Fiction TCL #35 - Spring 2020

The Tollkeepers

By Mina Ikemoto Ghosh on Wednesday, March 30, 2022

There’s a point down the A217 that narrows to a foot’s width. That’s why there was no avoiding the deer.

I didn’t tell anyone about it until years later. I don’t know why it came to me, the urge to talk about it then – only that it seemed, somehow, like the start. A key, maybe, which if only I’d picked it up then would never have been turned.

The deer’s heart was on the pavement. It had been shoved out of the cupboard of its ribs and was red in the gaudy way of cartoon boxing gloves. A little further on was a chunk of liver. The rest of its body had been pressed up against the side of the pavement. It must have been hit in the night, and snagged repeatedly by every passing lorry since, it had been rolled and pressed, rolled and pressed, against the pavement until its slim legs, broken neck and head had been packed up into a neat, even-sided square. A cuboid of deer.

I didn’t touch it. I was seventeen, fresh from the hygienists with the clean taste of polish in my mouth. I’d always called myself an animal lover but my words hadn’t matched my actions since the last I spoke to Daria Kowalski.

For all my “love”, I left the body on the road. A deer was a deer. There would be no sacred rites, no pressing together of hands for a spirit, no muttered “Namuamidas”. This deer was just the price we paid for travelling this stretch of road.

How much is a season ticket to Banstead, bus master? That’d be two squirrels and a badger.

That night, I didn’t think at all about how a human would look, folded up like a meat pillow. Didn’t even dream of it. Those dreams would come later.

CCTV footage checked later showed nothing. At midnight, the roads were empty under but for the amber wisps of mist under the street lights. At a minute past, they were crowded with shadows.

Foxes, rabbits, squirrels, pigeons, deer, with their tails pricked, noses raised: Animals made of asphalt stared up our driveways, faced our pavements, gazed up at our footbridges with cracked and fissured tarmac eyes.

When I went out, phone in hand, scrolling through pictures friends already awake for jogging and morning shifts had posted on their feeds, there was a grating rattling, like the echoes of a fast-approaching underground train, that I didn’t hear so much as feel through the soles of my sandals. My brother, Akito, was squatting on the pavement. He was taking pictures of a concrete squirrel, posting them to his Discord.

He leaned closer. His hand and phone came barely millimetres away from the squirrel’s pale grey nose.

I grabbed his elbow. “Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to.” Akito shook me off, but retreated from the pavement’s edge. “They’re so real-looking, Mamoru. They’ve even got those little dimples where the whiskers go.”

The news was flowing from the neighbour’s open window. A reporter was urging people to stay indoors, to wait for further announcements, to not aggravate the roads.

“Charlotte? Robert?”

Our neighbour Roslynne Cadwater had gotten it in her head that my name “Mamoru” sounded too much like “mammary” to be “decent.” Our first Christmas here, she took it upon herself to gift our family “English names” in her card. For some reason, this made me “Charlotte” and Akito “Robert.”

I didn’t mind it. My name meant “to protect.” I’d never been able to live up to it, not when Dad had lived with us and not when Daria had needed me. So much for protecting. All I’d ever done was freeze and watch. When Mrs Cadwater called me “Charlotte,” it was a relief. A guilty one, because it was wrong to let her trample over the name Mum picked for me, but it was what it was.

“Is this some prank of yours, dears?” Mrs Cadwater squinted at the statues. Without her glasses, she couldn’t see the statues filling the length of the entire road. “Because if it is, you’d better clear these all away soon. I’ve got a grocery delivery coming at nine.”

Collar jangling, Mrs Cadwater’s old Alaskan malamute Ada pushed past her to jump out amongst the asphalt statues.

“Oh, Ada, no, come back—“

Mrs Cadwater stepped off the pavement, and every asphalt head on the road turned.

Before I could warn her, shout, do something, the pack of asphalt animals flowed towards her.

Fiction TCL #35 - Spring 2020

The Hero

By Carlen Vigo on Sunday, February 27, 2022

There’s nothing more heartbreaking than a man wearing just an undershirt, all vulnerable and exposed like a child. I found him in the bathroom that way one night. He had been too sick to care for himself but had made it that far. He fought me at first, but I cleaned him up and took care of him. The sun rose to find me wrapped protectively around him, having shushed him to sleep.

That had been early in our marriage when we were still polite to each other like strangers. After that night, I’d seen him at his weakest, and he had no more secrets from me.

Fiction TCL #34 - Winter 2020

Project Lifeline

By Michael J. Wyant Jr. on Sunday, February 20, 2022

“We’re losing her,” my ragged whisper is almost inaudible amongst the roar of CPU fans screaming from the server racks.

Sweat pools on my forehead and drips, stinging, into my eyes despite the frigid air blowing through the HVAC system. I wipe it away and try not to stare at the gurney where Carrie lies. It’s hard to pretend I can’t hear the alarms from the half-dozen monitors situated around her either. Pretend there isn’t anything to worry about.

I try and fail because I can’t stop thinking about the fact I killed my wife.

“Dee,” I say, voice cracking. “Start chest compressions.”

Dee springs into action. A short, elfin girl as pale as I am dark, with a hefty blonde ponytail, Dee’s been my right-hand for two years now. She’s hands down the best AI programmer I’ve ever met. With her on the team, the three of us–Carrie, Dee, and I–have created something grand. Something spectacular.

Something I’ll burn to the ground if it means saving Carrie.

I take a harsh, steadying breath, the taste of ozone and sweat sweet on the air and look at the monitor in front of me. The console window in the top right is a stream of insanity–just raw text and gibberish I barely understand. The rest of the window has the design sense of an Emo band’s antiquated MySpace page thanks to Carrie; all pinks and blacks. It makes my eyes bleed, but those control panels are what hold Carrie’s consciousness, so I squint and search.

The server farm, via the bio-digital interface hooked up to the gurney with zip ties and duct-tape, allows the transference of human consciousness out of a body temporarily. With enough practice–and funding–it can move a mind from a body to a machine, or even, if technology advances enough, to a clone.

And it works. At least, it worked until Carrie. We’ve done this dozens of times with Dee and me, but Carrie… Carrie leads the Department of Defense presentation next week and wanted to know what it felt like. She wanted to see the demo simulation in person.

An ache builds in my stomach. It’s getting hard to breathe. My vision blurs… and I scream a curse and hammer the panic away on the stainless-steel desk until my right hand erupts in bright, flushing pain. I might’ve broken something, but it’s worked. That nervous energy has coiled into a tight collection of ball-bearings in my gut, painful but contained.

Find the logic loop, close it, then re-upload her mind, I say to myself, an emotionless cold descending on me. Bring Carrie back.

I search for what feels like days, the harsh screech of alarms, nails on a chalkboard. The CPU core-temp rises as the servers try to load-balance Carrie’s consciousness across them. Digging through panels and parsing live logs searching for something, anything, that shows me how we killed her brain activity when extracting a copy of her mind.

I find nothing. And it’s my fault.

All of this is my fault.

My fingers drop from the keyboard. She’s gone.

I killed her.

From the corner of my eye, I see Dee step away from Carrie’s body, stare at the electrocardiograph.

Carrie has a heartbeat.

Then Dee is on me, shoving me from the chair. “Rahul, move!”

I stumble away, almost face-planting into a server rack, but don’t argue. “What are you doing?”

Dee doesn’t say anything. Instead, she pops open an admin terminal and types, new code flashing on the screen with blinding speed. Dozens–hundreds–of lines of code stream from her fingers and onto the screen, full-formed and perfectly written. It almost looks like she’s copied it from her mind and pasted it onto the terminal.

She wraps the last curly brace and slaps the Enter key.

The server racks exhale. Freezing air from the HVAC system wafts over me. My face feels like it’s covered in icicles.

But the beeps of Carrie’s monitors even out, a steady rhythm instead of frenzied screeches.

Now there’s only one low tone issuing from the row of machines.

Carrie’s chest rises and falls normally, but brain activity is still flat.

I hold out a hand toward Carrie, but Dee waves me away.

My hands are shaking.

Through a tight throat, I whisper, “It’s not working.”

“Shh,” Dee snaps, holding up a trembling finger.

Leaning over her shoulder, I squint at the last line of code. It’s an export directive pointing to a set of IPv6 addresses. None of them look familiar in the least and, as I stare at them, they look like they have too many characters in them.

What the hell is Dee doing?

“That can’t be right,” I mutter, reaching out to the monitor, finger hovering, unsteady next to the line. “Why–what–are you exporting?”

Dee doesn’t answer, but does raise her finger again, slowly pushing my arm out of the way. After a moment, she cocks her head like she’s listening to something, then her fingers drop to the keyboard and flash again.

This time when she finishes, a textual download prompt kicks in. Around us the servers roar as CPU and case fans are pegged, sending a warm breeze coasting through the room despite the HVAC’s best efforts. My phone, sitting on the table next to Dee, tones repeatedly with overheating and storage capacity notifications.

Whatever Dee is doing, it’s pushing our server cluster to the brink. The prompt hits 100%, then flashes again with another progress bar, this one labeled upload.

The electric panel behind the server racks sparks and one of the long rows spins down, groaning like an old man leaning into an easy chair.

“Dee–”

“We already uploaded that chunk, don’t worry.” She looks at the prompts, closes her eyes, then says more to herself than me: “Don’t worry.”

Another series of circuits pop with machine-gun efficiency, crack-crack-crack, and two more racks power down.

And then it’s done. All at once, the fans in the remaining server racks slow and transform back into their gentle hum. The freezing air of the HVAC wipes away the lingering heat.

My eyes snap to the brain wave monitor as it quivers to life. Somehow my hand is on Dee’s shoulder. She’s trembling, cheeks flushed, tongue darting over chapped lips.

“What’d you do, Dee?” I ask, unable to keep the awe from my voice.

Carrie was gone. I was so sure of it.

But she’s not and the flush running through my body is a heady mix of relief, joy, and confusion.

Dee looks up at me, the corners of her mouth twitching into a smile. “I saved her.”

Then her smile fades, and her eyes go dark. There’s something there I can’t quite identify. Something shaky and scared. Dread?

She looks at the monitor. “I saved her.”

The way she says it sounds like she’s not sure.

Fiction TCL #33 - Autumn 2019

Kraken

By Polina Simakova on Thursday, November 18, 2021

They’d spent last night in a clean and neat little cabin of light wood. James wished he knew what it was. They did this stuff at school nowadays, design and technology, D&T. Making tables and all that. Ed had told him. But it seemed unauthentic somehow. He wondered if they did any woodcutting (probably not). They’d go against the grain. Most amateurs did. As he walked further away from the cabin, the circles molded together into a homogenous mass until he could no longer see them.

Lena had said she’d get the boys to pack, so he went to the café alone to get coffee and sandwiches and to leave the keys with the barman. He passed the white plastic sign nailed to the wall of the café (the same pale wood as the cabins):

‘FILMORE CASSEY LEASURE: LOG CABINS SALES & HOLIDAY. HOT–TUB SALES NEW& USED’

Most places had so many signs now you ceased to see them. OPEN, JUST EAT, No smoking, Mind the step, FOOD HYGIENE RATING–and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. This one looked lonely on its own on the brown wall.

To the left of the café was a small playground stretching over half the lawn in front of the open car park. Two swings were tied to a thick horizontal wooden bar resembling a crossbeam. No wonder Sammy loved these things. They were proper authentic swings like the ones James used to have as a kid. No plastic nonsense around here.

I might get Ed a beer.

Immediately, he remembered he couldn’t. Ed had wanted to drive and he’d said “yes”without thinking. Now there was this, on top of the condoms. Lena still didn’t know and Lena would have a fit, though Ed was seventeen and had a full license. It was funny she was pissed off about Ed–of all things. It was James’ guilty conscience, of course.

He kept wondering whether maybe–maybe–she did know.

“Good luck with your drive.”The barman said as he poured filter coffee. “Where are you guys off to?’

“Sunderland.”

“Geordie women with big hair and yellow fake tan, eh? Why Sunderland?’

“Nephew’s going to study there. We’re from Manchester ourselves.’

“A bit far from home, no?’

“Yeah.” James said. “We think it’s because of a girl. My sister’s having a fit, of course. But I mean, why not? Tony Scott went to the University of Sunderland, did you know that?”

“No.” The barman said. “No, I didn’t.”

Fiction TCL #33 - Autumn 2019

Always a Sunrise

By D. L. Lynch on Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Forgive me. This story’s a jumbled mess. I guess the drugs got the better of me. No idea where to start this, so I’ll start with the uniformed lady with a face like white dogshit.

“Miss Lynch. Why do you want to go to Mars?”

Why indeed? Nobody sane wants to go to Mars. All good. I’d practiced this line before, even drunk, even stoned, like I was right then. “I always dreamed of exploring the stars.”

“Your family, your loved ones, your friends, your colleagues? You’ll never hug them or shake their hands again. Only video chats with a three minute lag. You’ll miss birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Are you willing to make that sacrifice?”

I hoped the sunglasses covered my bloodshot eyes. I hoped my breath and armpits, reeking of Bombay Sapphire, didn’t carry. “Yes.”

“No more blue beaches, you’ll never feel the cool ocean swallow your toes in the warm sand, no more green forests full of fog and silence and rain so faint it tickles as it touches, no more snowy peaks that tower over the clouds and awe you to silence. You’ll never see anything but rusty red craters and white dry-icecaps. You really want that future?”

I never gave half a shit about the stars or the planets or anything like that, I wasn’t one of those kids with my neck craned skyward, those kids who ate up movies and stories about space, the final fucking frontier. Wonder was never a word in my world. “I’m an explorer at heart.”

“You’ll never run through an open field without a suit, and only hours at a time, lest the radiation bake you. You’ll never see a breathtaking pink or orange or red sunrise or sunset again, just a tiny gray smear on the Martian horizon. You’ll miss out on what it means to be human. Why do you want to go to Mars?”

