Actually talks. I know he might not be very smart, according to your standards, but you’d be surprised how much he and I have to talk about. You’d be surprised how much more there is to life—to my life—than your car magazines, and your TV, and your bottles of booze.”

“Stop it,” he said.

“He’s also a very considerate lover. He paces himself. For my sake. For me. Did you ever do that, Brian? In all the times we made love?”

He felt tears crawling down his face. Christ. When did that start?

“I can forget things when I sleep with him. I can forget about . . . I can forget about everything. He lets me do that.”

“You cold bitch,” he rasped.

“You passive little shit,” she bit back, with a venom that surprised him. “You let it happen, do you know that? You let it all happen. Every awful thing.”

She stood abruptly and walked out the door, slamming it behind her. The force of it rattled the windows. After a while—he had no idea how long—he picked up the remote and turned the TV back on. A girl pointed to moving clouds on a map.

Eventually Dodger came by and curled up at his feet. Brian slid off the couch and lay down beside him, hugging him close. Dodger smelled the way dogs do, musky and of the earth, and he sighed with the abiding patience of his kind.

Violence filled his dreams. In them he rent bodies, spilled blood, painted the walls using severed limbs as gruesome brushes. In them he went back to the park and ate the children while the teacher looked on. Once he awoke after these dreams with blood filling his mouth; he realized he had chewed his tongue during the night. It was raw and painful for days afterward. A rage was building inside him and he could not find an outlet for it. One night Amy told him she thought she was falling in love with Tommy. He only nodded stupidly and watched her walk out the door again. That same night he kicked Dodger out of the house. He just opened the door to the night and told him to go. When he wouldn’t—trying instead to slink around his legs and go back inside—he planted his foot on the dog’s chest and physically pushed him back outside, sliding him backwards on his butt. “Go find him!” he yelled. “Go find him! Go and find him!” He shut the door and listened to Dodger whimper and scratch at it for nearly an hour. At some point he gave up and Brian fell asleep. When he awoke it was raining. He opened the door and called for him. The rain swallowed his voice.

“Oh no,” he said quietly, his voice a whimper. “Come back! I’m sorry! Please, I’m so sorry!”

When Dodger did eventually return, wet and miserable, Brian hugged him tight, buried his face in his fur, and wept for joy.

Brian liked to do his drinking alone. When he drank in public, especially at his old bar, people tried to talk to him. They saw his presence as an invitation to share sympathy, or a request for a friendly ear. It got to be too much. But tonight he made his way back there, endured the stares and the weird silence, took the beers sent his way, although he wanted none of it. What he wanted tonight was Fire Engine, and she didn’t disappoint.

Everybody knew Fire Engine, of course; if she thought you didn’t know her, she’d introduce herself to you mighty quick. One hand on your shoulder, the other on your thigh. Where her hands went after that depended on a quick negotiation. She was a redhead with an easy personality, and was popular with the regular clientele, including the ones that would never buy her services. She claimed to be twenty-eight but looked closer to forty. At some unfortunate juncture in her life she had contrived to lose most of her front teeth, either to decay or to someone’s balled fist; either way common wisdom held she gave the best blowjob in downtown New Orleans.

Brian used to be amused by that kind of talk. Although he’d never had an interest in her he’d certainly enjoyed listening to her sales pitch; she’d become a sort of bar pet, and the unself-conscious way she went about her life was both endearing and appalling. Her lack of teeth was too perfect, and too ridiculous. Now, however, the information had acquired a new kind of value to him. He pressed his gaze onto her until she finally felt it and looked back. She smiled coquettishly, with gruesome effect. He told the bartender to send her a drink.

“You sure? She ain’t gonna leave you alone all night.”

“Fuck yeah, I’m sure.”

All night didn’t concern him. What concerned him were the next ten minutes, which was what he figured ten dollars would buy him. After the necessary negotiations and bullshit they left the bar together, trailing catcalls; she took his hand and led him around back, into the alley.

The smell of rotting garbage came at him like an attack, like a pillowcase thrown over his head. She steered him into the alley’s dark mouth, with its grime-smeared pavement and furtive skittering sounds, and its dumpster so stuffed with straining garbage bags that it looked like some fearsome monster choking on its dinner. “Now you know I’m a lady,” she said, “but sometimes you just got to make do with what’s available.”

That she could laugh at herself this way touched Brian, and he felt a wash of sympathy for her. He considered what it would be like to run away with her, to rescue her from the wet pull of her life; to save her from people like himself.

She unzipped his pants and pulled his dick out. “There we go, honey, that’s what I’m talking about. Ain’t you something.”

After a couple of minutes she released him and stood up. He tucked himself back in and zipped his pants, afraid to make eye contact with her.

“Maybe you just had too much to drink,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“It ain’t nothing.”

“I know it isn’t,” he said harshly.

When she made no move to leave, he said, “Will you just get the fuck away from me? Please?”

Her voice lost its sympathy. “Honey, I still got to get paid.”

He opened his wallet and fished out a ten dollar bill. She plucked it from his fingers and walked out of the alley, back toward the bar. “Don’t get all bent out of shape about it,” she called. “Shit happens, you know?”

He slid down the wall until his ass hit the ground. He brought his hand to his mouth and choked out a sob, his eyes squeezed shut. He banged his head once against the brick wall behind him and then thought better of it. Down here the stench was a steaming blanket, almost soothing in its awfulness. He felt like he deserved to be there, that it was right that he should sleep in shit and grime. He listened to the gentle ticking of the roaches in the dark. He wondered if Toby was in a place like this.

Something glinted further down the alley. He strained to see it. It was too bright to be merely a reflection.

It moved.

“Son of a,” he said, and pushed himself to his feet.

It lay mostly hidden; it had pulled some stray garbage bags atop itself in an effort to remain concealed, but its dim luminescence worked against it. Brian loped over to it, wrenched the bags away; its clawed hands clutched at them and tore them open, spilling a clatter of beer and liquor bottles all over the ground. They caromed with hollow music through the alley, coming at last to silent rest, until all Brian could hear was the thin, high-pitched noise the creature made through the tiny O-shaped orifice he supposed passed for a mouth. Its eyes were black little stones. The creature—angel, he thought, they’re calling these things angels—was tall and thin, abundantly male, and it shed a thin light that illuminated exactly nothing around it. If you put some clothes on it, Brian thought, hide its face, give it some gloves, it might pass for a human.

Exposed, it held up a long-fingered hand, as if to ward him off. It had clearly been hurt: its legs looked badly broken, and it breathed in short, shallow gasps. A dark bruise spread like a mold over the right side of its chest.

“Look at you, huh? You’re all messed up.” He felt a strange glee as he said this; he could not justify the feeling and quickly buried it. “Yeah, somebody worked you over pretty good.”

It managed to roll onto its belly, and it scrabbled along the pavement in a pathetic attempt at escape. It loosed that thin, reedy cry. Calling for help? Begging for its life?

The sight of it trying to flee from him catalyzed some deep predatory impulse, and he pressed his foot onto the angel’s ankle, holding it easily in place. “No you don’t.” He hooked the thing beneath its shoulders and lifted it from the ground; it was astonishingly light. It mewled weakly at him. “Shut up, I’m trying to help you.” He adjusted it in his arms so that he held it like a lover, or a fainted woman. He carried it back to his car, listening for the sound of the barroom door opening behind him, of laughter or a challenge chasing him down the sidewalk. But the door stayed shut. He walked in silence.

Amy was awake when he got home, silhouetted in the doorway. Brian pulled the angel from the passenger seat, cradled it against his chest. He watched her face alter subtly, watched as some dark hope crawled across it like an insect, and he squashed it before it could do any real harm.

“It’s not him,” he said. “It’s something else.”

She stood away from the door and let him come in.

Dodger, who had been dozing in the hallway, lurched to his feet with a sliding and skittering of claws and growled fiercely at it, his lips curled away from his teeth.

“Get away, you,” Brian said. He eased past him, bearing his load down the hall.

He laid it in Toby’s bed. Together he and Amy stood over it, watching as it stared back at them with dark flat eyes, its body twisting away from them as if it could fold itself into another place altogether. Its fingers plucked at the train-spangled bedsheets, wrapping them around its nakedness. Amy leaned over and helped to tuck she sheets around it.

“He’s hurt,” she said.

“I know. I guess a lot of them are found that way.”

“Should we call somebody?”

“You want camera crews in here? Fuck no.”

“Well. He’s really hurt. We need to do something.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. We can at least clean him up I guess.”

Amy sat on the mattress beside it; it stared at her with its expressionless face. Brian couldn’t tell if there were thoughts passing behind those eyes, or just a series of brute reflex arcs. After a moment it reached out with one long dark fingernail and brushed her arm. She jumped as though shocked.

“Jesus! Be careful,” said Brian.

“What if it’s him?”

“What?” It took him a moment to understand her. “Oh my God. Amy. It’s not him, okay? It’s not him.”

“But what if it is?”

“It’s not. We’ve seen them on the news, okay? It’s a, it’s a thing.”

“You shouldn’t call it an ‘it.’”

“How do I know what the fuck to call it?”

She touched her fingers to its cheek. It pressed its face into them, making some small sound.

“Why did you leave me?” she said. “You were everything I had.”

