Today is a great day. The sun is shining, and my job is amazing. Hannah sighed. This wasn’t working. At least she had dinner with Grace to look forward to tonight.

She looked up at her team’s mission statement, proudly emblazoned beside a cartoon panda. The PandaWeb Customer Happiness Team aspires to make our customers’ lives easier. Someone should’ve been fired for coming up with the name, ‘Customer Happiness Team.’

“That’s stupid,” the caller spat. “Why can’t you just give me their phone numbers?”

Hannah sighed—in her mind, at least. She was careful not to let her frustration show through her voice. Most of her customers were angry and rude if they didn’t get what they wanted, and this guy was no different. She put on her best, well-practiced, pleasant support voice.

“PandaWeb does indeed share others’ personal information if they consent to it. Unfortunately, these individuals didn’t consent, so we can’t share their details. Perhaps you could expand your search to a wider target audience?

“Perhaps you could just do your jobs and be useful for once!” he shot back, before hanging up on her. Mercifully. She understood his frustration, but she simply couldn’t help him.

PandaWeb’s AI could compose music, hold conversations, and even create your sales strategy. It could tell you—generally—who your likely customer group would be, even though the system knew exactly who they were. But PandaWeb would never give away personal information. Sure, it was unethical, but bad press was worse. Not to mention the lawsuits.

This was vastly different from where Hannah thought she’d be in her career. She’d graduated with her psych degree two years ago but struggled to find the clinical work that she enjoyed, so she took this customer service job, just to pay the bills. Grace, her oldest friend in the world, teased her about it mercilessly. But Hannah stayed, even though some days it felt like she spent her whole life on the phone with angry people. It was a petri dish of human dysfunction, but it was right there for her to examine, a real-life experiment. Well, that was the story she told herself.

And on top of it all, Grace and Noah just got engaged. Hannah was thrilled at the news. She almost believed that one, too.

The next customer immediately appeared on her queue. A new user, with the ID ‘nobodyhome’. Well, at least he had a sense of humor. His account showed his name as Ryan—it was always important to use the customer’s name, after all. She connected the call and put on her best, happy-customer-service voice.

“Hello Ryan, and thank you for calling PandaWeb! My name is Hannah. How can I make your day great?” she asked.

The person on the other end laughed. “Wow, that’s quite the greeting! Congratulations, you’ve already made my day. Do they give you lots of free coffee or something?”

Hannah smiled—it was nice to finally talk to someone who wasn’t angry. “Oh, I’m just a naturally awesome person,” she retorted. If the Quality Team reviewed the recording of this, she’d get her wrist slapped for going off script. But her customer happiness stats were pretty good, despite the grumpy callers, so she wasn’t too worried. “So, how can I help you today?”

“I’ve kind of locked myself out of my account, and I need help getting back in.”

“Just ‘kind of’, huh? Sure, I can help you with that one.” This was an easy fix. After her last few calls, Hannah could use an easy one. “Did you try resetting your password online?”

“Yeah, so, uh… no. I couldn’t. I entered the wrong password too many times and it took away the option.”

“Really? How many times did you enter the wrong password?”

“Um… twelve…”

Hannah stifled a laugh. It was hard. Really hard. “And then it finally locked you out, huh? Can’t imagine why. You didn’t want to hit the ‘forgot password’ button before it locked you out entirely?” Quality would roast her for saying that. But come on, she had to. Some people just deserved it.

“I was sure I remembered it! I was so close…” Hannah could hear the grin in his voice. He was enjoying this, too. “Aren’t you supposed to be nice to me or something?”

“Okay,” Hannah put on her sweetest, most reassuring tone, “I’ll be nice. I can help you reset your password. Can you confirm your full name for me, please?”

“My name is Ryan Cooper.”

“Thanks, Ryan, it’s nice to meet you!”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Hannah, even though you’re being very mean to me,” Ryan teased her back. He remembered her name. Hannah was impressed. Callers don’t often bother to do that.

“And can you confirm your address for me, Ryan?”

“Are you sure you aren’t going to start stalking me?” came the response.

“Only if you’re cute…” Okay, Hannah mentally slapped herself for that one. She truly should not have said that. Quality was going to discipline her for sure. But it was surprisingly easy to get caught up bantering with this guy. She took a breath. Get back on script, she told herself.

“You’re in luck then!” Ryan replied. “I’m totally cute. And I’m not at all biased about it.” He gave her the address.

Hannah looked at Ryan’s account info. The address checked out. He was in Portland, just like her. And yes, his profile picture was there, and he was actually pretty good-looking. She was intrigued. He was unusually friendly, easy to chat with, and in the same city. It was a promising coincidence, but in the back of her mind, something also seemed a little off. She wasn’t a suspicious person, but this was awfully convenient.

He could be a contractor, hired to find holes in the company’s security. Hannah knew enough about human behavior to know that tricking people was always the easiest way to break into a company. And PandaWeb had some serious cutting-edge tech, which came with competitors very eager to get their hands on it. This guy was a super smooth talker. He could easily be some kind of social engineering security consultant.

But then, for all she knew, ‘Ryan’ could even be one of the company’s AI bots, software pretending to be human and probing for weaknesses in employees’ security training. He sounded real, but PandaWeb’s AI bots were sophisticated. Really sophisticated.

“We’re still connected, right?” Ryan’s voice came floating back into Hannah’s consciousness. “I didn’t scare you off, did I?”

Hannah laughed. Well, fine, even if he was a bot, at least she was going to enjoy the chat. And as long as she stuck to the script—mostly—then he wouldn’t be able to use her to get past the company’s security.

“I’m still here! Just confirming your address. And can you confirm your phone number for me, please?”

Ryan laughed again. He laughed easily, she noticed. “You want my number? Okay, now I definitely know you’re hitting on me.” But he still gave her the info, which matched his account.

Hannah sighed in mock exasperation. “You wish you were so lucky. I’ll text the number with a link to reset your password. Okay?”

“Sure, that works. But this isn’t fair. Aren’t you going to give me your phone number, too?”

“Sorry. Doesn’t work that way,” Hannah countered with a smile. “At least, not yet. Did you get the text?”

“Fair enough. But don’t think I’m giving up that easily.”

“Oh, you’re clearly persistent. I’m sure you’ll never give up. You did try to enter your password fifteen times…”

“Ouch! And it was only twelve.”

“Right. That’s much better. So, did you get the text?”

“Yup, just going through the link to reset my password… And we’re in! I’m going to write it down this time, so I don’t forget it.”

“Smart. Is there anything else I can help you with today?” Hannah didn’t want to end the conversation, but she did have a job to do and lots of angry customers waiting for her to brighten their day.

“Nope, you’ve been wonderful. But I’m sure I’ll think of something tomorrow that’ll absolutely require your help.”

Hannah smiled. Again. “I’m sure you will.”

When I was young, my neighbors buried their house. I had been in the house before it was buried, because Tim Fisher and I had the same bus stop and we were kind of friends. We never had the same teachers, but we sat in seats on the bus across the aisle from each other and walked home together most days. Sometimes, he shared cookies his mom made, decadent saltine crackers soaked in butter and salt with chocolate on top and toffee bits sprinkled in. My mom never allowed treats like that in our house. I’m salivating thinking of them now.

Some days before the burial we’d stop in at the house, where he had video games I wasn’t normally allowed to play and other snacks like sodas I couldn’t always drink. We didn’t go crazy. I never even stayed for long, maybe an hour, because that was all I could spare before my mom would be home too. Sometimes Tim would ask me if I couldn’t stay longer, or if I could come over on the weekend instead so we could have more time for games. Once, he wanted to go outside with me and play catch with his dog. I told him I was afraid of the dog running away.

“He won’t run away even though we don’t have a fence,” Tim had said. “He’s good like that.” But that wasn’t the real problem, and Tim knew it, and I knew he knew it, and I didn’t even have the guts to tell him that. The real thing was my dad’s office window faced their backyard, and he would see what I’d been doing before Mom got home. The real thing was my parents didn’t want me over there, even though nobody had ever actually said so. I just knew I couldn’t ask them. In any case, we stayed in his house in the living room, played a video game for a little bit and then I went home like I usually did. We never did play with the dog outside. I can’t even remember the dog’s name.