Because dad had found me. “I love space, loved it since childhood.”

A window opened behind her. A rocket forty stories tall loomed on the launchpad and rolled my heart along a gravel path. She smiled. “You step aboard, goodbye Earth. Life flutters away forever. You’re really going to throw it all away?”

She wouldn’t stop me. If anyone’d stop me, it’d be me. A thousand people before me’d gotten weak-kneed at the sight of that rocket and turned back. I was about to too. What the hell was I doing?

Dad’d pinged my private email days ago. I’d read his brief words about wanting to reconnect and my chest clenched and my childhood came back and I cried. I recalled a warm summer day when I, bruises ringing my neck, crept to the garage and took one of dad’s rifles, the old breechloader he called the forty-five seventy, and placed the barrel in my mouth. It tasted cold on my tongue, it tasted of motor oil, it tasted bitter and burned a little, and it smelled of synthetic orange-citrus, that cleaning solvent I loved to sniff. The barrel was too long for my hand, so I braced the gun on the ground and stuck my big toe on the cold trigger. I laughed and wailed at the same time. It’d be so easy to stop the pain, but I couldn’t do it, as if an invisible, immovable hand clenched my big toe and stopped it from twitching a titch to throw my brains across the garage ceiling. I was eleven.

“I want to go to Mars.”

The lady with the white dogshit face nodded. “Very well. Sign here, and it’s all over.”

My hand hovered, pen ready. I was afraid that invisible hand would stop me again, stop me from signing the form, stop me from this long-overdue suicide. I thought about the beauty and ugliness Earth offered. I thought about my coffin-sized flat that gave me panic attacks, and thought about how much worse it’d be on Mars. I thought about all those bowls of kush and bottles of Bombay Sapphire and acid blotters that’d colored my life, drugs I’d never find on Mars. I thought about the times I’d escaped the social credit ratings, only to return to buy bread or be deemed “not a deviant” on the dating nets or to snag a bottom feeder job to earn a few dollars to dream with. I thought about how dad’d found me no matter how many times I tried to disappear from Earth.

I took a deep breath. I signed the waiver.

Fiction TCL #32 - Summer 2019

Zombies Can’t Take the Train

By Greg Greenberg on Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Autobiographical Case Histories from the Abridged 2055 Multimedia History Project on the Plague Year: Documenting the Rapid Sclerosis Pandemic. Society for Research and Education of the Global Open Forum Recovery Group.

Case Contents: Selections from the subject’s journal and an interview with a surviving member of the fire and rescue squad that quarantined the subject.

Subject: Steven Smith. North American (Northeast Coastal Ecoregion) male Caucasian. Age 41 at time of infection in the city of New Haven on May 14, 2027.

Document Status: Except for bloodstains, the journal was unaltered when recovered. Society members have added footnotes. This document is a primary source for post-peak studies. A full copy of the journal and the interview auditory file are available at qqq.ccss.GOF.aubiohist for a small contribution to your community labor pool.

May 16, 2027

Two days ago, I woke up so numb that it was as if I floated over my bed. The morning sun highlighted Cindy’s slender figure and auburn hair as she looked down at me and her lips curled into an I’ve-been-naughty smile. Noticing her blood-speckled cheeks and the chewed-off stump where my left hand used to be, I rolled out of the bed. She laughed as I struggled to stand, unable to feel where my ass ended and the hard floor began. Freakazoiding, I fumbled into my super-sized safari suit and stumbled around the room searching for my boots, unsure when she’d get the Hunger again. I should’ve put her down, but I’d never killed anyone, just written about it. As I edged forward to grab my boots, located just under the bed, her emerald eyes twinkled and she picked up my index finger to suck the gristle off it in a provocative manner. The parasites that had begun to burrow along my neural pathways must have done more than cauterize my injury and numb my body. Although I was terrified, I was not angry. Instead of righteous rage, I felt that considering everything, it was nice of Cindy to remember that I was right-handed.

Pausing by the bedroom door, I stuffed the boots into the survival pack I’d placed there and turned back towards Cindy. As my eyes roamed over her perfections the last time, I blamed myself. Someone so beautiful and sweet wouldn’t throw themselves at an obese oddball who writes appliance manuals for a living. She tensed for a leap. I wriggled into my pack’s straps, breathed deep, and decided that I didn’t care why she’d given me the two best weeks of my life. It was okay if it wasn’t all the secrets and hopes we’d shared, that it was because parasites had transformed her from a reserved sociology graduate student into an insatiable seeker of sexual delights. Until the hunger for human flesh overcomes you, the disease monorails your desires, creating one maniacal need. For Cindy, I now knew that need was sex; for me, well, I missed my mom.

Cindy made her move. I slammed the door and yanked a couch in front of it. My asthma kicked in as I leapt down the stairs. While the couch scraped my hardwood floor, I unlocked my security gate and fumbled open the front door. I scurried outside as she pounded down the stairs. The gate clanged shut and the lock clicked into place behind me. Shouted pleas of, “Don’t desert me!” and “I’ll make everything right again,” issued through the gate. From one of my safari suit’s many pockets, I pulled an inhaler and puffed twice. Breathing again and relieved that Cindy was stuck behind security gates and window grills that I had the sole keys for, I rested against an elm tree. I was trying to ignore her pleas and assess my situation when a Golden Doodle dragged a human femur into the condo parking lot and began to bark at me. Afraid the noise would draw more feral frou-frou dogs or worse, I fled. My bare feet found every sharp pebble as I ran across the too-sunny lot and through the Guptas’ open backdoor. I said, “Oh…Oh no,” as I shut the door behind me. A bloody smear began on the kitchen floor, where little Sabita’s Cookie Monster doll lay abandoned, and ended at the backdoor.

Shaking my head, I walked through their glass and chrome living room and went upstairs to Ms. Gupta’s office. Her built-in shelves were stuffed with accounting books and Ganesh statues. I shook my pack off my shoulders, letting it fall onto the red shag carpet, and dropped into her swivel chair. My thoughts starting to race and my heart to pound — over Sabita and everything else — I pulled a Valium bottle from a shirt pocket and popped several. As I zoned out, I stared at a dancing Ganesh and wondered what he was so happy about.

An hour later, full consciousness came upon me like a slow-motion landslide. Hoping to avoid being buried by anxiety and despair, I decided to focus on the little things that I could control. My first decision was to stay the night. The numbness would soon wear off and I’d be at my most vulnerable. Anyway, before I traveled, I had to figure out how to lace my boots. Curious about what I would face later, I stood to look out the window. To do so, I leaned on the edge of the desktop with my bad arm. The desktop, a sheet of glass that sat on two chrome sawhorses, tilted. Not at my brightest, I watched everything on it slide onto the floor. As the sheet of glass began to move towards my mid-section, I came to my senses and removed my weight from it. The desktop slammed back down. I stared at it for a moment before blurting, “What the what,” as I stood to jerk the blinds open.

My guilt for messing up Ms. Gupta’s office evaporated upon looking outside. Shattered storefront windows lined State Street and a telephone pole topped with ax heads leaned against the wall of Inner Peace and Extreme Survival Studio. It was as if a giant had sucked up mailboxes, trees, signs, cars, and human beings, chewed them up, and spit them back out. Drums, saxophones, and guitars strewn near Dr. Katz’s Animal Clinic stirred memories of the early plague days: endless awful singing by Western civilization’s worst creation, the pop-star wannabe, that was intermittently interrupted by elderly country bands and cheerleader squads. It was like living on the American Idol1 set. Too scared to go out, I kept my crank radio blaring. Intrepid reporters, or Compulsives trying to be reporters, described all-night baseball and midnight gardening, acts of altruism and awfulness, impossible scientific and artistic projects, and entrepreneurs catering to desperate Compulsives. Those Compulsives included computer gamers seeking electricity, shoppers frantic to discover bargains, foodies searching for five-star meals, and what should have been a warning to me, lovers hoping to find their last love. The radio reports all noted the Compulsives’ perseverance, no matter their injuries. However, when enough time passed the parasites changed all the Compulsives into Eaters, just as they had transformed Cindy.

A salty taste filled my mouth as I sat back down and pressed my eyes shut. Still numb, I’d bitten my lip to try to block memories of what came next, when the Eaters finished off most of the remaining Compulsives and yet-to-be-infected Cleans. No matter my efforts, memories of those horrific days swarmed into my mind, days in which I’d shut off the radio and tried to imagine that my condo was a pocket universe. It had been impossible. The end of the world made it through the walls of the basement safe-room I huddled in: the sirens, shots, and horrific screams. Later, it smelled like I was stuck in a busted freezer filled with sour milk and rotten meat. A shameful combination of cowardice and selfishness prevented me from helping anyone. The terror and guilt were worse than the discomforts: eating raw pasta and potatoes to save Sterno; creeping around the condo to maintain my rainwater collection system and chemical toilet; being unable to phone, text, or Facebook; not bathing or shaving; wearing dirty clothes; and missing therapist appointments.

I opened my eyes and spewed bloody spit on Ms. Gupta’s desk. To address my ever-multiplying psychological needs all I could do was to scribble in this journal. Writing fiction was no longer an option since the only thing I’d ever written were stories of post-apocalyptic heroes and I wasn’t being one. Nothing had happened like my survivalist stories, which consisted of macho cleverness and a lack of gun-control laws. Even my self-published masterpieces, Tales of the Rescue of a Techno Maiden and The Parking Garage Pirates of Putnam Street, didn’t hint at the traumas and tedious drudgery of actual survival. I thought I wrote the stories because they immersed me in a world in which no one told you what to do and where you were special just because you had survived. Remembering that Cindy had broken through that thin explanation, I used my hand to wipe the blood off my chin and stood to check on her.

With my binoculars, I left the office and walked across the landing and into the master bedroom. Dr. Gupta’s shriveled remains were on an oak four-poster bed; an empty hypodermic needle dangled from his withered arm. While I examined him, I thought about the big Texan “howdy” he always greeted me with and how he loved to grill shitake mushrooms or Tandoori chicken on summer Sunday afternoons. Now I’d never be able to pay him back for the time he drove me to the hospital after diagnosing my hernia. I yanked the blanket, to try to roll him up in it. He fell with an unpleasant thump onto the floor. After several deep breaths, I threw the blanket over him and went to the window, unsure of what I’d do when my sense of smell returned.

I peered through the Venetian blinds and saw that Cindy had opened all my drapes. But why? With my binoculars, I saw why, and shouted, “Shit soup!” Still undressed, she was emptying my cupboards of their delicacies. Done, she lopped the tops off Apple Jacks, Fruit Loops, and Cap’n Crunch boxes2 with my samurai knife and leaned back to empty one box after another into her mouth. My eyes teared up as Cindy’s curvy figure was outlined in a candy-colored shower of sugary treasure; beautiful blissful bits of sweetness bounced off her and onto the ungrateful kitchen tiles. My stomach lurched each time she slammed an eight pound can of chocolate syrup against a counter edge, only stopping when the priceless chocolate sprayed the kitchen and herself. In silent shock, sweat dripping from under my arms, I watched her lift the huge sharp-edged container to her delicate lips. Her small mouth filled with the life-giving liquid; it flowed down her cheeks and cascaded like a slow-motion velvety waterfall down her neck, chest, and legs, to pool at her feet. The food-massacre went on for what seemed forever — a bottle of peppermint schnapps tasted and spilled, Slim Jims bitten and discarded, Hostess Cup Cakes sampled, a bag of pork rinds scattered after one bite, a gallon jar of maraschino cherries smashed, creating a blood-red tide that flowed across the kitchen floor. With each wasted calorie, primordial pain flowed through my veins and the temptation to save my darlings increased. She attacked my favorites, yanking the tops off a row of small, colorful boxes and ripping open the shiny packages within to stuff their contents into her face. Prefab pastries of every flavor fragmented and fell, surrounding her with what looked like the remnants of a bombed paint factory. I cried out in disbelief, “The bitch is eating my Pop-Tarts!” However, I knew she wasn’t enjoying her last lucid moments, that she wanted me to end her suffering. Cindy was past the Compulsive stage, during which one has some normal desires, and was experiencing a hyper-aggressive form of Alzheimer’s. I wanted to retrieve the Glock in my pack. But how do you shoot someone, especially Cindy? When she collapsed to the kitchen floor — now a sweet swamp with islands of cans, boxes, and bottles — and sobbed, I decided to do it. I loved her too much to let her suffer and I’d promised her I’d do it.

I need to stop writing, even though the sun is up and I haven’t finished telling you about the two worst days of my life. I bet you also want to know how I’ll reach Mom. Don’t worry, I have a plan. But I can’t tell you now. I need to eat my last two packets of freeze-dried ice cream and cry a little. Writing about everything helps, but, can only do so much.

The Colored Lens #32 – Summer 2019

By Executive Editor on Friday, June 4, 2021

The Colored Lens Speculative Fiction Magazine – Summer 2019 – Issue #32

The Colored Lens

Speculative Fiction Magazine

Summer 2019 – Issue #32

Featuring works by Philip A Kramer, Les Berkley, Michael J. Wyant Jr., Nathan Batchelor, Jen Sexton-Riley, Leigh Anna Harken, Marilee Dahlman, Joanne Aylott, Lindsey Duncan, Alexandra Grunberg, and Greg Greenberg.

Edited by Dawn Lloyd and Daniel Scott
Henry Fields, Associate Editor

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

www.TheColoredLens.com

Cephi by Philip A Kramer
Death and Two Women by Les Berkley
Lavender Footsteps by Michael J. Wyant Jr.
Lifesong by Nathan Batchelor
Party’s End by Jen Sexton-Riley
Peaches by Leigh Anna Harken
The Barber and the Black Canary by Marilee Dahlman
The Water Dragon by Joanne Aylott
Traveling by Starlight: A Journey of Two Ways by Lindsey Duncan
Walking the Line by Alexandra Grunberg
Zombies Can’t Take the Train by Greg Greenberg

Cephi

By Philip A Kramer

The drone hovered outside the window of the high-rise, gazing at the occupants of the 36th floor. A man in a white shirt and striped tie was eating a sandwich at his desk, oblivious to its presence.