Brian swooned beneath a tide of vertigo. Something was moving inside him, something too large to stay where it was. “It’s an angel,” he said. “Nothing more. Just an angel. It’s probably going to die on us, since that’s what they seem to do.” He put his hand against the wall until the dizziness passed. It was replaced by a low, percolating anger. “Instead of thinking of it as Toby, why don’t you ask it where Toby is? Why don’t you make it explain to us why it happened?”

She looked at him. “It happened because you let it,” she said.

Dodger asked to be let outside. Brian opened the door for him to let him run around the front yard. There was a leash law here, but Dodger was well known by the neighbors and generally tolerated. He walked out of the house with considerably less than his usual enthusiasm. He lifted his leg desultorily against a shrub, then walked down to the road and followed the sidewalk further into the neighborhood. He did not come back.

Over the next few days it put its hooks into them, and drew them in tight. They found it difficult to leave it alone. Its flesh seemed to pump out some kind of soporific, like an invisible spoor, and it was better than the booze—better than anything they’d previously known. Its pull seemed to grow stronger as the days passed. For Amy, especially. She stopped going out, and for all practical purposes moved into Toby’s room with it. When Brian joined her in there, she seemed to barely tolerate his presence. If he sat beside it she watched him with naked trepidation, as though she feared he might damage it somehow.

It was not, he realized, an unfounded fear. Something inside him became turbulent in its presence, something he couldn’t identify but which sparked flashes of violent thought, of the kind he had not had since just after Toby vanished. This feeling came in sharp relief to the easy lethargy the angel normally inspired, and he was reminded of a time when he was younger, sniffing heroin laced with cocaine. So he did not object to Amy’s efforts at excluding him.

Finally, though, her vigilance slipped. He went into the bathroom and found her sleeping on the toilet, her robe hiked up around her waist, her head resting against the sink. He left her there and crept into the angel’s room.

It was awake, and its eyes tracked him as he crossed the room and sat beside it on the bed. Its breath wheezed lightly as it drew air through its puckered mouth. Its body was still bruised and bent, though it did seem to be improving.

Brian touched its chest where the bruise seemed to be diminishing. Why does it bruise? he wondered. Why does it bleed the same way I do? Shouldn’t it be made of something better? Also, it didn’t have wings. Not even vestigial ones. Why were they called angels? Because of how they made people feel? It looked more like an alien than a divine being. It has a cock, for Christ’s sake. What’s that all about? Do angels fuck?

He leaned over it, so his face was inches away, almost touching its nose. He stared into its black, irisless eyes, searching for some sign of intelligence, some evidence of intent or emotion. From this distance he could smell its breath; he drew it into his own lungs, and it warmed him like a shot of whiskey. The angel lifted its head and pressed its face into his. Brian jerked back and felt something brush his elbow. He looked behind him and discovered the angel had an erection.

He lurched out of bed, tripping over himself as he rushed to the door, dashed through it and slammed it shut. His blood sang. It rose in him like the sea and filled him with tumultuous music. He dropped to his knees and vomited all over the carpet.

Later, he stepped into its doorway, watching Amy trace her hands down its face. Through the window he could see that night was gathering in little pockets outside, lifting itself toward the sky. At the sight of the angel his heart jumped in his chest as though it had come unmoored. “Amy, I have to talk to you,” he said. He had some difficulty making his voice sound calm.

She didn’t look at him. “I know it’s not really him,” she said. “Not really.”

“No.”

“But don’t you think he is, kind of? In a way?”

“No.”

She laid her head on the pillow beside it, staring into its face. Brian was left looking at the back of her head, the unwashed hair, tangled and brittle. He remembered cupping the back of her head in his hand, its weight and its warmth. He remembered her body.

“Amy. Where does he live?”

“Who.”

“Tommy. Where does he live?”

She turned and looked at him, a little crease of worry on her brow. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just tell me. Please.”

“Brian, don’t.”

He slammed his fist into the wall, startling himself. He screamed at her. “Tell me where he lives! God damn it!”

Tommy opened the door of his shotgun house, clad only in boxer shorts, and Brian greeted him with a blow to the face. Tommy staggered back into his house, due more to surprise than the force of the punch; his foot slipped on a throw rug and he crashed to the floor. The small house reverberated with the impact. Brian had a moment to take in Tommy’s hard physique and imagine his wife’s hands moving over it. He stepped forward and kicked him in the groin.

Tommy grunted and seemed to absorb it. He rolled over and pushed himself quickly to his feet. Tommy’s fist swung at him and he had time to experience a quick flaring terror before his head exploded with pain. He found himself on his knees, staring at the dust collecting in the crevices of the hardwood floor. Somewhere in the background a television chattered urgently.

A kick to the ribs sent Brian down again. Tommy straddled him, grabbed a fistful of hair, and slammed Brian’s face into the floor several times. Brian felt something in his face break and blood poured onto the floor. He wanted to cry, but it was impossible; he couldn’t get enough air. I’m going to die, he thought. He felt himself hauled up and thrown against a wall. Darkness crowded his vision. The world started to slide away.

Someone was yelling at him. There was a face in front of him, skin peeled back from its teeth in a smile or a grimace of rage. It looked like something from hell.

He awoke to the feel of cold grass, cold night air. The right side of his face burned like a signal flare; his left eye refused to open. It hurt to breathe. He pushed himself to his elbows and spit blood from his mouth; it immediately filled again. Something wrong in there. He rolled onto his back and laid there for a while, waiting for the pain to subside to a tolerable level. The night was high and dark. At one point he felt sure that he was rising from the ground, that something up there was pulling him into its empty hollows.

Somehow he managed the drive home. He remembered nothing of it except occasional stabs of pain as opposing headlights washed across his windshield; he would later consider his safe arrival a kind of miracle. He pulled into the driveway and honked the horn a few times until Amy came out and found him there. She looked at him with horror, and with something else.

“Oh, baby. What did you do. What did you do.”

She steered him toward the angel’s room. He stopped himself in the doorway, his heart pounding again, and he tried to catch his breath. It occurred to him, on a dim level, that his nose was broken. She tugged at his hand, but he resisted. Her face was limned by moonlight, streaming through the window like some mystical tide, and by the faint luminescence of the angel tucked into their son’s bed. She’d grown heavy over the years, and the past year had taken a harsh toll: the flesh on her face sagged, and was scored by grief. And yet he was stunned by her beauty.

Had she always looked like this?

“Come on,” she said. “Please.”

The left side of his face pulsed with hard beats of pain; it sang like a war drum. His working eye settled on the thing in the bed: its flat black eyes, its wickedly curved talons. Amy sat beside it and put her hand on its chest. It arched its back, seeming to coil beneath her.

“Come lay down,” she said. “He’s here for us. He’s come home for us.”

Brian took a step into Toby’s room, and then another. He knew she was wrong; that the angel was not home, that it had wandered here from somewhere far away.

Is heaven a dark place?

The angel extended a hand, its talons flexing. The sheets over its belly stirred as Brian drew closer. Amy took her husband’s hands, easing him onto the bed. He gripped her shoulders, squeezing them too tightly. “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Once he began he couldn’t stop. He said it over and over again, so many times it just became a sound, a sobbing plaint, and Amy pressed her hand against his mouth, entwined her fingers into his hair, saying, “Shhhh, shhhhh,” and finally she silenced him with a kiss. As they embraced each other the angel played its hands over their faces and their shoulders, its strange reedy breath and its narcotic musk drawing them down to it. They caressed each other, and they caressed the angel, and when they touched their lips to its skin the taste of it shot spikes of joy through their bodies. Brian felt her teeth on his neck and he bit into the angel, the sudden dark spurt of blood filling his mouth, the soft pale flesh tearing easily, sliding down his throat. He kissed his wife furiously and when she tasted the blood she nearly tore his tongue out; he pushed her face toward the angel’s body, and watched the blood blossom from beneath her. The angel’s eyes were frozen, staring at the ceiling; it extended a shaking hand toward a wall decorated with a Spider-Man poster, its fingers twisted and bent.

They ate until they were full.

That night, heavy with the sludge of bliss, Brian and Amy made love again for the first time in nearly a year. It was wordless and slow, a synchronicity of pressures and tender familiarities. They were like rare creatures of a dying species, amazed by the sight of each other.

Brian drifts in and out of sleep. He has what will be the last dream about his son. It is morning in this dream, by the side of a small country road. It must have rained during the night, because the world shines with a wet glow. Droplets of water cling, dazzling, to the muzzle of a dog as it rests beside the road, unmenaced by traffic, languorous and dull-witted in the rising heat. It might even be Dodger. His snout is heavy with blood. Some distance away from him Toby rests on the street, a small pile of bones and torn flesh, glittering with dew, catching and throwing sunlight like a scattered pile of rubies and diamonds.

By the time he wakes, he has already forgotten it.

“The Monsters of Heaven” copyright © 2007 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in Inferno, 2007.

The post North American Lake Monsters: “The Monsters of Heaven” appeared first on Reactor.

In “Skin Like Porcelain Death” a half-resurrected cleanup man for the bureaucracy of death confronts a sorcerous collection of chipped porcelain dolls in an attempt to save the soul of a horny young man who chose the wrong girlfriend.

When Victor has something uncomfortable to say, he usually ends up eating and smoking a lot. Since his health-conscious girlfriend Jenny’s bustling around in the bedroom, all he can do is stuff his wide face with those papery, tasteless organic chips that she fills the cabinets with. He flinches slightly after each bite, like the snacks have been charged with tiny electrical currents.

“Spit it out, man.”

“You’re dead, right, Carlos?”