---

I don’t know what set the Fisher family apart when they first moved in. They arrived later than many in the neighborhood, sometime the previous winter, so Tim was the new boy in school halfway through the year. That’s never easy. Tim’s father didn’t have a strange job. It was something suit-and-tie as far as I could tell, similar to many of the breadwinners of the neighborhood. His mother worked too; she was a hairdresser. Yet my father didn’t invite Mr. Fisher to golf with his business friends when he could help it; my mother didn’t include Mrs. Fisher in her and our other neighbor friend Renée’s Friday wine nights. If I asked to have Tim over, the answer was almost always no, even when Renée’s daughters were allowed. There were small differences I know bothered everyone, though as a child I couldn’t see why they mattered, and I hope I don’t think they matter now. So it just must have been something that set them apart at first that I couldn’t see which made everything afterward so harsh.

---

The school year ended, summer passed, and the Fishers’ house abruptly disappeared one day from their lot. Renee was the one who noticed; my mother got a call while I was eating a piece of toast.

“What do you mean, look out from the garage?” my mother was saying into the phone. “Hold on, I’m on the old landline.”

She put down the wired phone and I heard the garage opening a moment later. When she returned, she accidentally knocked the phone off the counter in her haste to get back. She hauled it up by the wire. “Renée, I’ll be right over.”

My mother hurried my breakfast and slipped my jacket and backpack on. It was the first day of a new school year, but the mornings were already beginning to cool. My mother marched me through dewy grass toward the Fishers’ yard, where of course the house was gone. I thought it looked the way a recently unsaddled horse might – relieved, unburdened.

Renée was there with her twin daughters, freckled girls who picked on one another when Renée wasn’t looking. “Rob left for work already, otherwise I’d send him in to investigate,” Renée said to my mother.

“What do you mean, in?” asked my mother. “Shouldn’t we just call the police?”

“Oh, that I already did,” said Renee. “I meant into that jungle they call a garden.”

My mother visibly relaxed at the news that the police were on their way. “Let me give my husband a ring. He can be here in five.”

But before she could even raise her phone to dial, I heard the creak of metal from between a clump of rosebushes, and from there flipped up a large metal hatch. There was a “Bye, Mom,” and a shouted “watch the hatch!” and then Tim was scrambling up and out, his backpack on, his mouth thin.

He approached us five. “Hi, Sean. Hi, Mrs. Thorne.” He was always so polite. He greeted Renée and her daughters the same way. “Why are you on our lawn?”

And then the police cars rounded the corner, lights flashing but not making a sound.

---

Before they moved underground, my mother often tried to avoid the Fishers but didn’t always succeed. Her feeling of social obligation sometimes got her in the end, especially when the Fishers were being what anyone else might see as kind. Once, Mrs. Fisher offered to my mother to cut my hair for free, the same day she was doing Tim’s.

I remember my mother was hesitant to accept. “We have a regular place, I wouldn’t want to disappoint them,” she had said, a weak attempt at graciousness that Tim’s mother all too easily overturned. Tim’s mom sat me and him next to each other in high chairs in her kitchen. The elegant sweep of the cape over me, and the snick of her scissors in my ear. When it was done, she held mirrors in front of both of us. I expected our haircuts to be exactly the same, but they weren’t.

My mother watched it done, and she chatted with Mrs. Fisher as she worked–about the weather, the neighborhood, their husbands, the challenges of raising kids. Tim and I were quiet. He didn’t fidget at all.

As we were leaving, my mom tried to pay Mrs. Fisher for the haircut anyway, which embarrassed me deeply. Mrs. Fisher waved it away. “It’s what neighbors do,” she said. My mother laughed and returned the cash to her purse, but she gripped my hand very tightly the whole way across our yard.

We had left their front door open, and when I looked back, I could see through into the kitchen. Mrs. Fisher was sweeping up all the hair, mine indistinguishable from Tim’s.

---

Aboveground, Mr. Fisher had a beautiful garden, the one Renee always said was a jungle. I saw him tending to it early in the mornings before school and every evening after he got home from work, even if it was dark out. There were large and fragrant roses, ranging from jewel tones to soft pastels. Forget-me-nots bloomed in a riotous layer beneath the rosebushes in the summer. They were choking some of the other plants and covering ground he was hoping to use for bulbs eventually, daffodils and hyacinths and tulips. I only know the names because Mr. Fisher once patiently explained them all to me. You have to plant daffodils in the fall if you want to see them in spring, he told me. They have to suffer the cold below to emerge when it’s time.

There was a vegetable garden, too, mostly roots. Carrots, beets, rutabagas, everything for a stew. Onions, garlic, shallots, alliums that made my eyes water. Watermelons that would swell into existence and just as soon disappear, turning up chopped up bloody on the Fishers’ kitchen counter in the weeks after. It wasn’t as contained as my parents and the other neighbors would’ve liked it to be; my mother once complained that gardening encouraged groundhogs and other burrowing vermin to wreck their own yards as well as theirs. The other neighbors mowed their lawns aggressively, and more than once I saw Renée call out to Mr. Fisher from atop her tractor mower, asking if he needed her to just carry on over the border between their properties and get it done for him. He used to laugh and wave her off.

Our own landscaping was lifeless compared to theirs. Pruned shrubs which reminded me of poodles trembling in the wake of a shave. No riotous flowers. Nothing I could eat, either, not even dandelions, since my mother had a gardener come by to pluck those away at the root. I didn’t know I could eat dandelions until Tim told me. But our landscaping looked a lot like Renée’s and everybody else’s, and that was the way my parents liked it.

The kid paddled in on a sundown, oil-slicked tide. Somewhere beyond, the Killer Wave waited.

Aidan had opined, loudly, that he and the rest of the Old-Timers should pretend they’d never seen the kid. They were Rec workers, and it was payday; let the security boats deal with it.

Once the kid really got moving, though, Aidan might as well have suggested blindfolds at a firework show.

The currents of what had once been the Sacramento Valley were strong, unpredictable, and intermittently evil. The wreckage beneath the waves never quite settled, creating white-knuckle rapids between the husks of old city blocks and half-buried bridges.

At first glance, the kid looked like he might snap his paddle, board, and neck, in that order, at any moment. But as he got closer, Aidan could see the confidence. What had looked like lurching imbalance became split-second corrections. The test of a mechanical bull isn’t looking good doing it, after all. The kid held on.

When he made it to shore, the Old-Timer crew gave him a round of applause. Varsha whistled a few bars of “We Are the Champions,” and the kid’s eyes lit up. He hefted his cherry-red board onto the sand and rummaged through a pack bungie-corded to the tail-end.

Then he pulled out the case and unsheathed the ukulele, and there went the night.

---

Payday usually meant heading down to the Windsong for some beer that they could actually taste and waiting for a shot at the only pool table in town that still had most of the balls. But the kid, Chance, stuck out like a sore thumb, so Rin and Ekoye grabbed a fresh lighter and a case of nothing-ale from the corner shop, and they all hiked out to one of the more private dunes for a bonfire. It was the six of them, Aidan, Varsha, Rin, Ekoye, Pedro, and Skyler, plus the kid. The Old-Timers and the wayward child.

“Old-Timers” wasn’t an ironic handle; they were all old enough to remember the concept of retirement ages, but they had missed that boat like the dinosaurs missed the Ark, or so Pedro liked to say. They were certainly old enough that Aidan thought they were lucky no one broke an ankle dancing like fools in the firelight that night.

Chance was a one-man throwback playlist. He knew his way around his chirpy little instrument and was a decent tenor to boot. There wasn’t much for Aidan; there was some half-remembered song lilting around the back of his head that he would’ve liked to hear, but he couldn’t remember the words and didn’t bother to ask. But the kid played some Stones, some Swift (Skyler shrieked in delight), and eventually Buffett.