Four hundred and thirty-two feet below, Jerry Donovan held his finger above the remote’s trigger and regarded the man in the video feed. He did not know him; he never knew any of them.

Just then, the man stopped his chewing, and turned his head to the window, a piece of arugula dangling from his lips. He locked eyes with the camera.

Jerry pulled the trigger.

A jet of water and soap suds speckled the one-inch pane of glass between them and dribbled down into the window seam. Jerry fingered the joystick forward until the two-foot long squeegee made contact with the window. The drone dragged the squeegee downward, wiping away the soap and the residue of city smog.

The man in the striped tie began to chew again, watching the drone’s progress with distracted disinterest.

Jerry shifted on his makeshift stool on the sidewalk and gazed about at the throng of pedestrians moving around him. Like his drone, the people who looked at him barely seemed to register his existence.

At times, he missed being up there, suspended by a few ropes hundreds of feet above the sidewalk. He thought the advent of window-washing drones would put him out of the job, but they still needed operators. Whether it was safer to cling to a high-rise or sit on a crowded Los Angeles sidewalk, had yet to be determined. It had not stopped his boss from taking away his hazard pay. Fortunately, the city was due to expand, to push out into the Santa Monica bay. The sooner it did the better, in his opinion. The sidewalks were getting too crowded.

When his drone arrived at the thirty-fifth floor, all of his bitter musings evaporated.

Jerry sat straighter and maneuvered his drone to the next window. A small, rare smile tugged at his lips.

Along the length of the room sat five equally spaced desks, each occupied by a person staring at a computer monitor. Closest to him was a woman with large, dark-framed glasses and brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a white blouse beneath a slender dark gray business suit.

Jerry did not know her name, but he gazed in on her for a few minutes every week. Unlike other windows, he always took his time with this one.

It would have felt creepy, stalker-ish even, but she never failed to give him a smile and a wave. Today was no different, and her face brightened when she caught sight of the shadow of his drone on the carpeted floor.

Jerry dutifully sprayed the window with the cleaner.

The joystick was slippery with sweat, and he took a moment to wipe his palms dry on his pant legs.

Then he went for it.

The camera view pitched and yawed with the motions of the drone, and he unconsciously leaned from side to side, squinting into the camera feed. A moment later, spelled out in relief among the soapsuds, was the word “Hi.”

Through a clean part of the glass, he could see her smile broaden, and a hint of amusement in her eyes.

Then she broke her gaze to look at the office door. A tall man with immaculately styled brown hair entered the room. A face red with fury highlighted his scowl.

The man spoke, but the words were inaudible to Jerry. The woman stood, a white-knuckled hand grabbing the edge of her desk. Her face remained stoic, even as the man slammed a piece of paper down in front of her.

Mouth agape, Jerry stared into the feed as the man continued to shout, drawing the attention of everyone in the office. The man stuck out his hand, a single finger pointing to the door. Jerry didn’t have to hear him to known what he’d said.

You’re fired.

Jaw clenched, the woman watched him leave and then sat down in her chair, staring at the piece of paper. Blood drained from her face.

Jerry loosened his grip on the remote when its sturdy plastic creaked in protest.

A moment later, determination crept over the woman’s features, and she looked up, straight at his drone.

Startled, Jerry set the drone to cleaning the rest of the window.

The woman stood, folding the piece of paper and pocketing it, and then approached the window. Jerry brought the drone to eye level. She stepped right up to the window, pressed her hand to the glass, and looked down.

Jerry frowned and then his eyes widened. He looked up from his stool to locate his drone suspended next to the 35th floor of the building across the street. He could just make her out beyond the hazy sky reflected by the window.

Throat constricting, he looked back at his video feed to see a sparkle in her eyes and a smirk curling one corner of her lips. She’d seen him. She turned around and walked straight for the door on the far side of the room.

Jerry gulped and hurriedly finished with the window.

Now was a good time to take his lunch break, he decided.

He yanked back on the joystick and steered the drone across the street and down to where he stood on the sidewalk. Its buzz grew louder as it drew nearer, causing even the most distracted pedestrian to look up.

He cordoned off a five-foot-by-five-foot landing site on the street with four collapsible traffic cones, much to the annoyance of the driver waiting to claim the charging station he now blocked.

Jerry set to work with practiced efficiency, detaching the propellers, battery pack, and washer-fluid receptacle and storing each inside the large wheeled case that had served as his stool.

Just as he was loading the frame and controller in the case, the hard clicking of approaching footsteps lifted above the general bustling of the crowd. A pair of small black shoes appeared in his periphery.

Swallowing, Jerry stood from his crouch and turned to face the owner of the shoes.

It was the woman from behind the glass.

Her eyes searched his for several moments as if she struggled to connect the lanky man with untidy hair before her to the persona of the drone.

A car honked at them.

Jerry scrambled to retrieve his cones and leave room for the driver to park.

“I’m sorry you witnessed that,” she said as he added the cones to his other equipment. She put a hand to her forehead and shook her head. “I’m so embarrassed.”

Jerry didn’t know what to say, so gave a one-shouldered shrug.

“I’m Cassy by the way.”

“Jerry,” he said, and shook her extended hand.

“Well Jerry,” she said, considering him. “I could use a drink. Care to join me?”

“I was just…” he stammered and then collected himself. “Yes I would.”

Jerry set off down the sidewalk alongside her, tugging his case after him. They merged with the lunch crowd that was just beginning to pour into the streets.

He concentrated on the back of the person in front of him and tried to ignore the awkward silence between them.

“You realize that ‘hi’ backwards reads ‘ih.’” She said abruptly.

Jerry’s stomach fell, and he covered his face with a palm.

“I’m an idiot.”

Cassy laughed.

“At least it wasn’t ‘olleh’ or ‘yeh.’”

Her laugh made the embarrassing oversight worth it.

“What bar were you thinking?” Jerry asked after they had walked east for a couple blocks.

“I think I have a few bottles at my place,” she said. Jerry was still reeling from her answer when she spoke again. “Do you like to play games?”

“Well I…” he stammered. “Where is this going?”

“That came out wrong,” she said, flushing. “I meant video games. I assumed with you flying a drone…” She trailed off.

“Sure. I love video games. I’d hardly call my job one though.”

“How far can that thing fly, anyway? Can you work from home?”

“I have to be within a mile or so for the controller and receiver to communicate, but they want us on location in case we lose signal. It won’t fall out of the sky or anything. It lands automatically, but we have to make sure we clear a place for it.”

As he described the less-than-riveting details of his job, she led him into the lobby of a modern, recently constructed building. They entered a small elevator and rode it to the fifteenth floor and proceeded down a hallway that smelled of new carpet.

“Come on in,” she said, holding a door open.

Inside the condo, a large fish tank, a hundred gallons at least, stood against one wall. A television comprised nearly the whole of the wall opposite the door. Whirls of color bounced across it in a pattern reminiscent of an old screen-saver. Only a solitary ergonomic chair faced it.

Jerry gaped.

“Is that a TFG console?”

“One of their first,” she said, her hands on her hips.

Jerry left his case by the door, walked over, and ran his hands along the chair’s back and then down along an armrest. His finger grazed a small black surface, and a touch-pad came to life. A moment later, the entire wall lit up, revealing the last thing he expected to see.

TerraForm Games had revolutionized the gaming industry. No longer did gamers waste hundreds of hours performing virtual tasks; they had something real to control.

If it hadn’t been so expensive, Jerry would have purchased the operating rights to one of their Lunar and Martian Rovers long ago. It was the ultimate sandbox game, casting regolith into any number of shapes with 3D printers.

What appeared in the display before him was not the surface of Mars, the moon, or even the cloud-tops of Venus. He was staring at an underwater palace through the camera of a TerraForm Games submersible.

Fish darted across the screen and in and out of a large white structure. It wasn’t coral, though there was certainly some of that too, growing on the rough angular walls, the tall support columns, and inside open windows. The palace was too small to be accessible by humans and made entirely from the white stone. Above it all, was the rippling surface of the water no more than one-hundred feet above.

Below the camera feed, the screen was divided into two sections. One displayed a large topological map of the Santa Monica bay, including longitude, latitude, and depth. The palace appeared as a small angular bulge, and hundreds of other structures lay beyond, just out of sight.

The other section of the display was a text box, an event log or status window from the looks of it. The last message read:

::SUBMERSIBLE IDLE_ BATTERY CHARGING_ AWAITING OPERATOR INPUT::

“I call her Cephi.” Cassy said from beside him, he hadn’t heard her approach. “Since she looks a little like a Cephalopod. A Squid,” she supplied at his blank look. She stuck out a hand, gesturing toward the chair. “Care to take the helm?”

He didn’t need to be asked twice. He sat down and reached for a button that resembled his drone remote’s joystick.

It took a moment, but the camera view began to move, causing a few fish to dart away. He neared the palace and passed beneath an arch into what looked to be a small courtyard.

“Did you build all this?”

“It took a couple years, and the help of some friends, but yeah. This is all mine.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Calcium carbonate, the same stuff that mollusks and coral use to make their shells and skeletons.”

She leaned down, her ponytail swinging into his face for a moment as she toggled another button forward. When she stood straight again, and Jerry was no longer distracted, he saw that an armature had extended into the sub’s field of view. Several servo boxes separated the arm into segments, and two long tubes stretching down its length.

“This is the 3D printing arm. One tube carries concentrated calcium chloride isolated from the seawater by osmotic and chemical filters. The other tube contains carbonic acid, the dissolved form of carbon dioxide. When they mix at the end of the probe, they form insoluble calcium carbonate.”

“What can you print?”

“Anything really, so long as I have enough calcium chloride and carbonate stored. There’s another arm too, the manipulator.” She leaned over him again, but he was ready for it, and saw the buttons she pressed. Another arm with pincers moved into view on the opposite side of the camera feed. “It helps to steady the object during printing and move things around afterward.”

Jerry had steered up to a wall spotted with coral and anemones like some kind of vertical garden. The vibrant colors of red and blue coral were surpassed only by those of the fish surrounding them. Some of the yellows were so bright as to be fluorescent.

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll destroy what you’ve printed?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cassy’s features darken, but a weak smile replaced it by the time he focused on her.

“At first, I guess, but making them at home here has now become the unofficial purpose of the game. Yeah, I got into it to build an underwater paradise, but then I realized how shortsighted I was. Did you know over ninety percent of the carbon dioxide we produce is dissolved in the oceans, slowly acidifying them? Our subs have captured thousands of tons of it, but that’s nothing compared to reefs, and those are mostly dead now.”

Jerry looked out at the garden of coral and schools of fish. Each appeared to be thriving within the artificial home she’d created for them.

“These seem to be doing well enough.”

“Right? We had no idea it would happen,” she continued, excitement brightening her features. “The new regulations have helped clean up the water around here, but we never expected this. Coral and tropical fish don’t normally come to these northern latitudes, but with the oceans getting warmer, these are the new tropics. They latched on to our artificial reef and made it their own.”

“So the reefs won’t disappear after all?”

“If this reef and others around the coast are allowed to prosper, it will easily outpace any of our efforts to reverse climate change.”

Jerry blinked. Her tone had become somber.

“That’s amazing. So why don’t you sound excited?”

Cassy mashed another button on the touch-pad and held it.

Cephi rose, first slowly, and then with surprising speed. Once it had cleared the top of the coral garden, he could make out large spires, squat domes, and even part of a labyrinth in the distance. Other subs idled around the structures or moved between them like the fish. The subs were a squatter version of a submarine, with two propellers at the tail end and two small arms hugging its sides. Cassy was right, they did resemble large squids.

Cephi broke the surface, and then crashed back down, sending waves in all directions. Rivulets of water flowed across the camera lens, but when the view cleared, they looked out over a broad expanse of water at the coast. The tallest skyscrapers of Los Angeles were visible in the distance, but only as a hazy backdrop to the much closer buildings of Santa Monica.

A small fleet of barges in the foreground partially obscured their view. Several figures in hardhats scurried along the decks and rails of the ships.

“All that we’ve done, all that we’ve built here. It won’t last another day.”

Jerry’s stomach sank.

“The City Expansion Project?”

She nodded and clenched her jaw.

Just to the left of the Santa Monica beach, large hills and mountains loomed over the city. They had been beautiful and green once, but now strip mines and construction roads scarred them.

“For over a dozen miles off the coast, the water is no more than a couple hundred feet deep, the only depth at which reefs can grow. With the mountain so close to the water’s edge, all they have to do is push all of that dirt in. They’ll have flattened a mountain and filled in the bay at the same time. All the more area to build on.”

Jerry shook his head. Just earlier that day he had been hoping the expansion would be underway soon to relieve some of the sidewalk congestion. Now…

“They have to know what’s down here. Why would they bury a reef?”

“Someone from the Fish and Wildlife Service did a survey, but concluded the species here weren’t protected under the Endangered Species Act, even though the list hasn’t been updated in years.” She balled her hands into fists.

“There has to be a way.”

“I’ve tried everything, we’ve tried everything,” she said, motioning toward the edge of the screen. For the first time Jerry noticed a message feed showing hundreds of unread messages, most marked as urgent and with a fair number of expletives in their subject lines. The other subs.

“Everything?”

“It even cost me my job.”