I roll my eyes. We’ve half-stepped this conversation so many times and I’m tired of tiptoeing.

“I’m partly dead.”

“Right, whatever, you’re deadish.”

The difference means nothing to him and I have to remind myself it’s only ’cause he doesn’t know any fully dead people. I deal with their chilly, translucent asses all the time. I nod at him to get on with it.

“And your job—you investigate, uh…”

You know what I hate? When someone stops mid-sentence and stuffs a bunch of food in his face. Then you’re just stuck there listening to all that crunching and smacking, waiting for the conversation to start back up. “Victor,” I say, “I’m hung-over. Breakfast was delicious but maybe I should come back when you’ve rehearsed a little better whatever it is you need to talk about.”

Victor swallows a little too quickly, sputters, and gets back in it. “My little cousin Jimmy…had a weird…experience.”

“Tell him it’s very normal and one day he’ll be able to do it with a real live woman, but not to hurt himself in the meantime.”

“No, Carlos, this is serious. He says he saw something. He’s all freaked out, wouldn’t even tell me what it was. He went over some girl’s house and something real off musta happened. Came back pale as shit and stuttering.”

“Also normal. Surely there’s some pills he can take.”

“Carlos!”

“Alright, Victor. He didn’t say anything else?”

“He mentioned something about dolls. That’s all I could get. I know it’s a cliché, but he looked like he saw a ghost.”

“That’s why you asked me over here for breakfast?”

“Look, Carlos—I never ask you for nothing, and it’s not like you don’t owe us a favor or two.”

Damn, he played that card. Most of the time when I show up at Victor and Jenny’s door it’s because some heavy supernatural shit went down and I need a little upkeep. Victor works overnights on an FDNY ambulance and Jenny has as many herbs and nerdy things to say about herbs as any botanica. It’s a strange, fiery combo—new age and 911—but my half-dead ass can’t just stroll into an ER and demand treatment, they might try to resuscitate me while I’m napping. “You know,” he continues unnecessarily, “we had to get a new couch cover after you bled out on our last one.”

“Thank you, I remember.” It was a nasty little run in with a million-year-old ghost mammoth. And yes, I stained the couch, but this guilt trip, I don’t need. Maybe I would be better off at an ER after all. “Alright, I’ll talk to him. But look, he doesn’t need to know about me and what I am.”

“Carlos, you already know I keep your shit under wraps. HIPPA, patient confidentiality, I got you, bro.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Bring him to Marcus Garvey Park in three hours. I’ll see what I can do.”

Jenny pokes her head in. She’s wearing a flowy pajama thing and her blond hair’s pulled into a tight and shiny pony tail. “I’m gonna do some yoga, boys.”

“Try not to hurt yourself again, baby,” Victor says. “I’m off duty.”

“Fuck you.”

***

I like Garvey Park because the spirits here are very old and very chill. They don’t wile out and send kids hovering over swing sets or switch joggers’ right and left feet just to pass time. They watch, nod their ancient, glowing heads, appraise the spinning world around them, and confer quietly amongst themselves. They’re older even, than The New York Council of the Dead, that sprawling bureaucracy of the afterlife that keeps me busy with heinous errands in return for a modest income and a vague sense of purpose.

It’s one of those languid Harlem afternoons in late summer that the whole world has come out to enjoy. The park is thronged with barbecue families, bums, and flirting teenagers. Each group orbits in little clusters around the picnic tables and basketball courts. The occasional sweaty, spandexed jogger huffs and puffs past. The sun sends a golden, gentle glow through the trees as it gets ready to turn in for the night. And here’s when the nothingness sets in. These damn peaceful moments, when no bodies are dropping, no fanged fuckups are charging through subway tunnels at me. This is when I seem to be a sum of only negative parts: Not dead, not alive. Not a father or a son. No memory, no past. Aloof even with my closest friends, unless we’re laughing about some grim shit that just popped off. I think it’s all the happy families around that do it to me. All that cheery wholesomeness clogs my flow and gets me nostalgic for a time that never was. It’s why I usually don’t bother with the park ’til late, late at night.

In the woodsy slope above the playground, the ancient, blissed-out park spirits are watching the tiny theatrics play out and nodding silently. One floats just at the edge of the trees, staring back at me. Apparently onto my neither-here-nor-there status, his bearded face shines with serene uncertainty.

“That high-ass geriatric bothering you, Cee?” My partner Riley has materialized a few feet away. “Want me to fuck him up?”

I grin. “Nah, I’m used to it.”

“He’s either/or, abuelo, walk the eff along.” If nothing else, it’s good to have crude friends to stand up for you even when you don’t really need them to. The gently bobbing ghost keeps staring, his ancient mouth forming a little concerned O from within a long translucent beard.

“He’s not scared of you, Riley.”

“He’s bluffing, but we can let him have his moment. C’mon.” Riley flips the old ghost off and floats towards one of the winding paths.

“What’s all this about anyway?” he asks as we stroll along the outer rim of the rusty amphitheater.

“Victor’s little cousin got into some shit with a lady.”

Riley chuckles. “Okay, Anne Fucking Landers, but why am I here?”

“And he thinks there’s something about it that might pertain to us.”

“How’s she look?”

“Who?”

“The lady, Carlos. Jesus.”

“I don’t know, man, she’s probably a kid like the cousin. What’s wrong with you?”

Every once in a while, being dead catches up with Riley. The few shards that he remembers from his life swirl in repeat through his head and he gets all agitated and perverse like a damn teenager. I don’t think he can even really be horny, but something about that frisky interplay and all those gooey juices mashing up together just means life to him. It drives him even more crazy that it’s a game I could play but don’t.

“What’s wrong with me?” he says. “What’s wrong with you?”

Instead of responding, I light two miniature cigars and pass one to my partner. I do have a recurring fantasy, or perhaps it’s a memory, who can tell? She’s Puerto Rican, dark skinned, hair a black ocean of curls, eyes mahogany and penetrating, ferocious. She just looks at me, usually in that perfect dream-time between sleeping and waking, when everything is foggy enough to make thoughts and dreams indistinguishable. She floats towards me, always getting closer and closer but never touching. Her eyes bore into mine like delicious drills, evacuate everything that troubles me from the inside and leave me empty, wide open, charmed and with a huge-ass erection. Other than that, I don’t pay much mind to ass on the street.

Riley and I make our round, smoking in silence. Victor’s waiting for us by the half-shell stage. Beside him stands the tallest sixteen-year-old I’ve ever seen. His face is long, moose-like even, and he wears Malcolm glasses over a serious frown.

“Damn, Victor,” I say as we stroll up. “You miss out on some genes?” Victor’s not particularly short or wide but he looks like a fat midget next to his cousin. “You play ball?” I ask up at Jimmy.

“Chess actually.”

“Oh well.”

Victor rolls his eyes. “You done?”

I nod. “Let’s walk.”

We start a wide loop around the ball field. Riley floats along beside me, invisible to Victor and the giant. It’s further into evening now; the little ones have been dragged off to bed and the park belongs to a few squirming teens and some quietly conversing homeless guys. The occasional rising firefly glistens against the darkening field.

“So me and this chick, right,” Jimmy says, “we been talking, you know, for like, two, three weeks now.”

“Talking means fucking in teenager,” Riley points out in my ear.

“When you say talking,” I say to Jimmy, “do you mean having a conversation or having sex?”

The boy flashes an awkward smile and waves his hand as if swatting the thought away. “Nah, we was just talking.” He giggles a little. “Yeah, you know, speaking, with words, to each other. Or whatever.”

“Gotchya.”

Victor, I realize, has turned bright red and put his hands in his pockets, which means things will only go downhill for him from here.

“So then on, like, Saturday, was it? Yeah, Saturday. Mina—that’s the chick, Mina Satorius—asks me to come over to her house and watch a movie.”

“That also means fucking, by the way,” Riley says. “Ask him what this Mina looks like.”

“White chick?” I say.

“Yeah,” Jimmy nods but not, I notice, with any particular pride or boastfulness. “But she’s, like, white-white, not just Caucasian-white. Not an albino either, but her skin’s like fucking porcelain. Shiny and everything.”

“That’s kinda creepy,” Riley says. I nod, which to Riley means I agree with him and to Jimmy means ’go on.’

“Like, she’s definitely fine,” Jimmy shrugs. “I mean, dudes always sweatin’ her, so I was surprised when she started talking to me, ’cause I just kinda have, like, my boys I chill with and whatever, but we definitely not the cool kids, if you know what I mean.”

I say I do but I really have no idea what he’s going on about. High School, if I even went, is at the bottom of a pile of deleted memories for me.

“So whatever, you know, I go over there. She lives in Staten Island, so it’s like a serious journey; had to take a train to Manhattan, then the ferry and then a bus.”

Riley belly laughs. “And I know he was thinking, ‘This better not be for no damn movie.’”

“She meets me at the bus stop. She’s looking really fine, wearing one of them, what-you-call-it, spaghetti strap shirts?” Riley and I both shrug. Victor’s still turning colors and chain smoking menthols with one of his FDNY rubber gloves on to hide the hand stink from Jenny. “We walk a few blocks through the suburbs. But it’s, like, serious suburbs, like, manicured bushes on the lawns and tons-a space between each house, and mad pastels and shit. And I’m already feeling kinda on shaky ground, you know, ’cause clearly this place ain’t seen a negro since there was cavemen in it.”

“True, true,” I say.