That brought the house down like storm surge could only dream about.

Age being what it was, the rest of the gang needed a breather after all that excitement. So, Aidan started interrogating the kid. Where was he from? Was he even old enough to be traveling alone? What the hell was he doing here?

That last earned Aidan some harsh glares around the bonfire, but Chance didn’t seem to mind. He was from a commune built around a lighthouse on the Old Coast up north. They were big on music, apparently. A human song library. It sounded a bit Kumbaya for Aidan, but to each their own.

As for age, Chance reported himself at twenty-two, though he looked closer to seventeen, and a lean seventeen at that. He had unzipped his wetsuit down to his waist, and even in the firelight, they could see the arches of his ribs and the hollow of his stomach under teak-colored skin. Too thin. But then again, who wasn’t, these days?

What he was doing here was fuck-all, because he had come to check on the “reconstruction efforts.” When Ekoye told him there weren’t any, just corporate scavenge operations, the smile left his face for the first time that night.

“When are they going to start?” He asked, looking between them.

“They’re not,” Aidan said. “Sorry, champ. The world ended.”

“Oh,” he said.

For a while, they sat with it, no songs but the duet of wind and tide. Then he picked up his uke and started idly plucking at the strings.

“Hey, do you guys know what cheeseburgers tasted like?”

For everyone but Aidan, that blew up like pure, nostalgia dynamite. Aidan disengaged, cutting his eyes out to the sea, watching for swells, waiting for signs.

The kid didn’t pack up and paddle off at sun-up, despite Aidan’s hopes. He had a tent on the back of that board of his, and his spine was still young enough for sleeping on sand. He set up a camp in the goldenbush and marram grass where he could happily stay a week, or possibly forever.

He didn’t seem to understand why he had to lay low, paddling in unwanted on a corporate reclamation site. Honestly, he didn’t seem to understand a lot of things. Why were they working for a company instead of just salvaging for themselves? Why were they paying to rent run-down housing instead of camping out or building their own places? Why didn’t they leave if they didn’t like it here?

Never mind that this was all that was left anymore. There was nothing freeing about a government, global economy, and biosphere on the verge of collapse. If anything, you held on tighter. Shit job? At least you knew you would be eating every day. Shit apartment? At least it was a roof overhead when the next super-storm blew through. Shit longitude and latitude? Well, a couple of centuries of industrialization hadn’t exactly left any Edens in their wake.

The biggest thing the kid didn’t seem to understand was the fear. Everyone who had survived out here had a story about the time they almost hadn’t. And Aidan didn’t even mean the big stuff: the San Andreas 9.0, the Second American Civil War, and the Hell Summer Double-Pandemic.

Those were just stamps on the bingo card these days. At Aidan’s age, he had seen much closer, more intimate brushes with death. For Rin, it was a jagged piece of rebar and an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection; three straight weeks in the kind of fevers that usually kill the virus by taking the body with it. She got a fresh reminder looking at the scar in the mirror every morning.

For Ekoye, it was his dog, Walker, swept away in a flood. Ekoye knew better than to wade into that water, but “man’s best friend” were never just words to him. The man had been knocked unconscious against a lamppost for about thirty seconds and ended up under the water. Woke up just in time, and Walker was saved, never to know how close his human came to dying in the line of duty. The dog was still around, as gray in the muzzle as Aidan.

For Pedro, it was the one-eyed seagull. He still refused to talk about it.

For Aidan, it was the Killer Wave.

This was years ago, when his hair was more red than white. He and Clara had parted ways right after Hell Summer, neither one at fault, nerves just too raw to handle a team of two. He still missed her. That woman had never been second-best.

He’d traded Atlantic for Pacific, like you do. Surely if any place needed construction work and was willing to pay, it would be California, right?

But then came San Andreas, and the state of emergency stretching into double-digit months, and the fire season that just wouldn’t stop burning.

So, Aidan was paddling up the PCH, pulling day work, building make-shift hospitals and temporary schools.

The weather forecast called for a goddamn monsoon in three days, and he was surrounded by toothpick architecture, so Aidan had started paddling immediately. It was all blue skies and smooth breezes the first two days. The third day, there was a bit of a current to fight, but he had been doing this how many years? Plus, he could see the chop building. If he had paddled back in to take a rest, he would have been Poseidon’s punching bag trying to get back out past the breakers.

He kept going. Careless.

The birds had all scattered. He never forgot that part. They must have seen it coming.

It was nearly high noon and high tide both. The coast was curving out in front of him, the space between the steady blue and the whitecaps starting to go ombre. The tide kept pushing him toward the splash zone, all in on a Royal Flush. He fought back until his obliques were a wildfire. And all the while, there it was.

It brooded on the deep, rising and falling, but keeping its distance. It peeked above its lesser brethren like a crocodile surfacing to lay eyes on its prey. Then it sank, and Aidan knew, immediately, that he was in for it.

The Killer Wave was coming.

The nose of his board drifted relentlessly toward shore, and the onslaught began. He caught the first few—he wasn’t an amateur—but as soon as one had broken, the next was yanking him back, and the shore was closing in by inches instead of yards. It was a wave train, plain and simple. Each one was seven feet, eight feet at the outside; all together, they were the overture.

He pushed too hard, trying to gain ground (so to speak) on the beach, over-balanced, tumbled.

The board was bungie-d to his ankle, like the bobber to his hook. He climbed the cord to the surface and broke for half a gasp of air before the next breaking wave, which dragged down the board and him by transitive properties. Minutes of this felt like hours, but he still wasn’t ready to give up the board. The main event was still out there.

It waited. That was the part he could never get over. At that size and speed, it should have passed right through the lesser waves, broken beyond him while he was still under water. But no. It waited until he was tired, waited until he was bruised, waited until the fear had dug its fangs into him.

When the last of the waves in the train broke, he managed to splay himself across his board, praying that the big one had already passed. Then he looked up.

It was a plunging wave, a drop-you-in-the-trough-and-blot-out-the-sun wave, an abandon-hope-ye-who-tread-water-here wave.

On the third day, the kid came out salvaging with them. Aidan was dead-set against it. Corporate security patrolled by on speedboat and jet-skis at all hours of the day, but it wasn’t their security those teams worried about. They didn’t even carry life preservers. Reclamation teams lost people with security in line of sight. But they weren’t Coast Guard or Life Guards. They were Corporate, Fuck-You-That’s-Ours Guards. Loss prevention. Keep your friends off the jobsite, or we’ll find a cage big enough for all of you.

Aidan was overruled.

Reclamation work wasn’t glamorous. Mostly they puttered out in their piddly little motorboat (oldest hands got the worst boat, by reason that you want to keep all of your expendables together), hunting down shipping containers. Storms and seaquakes had made trans-pacific shipping a real gamble. But where there’s value, a large corporate entity will swoop in to suck it dry. Hence Green Trove, a “recycling” operation that raided any containers or wrecks that found their way to the coasts and inland seas of California.

The work was that timeless, blue-collar cocktail: hands-on and straightforward, hold the easy. They climbed into the piece of junk boat and followed transponder signals to the day’s plunder. Once they got close, they’d paddle out and dive to check all the seals. If it was beyond saving, they reported in and hauled their asses on to the next one. If the whole thing was still sealed, they tagged it with a beacon for a real team (ie. one with a ship, staff, and actual equipment) to hoist it aboard and return it to port.

But that day, they had the real shit job: a mystery box.

The container was painted royal blue with a large, white W. It was caught between some toppled concrete pillars that were holding it mostly steady. One of the seals, top-front corner, starboard side, had been shorn off like a monstrous bite in the steel. But here was the trick: the box was hauling sealed MREs, so there was a chance that everything inside was still A-OK. That meant getting up close and personal with the behemoth, hoping it didn’t shift, flip, or in any way demonstrate the principle that when steel meets flesh, only the latter yields.

It was Aidan’s turn. They anchored the boat about twenty yards away. He sat passenger on Pedro’s board as the latter paddled him most of the remaining way. Rin, Skyler, and the kid all got out on their boards, ready to come after him if he lost his footing.