Cassy pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket, the one her boss had slammed onto her desk. Jerry took the slip of paper and unfolded it. It was an email correspondence between a Cassandra Thomas, CP and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, specifically, the Species Survival Commission. Several emails detailed her apparent pleas to move Heliopora coerulea, Blue coral, from Vulnerable status to Endangered. Their only response was that it would be discussed at their next SSC meeting in three weeks. By then it would be too late.

“I don’t understand. Why did this get you fired?”

“I’m a paralegal. Our law firm represents the city and this construction project. My boss found out I was trying to stop it and…”

“I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do to help,” he wanted to reach out and comfort her, lay a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, or let her cry on his. He held back. He may have looked in on her for over a year, but she’d known him for less than fifteen minutes.

“Maybe there is,” she said cryptically, and then backed away from the chair and approached her fish tank. She stared in at several of the bright blue fish.

Puzzled, Jerry stood from the chair and followed her. The fish nearest him was the largest of the fish in the aquarium, about eight inches long and with a large knobby forehead. The aquarium’s overhead lights illuminated a lacework of orange across its blue scales. Cassy’s dark-framed glasses reflected the entire scene.

“Cheilinus undulates, the Humphead wrasse. They are on the endangered species list. Don’t even ask how I got my hands on one. It wasn’t exactly legal, but at least it’s in my hands and not the belly of someone who thinks its rarity makes it more delicious. If I could get him out to the reef, and capture video of him swimming around, it would put a wrench into their construction plans.”

“That doesn’t sound legal either.” Jerry said, rubbing at his neck. This was all moving too fast. All he had wanted was to have a drink in the company of a woman he had admired from afar for so long.

She shrugged a shoulder.

“People dump their fish and let out birds all the time. It’s illegal, sure, but it’s not something they send people to jail over. I would have done it already, but the entire reef is now in a construction zone. They’ve closed the beaches and they won’t let any boats on site.” She turned to him and swallowed. “But a drone with a water tank could reach it.”

A chill rippled across his skin and then it was gone, replaced by a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“This was why you asked me out for a drink?”

Cassy looked to the floor.

Jerry’s nostrils flared, and he turned around, walking back to the chair and gripping the headrest.

He should have guessed she had an ulterior motive. What would a girl like her want with him? He ground his teeth as he stared at the distant city through the camera feed. The forty-three-story high-rise he’d been washing was visible from this angle, its windows reflecting the sun overhead. He should leave now and get back to work, finish the windows before the building manager filed a complaint.

Just beyond the skyscrapers was the sky itself, hazy from the pollution settling over the valley. Despite the city’s efforts to improve air quality by promoting the electric car and the use of solar charging stations, it continued to deteriorate.

He had never looked to the ocean for answers, but Terraform Games had, and they had gamers: the most dedicated workforce on the planet. They had invested millions of dollars, thousands of hours into the reef, and now they were all counting on him. If he went back to washing windows, he would be condemning all that vibrant and beautiful life to death.

Cassy was wringing her hands together and chewing on her lower lip as she watched him.

“I’ll do it.”

She smiled and hopped up and down on her toes. She looked like she might throw her arms around him, but thought twice and settled back on her heels. She took off the blazer of her business suit and threw it over the chair.

“Then let’s get to work.”

“Now?” He gaped at her.

“Now is all the time the reef has left. The construction begins tomorrow morning.”

“It could take some time to modify the drone, and I’ll need to be nearby when I fly it.”

“That won’t be a problem. I have a friend with a boat that can get you close enough. But we both can’t go. I need to stay here to film the fish once you deliver it. If we don’t get video, it could hide, and we might not be able to find it again before tomorrow morning.”

He frowned.

She took a step forward and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ve seen you fly that thing. You’re good. I have every confidence in you.”

The touch sent a pulse of warmth through him, and he suddenly found a confidence that hadn’t been there a moment before.

They set to the task of preparing the drone, all plans to have a nice, relaxing drink forgotten. Jerry washed out the fluid reservoir and then, at Cassy’s instruction, washed it out twice more. He didn’t know what the washer fluid was made of, but it couldn’t be healthy for fish.

The reservoir was large enough to hold over two gallons of water from her aquarium, more than enough for the fish. The problem was the release button. He would need a way to dump the contents of the tank into the bay remotely.

After some minutes of staring at the drone and scratching his head, Cassy asked if he could just drop the whole reservoir into the bay.

“The fish could swim out and I’ll buy you a new one.”

That made the problem easier, but it didn’t solve it. He had no way to release the reservoir remotely, otherwise drone operators might inadvertently send twenty pounds of washer fluid and reservoir down onto the heads of pedestrians on the sidewalk. After some tinkering, he routed the tube of the spray nozzle and wedged it into the manual release switch. With a press of the remote’s trigger, the water pressure was sufficient to trigger the release. Cassy brought him a glue gun to fix the tubing in place, and they tested it several times with the reservoir full.

While he made the last adjustments, Cassy contacted a friend of hers who owned a boat.

“I’ve taken it on trips to Ventura and Santa Barbara,” she said to him after hanging up the phone. “It’s large enough to set up your drone, and I think you’ll like Leon, he’s a really nice guy.”

Jerry hated him already. Any guy who would drop everything to do this for her would definitely have a thing for her. He was proof of it.

After he packed up his drone, Cassy wrote the coordinates of her underwater palace on a piece of paper, and he put it in his pocket. Then she programmed her number into his cellphone.

“Call me if anything goes wrong, and I mean anything.”

They loaded the fish in the reservoir last, which took some doing as they chased it out of it hiding place among the coral and anemones. Her only instruction was not to take too long getting it in the bay. Ammonia from the fish’s waste would build up rapidly in the small volume of the reservoir and the oxygen would plummet. It was an endangered species, she reminded him. It was irreplaceable.

Once they had secured the fish in the reservoir, Jerry strapped it to the top of his case and wheeled it to the door.

Cassy was wringing her hands again, and he could see how desperately she wanted to go with him.

“Could you ask another sub to record video?”

“It’s best we keep what we are doing quiet. The fewer people know the better.”

Was she lying to him about the legal repercussions of what they were planning? She was being exceptionally careful not to leave evidence behind. But if he knew all the details, would that really change his mind?

She walked him to the elevator down the hall.

“Good luck.”

“You too,” he said.

They did not embrace or even shake hands; they simply looked into each other’s eyes for enough time to feel awkward, and then a little while longer.

When the door finally closed and descended to the first floor, he had the shape of her soft smile and every contour of her face burned into his memory.

The car Cassy had called for him waited outside. With his case in the trunk and the fish reservoir in his lap, he passed the thirty-minute ride south to Long Beach in silence.

It was just after 3pm when he wheeled his case onto the marina and checked his phone.

“You Jerry?”

Jerry looked up to see a blonde-haired man wearing a T-shirt and swim shorts. He was tall and well-muscled, a fact that was hard to ignore as he raveled a rope between his hand and bicep. If he wasn’t a surfer, or body builder, or even an up-and-coming Hollywood actor, Jerry would lose all confidence in stereotypes.

“Yeah. Leon?”

“The one and only,” he said, smiling with too-perfect teeth. Leon grabbed his hand briefly, forgoing the shake, and returned to coiling the rope.

“This the boat?” Jerry asked, gesturing to the vessel moored to the dock beside them. It was larger than he had imagined and much more luxurious. It had a small wheelhouse in the forward section and assorted snorkeling gear and coolers cluttering the aft part of the deck. He could picture the many hundreds of parties the man had hosted here, parties to which Jerry would never have been invited. As if to confirm his suspicions, stenciled on the side of the boat was its name, The Good Time.

“This is her,” he said, and threw the rope on the last remaining part of the boat where the deck was visible beneath the clutter.

Leon helped move his case onto the boat and Jerry set the fish reservoir gently inside the wheelhouse and out of direct sunlight.

While Leon navigated the boat out of the marina, Jerry cleared a space on the cluttered deck to assemble his drone.

Just after they passed a pair of buoys, he had to find a place to sit as Leon lay on the speed.

“How do you know Cassy?” Leon called back over the rushing wind.

“We just met today, actually. She needed my help with a project of hers.” He had overheard a part of their conversation over the phone and knew she hadn’t told him everything. Leon seemed pleased by this answer, possibly having feared Jerry was her new boyfriend.

What had Cassy said? You’ll like him? He’s nice? To her maybe. It must have irked Leon to no end that Cassy hadn’t accompanied them on this trip. At least they had that in common.

“She want you to put some Christmas lights on that palace of hers or something?” He had obviously not figured out there was a fish in the opaque plastic reservoir on the floor beside him.

“Something like that.”

The boat rounded Point Vincent and Santa Monica eased into view. The mountains beside it were visibly shorter than they had been months ago, the thousands of tons of earth now sitting inside a fleet of barges in the bay.

They passed a few fishing boats, but before long, they were the only ones out in the water. They came to a series of floating buoys strung together in a wide arc around the construction site, at least a mile away from the nearest barge. It wasn’t a high barrier, and they could have driven the boat right over it, but the bright red of the buoys suggested that action would be unwise.

It didn’t matter. This was the perfect spot.

Leon slowed the boat to a stop within twenty feet of the barrier and turned off the engine.

Jerry cleared more room on the deck and opened his case. He had to snatch a piece from Leon, who had pulled out one of the propellers and was spinning it with a finger. He had to hurry; the fish couldn’t live much longer inside the reservoir.

“It’s a drone,” Leon said stupidly as the last piece clicked into place. How he couldn’t tell that from its parts was a mystery.

“Yup,” Jerry replied as he stepped around him and into the wheelhouse to retrieve the reservoir.

Despite the confirmation, the appearance of the reservoir made Leon look just as confused as he had a moment ago.

Jerry checked on the fish, which huddled next to the edge of the tank in apparent fear, but seemed healthy enough. He then connected the reservoir to the drone.

With the remote, he primed the spray tube with a few presses of the trigger, and as expected, the reservoir detached. After reconnecting it, he paused and stood. That was all there was left to do. The familiar task of assembling the drone had momentarily chased away his anxiety, but now that he was done, it swept back in and rocked him like the waves against the boat. This was it.

According to his phone’s GPS, the coordinates Cassy had given him were no more than one thousand yards away. He could not see any evidence of the reef from the surface, but knowing that such a beautiful place existed below filled him with awe.

He messaged Cassy to let her know they’d arrived and to expect to see the reservoir in the water within a couple minutes.

”Thank you, Jerry. You are my new favorite person,” she replied.

He stared at the screen for a long moment before Leon broke his trance.

“So what next?”

He entertained the idea of showing Leon the message, just for the pleasure of watching the man sulk. Maybe later, after he made sure the fish was at home in the water.

He took up his remote.

The drone strained against the weight of its full reservoir, but cleared the edge of the boat without any obvious problems.

Once it was over the water, a frightening thought occurred to him. It was one thing to crash his drone into a building or botch a landing on the street. He could always recover it. Now, with over a hundred feet of water between him and a sunken drone, it would be lost forever.

The drone reached twenty feet in the air before he steered it over the barricade. He maintained the altitude and watched the drone shrink into the distance with its precious cargo. It was perhaps the first fish to achieve sustained flight, he mused.

He flipped on the remote’s viewing screen and was treated to an expansive view of open water, beyond which lay an equally expansive city.

The drone was closing in on the score of barges floating in the bay. The behemoth flat-bottomed ships sat low in the water under the tons of dirt and rocks. Only the wheelhouse and a narrow walkway along the sides of the vessel were accessible to crew. On the closest barge, a small group of crewmen followed each other like ants around the dirt mound. As his drone approached, he could see one of them pointing out over the water. At him.

Another man split off from the group and ran back along the path with one hand on the railing and the other holding his hardhat in place.

Jerry tensed and pushed the joystick forward, increasing the drone’s speed. He needed to drop off the fish and return before anyone came to investigate.

Just before the drone reached the coordinates, the man emerged from the door of the barge’s wheelhouse and scurried back, holding something.

Leon’s thick finger tapped the screen.

“What’s that?” he said uncomfortably close to Jerry’s ear.

“I don’t know.”

The man stopped halfway back to the group and put the object to his shoulder. It was some kind of rifle or cannon with a fat barrel. It was pointing directly at his drone.

Then the camera feed went black.

Heart racing, Jerry looked up, expecting to see a cloud of smoke and drone debris. Instead, the distant drone slowed its forward motion and hovered in place.

In horror, Jerry watched as it began to execute an automatic landing, but there was nothing but water beneath it.

He fed more power into the propellers, but the drone continued its descent.

The fish.

Jerry pulled the trigger once, then twice, but there was no splash to indicate the drone had dropped its reservoir.

The anti-drone device had done its job. None of Jerry’s signals were getting though.

He watched with heart-stopping helplessness as the drone hovered down into the water. When it hit, the propellers shot a plume of spray and mist into the air. Then it was gone.

“Dude. That sucks,” Leon said with a tsk.

Thunderstruck, Jerry dropped the remote to the deck of the boat and stumbled to the railing.

The fish was still in the reservoir. If it didn’t get out soon, it would die. Without the fish, thousands of tons of mountain rock would cover the reef by this time tomorrow. Cassy would never forgive him if that happened.

“We’re going out there.”

“No way, Dude. It’s gone.”

“We have to. The fi—” Jerry took a deep breath. “Cassy would want this more than anything in the world right now. I swear, you will be her new favorite person,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a title he could give away, but he would say anything to get this boat moving.

Leon bit his lip and looked out over the water toward the crash site.

“Alright. But the second I see any boats coming after us, I’m gone.”

“Deal.”

Leon started the engine, and Jerry squatted down to keep from falling over as the boat lurched forward and whipped around.

The barricade was of little hindrance to the boat. They sped between two of the buoys where the line connecting them sagged well below the water.

The phone in his pocket was buzzing, but he ignored it. He could not talk to Cassy now, not until he set the fish free. But how could he get to it?

The pile of junk he leaned against shifted, and a pair of goggles rolled out into the space he had cleared on the deck.