“Not to mention a tall-ass Spanish-speaking one like me.” We’re all laughing now. I notice that the old park spirits have ventured out of their forest hideaway with the onset of dusk. They form a growing crowd of curious onlookers in our wake, marveling at this strange fellowship of night strollers.

“Her house was ornate, yo. I mean, like some kinda Disney movie shit: All fucking swirls and coordinated furniture and pearly crap in vases. She leads me inside, and yeah, I’m definitely thinking about getting ass, but I’m still shook from being this deep in unfriendly territory, and the house is just giving me weird vibes.”

“Ah-ha!” Riley says. “Get into that!” Which I was going to do anyway, but I let it slide.

“What kind of vibe, Jimmy?”

“I mean, the shit just felt spooky, like I was being watched by a hundred tiny eyes. Like, you ever go into one of those emptied out apartments in the projects and you can’t see ’em, but you know the wall’s fucking alive with waterbugs and centipedes and shit, and even if they don’t actually touch you, you can feel them all around? That’s what this was like, but it was crazy, ’cause like I said, the shit was ornate.”

“Now we’re talking,” Riley says. He is getting excited. So are the park ghosts; I hear them muttering and humming behind us in ancient languages.

“She leads me through the main room into a smaller one, and this one’s real dark and draped with all kindsa heavy fabrics, blood red and burgundy colored curtains. But that’s not even the thing with this room. This room is full, from top to bottom, of dolls. You know, like, the girly kind they’re always hocking on late-night TV and you’re, like, ’Who buys that shit?’ Well, this lady does—all of ’em. Grandma Tess I guess, that’s what Mina said. The old lady’s, like, a serious doll fanatic. Mina just rolled her eyes like it was some annoying grandma thing, but I was, like, truly chilled to the bone, yo. It was deep, because like I said, I had felt all those eyes on me, and then we walked into the room and there they were, hundreds of creepy little girls, all dressed in creepy little outfits and posed in mid-gesture. And no matter where you move in the room, they all looking right at you, I swear to God.”

“That’s fucked up,” I say. Riley nods in agreement.

“So babygirl starts getting all hot and heavy right then and there.”

“In the creepy doll room?”

“In the creepy doll room!”

“Oh hell no!” Riley yells. Even the elder ghosts swish back in disgust.

“And I was, like, ‘Oh hell no!’” Jimmy says.

“Good man,” says Riley.

“But she’s, like, fiddling with my fly, making like she wants to give me some brain.”

I look at Riley. “Bobo,” he says. I blink at him. He circles his fingers near his mouth and pokes his ghostly tongue out the opposite cheek.

I say, “Damn, son,” to Jimmy, who’s starting to wonder what I’m looking at. Victor shoves a fresh menthol into the dying embers of the one in his mouth and puffs ’til it’s lit.

“And I’m, like, ‘Don’t you have a bedroom?’ And she’s, like, &ksquo;Yeah but ain’t you want some right here?’ And I’m, like, &ksquo;Ain’t you feel like a million fucking porcelain freaks about to go Chucky on your ass?’”

“You said that?”

“Nah, but I was thinking it.”

Riley’s doubled over, slapping his knees.

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Let’s go in your room, baby,’ and you know, eventually she let up. But for a minute I thought I was gonna haveta choose between head in the dolls-of-death-room and no head at all. And I really don’t know what I woulda done.”

Riley clicks his tongue. “That’s teenagers for you. I’m horny, but not that horny.”

“So we went to her bedroom…”

“What was it like?”

“It was normal, you know, like your average teenage girl shit: Band posters and half naked dudes on the wall. A few leftover stuffed animals from elementary school. Mirrors and makeup and shit.”

“Nothing creepy in there? No dolls?”

“Nah, it was cool. And when we get in she lays out on that big poofy pink bed and does the one finger c’mere thing and we just… You know.”

“You do it?”

“Well, you know, not all the way…”

“What base?” Riley says. I give him a what-the-fuck face. “Just ask!”

“What, ah, base?”

Victor scowls at me.

“First she went down on me. It was alright, but there was definitely teeth.” Riley coos sympathetically. “Then it was third base, like, right away.”

“That’s French kissing?” I ask.

“No, asshole,” Riley says. “Third base is finger in the pussy.”

“Nah.” Jimmy raises two fingers and two hopeful eyebrows.

“Right,” I say.

“Alright,” Victor finally pipes up. “Jimmy walk ahead a sec, I gotta talk to Carlos here.” Jimmy looks confused but strolls a few feet along the dimly lit path. Night has dropped her cool darkness around us. The air is fresh with the swirling of plant life and the churning urban forest. The elder dead watch us anxiously, unclear on what the holdup is.

Victor smokes and waves his hands like he’s trying to pick the words out of the air around him. “It’s just…” he takes another drag. “Jimmy was born when I was ten. I babysat him ’til he was twelve. I changed his fucking diapers. I’m not really ready for him to be getting to third base yet. That’s all.”

“For a paramedic,” Riley says, “Victor sure don’t have a very nuanced appreciation for the gooier aspects of human life.”

“Riley says you need to get your shit together, ambulance boy,” I tell Victor. “And I concur. Dirty diapers or not, the kid’s growing up. So you may not be ready, but he is. Deal with it.”

The funny part is, Vic can talk up as mean a sex story as any of us, and don’t get him started on the nasty traumas he catches on the graveyard shift. But that’s family for you. He’ll get over it. We catch up with Jimmy, who was clearly overhearing everything we said. “Can I continue to live my life now?” he says to Victor. Vic nods wearily. The ancient park spirits gather closer around us.

“After third base, it was sloppy seconds.”

Riley turns to the floating audience. “That means he licked her titties.” They nod solemnly.

“They were a little on the small side,” Jimmy reports, “but perky. Looked right at you. It was awesome. And I know this sounds corny, but the whole thing was just really sweet. Like, it was comfortable, you know? She didn’t try to act all pornstar like some of ’em do. We just kinda held each other for a while.”

“That’s sweet,” Victor admits.

“Then she blew me again ’til I nutted on her face.”

The whole park lets out a collective hum of muted fascination. Teenagers really are another species entirely.

“We passed out—well she cleaned up and then we passed out—and I dreamt some heavy shit. I can’t remember what was going on though, but this creepy carnival type song was playing the whole time.”

“You remember how it went?”

“I actually can’t get the fucking song outta my head. It’s haunting me. And I can’t figure out if it started before I fell asleep or not, like, you know, when you’re almost passed out, but not quite? That’s when the music started.”

“How’d it sound?”

Jimmy whistles an eerie minor key waltz, slightly off time and dissonant. It gives me the chills. The park ghosts have widened their circle around us by the time he finishes. Riley and I trade concerned looks.

“That’s evil,” Riley declares.

“Word,” I say. Jimmy looks confused. “That melody’s got some power in it.” I tell him. “But go ’head. What happened next?”

“When I woke up, Mina’s gone and the dolls are all around me in the bed.”

“Now that,” Riley says, “is some horror movie shit.”

“And I feel sick, like, physically ill. Not to mention terrified. I throw ’em off me and they’re so cold—it’s not natural. It was still dark out, just before dawn actually, and I just got up and fucking booked it outta there. I barely put on my clothes all the way, just was out. Out, son. My black ass was running down all them crazy Arthur Kill Road type-a streets and I wasn’t even afraida no crazy white people anymore. I woulda been relieved to see some sheet-wearing mothafuckas, just to get away from those dolls, I swear, Carlos. I was shook.”

“Then what?”

“I caught the first ferry home. Passed the eff out and tried to forget the whole thing happened.”

“Alright,” Riley says. “So some phantomified American Girl dolls jumped him after he banged their owner’s granddaughter. He got away. It’s spooky but not much else. Open-shut.”

“Anything else go on since?” I ask Jimmy.

“That’s the thing,” he tells me, and I feel a little lump building in my throat. “I haven’t really been the same since.”

“What, you can’t sleep? Nightmares? That’ll pass.”

“No, man, I’m telling you, I’m off. Look.” He reaches his hand out to Victor and his fingers shudder dimly and fade into his cousin’s shirt. “I’m disappearing!”

This is bad. This is bad in so many ways. I can almost feel Riley’s gears turning at the same time as mine. The dolls. The girl. The grandma. And now our boy’s slowly checking out.

No easy way to do this: I reach a hand I hope will be comforting up to Jimmy’s shoulder. It doesn’t pass through him but I can tell the flesh isn’t fully there. “You’re dying,” I say. “You don’t have much time.”

Victor spits out his cigarette. “What?”

Jimmy just nods slowly. He’s fighting to get that man mask on, the one that doesn’t cry or feel anything, but he can’t do it fast enough. His eyes get shiny. I’m sure he’d suspected as much, but it can’t be easy to hear.

“The dolls kept your soul. Without it, your body won’t last long. When you go,” I feel horrible dumping this all on him, but it has to be said, “your soul’ll be trapped in that house, probably in one of those dolls.”

This is more than Jimmy can take. He starts trembling and tears flow freely now. “For how long?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Because we’re gonna bust up in there and stop it before it happens.”

***

Staten Island really is a pain in the ass to get to, especially late at night. I’m fast on land, even with my crook-leg, but that damn ferry goes from occasional to barely-ever after midnight and time is slipping quick for Jimmy. It’s damn near 3 a.m. when Riley and I show up to stake out the premises. The quiet little suburb is all dark patches and occasional foreboding mansions with high walls and security systems. We perch on a hill just outside the gates of the Satorius house and take in what we can.