The corrugated steel was slick under his heels as he stepped off Pedro’s board, and he was feeling every one of his years as he crossed to the open end. The missing seal was a razor bloom of gunmetal and blue paint. Aidan took the camera off his hip, a water-proof number with a light and lens on a long, adjustable neck. You snaked it into a broken seal, took a look around, and sent it off to central dispatch, who made the call. Or, maybe, asked if you could get your whole arm in there and wiggle it around, they thought they saw a shark.

Standard Operating Procedure, except Aidan could never get the damn thing to work, proof positive that he had truly gotten old, technology turning against him. The screen was taking forever to boot up, and he had to keep bracing on one knee when the sea spat up against him.

A squadron of sea birds passed over him, beating their wings like hell had taken flight. Aidan tore his eyes from the screen and scoured his horizons. He knew the signs of the Killer Wave, and even one put his whole body on edge.

“Watch it!” Pedro called.

Aidan looked down, just in time to see a broadside wave topple into the container. He fell forward, dropping the camera, which slid off into surf. He threw his arms out, too late, tumbling toward the shredded metal—

And fell on his back, wind knocked clean out of him, the flat of a paddle in his chest.

“I got ya!” Chance called out, towering above the old man.

That earned a round of applause from the rest of the Old-Timers and a swooping feeling of frustration and relief from Aidan. Before he even got up, he scanned every direction. Too flat for his wave to hide.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said.

“For sure. We’re all in it together,” Chance said.

Aidan pulled himself up with the paddle wondering which bumper sticker the kid had got that one from.

Upon further inspection, the box was worthless. One of the missing shards of steel had got caught up in the container, and time and tide had shredded the contents. Tens of thousands of meals gone, all because of a bad weld. At least they had probably fed some fish.

They were back on the boat and ready to move on when the kid spotted the other container: white paint with red scars sticking up at a thirty-degree angle from a sandbar.

It took a second for Aidan to make sense of the paint: two rusty, red lines intersecting at the center.

Red Cross.

Another win for the kid. Good eyes, pats on the back all around. He was thrilled.

“We’re stocked up on food, solar panels, and water filters back home, but short on medicine. Does your company do trades?”

“Yeah, cash, barter, IOU, whatever works,” Aidan grumbled.

“Really?”

“No, hon,” said Varsha, comforting him and scolding Aidan with just those two, spare syllables. Downright maternal in the economy of it.

“No transponder,” Rin remarked. “It’s uncatalogued.”

“Probably drowned in that buried half,” Ekoye said.

“Shouldn’t we check it out?” Chance asked.

“Quotas,” Ekoye said, sadly. “Need to be going.”

The kid looked ready to protest, but he clamped his mouth shut.

“Yeah, OK.”

Kate Calhoun broke the news when she came by to clean the other day. At first, she teased me with what my father always called “woman talk, who was dating who, who was sneaking off with who, that kind of thing. I sat in my easy chair in the living room and read the paper, nodding and grunting responses, the way I had when Muriel used to run her gob. But suddenly, she sucker punched me with something that hit deep.

“They’re closin’ up Chad Riley’s bar,” she announced.

Down came the paper, and I peered over my shoulder at her while she dusted off the living room lampshades. “What now?”

“Heard it from Dan Riley hisself!” she declared, as if I had dared contradict her. “They’re closin’ her up. Gonna sell it to some outfit from outta town.”

There was more, but I didn’t bother listening. My mind drifted immediately elsewhere, back to better days when I was a younger man. I sat there long after Kate had left and let the memories come flooding in like the tide. I could taste the cold draft beer, hear them pool balls clacking like cassinettes, and smell the mix of smoke, whiskey, and Chad Riley’s English Leather cologne that had always hung in the air around the bar.

And suddenly, I was there on the stool, which was my stool, at the corner of the bar which was my corner, and Dusty was there at my elbow like a ghost. I could even hear the boys, all the boys, from Johnny King to Nick Little, from Willy Cashum to Pete Bigelow, they were all there, laughing and drinking draft and talking about girls, trucks, anything and everything. Chad Riley’s, a lynchpin of my existence that had stood for five decades, and which I had taken for granted would stand for ten more.

I’ve lived in south Texas my whole life, in the same town where I and Muriel raised a family. I grew up on daddy’s farm, which I inherited when he retired. We had Bobby here, and I kept the place up after he moved and Muriel died. And all that time, nearly twenty-five years, there was a Chad Riley’s to serve as my second home. I was thirty when Chad opened it (he come down from Vegas, where he used to be a bar tender at one of them Caesar’s Palace-type outfits) and it had become as much a part of me as my fingers and toes.

Though I was sitting down, I could feel myself floating out of the chair and into the air, like one of them Astroturf projections that I heard about on TV. I was walking through the front door of Chad’s, into the dark wood interior with the tables all in one corner, the bar on the right by the jukebox, and two pool tables taking up the rest of the place with a little hallway that went to the bathrooms. Over the bar hung a wall-to-wall neon silhouette of a sexy lady showing some leg, which Muriel had once petitioned to have taken down to no avail. When you came into Chad’s, you felt like you were coming home, like the whole place always had its arms open, ready to embrace you.

Hearing about the bar being closed, I felt the way you would if somebody you loved had finally died of cancer. Watching them slog through life in pain was more burden than the thought of them dying, and you felt free when they finally kicked the big one. I had felt that way when Muriel passed, and I felt that way when I heard Chad Riley’s kids had finally decided it was time to end their father’s legacy.

The cancer that killed Chad’s, of course, was The Chopping Night. Nothing was ever the same after that, and those memories tainted the bar forever. Chad Riley retired a year after all that hullabaloo and his kids tried to keep the doors open, but the boys all gradually left off coming. Me and Dusty started hanging out at Rudy’s pub instead, and though we talked about going in to say hi to Dan Riley from time to time, we never did. We couldn’t.

Part of it was the men in suits, who showed up and started making life difficult. This is south Texas: nobody wears a suit, not even on Sundays. But after the Chopping Night, almost every day, two or three preppy fellas in two-piece business suits would troop in and hang around asking questions about Carl Bannon. They was like Joe Friday from that cop show, and made a habit of pestering everybody in the bar. Funny thing, even though Chad normally took absolutely no shit from anybody, he wouldn’t even look those button-up Bills in the eye. Willy and Pete petitioned him to have those suit guys barred several times, but Chad wouldn’t even give them a straight answer. It was clear as day he was scared of’em, and Chad Riley wasn’t scared of nobody except Marv McMurphy, who got the needle after he carried out one of the most brutal crimes in Texas history.

Oh, there’s books about the Chopping Night and true crime podcasts and even an episode of one of them crime report shows that Muriel used to watch. Over the years, I’ve talked to journalists and writers and even a couple of young people who blew into town to make a YouTube video about it. I told them the same balooey I’ve told everybody, the basic rundown that leaves out everything that actually happened. What me and Dusty and Chad Riley saw ain’t something you can tell folks. It ain’t’ something you can even admit to yourself, because it implies a universe that’s far too wide and far too deep to be comfortable in.

It’s been enough years, I guess, and everybody involved except me is dead. I’m eighty now, and I ain’t got much longer left. So, it’s as good a time as any. You won’t believe me, and I wouldn’t expect you to. When Muriel, God rest her, asked me about it I just changed the subject. Maybe it was them suit guys, and maybe it was just the idea of being sent to the funny farm, but I didn’t want to talk about the Chopping Night. But I saw what I saw, and I’ll go to my grave with that night floating in my memories.

The first thing I reckon you got to understand is what kind of man Marv McMurphy was, even before the Chopping Night. To sum it up: he was an ugly guy married to a beautiful woman. Loretta McMurphy was as gorgeous as a dream, and nobody could blame Marv for being jealous. But suspicion worked on Marv like one of them cocaine speedballs, making him powerful gungy whenever another man was within a hundred feet of his baby girl. When he came into Chad’s on Friday and Saturday nights, you had better not give his lady a look if she were with him. I had seen Marv lay one or two of the boys out on the floor for making eyes at Loretta and he beat Pete Bigelow half to death for giving Loretta a whistle. The sheriff had threatened him and Chad had talked of barring him, but Marv was a dangerous guy to cross and everybody in town knew it.