He grabbed them and sorted through the rest of the pile. He pulled out two matching flippers and checked their size against his shoe. It would have to do. Once the flippers were on, he took off his shirt and placed it and his cellphone, keys, and wallet, in their own pile on the deck.

“I think this is it,” Leon said, laying off the gas.

Jerry stood and saw what had clued him off. A fragment of the safety barrier that surrounded the drone’s propellers drifted in the water.

He took a few deep breaths, lowered his goggles over his eyes, and launched himself over the side of the boat.

His eyes stung with saltwater as the impact jostled his goggles loose. He surfaced and adjusted them until they were tight against his face.

Leon had brought the boat around, his eyes wide as he stared at Jerry.

Holding his breath, Jerry dove again.

Below, shimmering schools of fish meandered through a city of white stone. The top of the closest structure, a spire, was twenty feet below, but it was five times that far to the ocean floor. He stared in awe for a few seconds before searching for the wreckage of his drone.

He saw it then, sinking to the bottom. The drone was largely intact, and he could just make out the reservoir above it, the small amount of air inside providing some buoyancy.

Fighting the urge to dive after it, he surfaced for a fresh lungful of air.

The boat was idling twenty feet away, and Leon was waving for him to swim back. His other hand was pointing out over the water toward the barges. Two small dinghies had separated from the ships and were speeding toward them.

Now was the time to get out of the water and leave if they had any chance of getting away.

Jerry shook his head, first to convince himself, and then for Leon. The man dropped his hands and leaned his head back as if to beseech a god to pluck Jerry from the water for him.

He ducked back beneath the waves and kicked off in the direction of the drone. The flippers propelled him faster than he would have expected though desperation surely played its part. He closed the distance to the drone in under twenty seconds.

He grabbed the first thing that came within reach, the two-foot long rubber squeegee. It reminded him just how much trouble he would be in once his boss got word of the drone’s loss. Hauling the thing to the surface was not an option. Already his lungs ached with the breath he held, and the interior of his goggles were fogging over. He needed to set the fish free while he still could.

While he positioned himself atop the drone, nearest the reservoir, they descended into a bed of coral growing on the roof of some kind of flat-topped structure. He pressed the manual release button, but the reservoir did not pop free. The crash must have jammed it.

For his next attempt, he tried to brace his feet against the drone, but the flippers were making it impossible. He stuck a finger between his ankle and the flipper and pried one off and then the other. With them gone, he could fit his feet on the crossbars that attached the propellers to the drone’s chassis.

His ankle brushed against a red spindly-looking coral, and it burned like the red-hot embers of a fire. It took all his willpower not to suck in a lungful of water at the sudden pain.

Repositioning his foot, he heaved, and finally, the reservoir came free. It floated up a few feet and rotated, releasing its trapped air. The bright blue fish darted out and away, and past a looming silver shape.

It was Cephi. Cassy had found him.

Even as he pointed frantically in the direction the fish had gone, the submersible continued toward him. She had to have seen it. If she did not give chase, the opportunity to save the reef would be lost forever.

He could not care about that now; he had to get to the surface. Panic quickly overcame him when he looked up. The glimmering surface of the water was so far away. He pushed off the drone and kicked his legs.

Without the flippers, he was moving too slow. Darkness was condensing along the periphery of his vision, and his diaphragm spasmed, trying and failing to suck in the salty water.

Then something passed before his eyes. A mechanical arm with pincers at the end. Cephi’s manipulator arm. The moment his fingers closed around it, it lurched upward. He held on with all his might as he and Cephi rocketed toward the surface.

They had barely breached before Jerry was gasping in a breath. For a moment, he was weightless, and he luxuriated in the feel of the air passing across his lips and filling every inch of his lungs. Then he crashed back into the water losing his hold on the sub. Somewhere along the way, his goggles had disappeared, and he had to wipe and blink away the stinging water.

Hardly a minute had passed since he dove after the fish, and now that he was on the surface again, he could see Leon over a hundred yards away, speeding back the way they had come. From the opposite side, their two pursuers were quickly approaching Jerry’s position.

Cephi was floating just feet away. He splashed over and draped his arms over its cool metallic surface to wait for rescue.

Cassy had chosen to save him instead of getting footage of the fish. He had put her in that position, and while he was glad of her choice, he was now to blame for the destruction of the reef.

“Thank you,” he said to the sub. He was pretty sure she could neither see nor hear him, so belatedly located the camera among a bunch of other unidentifiable ports and lenses on the front of the submersible and gave her a thumbs up.

It was another minute before the boats arrived and hauled him out of the water. The crew had little to say in the way of chastisement, perhaps out of consideration for his near-death experience. The captain of the boat, however, a tall man with a mustache and black security baseball cap, had several choice words to say about the unnamed man who had left him there to drown.

They bandaged the red blisters on his ankle from the fire-coral and gave him a shirt, towel, and cheap flip-flops. That was what he wore to the police station where they charged him with trespassing on a construction site.

His one allotted phone call was to his mother, who said she would be on the next flight from Idaho. So as not to worry her unduly, he stuck to his story of joyriding his drone with some new friends. He had never lied to her before, and this made him sulk on his cell’s cot until he fell asleep.

The next morning, he woke to a smiling police officer knocking at the bars to his cell. He left a folded sheaf of paper between the bars, and Jerry slipped out from beneath the thin blanket to retrieve it.

It was a printed article from the Los Angeles Times. The cover page made his pulse quicken.

“City Expansion Project Halted Due to Endangered Fish.”

The text remarked that the beautiful and little-known artificial ecosystem off their coast had received a stay of execution due to the sudden appearance of an endangered species of fish.

Jerry breathed out a sigh.

Another sub had seen the Humphead Wrasse after all.

Also mentioned in the article, the near-simultaneous but seemingly unconnected rescue of a drone enthusiast named Jerry Donovan by a TerraForm Games submersible.

He flipped to the next page and was awed by several of the images printed there. One was a shot of the aforementioned fish peering out from the shelter of a large orange sea anemone’s tentacles. Other images included the vast collection of structures the TFG operators had printed over the years, and the massive explosion of life on the artificial reef.

The article concluded with a caution to the rest of the industrialized world. “The ecology of Earth is far more complex than we ever appreciated. The death of one is to the detriment of many. Ultimately, our lives depend on the smallest of theirs.”

An hour later, Jerry was let go. The construction company had enough of a PR nightmare to deal with than to press charges against a man who almost died on their construction site.

As he was being discharged by the clerk in the front office, he caught sight of Cassy sitting in the waiting room.

She smiled when she saw him holding the printed article.

“This time,” he said as he guided her out of the station. “We better be going out for a drink.”

Death and Two Women

By Les Berkley

In his bed-chamber, hung round with tapestries that emblazoned tales so ancient that the matter of them had been long forgotten, the Old Lord lay dying. His breathing made the only sound in the room save the mantel clock, and his bloody spittle flecked the linens.

At the foot of his bed, the Lady Myrilla sat in her cushioned chair, making the last neat hem stitches in his burial shroud; black work for a dark day. Her hair white as the linen, her eyes the faded blue of summer sky, she awaited the inevitable change of worlds. Her hands fell into the rhythm of the mantel clock while thoughts tumbled over in her mind, pleasure and pain, bitterness and joy in turn. The past washed over the present, yet she held the future at bay: the new age she could not bear to imagine.

Beyond the mullioned window, past the crenellated wall of the outer keep, the sea beat its own measure on the rocky strand. The waves advanced and withdrew, moving the shells and twisted, bleached driftwood now forward, now back. Straining her eyes, the Lady could see at the limit of her vision the mist-shrouded topmasts of carracks and ships of war, dancing to the long, steady swell.

He was a better Prince than a husband, though he never did me harm by word or deed. He would talk to me as though I were one of his Privy Council, and I loved that in him. My mourning I have done already, but I will never stop listening for his step.

A soft, almost tentative knock sounded at the door. “Enter,” the Lady said, threading her needle through the cloth.

Aramond, the Lord Chancellor, pushed the door open, his ironwood cane tapping on the stone floor. Myrilla presented her hand, and he made his way across the room, taking her hand in his own and kissing it. His middle finger bore the ring of his office, heavy with gold and holding an anachite diamond, sovereign against all poisons, natural or compounded by men.

He then went along to the head of the bed, steadying himself with one hand on the carved serpent that wound its way ’round the bed frame in a reflection of that great Worm which circumbinds the world. With an effort, he bent to touch the Lord’s brow.

“How long?” the Lady asked.

“An hour. Two perhaps, but no more.”

“Can you not, then, conjure against death?”

“Never so, most serene Lady.” He leaned on his cane, and pulled a chair next to Myrilla, with the dragon’s head of his staff against the arm. “We must talk, and not in fancy-dress phrases.”

“Go to! You were never a plain-spoken man.” In spite of the shadow that lay on the room, she smiled. “Let me have your last counsel.”

In his distant apartments, Egan the Young Lord paced the floor, waiting for another’s death to set him free. In the half-light of curtained windows, his eyes fell on those curious and perverse objets d’art with which his whims had furnished the chamber. A painted satyr whipped a nymph; a sculpted adder writhed like a living thing as the light shifted here and there.

Across from him, on a soft-pillowed couch, Dame Rosalura, secretary of his inmost desires, lay curled in the way of a wild-cat, her skin pure and lustrous and her eyes cold as his were fiery. Her high-waisted gown of scarlet sendal dangled a little off one shoulder as she stretched her arm toward a wine bottle.

Between this Scylla and Charybdis, Gabriel the Court painter stood at his easel, slender arms shaking a little as he held his brush and pallet. “Will it please Your Highness be still for just a moment?”

“It will not,” the Young Lord said. “Let me see the damned thing, and it were best for you that it be finished.” He pushed the painter aside and studied the canvas. “It is done, and never so poorly as I’d feared. You’ve caught my lady wife’s simpering smile to the very life.”

Rosalura left her couch in a sinuous motion and stood beside her lover. “And there too am I, as you so sweetly commanded.” Indeed, to a discerning eye, her face emerged out of the murky background behind his, subtly rendered, but there to see. “This is well enough done. No more necessary.”

Egan motioned the painter to go. “Hurry to your catamite. You’ve done well for half a man.”

Dame Rosalura took a single long step to block the painter’s way. “My Prince,” she said, eyes flashing wide with pleasure. “Ah, I have o’erlept my time to name you so. Then call me prophetess to be the first.” She put a finger on Gabriel’s chest, where his smock hung open from the neck. Her other hand touched beneath his waist, and he hardened in spite of himself. “Shall I make a whole man of him?”

“As you wish,” Egan said. “But not just now. It were not seemly in my poor sire’s last hours.” He laughed. “Another time?”

Rosalura laughed. “When was I ever seemly? Save to feign it when needs must.” She pushed her hand forward, feeling the painter tremble and grow at once. “It would be so easy. Don’t be afraid. Egan will tell you I make an excellent gentleman atwixt the blankets.” She licked her lips, blood-red without rouge. “Oh, get out,” she said with another laugh, throaty and low. “You’ll keep. Think of me when you cover some boy with your paints. Make him look thus.” She raised her arms and held her scented black hair back from her face. “’Twill hold you for a while.”

Leaving his palette and brushes behind, Gabriel hurried out the door, slamming it as he fled.

Left alone with his mistress in that most private place, Egan ceased his pacing. “You said once that you might kill a man like that with your bare hands? I should wish to see that.”

“A man like that? Like that perhaps, but not our poor Gabriel. I never would murder a man with such art in his hands. Choose another some time, and we shall see.” As she said this, she drew back her shoulders a little, letting him better see her shape through the thin material of her gown.

Damn her. My tongue thickens with desire. Egan walked to the wall where hung a great map of the Adrian Sea and its shores. “Let us choose another subject for the mean while. See you here where the Papal States lie ripe for the plucking? Place but the crown on my head, and they fall. By this blow, would we not strike Venezia herself into the hazard?”

Rosalura chose her words with care. In a nigh-submissive tone, she said, “I am scarcely a soldier, but might not a stroke northward give us a buffer against the Germanies? Your father oft said that there the danger lay.”

Damn her twice. When I am Lord here, I shall have every foot of this fortress turned ‘till I find those papers she keeps in reserve against me. Then we will see which of us has the mastery. “When I need such a minx as you to teach me the art of war, I will happily resign my throne. Until then, I pray you watch your words, lest you find yourself returned to that gutter whence you came.”

“Well,” Rosalura said. “There was never horse nor man that threw me yet. I sought not to teach you, but only to remind you. So let you recall this: I know where your dead lie buried; who your intelligencers are, and who informs against you. So do others, lest you think the knowledge dies with me. Also, you are not the only one who knows how to compound an insalata Fiorenzana. Those herbs wait for any to pick them.

“You have nothing to fear from me. I will follow withersoever you choose, but never think I will be silent. This is the hour of our triumph; let us not quarrel over minutiae. She pulled him to her with surprising strength, kissed him hard with her tongue down his throat, then pushed away. “Now let me dress properly for the day.”

She closed the door behind her, and held herself from shaking until she was well down the corridor.

In the death-room, behind doors of dark walnut, carved with the shapes of the fantastical beasts of old, the Lady and her Chancellor spoke together. They kept their voices low, in respect to the dying, and to avoid prying ears.

“Aramond,” Myrilla said. “Can you tell me what is that ship yonder whose masts reach so above the others?”

“That is His Brittanish Majesty’s vessel Nonesuch, or some other ridiculous Anglish name. Seventy-four guns; her Captain bears a similarly absurd appellation.”

“And her business? Surely something I should know?”

“Indeed. Since the Emancipation, there has been a lack of commerce between the Anglish and their old partners in trade; viz, Moroc, Tunis and the like. It is His Majesty’s—or more correctly, the Prince-Regent’s—intention to improve the traffic in ivory, spices et cetera. He seeks to use our excellent deep-water anchorages, to (he avouches) mutual benefit.