“It’s bad,” Riley says. “I don’t like any of it.”

“You think the girl’s in on it?”

“Only by proxy. I’m guessing the old dame got the youngin involved in her shit, but baby Barbie prolly don’t know it.”

“Sounds about right,” I say, “but here’s what I really don’t like: Let’s say granny’s stealing dudes’ souls and keeping ’em in the dolls.” Riley nods. “Now you and I bust in there, swords a-flashing, and me—I’m a body and maybe I got half a soul, give or take.”

“Sad but true.”

“But you, Riley, you’re all soul.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“You know what I mean. It won’t be a slow decline for you; you don’t have a body. If things don’t go our way in there, and there’s a good chance they won’t from what I can tell, it’s gonna be a wrap for you quick.”

“Now hold on a minute…”

“Second of all,” I say, “I need you on the outside. I’m guessing a whole lotta souls gonna get released when things start getting hot, and I need you to be out here with Jimmy to figure out which is his and get it back to him. Feel me?”

“I feel you,” he says. “But I don’t like it. You wanna go in there all by yourself and you’re not even sure if both of us could handle it. That don’t make no damn sense either.”

I’m opening my mouth to get into it when a voice behind me says “Who’s that?”

I look up, and then further up, at Jimmy’s face. He’d walked up through the underbrush while we were arguing.

Riley says, “Uh-oh.”

“What do you mean, ’Uh-oh?’” Jimmy demands.

“You can see Riley?” I ask.

“If that glowing floating dude you’re talking to is Riley, yeah. What’s that mean?”

“It’s bad,” Riley says. “The living can’t see me.”

Jimmy says “Oh,” so sadly I almost have to sit down.

“It just means we don’t have much time,” I say. “Even less than we thought.” I look at my partner. “Stay with him, man. That ain’t no place for you to be with your dead ass.”

“That’s true for so many reasons,” Riley says. “But I still don’t like it.”

Halfway down the hill I pause and look up at them. “You wanna call the COD for backup?” Riley and I toss the idea back and forth silently for a second. You never know what you’re gonna get when you call in the Council of the Dead. They might come in all heavy, spirit blades a-rattling or they might not come at all. Usually it’s whatever would be least helpful in the given situation.

“What’s COD stand for?” Jimmy asks.

“Corpulent Old Dickheads,” I say.

“Corporation of Ongoing Douchebags,” Riley says.

“Nice one,” I say. “Let’s not. They’ll find out soon enough.” Jimmy just shakes his head at me as I turn and head off towards the mansion.

Normally, we have all kinds of slick moves we do to get in a spot we’re not supposed to be. I have my grumpy cop routine down pat and a range of fake badges and IDs in my coat pockets. But that’s for when we have some time to find out what’s going on. I hop the fence, limp-sprint across the lawn and kick the door in. One thing about houses that’re heavily spirited up, they rarely have much in the way of earthly protection, A) ’cause they don’t need it, and B) ’cause they don’t want a bunch of cops up in there, anyway.

Ornate is the right word. The kid was also on point about the icky, too-many-eyes feeling. I can almost hear them whirl around in shock and focus that sick stare on me from their perches. I pull a no-nonsense blade out of my cane and advance slowly forward, imagining ghouls lurking in every shadow. The next room is the doll house, but when I walk in, the shelves are empty. I don’t like that at all. I move through quick; don’t need to linger to know about all the bad things that’ve happened here. The room still echoes with lost soul screams.

Next comes a dark corridor with two doors at the end. One goes to Mina’s room, I’m guessing, and the other probably gets me to grandma’s. The energy seeping out of the room to my right is hot and old—a crude mix of fevered sepsis and sterile medical equipment that can’t have much to do with Mina. I click open the door and walk in, blade first.

It’s all dark but for a muted TV in the corner by the door. The screen projects shuddering, colored lights that dimly illuminate Grandma Tess. She’s sitting up in a steel outpatient bed on the far side of the room, staring at me. Long, loose-flesh arms wrap around the guard-rails. Her tightly wound bun and heavy makeup give her face that old-lady/demented clown look. The room is boiling hot.

“Ah, a visitor!” she croaks when I walk in. “How lovely! Come, sit by my bed. I do get so lonely these days.”

“You know why I’m here,” I say. Sweat has begun running unrepentantly down my face and back.

“I’m sure you’re here to keep me company, my dear. You can put that sword away.”

“You have quite a little operation going, lady.” My eyes are jumping around the room, from her forest of see-through orange medication bottles to the stacks of sterile sheets and catheters, but nothing seems about to pounce. “Where’s the dolls?”

“My children? I have quite a collection, you know. You’ll meet them soon enough.”

“This is what I figure,” I say, winding a slow orbit around the room. “You’re a lonely old lady…”

“Tut-tut,” she chirps. “Where are your manners, young man?”

I pick up an old black and white photo of a beautiful smiling woman. “You used to be all the rage, when you weren’t oversized and bed-bound.”

“I had my heyday, yes.”

“Probably quite the man-killer. And then…” My eyes scan the family photos decorating her bedroom wall and land on a fading image of a teenage girl with her hair in a horrific topknot. “You had a pretty young daughter.”

“Celeste.”

“And you inducted her into your ways. Taught her the art of luring a man in. And once she had him here, you went about your creepy soul-trapping business.”

“Nothing creepy about it, my dear. They all came willingly enough. Celeste was quite the little nymphette I’m afraid.”

The air in the room is getting heavier. Things shift nervously in the dark corners above my head. “You trapped their souls in those damn dolls, and when their empty bodies decayed they belonged to you.”

“Like I said,” grandma’s breathing comes in fast labored wheezes now, “it gets lonely up here. No one comes to visit. The young don’t give elders the respect we deserve. Such a shame, really.” Her edema-heavy hands reach over to the bedside table and retrieve a gold-lined, velvet jewelry box with dancing clowns on it and a crank sticking out of one side. “Such a shame.” She absent-mindedly starts twisting the handle, staring at me with that bright red smile all the while.

The music seeps out in lurching, timid jolts at first. Jimmy’d had the melody down perfectly, with all its eerie, off time elegance. It comes from all around me, envelops me in a hazy cloud of uncertainty.

“Pretty song, no?”

I shake my head no, trying to steady myself. If I speak I might puke, and that wouldn’t be a good look. “What happened,” I gasp, “to Celeste?”

“Bitch got a conscience,” Grandma Tess laughs. “Or more precisely: She fell in love. Broke the Golden Rule. I told her: ‘Celeste baby, never, never fall in love. You can have all the men you want, my dear, just don’t fall in love.’ It worked for so many years. I thought when she had Mina, something would change, but when I placed Mina’s father on my shelf with the rest of them, Celeste took it all in stride. I was so proud of her.”

I let myself sink into a chair at the foot of her bed, because otherwise I would sprawl out across the floor. The melody trudges on around me like a dying ballerina.

“But then, a few years later, this Maurice character starts coming around. A mailman, of course. I knew from the start he would be trouble, with all his good natured smiles and gentle ways. She should’ve known better. Soon enough, it’s ‘Mommy, not this one, don’t take this one from me, please.’ And what did I always tell her? There’s only one Golden Rule. A mother must be firm with her teachings in this day and age.”

I have to stop the room from spinning or I’m toast. The walls swim with movement, and I can’t tell if it’s the dolls lurking towards me or my own weary head.

“Mina was eight at the time. I told her it was cancer that took her mommy and she was too young to question it, poor dear. Now I’ve spent nine long years with the same old irritating companions, waiting for my granddaughter to come of age and my daughter’s ghost to stop moaning underneath my house. She’s given me at least two strokes and probably caused the renal failure, the bitch.”

It’s definitely the dolls. I slash out haphazardly with my blade. They’re moving faster than I thought they would, swaying and scurrying towards me like porcelain roaches.

“Now, now, young man,” the old lady’s voice rings out sing-songy and fierce. “No need for violence. We just want to help you sleep. I know you must not sleep very well, all that hard work you do. Sleep, my friend.” The music won’t stop. The dolls are everywhere.

Something deep inside me is calling out to get my attention but I’m too busy trying to swat away those tiny hands to notice. Finally, it gets me: Jimmy and Riley, waiting outside. In this moment of utter desolation, my soul has coughed up a stern reminder that folks are depending on me not to get myself taken down. People I care about. If I fail, not only will Jimmy be sucked forever into this Hell house, Riley will surely come in after me and get his ass evaporated too.

I force myself to stand up straight, block out the swirling melody with all my mental might and focus my eyes. Those shiny little porcelain faces glint up at me in the flickering TV light. I pick one and smash its head off with my blade. A bright ball of light issues forth, one of Celeste’s poor lovers, and scatters frantically towards the ceiling. I slice again, crack another, and swing my body backwards, almost toppling, as the light bursts out and swooshes past me. In the new illumination, I see there are many more American Girls than I had thought, and my mind is still swimming, in spite of my best efforts. I begin whacking viciously at the crowd with both my blade and the cane sheath. Porcelain explodes around me as lights burst upwards.

I’m ignoring both the creeping melody and the old woman’s screams but my energy is waning quickly. The dolls keep coming. Their little hands are grabbing at my ankles and their skin is cool and soft like dead flesh. It chills me, drains my drive. I have the notion that I’m hemorrhaging somewhere, which would be a quick wrap up to the situation ’cause I’m damn near anemic. But there’s no blood. I tumble towards a window and smash it with my cane. The swirling balls of light flush towards it and burst out into the night like an explosion of stars. Hopefully, Jimmy’s is in there somewhere. If so Riley will sort it out.