Poor Loretta. For a pretty woman, she never seemed to have no fun. I reckon she was about twenty-five then, but you could tell three childless years with Marv was aging her prematurely. I saw lines forming around her mouth and eyes, her skin folding under the pressure of being shackled to that crazy fool. Why she married him I can’t figure, but he had a miser’s love for her affection.

The other thing you got to understand is Carl Bannon. He was twenty-something, but what he did in the two decades before he wandered into town will forever be a mystery. He was a drifter who just blew in one day and was a quiet kind’a fellow who never talked much. The town was always small, and everybody knew everybody, so an out-and-out stranger like Carl stood out like a sore thumb. My best friend, Dusty Stalburg, said he just showed up in his office at the garage one day, hands in his pockets, looking kinda lost. He was dressed in faded denim with long, tangled blonde hair and a fidgety look to him.

“What you need, boy?” Dusty asked.

“Lookin’ for a job.”

“What makes you think I need anybody, son?”

The kid swallowed. “I’m good with my hands. I can show you.”

When I saw you for the first time, you were an old woman, and I was only six. My shoulder had briefly collided with your hip, and for that short stretch of contact, the world went soft in my vision–not soft like fur, but foamy and sticky, like a bubble bath, like someone clapped a handful of suds over my ears. You kept walking, but I saw you stumble. It was enough to know you were feeling it, too. You had felt the stretch of earth beneath us dip only a fraction lower, enough to catch the toe of your clogs.

I kept watching as you shuffled away. You were like every other old granny I’d ever seen, down to the way you dressed: a frumpy blouse that came all the way up to your collarbone and a pair of cut-off pants that flared out at your shins. With each step, the drooping beads that connected to your glasses swished back and forth until they disappeared into the crowd along with you.

My limbs were suddenly slick and heavy, like I’d been covered in oil. I wanted to laugh and vomit and scream at the same time. But the feeling had vanished with the sight of you, and I was left cross-eyed and panting.

It was my fault we’d bumped into each other. I was sidling behind the stalls of the weekly Farmer’s Market, far from where Dad had told me to stay, which was right next to him. He was selling some new pyramid scheme, and I could feel my insides souring amidst all the talk of weight loss and health benefits. I just had to leave.

There was a splash pad just beyond the homemade soap stall, the only relief from the unrelenting Florida sun. I wasn’t allowed in it, for a reason Dad changed every time. This week he’d said, “I just cleaned the car, Eve. I don’t want water stains on the seats.” Last week it was, “They just mowed the grass out there; you’ll get a rash.” Still, I was determined to get my feet wet, to wiggle my fingers through a geyser, before I rushed away with enough adrenaline to run a lap around the stalls.

When it all was said and done, I reluctantly perched on the lower rung of a wooden fence, facing the Farmer’s Market. Behind me, the splash pad was close enough to hear the fat feet smacking against the wet pavement. I squinted through the sun at the shuffling patrons and hoped a few more tiny drops from the sprinklers would land on my pink shoulders.

A flicker of light caught my eye, reflected off the flat metal that dangled from an earring. And there you were again, speaking gently to a vendor about sourdough. I observed you more carefully this time, somehow safer now that I was out of your sight.

Your skin collected around your eyes and mouth, the same way my dirty clothes piled on the floor of my bedroom, the clothes Dad yelled at me for. You were squinting against the sun, holding your knobby hand to the sky, and seeking respite in the shade of your fingers. Even from my distance, I could see the papery thin wrinkles of your skin, nearly translucent. Your hair, what was left of it, glowed white under the sun. Those shimmery blue earrings stretched your lobes like taffy.

The feeling was back, a gurgle of horror and wonder, but I had longer to feel it this time, longer to understand what it was screaming at me.

The same way birds know to fly, I knew you. Like somewhere beyond the reaches of my mind, you had always been standing there, quiet and dormant.

I wanted to be you, more than I wanted the splash pad, more than I wanted to stop coming to the Farmer’s Market every week. But beyond that desire, was something stronger, like a rope tethering us together. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be you. It was the realization that I already was you. And you—even though your stature curled in on itself, even though you struggled to hear the baker in front of you—were me.

My jaw went slack. The sun let up on its tirade. Even the beads of sweat that dripped down my neck stopped itching. I wanted to scream your name—our name—so you would look over and see me, so the hairs on your neck would stand at attention like mine had. But when I drew in a breath, the single syllable caught in my throat and I was suddenly terrified of confronting you.

I never got to. Dad’s strong hands yanked hard against the collar of my shirt, dragging me across splintering wood. I was not quick enough to catch myself on my feet, and even as the undersides of my legs burned, I was still searching for your face. Even when Dad raged on about wandering off, his words hit me like styrofoam, crumbling to nothing at my feet.

---

The next time I saw you, I was ten and wandering the aisles of the grocery store. Dad was waiting outside because a young couple caught him shoving ramen noodles into his blue jeans a few weeks before that. Earlier, we’d bummed for change in the parking lot, where the pavement was hot enough to warp the air around it. I spent the entire time hoping he’d make at least ten dollars so we could get the real hot dog buns instead of the white bread that caked to the roof of my mouth.

We only made six dollars, so I went in and collected as much ramen and hot dogs as I could afford. I was soaking up the last few moments of crisp, recycled air, and there you were, the figure in front of me, pushing a grocery cart down the baking aisle. Four years different, with haphazardly chopped hair that framed your face in wisps that glowed like a dying light bulb. Like there was almost nothing left.

You were dressed like a teacher: a white, puffy blouse tucked into a gray pin-striped skirt. I tried to imagine the version of myself that would stretch the hips of a skirt, the version of myself with shoes that went clunk, clunk when I walked between rows of school desks, with a wallet that had money in it before the parking lot.

A stranger with my face. I pressed my fingers into my cheek, searching for the sharp bones that framed your eyes, but there was only soft, squishy pudge.

You paused at the end of the aisle. Had you felt the air change? I could see your muscles tensing, like you were about to glance over your shoulder, and the terror returned like instinct. I headed straight for the parking lot, dropping crinkly plastic wrappers like breadcrumbs behind me. When Dad scowled at my empty arms, I told him I’d gotten caught stealing Tic Tacs.

World Hunger

by Mark Manifesto

Sheets of poison smoke hung over the night sky. Trails from the crumbled skyscrapers. Faint alarms. Most had died out. Staring from overtop the metropolis, Hector tried not to think of the lives beneath the burning steel, generations which had erected these towers, towers cleaved in less than an hour. A world taken in less than a day.

The planet shook under the Obstinought’s step. It was his own. All ten thousand feet of the titan. The flesh over his bones, the eyes through which he stared out of Thesakles’ visor, they weren’t really him. The suit was.

Admiral Booker called over the radio, “One last wasp, Thesakles.”

Soaring in from northern clouds hummed a mammoth battleship. His greataxe carved through the streets as he dragged up and over his back.

“Quellcannon,” Hector commanded.

The quiverholster rotated. Power inputs attached from wrist to rifle. Missiles flared out from the ship in rounded arcs, a great plague of fireflies. He doubted they’d darken the hull.

He slid the power control near the trigger. Three percent. A red glow illuminated the rifle’s core. With crosshairs on the ship, he felt a sudden fit of asphyxiation, panic and self-loathing. He reminded himself of the billions of Unus Animus citizens waiting in orbit, exiled from a world turned desert. Pauci pro multis. A few for the many.

Hyllan had its time.

Hundreds of fiery plumes burst over the hull. He squeezed the trigger. Unholy thunder roared and a colossal pearl of red energy cleared the city’s smoke. Like a fist through wet paper, the ship erupted.

Hector looked over the apocalyptic landscape. Gauges read that he’d only used twenty three percent of the suit’s battery over the course of the day. The casualty estimate bore too many commas to conceptualize. Acid licked sharply at the lining of his stomach.