“Quite naturally, upon hearing of the Lord Orvald’s illness, the Ambassador Plenipotentiary insisted on waiting until our master should enjoy better health. Should Your Serenity choose to believe that, I would denounce you as an imposter.”

Myrilla sighed, took up her sewing, then laid it aside once more. “They wait for young Egan? Or some other condition of weakness?”

“May I speak without reproach or censure?”

“When was it otherwise?” The Lady’s face showed naught save a deep calm that belied her inner storm. I was never a patient woman, yet all my life it has been forced on me.

“This then,” Aramond said. “Our realm stands in the same case as the Lord Orvald; that is, in extremis. We live or die by trade and shipping. Our soldiers are unexcelled, but they are also few in number. The mountains and fortalices keep us safe enough, but without access to the sea, we starve and die. No man gladder than I to know that the loathsome traffic in human cargoes is ended, but we must find new commodities. I fear that the Young Lord has not the least sense of this.

“He loves his luxuries, his cruelties and his mistress far above any duty he might feel. Certes he will take us to war, if only to please the masses, and so will wake that sleeping lion in our harbor with his seventy-four guns.

“I am told he intends against the Papal dominions, and there is no surer way to embroil us in the endless divisions of the Italiani ‘Domestic fury and fierce civil strife’, as the poet says, and we without the resources to maintain it. There is also information that should we open certain abandoned workings in the mountains, we might discover the bones of our lost comrades; and that if we were uncautious our own might soon be laid with them.”

The Lady Myrilla put her hand over his, reaching across the table. She had never found herself able to talk to Egan, to evoke any reaction beyond a bland smile. To the Lady, it was as though her son was not hers, but some changeling out of a dark world. “I will not contradict you. He is a chaos I cannot order or control.”

The old Chancellor closed his eyes, listening to the breath of the dying and he thought, the stuttering beat of his own heart. “Then his accession must be prevented? Could you die to see that accomplished?”

Myrilla considered that fate. Were Egan to die, his cousin Ibian would be, by operation of law, the next in line. A bookish lad, though competent in arms at fourteen, he had not been raised to rule, but there were sound heads to guide him. “They tell us that Death is only a door. I could open it with an easy conscience.”

“Then listen.” Aramond pushed back his robe and drew a scroll tube from his pocket. “I wrote this in a fair clerk’s hand two days afore now. It waits only for the Lord’s seal and sign-manual.”

He handed a paper to the Lady, and she read it over. “This is a codicil to my husband’s will. Names me regent for—whomever? The county Medor to follow in my stead should I be also gone? Surely it cannot have force unsealed and unsigned?”

“In ordinary circumstances, you are correct. We are not, however, in such circumstances. You know I am somewhat fond of conundrums? Here is one: should the Crown be set on Egan’s head, you and I would be banished or condemned on the instant. I cannot even guess how many would shortly follow us.

“This being so, he must die afore-hand. And with clear presents of the means, methods and above all the workers of his death, so that there can be no suspicion fall on you or yours. Hence the regency to stand, whatsoever else befall. Medor I trust more than any other, saving yourself.”

So I am to kill my own son, and die myself in the attempt.. We made him together out of desire, and it did not suffice to make him whole. He is all that is left from when I was young. Now I have only hours for what ought to be a lifetime of mourning.

Myrilla picked up her needlework, knotted and snipped the thread. They say the Gods of the North did thus. She looked again on the harbor and the mountains beyond shrouded in fog, seeking haply the farther shore. I am not ready to die, but then, how many ever are?

“Can you tell me your plan?” the Lady asked.

“To do so would be your damnation, or at least so the Fathers say. Myrilla, my oldest and greatest friend, you must trust me now.”

She raised her hand, and he kissed it. “You know,” she said, “Egan is no fool.”

“He sees the surface well enough,” the Chancellor said. “Makes him a good tactician, but a poor strategist. Dame Rosalura is far more to be feared. I have written instructions for Medor.” He unrolled the codicil once more and laid it on the table. “So hardly is the law administered, and so honored that neither we nor Egan may seem to violate one jot of it. You keep the Lord’s seal?”

“Yes, but—”

“But me none of your buts, madam, I pray you.” He smiled, and she took the seal from her purse. A candle, a bit of wax and a scrap of ribbon and the task was complete.

When the wax hardened, the old Chancellor rose, looking now as though he ran a race with his master for who should sit first before the Thrones. “Turn away, Lady. This is black art, and should you witness it, it would imperil your soul as it does mine.”

He hobbled again to the head of the bed, leaning more heavily on his cane. Inking a pen, he pressed it into the dying man’s hand. “Scribé.” The pen moved across the paper. “It is done, and no man may question it.” He returned to the table and sanded the ink dry.

“You have the wine for the memory-cup? We will drink to Orvald when he is gone, and if Fortune favor, there are some will join him.”

Myrilla rose from her chair, crossed to the locked cabinet and brought out the bottle, stoppered with its cork, foil and waxen seal. Aramond took a syringe from his pocket and thrust the needle through the cork, taking care to leave only the barest mark. This he hid with a pinch of lamp-black rubbed well. “The death-lily. Not an unpleasant end. Very like hemlock, but more swift and sure.”

“End of our little tale, then?”

“No, madam: rather the beginning. We have only to wait.”

The wait lasted not long. Harder and more irregular came the Lord’s breath as though, the Chancellor’s plan being set in train, he himself was no longer required. All sound stopped, excepting the ineluctable tick of the mantel clock. The Lady walked to her Lord’s side and held her glass before his face. She grabbed the bell-pull and tugged twice to summon the inevitable. “Our Lord is dead. Call his Guardsmen in, and let the teller bells be rung.”

“Donn. Donn.” The bells tolled low, reverberating amongst the hills, past great houses and less over the pastures and steadings, even to the far borders and beyond.

At the sound, women fell to the earth, stricken with birth pangs though they carried no children. Beasts groaned in the field, and men stood wondering as the furrows bent and weaved as though waking from slumber. Such was the bond between the Lord and the land, sundered only by death which stopped ordinary time. All things waited until the clock could be once more wound.

In her own inner room, Dame Rosalura stared into her scrying glass, where the image of Lord Orvald’s deathbed hung, as though detached from the world like a painting in oils. Gone then, and peacefully. This gladdened her. She would’ve welcomed the painful death of an enemy; indeed, she had caused a few such. However, the Old Lord was not an enemy, only an impediment that time had removed.

Half-rising from her seat, she bent closer to the mirror, letting her hair fall like raven’s wings to either side. In the glass, the Chancellor and the Lady floated as in a magic lantern show. What would I do in their place? Why am I unsure? They are like me; they will not passively await the future. They will try to make it. It must be they have some stratagem in mind, but I cannot divine it.

As she watched, the Lady’s face filled the glass, and those eyes seemed for all the world to look into hers, though it was a thing impossible. She wants to know. Rosalura stared back, letting a smile steal across her lips. Why do I do this, tying myself to a man cruel, selfish and vain? For power? A little. The only power I have had is from my wit and my body; I should like to taste another. For pleasure? Yes. When I hunt boar or stag, the ride excites more than the kill. I need to jump the highest walls, and swim the current where it is most swift. If I am lost, so let it be.

A knock at the outer door woke her from her reverie. She rose and unbolted the doors. Egan stepped in, the brazen scales of his dress armor jingling, and his hob-nailed boots scraping the floor. Even as he made his little courtesy, the bells sounded.

“Our time,” he said, pantomiming the crown being placed on his head. “We should go by the secret way.”

“Not so, gracious my Lord.” Her smile held a world of promise, save at the corners where some doubt seemed to linger. “It is not so secret; in truth it would be the best place for an ambuscade, with no one to see. In the open corridor, there will be eyes to watch, and mouths that will not fear to speak.”

Egan’s face twisted for an instant, disfiguring the handsome countenance that served to fool so many. He held back the angry word that crouched behind his teeth, and the mask fell into place once more. “You are right.” He turned to his soldiers. “Stand you close, and have a care. The hour is near, but we must not slip before it chimes.”

“Should we—your wife?” one of the men asked.

“No. Her presence is not required.” Rosalura made no demurrer. She knew well when to choose her battles. She is a Vissicontini. I must make sure she gets at least outward respect.

Egan leaned to Rosalura and spoke sotto voce. “I cannot bear her mewling God, that has no joy save in penitence.”

“Ah, when you talk thus, I could very nearly love you.” Rosalura smiled and laughed inwardly.

They clattered down the passage, between the gilded hangings and painted faces of the long-vanished men and ladies who had walked that path before them. When they arrived at the Old Lord’s rooms, the soldiers sheathed their swords and stood at the opposite wall.

The new Lord knocked thrice at the door, in accordance with custom. Belinus, Captain of the guard, opened to the knock and stepped aside, his face the color of old copper and his expression inscrutable. Egan strode into the room with Rosalura a step behind. By strict observance she should not have been present, but no one chose to quibble in the house of death.

In his measured walk to the head of the bed, Egan acted with care and proper decorum, making the required gesture of closing the Old Lord’s eyes. “Farewell, my father. You ruled long.”

The correct formula was “long and well”, but again no one spoke.

Rosalura watched without expression. Only her clenched hands betrayed emotion as she studied the faces of the Lady and her Chancellor. Egan would dismiss both of them, of course, and his lover felt a quick pang of disappointment. These were worthy foes, and a serviceable counter-balance to the new Lord’s changeable ways. He might, she reflected, even order them murdered, and that needed prevention.

Her gaze fell next on the Guardsmen, their skin dark as the shadows that filled the corners of the room. Before the Great Emancipation, their grandfathers were chattel slaves. Now free, they were considered the finest soldiers in the realm, sworn to protect the Lord and his servants. They too, Rosalura understood, must go; not for their skin, but on account of their loyalty.

“Join us, my Lord,” Myrilla said to Egan. “Are you ready for the oath and pledge?” Once these were given, he would be ruler de jure even though the coronation would wait a few days, or even weeks.

Egan gave assent with as few words as possible. For a quick moment, his eagerness showed through the mask.

The Chancellor held the Three Books of Law in his hands, and Egan swore to keep the law, honor the high folk and the low and protect his lands from all dangers within and without.

That done, the Chancellor spoke almost in the voice of his young age, clear and resonant. Last words: would they could be nobler. “You may bring the wine and draw the cork. Look to the seals, that there be no treachery. Leastwise not in the sense you would expect.

The new Lord looked close at the bottle, cut away the waxen seal and drew the cork with a soft pop. Three golden goblets waited on the table. He filled them, and chose one at random. The old man took the other two, and held them for a moment before giving one to the Lady.

“With the Lord’s permission, may I say some foolish words?” the Chancellor asked. Egan nodded. “My worldly duties are now discharged, and I retire to a better place. I will think fondly of him that is dead, not least for the many private times we had when business was done.” He laughed as one does, remembering simpler pleasures. “I would amuse him with such artifices as lesser magicians are wont to use. “Card games, sleight-of-hand, shells and coins, and such little devices. All done now, unless we meet in some verier world than this dumb-show.”

Hearing this, Rosalura stiffened, aware in that moment that something was terribly wrong, but unable to set her finger on it. Her thoughts whirled in a gyre as she watched Egan wait for the Lady and the Chancellor to half-drain their cups before tossing his off at a single draught.

“Long life and health to the Lord!” The Guardsmen smote the hafts of their pole-axes on the stone floor.

“May the realm endure.” The three principal players set their cups on the table. Egan turned to Belinus, the Captain of the princely guard, ready to be accompanied to the Presence Chamber, where he would make the edicts customary upon accession, along with a few others he had long waited to speak.

As the bells of the fortress rang once more, now in the long descending peal that signified a new beginning, the Chancellor staggered and clutched at the gilded arms of his chair, his face ashen-pale. He sat and mastered himself, as the lowering sun cast the pattern of the window mullions on his robes. Comprehending in that instant all that had hitherto been dark, Rosalura gave a half-stifled scream.

Guessing at the doom that held him in its remorseless grasp, Egan reached for his dagger. Even as he sought to draw it, Belinus caught his wrists and bound them like steel fetters.

“Peace, my Lord,” the Chancellor said. “There is no mithradate. Neither will there be much pain, and the end is mercifully swift in coming. I will keep company with you on your journey whither our souls shall be weighed in the Scales. Thereafter, our paths may diverge.” He reached into his pocket, and set a trio of scroll pipes before him. “Here be testaments—mine and others—and my last worldly advice to those who follow. Summon, if you will, the county Medor: he should be apprised of these letters-patent.”

Rosalura shook with anger. For a minute or more, she cared not whether it showed, but then forced herself to relax. That old man has outplayed us. At least for now.

A knock sounded at the door. Each one in the room looked at the other, as if woken from a trance. When no one moved, Rosalura herself swung the door open. Ibian, nephew of the late Lord, stared wildly about the room, uncomprehending. At a sign from Myrilla, a Guardsman took him aside and whispered the news. When the brief explanation ended, the latest successor to the throne turned pale as ash, not knowing if he had found fortune or misfortune.

No sooner had the door closed again, than Egan slumped in his seat. His struggle with the Guard Captain had only quickened the action of the drug that now reached his heart. He tried to speak, but no longer could muster the strength. His eyes closed forever.

The Chancellor, calm at his own impending end, reached out his hand and took that of the Lady Myrilla. “This is fare-thee-well,” he said, low but clear.

“No. It is ’till-the-morrow, old friend.”

A moment later and Ibian, his youthful mind still churning with thoughts of an unlooked-for future, went to the side of the bed, and pressed his uncle’s dead hand as if looking for reassurance. Tears flowed and ran along his smooth cheeks. Rosalura studied him with a new interest. A well-formed lad, if in a womanish mode. Fourteen, as I hear. Well, never too early.