Meanwhile, the room has fallen back into darkness now that the shimmering souls have flooded out and the old hag switched off her soap operas. I swing my blade blindly for a second before an icy mound lands on my back and then another on my shoulder. I’ve lost all sense of direction. Tiny, frigid hands are working their way up my ankles. How many can I smash before I succumb? My knees are giving way, so I try to gauge where the majority of the little fuckers are gathering and aim my collapse that way. A terrific shattering greets my fall and for a second all I see is a giant flash of light, rising into the air. It illuminates the room just enough to afford me a glimpse of more legions of dolls scattering forward. As the world gives way to that horrific crawling feeling scrambling over my whole body, I hear Grandma Tess cackle and then the sound of a young girl screaming.

My lady friend is sad tonight. We linger together like extras waiting for our cue, somewhere between asleep and awake. I have the vague notion that something horrible is going on all around us, but right now, I am safe. As long as she’s here, it’s inconceivable that anything bad could happen to me. Her light is just that bright. But she’s been crying, or is about to—who can tell? She reaches out a hand towards me and for the first time in all the years that this beautiful morena has been blessing my dreams, she touches my face. It feels like I’m walking out into the afternoon sun after being in a basement for weeks. The warmth spreads over my whole body and I want to laugh and yell with joy but my friend looks so worried I clam up. I raise my hand to touch her face but there’s blood laced between my fingers. It’s my blood. That warmth all over my body…

I roll my head back to scream and then wake up pinned to a wall in the flickering lights of the damn soap operas. The dolls are standing perfectly still around me. There are noticeably fewer than there had been, but I’m still outnumbered, surrounded and bleeding. Grandma Tess is talking urgently into an old antique telephone, and the thought that she’s in communication with people outside of this house fills me with dread.

I’m trying to gather my strength and figure out where I’m bleeding from when Mina appears in the open doorway. She’s absurdly skinny, has big gawking kitty-eyes and is still rocking that spaghetti-whatever tube top. Jimmy has some work to do on his descriptive powers. From the way Grandma Satorious says, “I’ll call you back,” into the phone, I gather Mina had been here earlier—scream-ing I vaguely recall—and wasn’t welcome back.

“Can I help you, Mina?” the old woman says icily.

“I don’t know what it is you do in here, Grammy,” Mina says, “but it has to stop.” Not bad for a mousy chick.

Grandma’s not having it, though. “Go to your room!” she hollers with all the fury of a runaway elephant. “Get out of my sight! I’ll deal with you later!” Mina has a lot to learn from this one. If I wasn’t chained to the wall I’d be cowering to my room, but the girl stands her ground. Then I see why: All six and a half feet of Jimmy step firmly into the doorway behind Mina. For some reason, the first thought that comes to my head is: How did these two ever possibly get it on? Then the flood of relief kicks in. He looks good and solid so Riley must’ve gotten him his soul back.

Grandma Tess reaches frantically for her music box and begins cranking it as fast as her worn out old limbs will let her. That horrible song tiptoes eerily out. I’m about to yell to Jimmy when he pushes Mina to the side and launches across the room. The dolls clutter towards him. A few drop from the ceiling and find their mark on his shoulders and Jimmy misses a step and crashes forward. I’m pulling at my binds with everything I got but that’s not saying much. Blood is still leaking steadily from somewhere.

Jimmy’s up before too many dolls latch on to him, and he rips a few off and tosses them roughly at the walls. They shatter, sending light balls scattering out the window. Mina screams and runs towards him but he’s already lurched the rest of the way across the room and is wrenching the music box from Granny’s hands. “No!” she screams hoarsely. “No! Give it back, boy! That’s mine! Mine!”

“Break it!” I yell. “Millions of pieces!” Little colorful bubbles are clouding my vision, which I take to be a bad sign, but I’m desperate to stay awake and see what happens. Jimmy aims at an attacking doll and brings the music box down hard on its head. Gears, springs and shards of wood explode across the room as the song finally grinds to a halt. I laugh drunkenly and am about to let myself slip into nothingness when a tall, glowing form steps into the doorway. I squint at it until the old bearded soul from Garvey Park comes into focus. Was he spying on us the whole time? If he’s in on it with the fat witch, the deal is done; Jimmy wouldn’t stand a chance. I’m about to say as much when the happy colorful dots mount a full takeover of my eyesight and I pass the fuck out.

***

She’s smiling now, my friend, but the sadness waits just behind her eyes like a persistent lover. Her hands are on my face, all that good warmth spilling sloppily over my cheeks, down my throat. I look at her longingly. I’m so tired now, I want to let the world slip away but only if she’s coming along too. And her face tells me sternly that she’s not. That we have to stay. If I was in bed I would roll over and pull the sheets over my head and then wait for her to come find me. Maybe I’m a child again. I just want to let go, let the darkness keep closing in, but then she smiles and I can’t. I can’t be anywhere if that smile’s not with me. I fight the bleariness away and reach out, put my hands on her waist and pull her close to me. Turns out she’s naked and that sacred warmth wraps around me like a steamy bath as I enter her. We move in slow motion, find our rhythm and then fall into a breathless, joyful, steady fuck that seems to go on forever. I wonder what base this is and then I wake up drooling, grinning wildly and staring into an ancient bearded face.

I scream and the face curves its little O shaped mouth into what must pass for a smile in old spirit expressions. Riley peers curiously down at me. He looks truly concerned, but he’s not worried about old beardy being there, which means I don’t have to be either. I become vaguely aware of the forest breathing in and out around us. Riley speaks but it just sounds garbley to me. He’s looking at the park spirit. Then the spirit says something garbley to Riley. Why can’t they bring back my new girlfriend and garble at each other somewhere else?

“How you feeling, bro?” Riley asks me.

“I feel like God stepped on me.”

“You lost a lot of blood.”

“I didn’t have a lot of blood.”

“Yeah, well now you have even less.”

“The boy?”

“Saved your ass. Soon as his soul burst out that window, we separated it from the fray, I worked it back into him and he bee-lined for the house. Brave kid, Jimmy. I barely had time to tell him to aim for the music box.”

“Ah, glad you picked up on that.”

We’re definitely in some remote corner of the park, deep in the underbrush. I test out turning my head. It works, but I don’t like what I see.

“We’re…not on the ground.” Not by about twenty feet from the look of it.

“Yeah, this fellow brought you up here. The COD was so pissed off about the sudden flood of dead souls at Intake they didn’t even want to deal with your hemorrhaging ass.”

“Charmingly Official Devastation.”

“Exactly. So we brought you here. Well, this old guy brought you here. He’d been watching us the whole time. He took care of the kid too.”

“Jimmy’s okay?”

“He’s fine. But he can still see me, which is odd.” I’m strangely relieved to hear that. It makes everything a little less lonely knowing someone else will now have to put up with this in-between shit. Even if he’s not half-dead like me, we’ll be able to compare notes. And he saved my life.

“You got the heffa?”

“Heffa got away,” Riley reports with a twinge of shame. “Seems she had someone swing by and pick her up. Made herself scarce while we were hauling you out of there.”

There’s that vague sense of dread again. “She was on the phone with someone,” I say, “right before Jimmy and Mina came in.”

“Yeah, the boys at the Council are on it, but you know how that goes. The daughter’s ghost popped up from under the house as we were leaving. Celine?”

“Celeste.”

“Whatever, she took off after the old hag in a hurry. She was going on about unrequited love and a mailman named Morris or something. Looked to be a nasty cat fight in the works, but not the kind you pay money to see. The wee, skinny chick stuck around, though. She’s spooked but she’ll be alright.”

The old bearded spirit stirs slightly and warbles at Riley. It’s a low moaning sound, like air blowing past a flap that keeps saying fworp fworp fworp over and over again.

“What is that?” I ask irritably.

“It’s old ghost talk,” Riley says. “Very old. Mostly forgotten. Few phantoms even speak it anymore. Lucky for you I had a crush on my ancient languages teacher in the academy.”

Fworp-fworp-fworp, goes the spirit. Maybe it’s changing intonations slightly.

“Turns out he’s some kind of family of yours. An ancestor.”

“What?” It never occurred to me that I have ancestors. Of course, I do—everyone does. But why bother trying to find them when I don’t even know what decade I lived in? It’s all too much. I look up at his peaceful old face and smile. “He knows about my life?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Riley says. “But he’s been dying to meet you. Says he’s sorry it had to be under these circumstances.” Speechless, I study him for signs of me but come up short. “He’s been keeping you alive for a few days now.”

I reach out a trembling hand to touch this brand new, very old piece of myself. All of the sudden, I am not the errant, half-dead weed in God’s garden I’d thought I was; I’m a link on a spiraling, ancient web. I have a towering young friend who saved my life twice. I have a partner that can make me laugh when we’re both about to die and a chain-smoking healer man that lends me his couch when I’m hurt. A woman loves me, even if she’s imaginary or long dead, she stays with me when everything else goes dark. I have roots. The old ghost puts his glowing hand to mine. It’s icy cold and barely there, but it’s real.