“Hell of a job, Thesakles,” Booker called from the ship. He looked up to the celestial gray sphere in orbit. “Hyllan’s down for count.”

“…”

“Steak on me.”

A firmament quivering roar rolled from the jets on Thesakles’ back. Buildings below seared and boiled as the mecha rose towards the stars.

---

Arms at his back, eyes on the Harvester ships descending upon Hyllan, Hector’s mind ventured towards places he wouldn’t let himself dwell. Booker finished reading the report and tossed the tablet onto his desk.

There was a time when Hector didn’t worry about the results. “Sir?” he asked, fingers running over the input jacks atop his hands.

“Nothing I haven’t seen,” Booker said. Deep wrinkles scored his ebony cheeks. Dark oysters swelled beneath his eyes.

“So I’m stable.”

“As anyone. They’re going to boost your prescriptions. More SNRI for the fits and PPI for the ulcers,” he said, sitting on the end of his desk. For a man who hadn’t undergone the Pilot Surgeries— and pushing 197 years old— he was a unit.

“How’d it feel to get back in the suit?” Booker asked.

Hector’s gaze turned to the sun and Thesakles before it, a spiraling cone of light siphoning the star’s combined energies into its core. Sharp thorns ran from shoulder to knuckles, hips to ankles. Its crimson alloy drank the light.

“I didn’t think about it.”

Booker grinned and shook his head. “Maybe it’s time I had the med team hollow me out too.”

People genuinely thought that Pilots couldn’t feel.

“Anything useful we should know?” Booker asked.

“The air and water have dangerous amounts of heavy metal. A lot of microplastics in the soil. Regardless of its size, I’m guessing the next two planets might provide more in the way of untainted resources.”

A sharp buzz sounded from the door. The security monitor in the corner showed Dr. Lanna Ross, tablet in hand, foot tapping anxiously. She buzzed again.

Booker sighed. “Keep your head together, Kid.”

He remembered the term as pedantic in his younger years, but at seventy-two, he didn’t care.

The steel door slid open, and without a second’s pause, Doctor Ross stormed forward. She held her tablet up like a second coming of the commandments.

“See!” she said, pushing her glasses and pulling her loose trousers up. Her hair poked like straw out of her ponytail. “I told you.”

“Most likely,” Booker said.

“This time near it was at the center of the Paramecium Galaxy. Last week in the Sculptor Dwarf. So either there are multiple of them or it can jump. Organic wormholes. Quicker than ours. Look,” she said, handing him the tablet.

Hector turned to leave.

“Captain Thorne, can you tell me what you see?” Booker asked.

The image showed a blurred image of a large cylindrical formation floating through space, surrounded by small asteroids, and hovering before a blue planet. Next showed it nearer, the last showed no planet. Ross glared in the abominable manner he’d become accustomed to at advisory panels.

“I’m not an astronomer.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Booker said.

“I see a large and irregularly shaped asteroid, surrounded by smaller ones. Then what looks like a planetary devastation.”

“Are you serious?” Ross asked, almost knocking her glasses off as she palmed her face. “An asteroid that size would be round, held together by gravity. And it couldn’t change direction, look at the frames! And these ones from last week. And these ones from two months back! Don’t be ridiculous.”

“As ridiculous as an interstellar, planet-eating leviathan, with symbiotic insects? We’ve been crossing stars for nearly three thousand years, Lanna, and not once have we seen one of these things. You’re making a wild leap.” Booker stood and stared down his nose. “And more importantly, I told you to stop wasting satellite time on personal projects when your job is to tend to the Obstinoughts. We’re still behind on Deianira’s core systems, and I’m waiting for a damage report.”

She tried to match the heat in his gaze. “This isn’t why I joined.”

“Dismissed.”

Down the stainless-steel halls, past communications rooms, and labs, the phantom reverberation of Thesakle’s ax through Hyllan’s Planetary Capitol Building sent a shiver through Hector’s forearm. Flashes of incoming missiles played in the periphery of his sight. Splattered bodies that could hardly be made out.

“Captain Thorne!” Ross called, running down the hall.

“Yes?” he asked.

Hunched over to catch her breath, she said, “Your psych evaluation.”

His heart sped and eyes turned furtively. “I’m tired, Doctor.”

“It’s my job to make sure our Obstinoughts and their pilots are in working condition.”

“Thesakles is fine.”

“He always is.”

“… What do you want?”

“To discuss your future.”

Fifty years of service, thirty at the helm of humanity’s greatest sword, and now a small case of regret was going to ruin him? “Can we have this conversation in private?” he asked.

Ross’ office was adorned like most of the research and maintenance team. Monitors, files, VR systems, fidget toys, and a hologram table.

“You don’t have to stand at attention,” she said, taking a seat and gesturing to him to do the same. “Suit yourself.”

“Are you going to recommend my dismissal?”

“No. I want to discuss the dismissal of the Conquest program.”

His brow furrowed. It was like discussing the end of public education.

She continued, “Have you ever thought about how ridiculous this system is?”

“To live is to consume.”

“To live is to learn.”

His jaw tightened in defense of many things. “There are over five hundred trillion Unus Animus citizens spread across a hundred worlds. How else should we provide for them?”

“For starters, taking care of those worlds.”

“Easier in theory.”

“Easier than relocating a population every few years.”

“You should talk to someone who can help.”

“I am.” She sighed and rubbed circles in her temples. “For deeply troubling reasons, people look up to Obstinough pilots, yet you, your colleagues, and predecessors only use your celebrity to sell bullshit.”

“The pension isn’t great.”

“The pension isn’t the problem— and there’s a reason most don’t live to see it.”

The crystalline memory flashed of his father slumped in his office chair. Blood on the wall, a half-finished note. He cited the Unus Animus motto, “Pauci pro multis.”

“What I’m saying is that if you endorsed alternative means of resource allocation, alliances, or maybe even just sustainable living instead of Dunbar’s Discount Imitation Shrimp, maybe we wouldn’t need to decimate half a dozen planets a decade.”

One of the main reasons he’d joined the military is because it was— on the surface— supposed to be simple.

“You overestimate how much people care about us.”

“And you haven’t estimated it at all. You might try to look like teflon, but you’re breaking. You have been since the last Conquest. Your liver’s proof.”

He squeezed irritation through his wrists.

“It’s my job, Ma’am.”

Too flustered to speak, she snarled, “It won’t last forever.”

He nodded and looked to the textureless steel floor. “Am I excused?”

“I’m not a commander.” She rolled her eyes upon seeing him still there. “Yes.”

“Thank you. And good luck.”

He meant it.

The only thing more stressful than an excursion to a museum planet with Year Threes? Starting the day with thirty galactic cherubs and hitting recess with only twenty-nine. But a guy couldn’t monitor every student at every second, even in 2390.

Ugh. Bring on holidays.

The system’s synthetically-restored sun warmed the grass under our feet at Old Earth’s entrance lawn. I stroked my dark brown beard and adjusted my glasses to thermal imaging. Two tall, red figures stood across the other side of the class—our Specimen Support Officers, or SSOs, counting and recounting student numbers. We still had twenty-nine. I wondered if my misplaced student had fiddled with tech they shouldn’t have, like Mrs. Farzon’s Year Eights last week. Ballooned the size of planetoids, they had. I’d almost booked an excursion to see them.

My heart skipped a beat as the likelihood grew that a student was actually missing. Then I saw it: the red haze of a figure fifteen feet upside-down in a palm tree. I didn’t need to switch off my glasses to guess the culprit.

“Ferrix! Get down!”

Just Ferrix again, thank goodness. I thought we might have lost little Havannoa Saint. Of the two most powerful corporations in the galaxy, the Corporate Housing Trust and the Saint Bank Syndicate, ‘daddy’ was president of the latter.

I switched off thermals. Sure enough, Ferrix disengaged the fixed-point device he’d used to lock himself to the tree. The SSOs sighed in relief. Back to a full house. So long as you counted eighteen humanoids, three squid, a half humanoid-half squid, four reptiles, three bears and a sentient ice cube as a full house.