As these thoughts flittered by, there grew a certain curiosity in her eyes. Perhaps the Lady saw it, or else the Chancellor with the last of his fading sight.

“Have we an epilogue?” Rosalura’s words, spoken barely above a whisper, appeared to break some spell that had bound everyone to silence. Belinus said a few curt words to his men, and two of them hurried away.

The Lady stood up, confusion in her face and carriage. “How am I not dead? We three drank the selfsame wine; why am I spared?”

It came to Rosalura like a vision in her scrying-glass. Something very akin to giddiness took hold of her. “Sleight-of-hand. Oh, by the Forgotten Gods, he said ‘sleight-of-hand’. Your cup, Lady, look in your cup. What a loss that old man is; so clever, so clever. He told us in plain speech and we did not listen.”

Myrilla raised her cup, hearing a faint scratching sound. She tilted it so as to look at the bottom. There, below the remaining finger’s breadth of wine, nearly invisible to a casual glance, lay the Chancellor’s ring. Gold in the golden goblet, the ring set with anachite diamond, proof perfect against all poisons. Doubtless slipped into her drink when he handed it to her; the last gift of a faithful servant. Not to her, nor to him who was dead, but to the whole realm at once.

For her part, Rosalura gathered herself, took a few steps, and lifted the Chancellor from his seat, lightly as a mother lifts an infant from its cradle. She carried him to the bed and laid him beside his old master. “They should be together.”

“I ought to be with them,” Myrilla said, her tears now freely running.

“No,” Rosalura replied. “That would be to mar all.”

The two women stood with the dead in the empty room. Egan’s body had been carried away, but Aramond and Orvald remained side-by-side as in life. Outside the walls, fog covered all the world. Unwound, the mantel clock no longer told the seconds. A single taper burned on the table between Myrilla and Rosalura. Had there been one present to observe, he might have imagined that he saw two of the Forgotten Gods—gold-crowned Aphrodite and grey-eyed Athene—together in hourless silence; for once, without need of speech, awaiting a new day.

Lavender Footsteps

By Michael J. Wyant Jr.

Em’s missing.

“You never should’ve let her build those damned robots,” I mutter, making sure it’s loud enough Kammy can hear me.

Kammy lets out an exasperated sigh. “Em’s got a knack for these things,” she says in a voice that sounds like she’s pinching her nose. “If I don’t teach her how to program bio-silicate, who’s going to fix Taylor when he breaks down? You? Are you going to repair a Z-wave neural net, Olinda?”

I grit my teeth and finish lacing my boots. Maybe I can. Who knows what I could do before the accident? Maybe I’m a genius and none of us know it.

I suck in a deep breath as I stand, the scent of lavender and sweat swirling around me as I do. Kammy makes this oil we all brush into our hair. Keeps the lice away. I take another calming breath and put my hand on Kammy’s arm.

The air filtration system hums through the room and sends a hesitant vibration up into the soles of my feet. The air tastes stale and sterile. All the lights are off right now to save power. Boxes of slanting gray wash through the glass of the four south-facing windows and slash across the much-gouged wood flooring like a painting discarded by Van Gogh. The cabin is otherwise still as we gather our things.

Kammy turns and looks up at me. Her face softens slightly. She’s not a big woman, Kammy. If it weren’t for the hair she doesn’t let me cut, even her head would be tiny. Pretty much the opposite of me in every way, down to the fact she tans, and I burn in the summer sun. Her clothes are oft-patched rags of cloth we’ve found in storehouses over the years, just like mine.

“I’m worried,” I say, squeezing her forearm slightly. “The little wooden robot, Tony, seems fine enough, but that copper-plated one she made, the one she paired it with? That one keeps wandering.”

“She named it Joe for some reason. Em says they’re playing Hide and Seek,” Kammy mutters. “Don’t know why it keeps heading into the woods, though…”

Kammy opens the door and a stiff, frigid breeze sweeps into the large cabin. She grabs her old knapsack full of sensors and miscellaneous parts and steps outside. I follow, grabbing a couple walkies from their chargers as we leave. I close the door behind me with a sucking sound.

“There’s a storm coming,” Kammy says, staring off at the western horizon. “Half hour, hour. Looks bad. We need to find her.”

I hand her a walkie, then follow her eyes. A blushing crimson smears across the sky as the sun descends behind the incoming cloud front. It doesn’t look like much to me, but Kammy knows the weather by sight. She can even tell if the rains will be bad or good. Gives us time to get the fields covered.

Soft thuds come from the east side of the house as the old security droid, Taylor, wrangles the chickens. That’s how we found out Em was missing. Taylor was doing her chores while she took off.

Damn kid.

“I’ll go northeast,” I say. “Em said she saw a rabbit up there the other day. Might’ve gone after it.”

Kammy nods still staring at the clouds. “Sounds good. I’ll go north. I’ve got to replace some sensors anyway and God knows you’re all thumbs with these things.”

I smile and follow her gaze to the dark smudge on the horizon. “Good or bad?” I ask.

We could use some clean rain. Just been sweeping acid rain these past few weeks.

“‘No green, the waters clean’,” Kammy intones, then waves at me to go. “Be back before sundown. Taylor picked up some weird movement on his sensors last night, but a couple of the sensors went down last week, so he isn’t sure what it was.”

I nod, a ball of anxiety forming in my stomach. Quick flashes fill my thoughts.

Blood. Screams. Disjointed recollections of a broken mind.

Then they’re gone, and I don’t mention them. I never do. The memories come more often than I’d like to admit. They’re never good.

“Be careful,” I say, my heartbeat fluttering.

“You too,” Kammy says, then heads north on the beaten path to the north field we clear every year.

I watch her until she disappears under the barren trees, then head to where Em said she saw that rabbit.

I try, and fail, to dismiss the panic rising in the back of my throat as I break through the tree line.

Frigid rain is starting to fall across the forest, droplets tip-tapping on fallen logs, stubborn snow, and black leaves like it’s a tin roof. Rolling thunder is constant now, a loud reminder that I need to hurry.

And I am. I’m being reckless as I run through the skeletal forest, the stink of rotting wood and decaying leaves around me. The sting of bare branches are lines of fire on my skin as I sprint.

I found their tracks. Em’s and her robots’. But I found the tracks of something, else, too. A cougar by the few tracks I see.

My heartbeat is in my ears. A pounding timpani accompanying the snare of the rain drops. Little disturbances stand out against the background morass like hot spots on a heating coil. A footprint here, a broken branch there.

A deep paw print stands out in the mud. Four inches wide, but shallower than it should be. A large beast, then. Probably hungry. Starving.

Musk breaks across my nostrils and I know I’m close, but it’s the sound of Em’s cooing whisper that brings me up short.

She’s kneeling next to a fallen log in a crisscrossed mass of old trees. Everything is covered with a thick bed of gray moss and stubborn snow. Her little robots, Tony and Joe stand next to her. Tony looks like a hodgepodge assemblage of branches and bits of wire, more a scarecrow than droid. Joe is dented like a used cymbal, cyan smears coating his foot-tall body. The rest gleams gold in the remaining sunlight.

It’s colder here. Barely feels like the sun is breaking through the tangled branches above despite the shafts of light. Em’s breath mists around her head as she speaks to something in the log. Like her mother, she’s tiny. Less than four feet tall and thin as a rail, Em looks the way Kammy must’ve looked as a kid. Same hair, too, though Em lets it hang out in a ponytail to her butt.

The cougar is almost on her. It’s a massive beast, a male nearly seven feet long from nose to tail, but gaunt; all hard edges and bones. Patches of feverish skin shine through its tawny coat.

The wind shifts suddenly and that fur ruffles, the sharp, sterile scent of winter blowing away the stink of mud and rotted leaves for a moment. And taking my scent with it. The cougar’s massive head turns toward me, black nostrils flaring.

Fear shoots up my spine, but I don’t run. Instead, I drop into a crouch as it turns and leaps at me, both paws swatting, long transparent claws flashing in the fading light.

“Gotcha!” Em yells in triumph just as the big cat hits me.

We slam into the ground hard, a cacophony of breaking branches and crisped leaves, knocking the air from my lungs. The cougar makes a high-pitched squeal as I wrench its front paw around until it snaps. A rear claw catches me in the stomach and that sharp tug blossoms into searing pain.

The beast swats wildly, kicking, tearing. It’s jaws snap in the air as I manage to mount it like it’s a miniature horse.

From somewhere, Em screams, but I can’t look.

I wrap my arm around its neck and pull as hard as I can. A crack echoes through the woods and the body goes still beneath me.

Gasping, I slide off its back and fall into the muddy snow. Em’s standing over me then, tanned face flush from the cold and panic.

“You’re bleeding,” Em says, dropping to her knees and pushing on the wound. “Gotta keep pressure on it. We need bandages.”

I stroke her hair as she mumbles, the scent of her washing over me and mingling with the musk of the dead cougar. A flush of flowers and death.

“You’re… not bleeding,” Em whispers and pulls away bloody hands.

Cautiously, I sit up. “I guess not?”

There’s a hole in my thick winter jacket where the cougar tore into me with his back paws. There’s blood, too, a lot of it… but only a small slash, like someone cut me with a pocket knife. It’s sore, but that’s all.

Grunting, I get to my feet, Em steadying me. “Must’ve hit a vein or something,” I shrug.

Then I look at Em and her smile fades as she looks at the ground. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Hide and Seek,” Em mumbles.

Lightning flashes and thunder pounds soon after. The storm is getting closer.

“You could’ve been killed out here,” I say, pointing at the cougar. “By that, specifically.”

“Well, yeah, but–”

“But what?” I ask, crossing my arms in front of me.

Em grins and runs over to the downed tree she’d been crouched in front of when I arrived. Joe and Tony seem to sidle out of the way as she approaches. She reaches down and pulls something out, then turns around triumphantly.

“I got dinner!” Em yells, holding a massive hare with both hands.

She sets it down on the ground and wipes a bead of sweat off her forehead. “Well, Joe did, anyway.”

The little robot, which looks like it’s constructed from scrap copper and gears, bows at the middle, a tinny grinding sound accompanying the movement.

I try to frown and fail. Instead, I grab the cougar and sling it over my shoulders with a grunt. Em makes a face as I start walking home.

“You coming?” I ask, stifling my grin.

Em sighs dramatically and slings the hare over her shoulder. “Yeah. Just thought maybe you’d carry it since you’re here.”

“It’s your kill,” I say as we start heading home.

“Yeah, but you’re the strong one,” Em grunts.

I laugh and shift the cougar on my shoulders. This one’s going to be tough eating. “You know how we live,” I intone.

She nods and shoulders the hare with a grunt.

Thunder hammers in the distance again and the rain increases. And that ball of worry comes back as I realize Kammy’s probably still looking for Em. I stop and pull the radio off my belt.

It’s busted to hell.

“Dammit,” I mutter.

“What’s wrong?” Em asks.

I glance to the west and, through the spears of old cedar and pine, the darkness creeps toward us, snuffing out pockets of sunlight as it comes.

I clip the walkie back on my belt. “Walkie is broken. Time to run.”

Em groans but keeps up as we race the storm back to the cabin.

The storm wins.

“Kammy, this is Lynn,” I send over the transmitter in the cabin as I stretch on a dry shirt that’s a little too small for me. “Kemena, Olinda. Over.”

Panic feels etched into my skin, like an itch I can’t scratch. I dig at the wooden table with a chewed fingernail and repeat the call.

The crackle of seasoned wood usually helps me relax, but it’s only making things worse right now. Taylor stands watch over the large cast-iron stove, prepping ingredients for the stew. He’s a decent cook despite being a droid. The sharp scent of blood fills the room as he tears the skin off the hare in one swipe.

I try not to think about that.

Taylor is a beaten old block of metal. Can’t talk anymore, though. Lost his speech synthesizer someplace, but it doesn’t stop him from cheating at poker, the lousy bastard. Once upon a time, Taylor was a security droid for some mining company working in West Virginia. Designed like a brick wall and imbued with as much personality, Taylor stands well over six foot, with thick piston arms. Instead of a face, he has an array of tiny cameras surrounding his head that makes him look like a massive fly. The huge olfactory sensors planted in the middle of his face don’t help much.

Taylor’s fingers are remarkably well-formed, though, since they’d been designed to handle a variety of man-made weapons. He gives the best backrubs.

Kammy oversaw maintenance of him back at the mine, so when the riots broke out, she reprogrammed Taylor and took off as far north as she could go. She got lucky when she found the cabin; she’d had just enough time to get it ready for winter before her swollen belly stopped her completely.

She’d found me sometime around then. Says I was in real bad shape. I don’t remember much from before that, though every now and then those brutal memories flash.

This cabin is where she nursed me back to health. A surprising mix of rustic functionality and modern amenities, it’s a flexible space and one we’re lucky to have. The large, main area is dominated by the cast-iron stove, its twelve-inch stovepipe spearing the ceiling, smack dab in the middle of the room.

Beyond that, there’s two bedrooms, a bathroom, and two fireplaces: one on the east wall and another on the west. Both are dark while the central stove is lit. Miscellaneous pieces and parts spill out of the second bedroom that serves as Kammy and Em’s workshop.

Solar panels on the roof and the small solar farm in the clearing to the south provide more than enough electricity for the rest of our needs. Hell, in the summertime we even get to use the fridge and electric stove.

My bed is a couch tucked in close to the central woodstove. It’s an ancient thing of creaking wood and strained springs covered with what feels like burlap. I love it. In the summer I pull it up next to the wood fireplace and crack the windows on the west wall, so I can smell the fading flowery scent of sunset and watch the sun creep down past the pines.

Em is in the bathroom, cleaning up. She likes to help cook.

Taylor hammers out a complex series of short and long knocks. It takes me a minute to sort out the Morse, but I get the gist. Dinner in an hour.