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“Professor Incognito Apologizes” is both a heartfelt mea culpa by Professor Incognito on the event of his beloved discovering his disturbing experiments and an in-depth FAQ on how to adjust to that newfound knowledge. It provides an excellent blueprint for young mad scientists to follow when confronted with investigatively inclined significant others.

My Darling,

If you’re receiving this message then you have made a startling and disturbing discovery regarding the nature of my scientific work.

Please forgive the unsettling nature of my appearance—the holographic projector is my own invention and probably very lifelike apart from the change in scale, which I believe lends a dramatic effect. I understand if it initially gave rise to confusion, panic, or small-arms fire. Needless to say—I have to add this—your puny human weapons are powerless against me.

I am recording this because I just gave you the key to my place, and although we’ve had the “boundaries talk” several times these things do still happen.

To get this far, you must have found the false wall I put in at the back of the bedroom closet. You must have pushed aside the coats and things, found the catch and pulled it aside to see the access shaft and the rungs leading downward to an unknown space deep beneath this apartment complex.

Did you hesitate before descending? Perhaps you still supposed this might be a city maintenance tunnel—strange, but surely more plausible than what followed. You must have started the elevator manually. (I’ve always admired your resourcefulness at moments like this.) And then you would have had to guess the combination to the vault door; tricky, but then of course you would know your own birthday. So maybe then you realized where you were, as the vault door opened and the rush of escaping air ruffled your black hair, and you crept inside, lips parted, flashlight at the ready. And you heard the electrical arcs sizzle and smelt ozone, and the glow of strange inventions cast a purple light onto your face, and you found yourself standing inside my secret laboratory.

Maybe this is for the best, you know? I think you should sit down—not on the glowing crystal!—and we can talk. This may take a while but fortunately the silent countdown you’ve triggered is quite lengthy.

This isn’t the first time I’ve faced discovery. Secret identities are fragile things; you set up a dividing line in your life that can collapse in an instant, that can never be reestablished. You yourself have already come close to the secret so many times, come so close to stumbling into the clandestine global conflict that is my nightly pursuit.

(The hero Nebula came close to unmasking me in Utah, before I lost her in the depths of the Great Salt Lake. In Gdansk I matched wits with Detective Erasmus Kropotkin. But always I knew you, Suzanne, were the greatest threat to my domination of the world.)

In any case, I’m afraid this knowledge will do you no good (which I am constantly having to remind people).

I’m not good at this. Most of my apologies happen when I say things like, “Please forgive my rudeness,” as a kind of facetious witticism, a quip to break the inevitable tension before some unspeakably evil act. I’m going to try and be more sincere this time, partly on the advice of our Doctor Kagan but also out of a sense that if I owe anyone on this terrestrial globe—which I will shortly crush with the burning talons of pure science, an apology—it is you.

(I have so much to apologize for. Please include in the spaces in between, all the small inevitable, innumerable offenses—toilet seats left up, dinners missed, gestures of tenderness that went unmade when they were needed most. And, yes, for the mighty and terrible engines that must, even now, be warping through the ether toward your pitiful planet.)

I, Professor Incognito, hereby issue apologies regarding the following:

RE: any confusion you may be experiencing at this moment

It must be a shock to learn that the person you think of as your hardworking, decent (perhaps a bit dull) fiancé is in reality the terrifying, fascinating, inexplicably attractive figure of Professor Incognito. You’ve heard of me, I suppose? A name synonymous with evil and brilliance the world over? I hope so. I made a point of mentioning it enough times.

I think—and I think Doctor Kagan would agree—that this might be really, really good for our relationship. You often spoke of a remoteness about me, a part you simply couldn’t reach. Maybe that was the reason you were attracted to me in the first place, that you sensed on some level a mysterious unknowable chamber you couldn’t find a way into. On some level you guessed what it might be, that I had hidden away my glittering machines, seething chemical vats, the mutation ray in a place you’d never reach.

Of course you did. People have levels. Engineering levels, generator levels. Hydroponics.

RE: any slight unavoidable deception

It didn’t start out this way. In the beginning everything was much as it appeared to be. I was a young physic researcher with a hopeless crush on a brilliant colleague. It would have been ridiculous, even if I weren’t five foot four, even if I weren’t maybe the most awkward individual on the planet. I would never have dared speak to you. That first kiss outside the student center is still as miraculous to me as the sunrise might have been to our primitive ancestors, long before science simultaneously cleared everything up and made it all more confusing.

And it’s strange because it was on the very day of that kiss, that I had the first whisper of the insight that would make my career, crack open reality, and ultimately lead us to this conversation.

I knew, before anything else, two things: one, that it was the greatest scientific discovery in a hundred years, and two, that you could never, ever be told of it.

RE: our date on the evening of January 25 2007

Yes, I was irritable and distracted at dinner, and I didn’t listen properly to your story about Eileen and the paper’s managing editor, whatever his name was, which I think, in retrospect, was more entertaining than I gave it credit for. It’s not an excuse, but that was the day of my first experimental proof of concept. I had discovered there is—layman’s terms: a gap in the world—a space between the atoms . . . if you knew where to look for it. A scientific principle with endless applications for the manipulation of matter and energy.

You were the most important person in my life, the one who knew me most intimately. Why couldn’t I tell you? Maybe I was afraid you would contact the authorities. Or steal my ideas. Or call me insane.

Maybe I knew you wouldn’t choose me if you knew everything about me. And maybe being in love means you never get to be a whole person again. The moment we met I became two people: the one I decided could be with you, and the one left over, the person I am by myself. A person who I could never, ever let you meet, and who became the greatest criminal genius the world has ever seen. I used to marvel at that fact that you didn’t have a hidden side, that you’re the same all the way through. How can a person not have a secret and glorious part of themselves that the world absolutely must not see?

In three more weeks I had a working blaster, and we met to see Hannah and Her Sisters at the Regent. I fell asleep on your shoulder, dreaming the genetic code for a race of sentient tigers.

RE: Ruddigore

I don’t know how we each ended up thinking the other was a fan of light opera. And in my defense, the reviews were very positive—I think the word “rollicking” appeared more than once. Believe me, I died a trillion deaths as we sat there together and watched undergraduate theater majors milk a comic Gothic pastiche for cheap laughs.

It was late fall, and when we met outside the theater your cheeks stood out pink against your dark green overcoat. We left our coats on inside, and all I remember of the play was feeling the cheap stiff wool of mine brushing up against your shoulder. Afterward, I walked you back to your dorm and we lamely joked about how bad it had been, and you couldn’t see how flushed my face was.

Pausing on your doorstep, I looked up at the stars, clear and bright in the Midwestern sky, and began to formulate the glittering digital architecture that would become Craniac XII. But I foresaw neither its first words, nor its tragic final act.

RE: the fate of your much-vaunted captain atom.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, maybe I won’t apologize for that.

RE: my methods

Crude, perhaps? Not so wholesome as you would prefer? You don’t even know the history of the world I live in and the conflict that formed it. The moment you commit a crime in a costume you see new truths about the world. You probably think Mage-President Nixon never reached the moon.

Consider: Do you remember that weekend, we drove for four hours in a snowstorm to visit your brother and his wife. We went the last two hours without talking, not angry—just in a shared reverie as the world darkened and we felt like the one warm dry place in an infinite plane of blue-white snow and black trees and wet, gritty highway.

You didn’t know it, but Iluvatar was following us—one of the Mystic Seven—but she knew I wasn’t going to try anything. She lagged behind, further and further back into the dusk and the storm.

We drove on. I thought about how much power an Unspace generator could make; I thought about what kind of treads a cybertank should have to cross this terrain, and if your brother was going to be a jerk to me the entire time, and how many human skulls would go into making a really nice throne, and whether there was enough power in all Unspace to get me through this weekend, and if Craniac XIV could untangle all the messed-up stuff in your family.

RE: any inconvenience I maybe causing you

Yes, well, you see, I haven’t mentioned it but you may be staying here quite a while. Don’t try to run. Do feel free to explore, though.

You know I don’t like to boast, but I’m really pretty proud of this place. I broke ground on the first chamber and a simple ventilation system while you were at your mother’s in Baltimore, but since then it’s actually gotten quite extensive. When the construction robots really got going, it all just spiraled: plasma containment, the xenoapiary, the panopticon, the emergency launch tubes. The catacombs below the lower level seem to be naturally occurring, but I never quite got to the bottom of some funny seismic readings. Best not be too curious.

What you’re seeing is what my real life was during the better part of our life together. We’d see a movie or have our study night and around 2 a.m. I’d come back here, get into costume, and duck into the secret passageway.

Sometimes I’d still be spacey and distracted for a while but I eventually I’d shake it off and spend three or four hours adjusting the nutrient fluid for a dinosaur embryo, or trying to tune in the exact broadcast frequency of a dying star, or laying the plans for another sub-basement. I’d get the robots going on the next phase then emerge through one of the four exits on Linden Street to see the sun coming up. I’d get a coffee then hurry through the quad to introduce freshmen to the basic equations of sound propagation. Then home to sleep, to wake up in the afternoon to see you again.

It was perfect in a lot of ways; I’m sorry it’s over.

It wasn’t easy. There were more last-minute costume changes than I can tell you. We’d have coffee and I’d be shaking off the effect of a stun-ray, or waiting for news of my unmasking. The heroes knew for a fact I lived in this area. Captain Atom even snooped around our department at school, asking after anyone who kept strange hours, had strange ideas and perhaps a lack of interest in social activities. It would have been obvious if only they had been looking for a real person—they were looking for a stereotype. My precautions were effective but I think you were the real reason they never picked up on who I was.