“Alright class,” I said. “Listen up while you finish injecting your recess. I know you’re excited to see your first whole planet museum and it’s—Kenzee, put that down¬!—been a long teleport here, but remember to take notes for your upcoming assignment. And listen to your guide. There’s lots to see today.”

“Yeah, and it’s all boring,” said a little voice.

“Try to stay positive, Ferrix. You can digitize your packs now, everyone.”

Havannoa bashed her pack repeatedly against her tech belt. “Mr. Stewhorn, mine won’t clip on.” Her frown evolved to outrage. She persisted with the bashing.

“Is that fixing the problem?” I asked.

“No. Why won’t it work!”

I let her frustration hang. The lesson was more important than the solution. “Try doing it the way I specifically told you a second ago. Digitize it.”

She tapped a button on her wrist monitor. The pack shrunk. It now fit. Amazing.

Our planetary guide warped in beside me, her mustard shirt evoking a daffodil aroma. She carried more excitement in her gray eyes than half my class combined. At least she wasn’t a bot, like the one from our last excursion.

“Welcome, class. I am Guide Yakka,” she said, smiling. She indicated the environment around them with her hand. “And this is Old Earth, jewel of the sector!”

Every planet was apparently jewel of some sector.

She went on. “Your MyWarps have already been pre-loaded with the appropriate site coordinates. First stop, the Under Land exhibit!”

My SSOs warped ahead of the class. I watched as students stood, twitched. One-by-one, their images flashed against my retina and they also warped away. Five, ten, fifteen …

The sentient ice cube, Gob, stared up at the tree where Ferrix had been. His thoughts matched his see-through viscosity. One unruly menace climbed something he wasn’t supposed to, and boom—five others wanted to try.

I hustled over, my broad shoulders towering above him. “Hey, Gob. Did you forget to turn your MyWarp on?”

“Were we supposed to?”

I breathed deeply through my nostrils and reminded myself he was only eight and over ninety percent Hydrogen Dioxide. “Yes, Gob. Please turn it on.”

“Okay.”

He warped away. Satisfied, I flicked on the device at my hip and waited for the slight freezing sensation, followed by a swift pull.

My molecules re-entered main state. A brown, barren landscape, charred by the sun’s ruining glare, replaced the green grass from before. It must have been fifty degrees Celsius. Students already fanned themselves. I counted them again, got twenty-nine.

Probably Ferrix mucking around.

“Here in Under Land,” Yakka began, “a large landmass situated in the planet’s southern region, the ancient inhabitants experienced many exciting trials. Serpentine creatures could bite you—and the ancients didn’t have Cureall or warp drives like we do!”

Several strange creatures with two powerful legs and thick tails leaped across the dry, dry ground before us. The musky scent from their hides drenched the air. “Ah, ha!” Yakka said. “Kangaroos! Amazing creatures. Ancient kids even rode them to school! Can you believe that?”

I didn’t believe that.

Three students yawned. Even I started daydreaming, as I pictured myself a pioneer on Old Earth. Muscles like mountains I’d have had, with a noble’s bravado. I’d have mapped out the first landmasses, risked a new world’s dangers single-handedly, just like the ancients. From my X3000 Starfighter’s cockpit, of course. Stewhorn the navigator. Stewhorn the planet’s beloved.

“Mifter Ftewhorn, my toof comed out!”

Some days I’d have settled for Stewhorn the elsewhere.

Our guide addressed us. “Let’s keep moving.”

Another headcount. Fourteen tentacles, three furry locks, seventeen humanoid frames, and … still twenty-nine.

“Ferrix, you’d better be here somewhere or so help me you’ve got a virtual compression tomorrow.”

“Here,” he said, leaning out from behind a bear. “Nowhere else to go.”

So, not Ferrix missing. Not Ferrix? I walked over and placed a hand on his shoulder to check he wasn’t a hologram. Not my first day in a classroom. But he was as solid as our ice cube, Gob. Who was missing?

I withdrew a metal box from my hip. It flipped open to triple in size, allowing me to ping the recorded roll. Almost all students were within proximity. One name flashed on my screen as ‘absent’: Havannoa Saint.

Sweat formed atop my brow as I read the name. I tucked the box back to my hip, tapped it furiously. I scanned the brown landscape. She was nowhere to be seen.

Think. Think.

Buddies. “Class, who is buddies with Havannoa today?”

A tiny paw raised into the air. “Thank you, Krill. Did you see her arrive at Under Land?”

The student shook her head.

“And you didn’t say anything? Why not?” I tensed my shoulders, exhaled.

Ferrix smirked. “Maybe a kangaroo took her.”

“Not helpful, Ferrix.”

Memories flooded my mind of the day Havannoa’s father, President Saint, had a parent accidentally exit from warp onto his polished diamond shoes at the school drop off zone. Simple device malfunction. Next day, the parent ended up with a rare job opportunity to study a black hole—from the inside. My veins turned to icy rivers just thinking about it. What would Saint do to me if I lost his daughter?

“Guide Yakka, a word.”

She pointed me toward the museum planet’s head offices. They would know more.

Nat was Openminded. She told me so the first time we hung out, sitting on opposite sides of my brother’s truck bed drinking slushies in the heat and mosquitos of an August convenience store parking lot evening.

“It’s like having the TV of your mind turned on, all the time, to this channel you can’t change whether or not you like it,” she said. “Drives my parents nuts. Can you imagine what it’s like being told to watch what you think? I wish.”

Openmindedness only went one way and she was a transmitter, not a receiver. The syrupy taste of watermelon slush and the way our shoes pointed at each other, wanting to touch across the plastic ridges of the truck bed, I didn’t care. It wasn’t enough to make me not like her, or not want to taste her cherry limeade lips.

Which I did. Not that night, but a different night, and without the cherry limeade. We’d been hanging out so regularly that everyone at the store sensed us making eyes across the linoleum walkway separating Women’s Plus, my section, from Sportswear, hers. If you like me the way I like you, Nat, why should I be afraid of what you think? I thought it for weeks before I built up the courage to lean across the gear shift, clammy hands sticking to the steering wheel, and I was still thinking it when I pressed my lips to hers, hoping she’d be able to receive what I was thinking.

Instead, a flood. Deluge. Oh my god oh my god finally, no, what are you doing I’m so sweaty why are her lips so cold what does my hair look like I wasn’t even ready for that; of course I was I’ve been waiting forever; no, I wouldn’t wish me on anybody, I shouldn’t have said yes to going out the first time, I wish I could make this stop but I didn’t start it did I and besides, I warned her.

Our lips came apart but the flood of words didn’t stop, only quieted a bit with the distance. I sat blitzed, lost in the flow, those last words echoing in my head: I warned her. I warned her.

The first thing that surprised me about hearing someone’s inner thoughts wasn’t their jumbled nature or brutal honesty, I was ready for those, but the way they bounced between referring to me in second or third person. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether she was talking to herself or thinking at me when she used the word ‘you.’ Was it any less strange to hear her think of me as ‘her’ or ‘Krista’ or ‘my girl?’ No, I liked the last one. I couldn’t help but smile, and she smiled in return, knowing why I did, and we laughed without having to explain ourselves, and laced our fingers together in a clutch of polished nails, her highlighter yellow and my deep maroon alternating, pulling in complementary fashion at the soft skin between knuckles.

And I wish I could say it was perfect, like those romantic comedies about being Openminded and the quirky misunderstandings that unspool from the condition. Except people aren’t perfect and movies aren’t life. She was right to say it was like having an unmutable TV channel in your mind. Closeness strengthened the connection, but some nights I could hear her across town, thoughts scrambling, cycling, finally wavering off into sleep. Sometimes at work they were so distracting, deafening, that I forgot what I was doing halfway through, or couldn’t pay attention to a customer, or had to fight the urge to walk over to her section and insert my opinions into her internal conversation. It was agonizing, almost, knowing what both of us were thinking about each other when we had to stock racks and fold tank tops.