I liked being your boyfriend. There were the times when it was absolutely the most blissful moment a person could have to leave the lab and know I’d be having a dinner with you. When we walked in the street holding hands, I’d want to check to see if people were watching just so they’d know how lucky I was.

And then, of course, there were the times when our relationship felt like being trapped inside a collapsing star, when it felt like I’d made the most awful mistake in the world. I know there must be a way to have a relationship that truly works, and I have faith that, with your understanding—and the aid of my Martian allies—we can find it. (More on that presently.)

RE: what our couples therapist considers an inadequate effort at communication

I understand why you left, that first time. You knew there was something missing, and I knew it too. I just couldn’t tell you.

There have been a hundred moments when I was on the brink of telling you. I tried to say the words out loud. I knew you were a physics major and all, but I didn’t think you’d be into it—power and wrongdoing—it was too strange. And I admit, a part of me worries that if I told you about it, the secret part of me would disappear.

And it’s too complicated now. If I’d just told you at the very start, maybe you could have understood, but now? After the diggings and archenemies and sea planes . . . If I started now I’d have to explain why I came to I speak Mandarin and what happened to my original eyes. It’s gone a little far.

RE: the breakup, my reaction to same, and the ensuing statewide “carnival of crime” (so-called)

I tried to channel the feeling into my work. I no longer had to sleep or take breaks except on missions and to make my teaching schedule, which I’m proud of having kept up. It’s harder than you think for a being of pure scientific evil to hold regular office hours. You remember the day I asked you to take me back? You can thank Detective Kropotkin for that humbling moment. The night before, I had snapped the lock of his office door and was busy dusting his things with nanotech powder. It happened that Kropotkin was waiting for me. He’d come in to work late, unable to sleep. He stood in the doorway looking especially seedy, a checked wool coat pulled on over his pajamas, bottle of Scotch in one hand, the revolver steady in his grip. It’s so obvious Kropotkin is an asshole, even his allies feel sorry for him. He honestly thinks living alone and playing drunk chess on the Internet makes him a tragic hero.

Seeing him there, with his sad little grin, I realized something worse: He thinks he understands me. He actually thinks we’re melancholy companions and rivals in a long dance of good and evil, law and chaos. And seeing him, I felt that I was, indeed, looking into a kind of mirror, but only in that I was turning into a pathetic cliché. I realized that the person I am with you, is also part of the person I am.

The next day I showed up at your work and told you I’d changed, and for once I was telling the truth. I know you don’t want to be serious again too soon, but there are a few things I think you should know.

RE: the Kris thing

Do you remember the time when we were forty minutes late to dinner with Kris and—who was it? Bryan?—and you didn’t speak to me the whole ride over except to remind me that the 3A is a toll road and you didn’t have any change? God, did I hate you then, and I’m sure you hated me, although I bet not as creatively.

And of course we got to the restaurant and the moment we got there, you were all smiles and I joined in as much as I could, thinking, god, relationships are a grotesque charade. No one had a bad time even though the conversation was warped by Bryan’s inability to leave even marginally ambiguous statements unclarified, and we were there maybe three hours. By the time we left we weren’t fighting any more; not for any reason, we just weren’t. I was hoping it would work the same way once I subjugate your planet’s military.

RE: the subtle, nefarious means by which i lured you here

You didn’t really think I gave myself away by accident, did you? Am I that sloppy? You saw the laser burn on my jacket lapel a few days ago. You caught a millimeter of costume poking out from beneath a shirt-cuff at the fund-raiser. (I know you did.) All carefully calculated to pique your interest, I assure you. And then I left the secret door open just a tiny crack, just enough for light to leak out.

I knew you’d find me eventually, darling.

Titanium steel bolts are sliding into place to secure the vault door behind you. Don’t be alarmed, and please don’t break anything. I’ve been decent so far, and I’ve taken your abilities into account.

I suppose now it’s time to talk about what happened three weeks ago.

You were away at one of your conferences, and I took the occasion to do a little more digging. Plunderbot and I were making a tertiary excavation on the south side, nothing serious, just laying in more server space and another heat sink, you know? Then we uncovered a power line that isn’t found on the city maps. We dug around out, followed it a few hundred feet until we struck a wall of reinforced concrete. We looked at each other, wordlessly, then I cut into it, making a cylindrical opening, and stepped through into a cool, air-conditioned, well-lit corridor.

It was an underground complex.

I explored further, ready for anything except what I found. That’s right, Suzanne, or should I say . . . Nebula? I should have known it was you under that cheap disguise. The way you smell when I lean close to you, like no unenhanced human could.

RE: any momentary discomfort you may have suffered just now

The rearrangement of molecules is never a pleasant experience. The disorientation will fade presently. Please be patient until your powers return, at which point if you choose, you can totally start smashing things. But I just need to feel that I am being heard (as Doctor Kagan would have it) on a few final points.

RE: the fight we had the other day

I’m sorry we both got angry. I shouldn’t even have been robbing that stupid museum. It was a bad day. I’m glad we got to talk, even if it was just a “curse you” and “you’ll never get away with this” thing.

RE: the Martians

Okay, elephant-in-the-room time. I, for one, choose to welcome our new Martian friends and overlords, and this is a personal choice I hope you’ll be able to respect. Believe me, I know how unpopular this particular stance is going to make me, but I don’t think it’s right to bring politics into our life together. “Overlords” is a loaded word these days, and I know that’s hard to get past. But you know what else is hard to get past? A glowing, golden, invulnerable Martian force field. Political views are in my view of secondary importance, once you see an ant grown to a hundred times its normal size.

I have new friends now, you’ll be happy to know. Lots of them. They’re an old civilization; they watched us evolve from domed palaces on their homeworld while writing sonnets and sitting under musical crystalline trees. We have long conversations about real stuff: love, philosophy, lasers. I might have let you in on it before but I’ve been a little busy. They can look just like us, you know. They can look like anything they want to.

Maybe this isn’t working for you right now, and I can deal with that. I’m not sure I have room in my life for another friend at the moment. In time, yes, I think you will regret your insolence. Possibly on the asteroid I have picked out, where you’ll be mining sodium. No rush, we’ll clear this up under the benevolent world government we’re planning. That is, once we’re done ending world hunger and, oh, I don’t know, curing cancer? Oh yes, you’ll be in the minority soon enough.

I worked hard on making this Martian thing happen, way before it was considered cool, and now that I’ve gone on record I know what the question is: Do I expect special treatment? I think it would be natural for them to call upon people who understood them from the first, for positions like, I don’t know, administrative director of planet Earth. Honestly, it’s not for me to say. But if you think they’re not listening right now, you’re kidding yourself.

Here’s what I’m saying: Maybe this movie isn’t about me at all. But it should be. The brave one who knew it was all a lie about the Martians, who was the first to stand up and say, hey, call me crazy but I think we can make this work. And maybe this is a lost cause, but right now it doesn’t look like it to me, so we’ll just see who wins this one, fair fight and no regrets. Don’t judge; you don’t know what’s going on in those saucers. It could be pretty great.

RE: what is about to happen

Well, I suppose this part is the most predictable, isn’t it? It’s a political transition; I think that’s the most sensible term. And there’s a place for you. I got specific with them on this. Their ideas on gender roles aren’t what you call progressive, but that’s exactly what a policy of engagement drives. A two-way street, right? Cultural exchange.

Oh, and the uniform. I’ve laid out some stuff for you wear, and probably you’ll think it’s going too far, but, you know, if you’re into it, it’s traditional where they come from. I know it’s a little skimpy, but we’ll be altering the weather on this planet soon. I do have two-sided tape someplace. And the headpiece is adjustable. Totally one hundred percent optional.

RE: everything, the fate of the entire world, and whatever

I won’t feel bad about the conquest of the Earth; not the destruction of the Capitol Building, or the White House; not tripods stalking the wheat fields; not the sodium mines or the humiliation of your primitive military forces, nor riding in triumph in my robot steed along lower Broadway to Times Square where I will personally accept the surrender of all seven leaders of the UN Security Council. I’m just sorry we wasted so much time that could have been ours, together.

I know we don’t talk much about the future but I have some proposals to make. We’ve talked to Doctor Kagan about models for an adult relationship but it seems to me we’ve been a little unimaginative.

Here’s what I’m saying: It would be terrible if someone were to find any of the equipment in my laboratory. Maybe they could comprehend what it was in time to stop me. It would be perfectly understandable if that person were to appropriate my inventions to use against me. Such a person would earn my undying enmity! In fact, I would be forced to consider that person my nemesis. We’d still fight on a regular basis. (I have a working mirror maze, if that makes a difference to you.)

The choice, Nebula—Suzanne—is entirely yours: everlasting enemies on a post-Barsoomian Earth, or co-regents of the North American province of the Greater Martian Solar Empire? I don’t want you to feel obligated, but yeah, I’m putting myself out there.

I could really commit to this, you know? Long-term. It’s not what you pictured, but be honest: Wouldn’t you have been disappointed with anything else? Shouldn’t there to be something more to a person than what you see walking around every day—an alternate self, a secret identity or two, or twenty. We’ve all had the dream where you find another room in your house you never knew about—if you found it, what would be in there? I thought hard about what that might be, and I’ve done my best to give it to you—something really cool, something scary and brilliant and mysterious all at the same time, every single day.

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