Doubts still riddled her thoughts: What am I thinking starting this, is this serious or not, how serious am I, how serious can it be after THREE WEEKS do I like her do I love her or what, what, what; am I supposed to be thinking about the rest of my life with her, when do you do that, how long do we wait to have sex, what’s the right way, shut up, she knows everything you’re thinking, stop thinking at all; no, that never works and you know it, think about food. What’s for lunch? Chimichangas? Taquitos? Did I even bring my lunch?

I had the same questions, hesitations, minus the awkwardness of knowing they’d be projected outside my mind. But it seemed like the more these questions came up for her, the more I had to think them, too. Why should it matter, these were the questions of how a relationship began. Answering them was how a relationship progressed.

It wasn’t her worries that cut to the quick, though, but rather her knee-jerk reaction to a customer in my section. I fought to remain focused on explaining different jean styles even while words like bitch and cow crashed through the back of my skull. My inner voice wanted nothing more than to scream back at her across the linoleum walkway, Who do you think you’re fooling? Look at who you’re dating and keep thinking that.

Later, while I was driving her home, she looked over at me, apologetic. “I thought she was flirting with you.”

I grunted. She didn’t have to say it because I’d already heard as much. And besides, even as she said it her mind rephrased the statement slightly but significantly: Or you were flirting with her.

“Don’t tell me what you think,” I said.

“What else am I supposed to—”

“You can’t unthink it, don’t try to make it sound better with words.”

She frowned down at her knees. “I wish I could make myself think differently, all right, but I can’t,” she said. And thought: I warned you and now I’m the bad guy; I never would’ve tried to kiss you first and this is why, you know what, Krista, you did this to us. Both of us. You wanted to have your own way so much well now you do and this is what you get, that’s a relationship, you get the good and the bad except with me you can never shut it off. Any of it.

“You have no idea what I was thinking,” I said, before I could stop myself. “You never have and you never will.”

Tears leapt to her eyes, frustrated and furious, and it took an effort to reach over and lace my fingers in hers. To drive her the rest of the way home with her thoughts amplified and raking at the contact. A migraine pounded, relentless, by the time I parked in her building’s lot.

“It’s late,” she said. And thought: Leave me alone.

I watched her gather her bag and open the door, and couldn’t help bitterly realizing that, already, I put more stock in her thoughts than her words. As though the raw impulses of the mind meant more than the way she navigated them into reality. My own response nagged me: You have no idea what I’m thinking. Thank god for that, or how much would she hate me for the fact that the memory of our shoes, so close but not touching, squeezed my heart with longing now?

She didn’t show up for work the next day, and I didn’t work for a few days after that. It helped the migraine fade, and the connection. The signal of that TV channel grew weak, distant. In the few transmissions I received, it sounded like it was a relief for her as well. To not have to know someone was always eavesdropping on her, judging her, overthinking her every unguarded moment and impulsive, imperfect thought.

When I next went to work they said she was transferring to another location. One closer to her home. I knew where she lived so I knew there was no closer location.

I waited. Waited for her to text and ask to see me again. Or to show up at work. Or for her internal monologue to spontaneously pop into my head so I didn’t have to be alone with mine. I wanted things to go back to how they had been, no longer wistful about our pairs of sneakers pointed together, but aching for the crazy rhythm of maroon and fluorescent yellow nails clasped in a steady cacophony, a hopeful chaos of connection.

And still, I wait. I want her to be the one to choose this time.

Late at night, over morning coffee, in the lulls when folding tank tops at work, I direct my thoughts toward her and hope she’ll catch my message. What I should’ve known to say back when I had the chance:

I’m listening, Nat.

As a fine art professional, Mar has wielded katanas and handled Lady Gaga’s shoes. As a veterinary assistant, she has cared for hairless cats, hedgehogs, and, one time, a coyote. As a writer, her short fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Analog, Escape Pod, Apex’s Robotic Ambitions anthology, and many other publications. She is a reader for Interstellar Flight Press, and a graduate of the Wayward Wormhole. She resides in the Pacific Northwest or can be found on various social media @MaroftheBooks.

The emperor’s poison-tester was tall, gaunt, and feared. She swept like a vulture through the emperor’s court, shoulders hunched, smelling faintly of burned oil. Twice each day she tasted the emperor’s food, and the court watched to see that she did not fall dead before them.

Officially she was his Glory’s poison tester. But those who spoke ill of the emperor were wont to fall ill themselves, to sickness that made their bodies twist and writhe. The emperor called it the wrath of the gods, cast upon the disloyal. The entire court agreed.

Still, few spoke to her.

Except for Amra, a diplomat from Sunamey, who was jovial to everyone, cordial to her. He sat in the poisoner’s laboratory one evening, watching the sun set above the domed spires of the city and the sand dunes beyond.

He nodded to a copper pot which the emperor’s poisoner set to boil. “Who’s the lucky fellow?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

Amra was a stout man of middling years. Sunamey was in the east, but he dressed in the Imperial fashions: a trim beard in a crescent moon around his face, and robes as bright as poppies.

“Perhaps you will give me three guesses,” he said.

“Amra. The walls have ears.”

The poisoner had lank dark hair and a sallow face, as though all the sunlight she saw was through the laboratory window. The laboratory was high in the northmost tower, close to the emperor’s quarters, so that the poisoner could be called upon all times of day or night, whenever the emperor was hungry.

Amra said, “Come, Serash, the walls do not care for idle gossip.”

“Nor do I.”

Serash set a lid upon the pot, to let the Madonna berry boil and distill. She didn’t know who it was for. Maybe the emperor would tell her tonight.

“You, though, do not mind the walls.” She plucked at Amra’s sleeve, Imperial fashion. “Better than Sunamey, eh?” He had been at court for years. This harvest season he’d gone back early, to pay his respects to the winner of a bloody revolt, but he was at court again before the grain was stored.

Amra laughed and looked aside. “They say you do not mind. That you can slip through stone when the sun is down and visit unsuspecting men in their sleep.”

“To breathe death into their faces.”

“Most likely.”

“Better that than crawl into their beds.”

Serash stepped away and stirred the Madonna berry. Her tongue flitted out, tasted the spoon. Amra raised his eyebrows.

“Tell me that is pretense, Serash, and you will swallow charcoal and throw it up when I’m gone.”

Serash shook her head. “It’s not. But don’t you try it.”

“Why would you do that?”

“They say that if you take a little poison, your body learns how to fight it. Then you take a little more, and then a bit more yet. Eventually, you can swallow a vial full of death without flinching.”

He stroked his beard, watching her. “And can you?”

“Me?” She put the spoon down slowly. “I have so much time to waste, alone. What do you think?”

“So there are some poisons,” said Amra, “Which would spell the death of any man, even the emperor, but would not harm you at all?”

Her lips thinned to a line. She did not say no.

“Which you would not even feel?”

“That’s a very strange question, my friend,” the poisoner said.

“My apologies.”

“Perhaps you can tell me the gossip instead.”

And so he did, while she ground fine powders and crushed dried leaves, and always washed her hands between. In spite of this, filth crept beneath her nails. There was a purple stain across her palm that no amount of scrubbing could erase.

---

Eventually Amra took his leave, and Serash went to her bedchamber. She lit a silver oil lamp and undressed before a tall gilt mirror, commissioned for her by a late lord whose name she didn’t remember. Beneath her black robe, her skin was spiderwebbed with ink. Geometric patterns spiraled up her spinal cord. They curled around her ankles. The ink was said to burn like branding irons if ever she left the palace without the emperor’s permission.

It didn’t. But then, the times she left, the emperor had not noticed.

Upon her pillow was a small white scroll. The poisoner spread it over one bony knee and groped for her lamp.

There was a single name written in cipher. The strokes were harried and dark; the young scribe’s hand, since the elder scribe drank tea spiked with arsenic last moon. The emperor had suspected the man of treason.

Serash worked through the cipher, speaking each sound aloud.

“Amra Turin Werrei.”