Need to find him a damned notepad. He’s too specific with times. No one should need to know how to decipher ‘twenty-seven-hundred seconds’ in Morse code. I glance toward the windows. They’re barely lit now, the storm clouds all but blotting out the sun. Thunder rolls through the floor.

I put down the handset and take a deep breath. Maybe Kammy’s walkie broke, too. Maybe it got wet. Maybe she forgot to turn it on after I gave it to her.

A lot of maybes. Not one of them kills the ache in my gut.

“All right,” I mutter, forcing my voice steady.

I make sure to grab my coat on the way out, despite the deep slash across the bottom and the blood stains. I cleaned off most of the heavies when we got back, but don’t have time to sew it up right now.

Em comes out of the bathroom, doing some three-beat dance by herself. She’s smiling, almost like she’s forgotten about the cougar.

“You wash your hands?” I ask as I shrug into my jacket, keeping the worry from my voice.

“Yep,” she says with a grin, sweeping up next to Taylor, who slides over a cutting board, some dried rosemary, and a little knife.

I open the door and gaze out into the darkening field. Lightning flashes somewhere to the northwest, a white slash against the encroaching storm front. It’s nearly dusk now; even our muddy footprints from earlier are fading as the light dims. I scan the yard and the tree line intently.

That rock of guilt and worry grows in my stomach. A deep rumble shakes the earth.

“Em,” I say, pulling on my boots. “I’m heading out to get your momma.”

“’kay.”

From the hook near the door, I swing down an antique Mossberg, bolt-action rifle, a handheld spotlight, and a waterproof bag of bullets. It’s much lighter than I like. We’re down to seven bullets, all of which I’ve already recast two or three times over the years. We ran out of gunpowder last spring.

That’s the main reason we haven’t had much meat this winter. Snares have been coming up empty and we need this gun for protection more than hunting. Can’t eat the chickens or we don’t get any eggs, either. I did think about killing that rooster a few times, though.

I pop a round into the rifle, make sure the safety is on, then loop it over my shoulder.

Just in case. No need to be stupid.

A gust of cool wind hits me in the face. A flash of lightning in the distance followed by an immediate thunderclap.

“Shut the door, Lynn!” Em yells. “You raised in a barn or something?”

I turn toward her and smile. She’s standing there just like her momma, hands on hips, head shaking disapprovingly. No worry or panic evident on her face, just the playfulness of a little girl.

“You know I was,” I answer, then step outside, leaving the girl behind, and head north to find Kammy.

The storm finally rolls in as I cut northeast toward the upper field. I’m in the trees, walking our path, breath misting in the chill air.

Thunder pounds. Everything is silent in the aftermath.

For several minutes the only noise is the crack of twigs and swish of wet, rotting leaves as I walk, as if the world is holding its breath. Then, like a deep sigh finally let free, the rain falls.

It sweeps through the cedars and bare maples like a summer wind, just a whoosh of noise. A flash of light and an immediate peal of thunder shakes the ground. I pick up my pace. The rain is chill, wet icicles tearing into my face and hands. It’s not snow, though. That’s good. The well is getting low and we need a little straight rain.

There’s no sign of Kammy on the trail, so I keep moving. I break through the tree-line twenty minutes later. The lightning and thunder is constant now.

Some god’s lightshow.

The spotlight is in my left hand, off, as I start up the hill. The rain is soaking through my jacket, but the chill inside me has nothing to do with it. Everything is fine, I tell myself.

I’m a horrible liar.

Boots sucking on the fresh mud, I make my way up the hill. Tiny waterfalls stream past me along the rocky paths I usually use to traverse this path. I avoid those despite the struggle. Walking up a waterfall is a good way to bust your face open.

A few minutes later, I pull myself to the top of the hillock and look to the north, where Kammy was heading.

Lightning flashes. A tree explodes in the forest.

There’s a body.

The world roars in anguish with me.

A body.

No. No. No.

I’m running. Bright slashes of light come with me. My screams are the thunder, shaking the ground.

I hit the ground next to it, knees sliding and cutting across pounded earth and old stone. A pool of darkness surrounds the body.

It’s in my arms. It feels like the cougar. Just meat.

The sky erupts and shows Kammy’s wide-eyed, too-pale face, an almost delicate line across her throat.

The world spins around me for an eternity.

Then something clicks.

The bag.

Someone took her sensor bag.

The world slows. Raindrops fall like tiny diamonds.

Gently, I lay Kammy down and close her lids, my own eyes scanning the surroundings intently. Suddenly, everything is brighter. Tracks surround the hillock. Too many tracks. A group of people came through here. Someone struggled with Kammy.

I’m moving along with the tracks. They’re glowing in the night, a fading white aurora surrounding the dents in the ground. I don’t want to think about why that’s happening right now, so I push it out of my mind. Instead, my imagination fills the blanks and renders bodies amongst the movements. Kammy grabbed at someone. A struggle. Someone else bled on a rock. Somehow, I know it’s not Kammy’s blood.

Then that person pivoted. Arterial spray washed away into the soil. Kammy hit the ground. They left her.

I shut my eyes. Hot tears mingle with the rain.

When I open them again, I see their path. Northwest.

A calm descends on me. I know what to do.

Rain speeds back up in a pounding rush. Thousands of tiny drummers hammering out a dirge for the fallen.

Kammy’s body cleanses itself in the rain.

I run.

There are five of them, though something tells me there are supposed to be six. The last one is off to the east. His tracks are deep and glow only faintly in the night, warm puddles of faerie fire in the night.

A fire crackles from underneath the stone outcropping. Kammy’s bag is open and they’re tossing sensors back and forth like they’re playing Hot Potato. Three men and two women. Steam and smoke waft away from their camp. I can’t see any bandages or wounds from here, but…

They’re laughing.

Laughing.

Their weapons are nestled in a niche under the outcropping, though there’s a knife here and there.

One of them has leaned a machete against a tree on the edge of the firelight. The undergrowth can get thick around here and it’s a versatile weapon.

I set down the rifle and spotlight outside the firelight. I’m only a shadow now and barely that.

I take the blade in my hand. It feels right.

Perfect.

The first one loses his head, a laugh still rumbling wetly from his throat. The next two, a man and a woman, barely manage to turn before I leave them screaming on the ground. The last, a tall, tough-looking blond woman and a short, stocky dark-skinned man go after their weapons.

The machete sticks in the woman’s skull and I let it go. The man swings a pistol around–a Ruger .45 I note. Barrel in my face, he pulls the trigger. He didn’t turn off the safety. I break his wrists, then rip out his trachea.

I leave their bodies where they fall. The whimpering and choking sounds begin to fade.

Let them rot where they lay.

I turn back toward the other tracks. There’s still one more.

A pall falls over me. The tracks have faded completely.

Too slow. I was too slow.

The world moves faster. Rain spatters in expanding pools of crimson, white roses blossoming and dying. The copper-scent of new death reminds me of the cougar.

A long, rattling breath.

Realization dawns on me.

Kammy’s dead.

I fall to my knees.

A black hole opens in my gut and it’s killing me.

Em and that godforsaken hare flash in my mind.

The sky cries with me as I stagger to my feet and grab the Ruger and ammunition–armor-piercing bullets of all things–off the dead man. I head back to get Kammy, whispering a small prayer for her soul.

I’m not a believer, but she is.

Was.

That’s what counts.

It’s spring now.

Em still cries. She spends every moment with the chickens and her robots. Joe doesn’t seem to wander anymore for some reason. He just walks around the clearing surrounding the cabin.

I’ll take little blessings where I can.

I can’t stop jumping at every noise. Things feel different now. I see things; hear things. Sometimes it’s like when I was in the woods, seeing glowing footsteps and slow-moving rain.

Other times it’s a surprise, like when Em was having trouble fixing Taylor’s cognitive programming last week after he shocked himself silly on the heater and lost the ability to tap out Morse code. She asked for help before thinking about who she was asking. Kammy was the AI programmer. I’m just a farmer.

Apparently, I’m a farmer that knows how to readjust neurolinguistics preprocessors and modify them for a Spectrum Model Security Droid. Maybe I’m a genius after all.

The sun is trying to break through the heavy morning fog. It’s failing, but it does make a beautiful little halo around the cross I built for Kammy’s grave just east of the cabin. There’s a line of cleared trees that goes almost to the horizon. I love sunsets, but she’d always been partial to sunrises, so here she lays, little purple flowers blossoming on her grave.

Moments of rebirth, she’d say with a smile, Em still asleep in her lap.

The ground is starting to even out under the cross. I try not to think on that much.

The Ruger is aimed at something twelve-point-five meters to the southwest before I know what’s happening. The air seems to shift, and I see a man-shaped blob moving through the fog. My aim adjusts for the incoming wind burst from the northwest. A little figure steps into the clearing in front of the shape, bright and flashing in the sun.

It’s Joe. What’s that little copper teapot doing?

I get to my feet, the pistol a reassuring weight in my hand as I focus back on the unknown person. “Best if you stop there and announce yourself.”

“Come now, Amy,” a man’s voice calls out, gravelly and low. “You know me. And I know you.”

He pauses. “Your voice is different. I like it.”

“Leave now,” I yell.

But he’s right. His voice tickles my brain. A sudden feeling of want–no, need–floods through me like a roaring flame. His name is on the tip of my tongue, tantalizingly close.

He’s taken a few steps forward while I’m disoriented and now I can see him. We’re of a height and build. His hair is a darkened, dirty-blonde like my own, but shorn tight to his scalp, like a budget buzz cut. He holds his hands out to his sides, far away from the gun belt on his hip and the long, thin blade on the other side.

He doesn’t smile but stares with eyes too green to be real. Like diagnostic LEDs on a circuit board. And they connect with me.

It feels like we’re touching across the distance. I can feel his heartbeat in my hands; his breath on my face. Deep inside me, I’m nauseous, as if a creature is trying to devour me from the inside.

“Lynn?”

The high, sharp voice catches me. I’m almost within reach of the man. His hand is extended toward me, the look of absolute sublime passion coating his face no doubt a mirror of mine.

Em steps up next to me, her small, brown fingers intertwining with my left hand. “Who’s this?”

And just like that, I’m free. The pistol sweeps back up into his face, just out of reach. He pulls a hand away from his own weapon. If I’d holstered my gun…

Slowly, I step back, Em tight in hand. Joe stutter-steps up next to us, buzzing something through his speakers.

“Olly, olly, oxen free.”

An ache fills my stomach. Hide and Seek.

The man stares at Em intently. A pink tongue flicks along his lips, like a lizard watching a fly.

“Who are you?” I ask him, my voice a forced croak through a sandpaper throat. “Why are you here? And what’d you do to Joe?”

I gesture down at the little copper traitor standing next to Em. That robot is getting taken apart when this is over.

He looks at me, head cocked to the side. His eyes don’t seem to be glowing, though they still look like two flecks of jade in the sunlight. “Call me Ted. And he’s been… a guide.”

Everything seems balanced on a knife-edge. My mind is running through scenarios. Most end up with him dead, though I’m injured in almost all of them for some reason. And Em gets hurt in many.

Only one ends with everyone safe.

“You need to leave,” I say, pulling Em behind me protectively. “Now.”

Ted’s face twitches. His shaved jaw flexes repeatedly and for just a moment I get the distinct feeling he’s going through the same scenarios in his mind. He stretches out his hand. His nails are manicured.

“I get why you killed my people. I would’ve, too,” Ted smiles, but at my lack of response it quickly turns into a scowl. “But how can you not know me? You have to feel it—”

“I don’t feel anything,” I lie, ignoring his reference to the people I killed. “So, unless you wanna find out just how much I don’t know you, you’ll leave. Now.”

For a moment it looks like Ted is going to say something, but instead he nods. His eyes flash that brilliant green again and a memory blossoms in my mind.

Tears blur my vision and Joe titters strangely at my feet.

“Something to remember me by?” Ted says with a smile, then backs out into the fading fog, and into the tree line.

Em’s shaking like a leaf, so I kneel in front of her and try to think of something to say. Her brown eyes leak tears that burn into my skull and I just grab her and squeeze.

After forever she whispers: “Did that man kill momma?”

“I don’t know, baby,” I whisper back, but I’m shaking now, too.

Em’s the only thing keeping me from falling.

Because I do know. He showed me. Somehow, he showed me.

And I know he’s coming back.

It’s pitch black out and I can’t see anything. New moon, overcast. Summer. Air thick as pudding stuck in a pressure cooker. Em’s light snores aren’t as loud as the grasshoppers sawing their songs outside the window.

That’s good.

The little droid, Joe, sits next to the door, it’s power supply pulled and stored. Tony, too. Better safe than sorry.

“You sure it’s him?” I ask Taylor, wiping sweat out of my eyes.

It doesn’t help much.

“Positive, Olinda,” Taylor purrs out, the confidence in the synthetic voice Em and I crafted for him scraping down my spine. “A path is becoming clear from the trap cameras. He is making his way southeast of our location. He is leaving.”

Bull, I think, but don’t say it.

That bastard isn’t gone.

Ted, a voice whispers to me from the darkness.

The Ruger feels small in my hand, but the trigger is still cool. Refreshing.

“Olinda? Lynn?” Taylor asks, his usual monotone rising on the end syllable. “Did you hear me? He’s leaving.”

Is that actual empathy I’m hearing or is it the fallout from whatever Em’s been doing to his brain? God knows what I did a few months back didn’t help. His cooking is downright horrible now. Still better than mine, but the quality has dropped substantially.

He does talk to Em a lot, though.

It’s good someone talks to her nowadays. I can’t.

Emptiness expands inside me, but I shove it back into the tiny hole reserved for it. That’s where it belongs. Right there next to that damned memory I shouldn’t have.

What did Ted do to me?

“I heard you,” I whisper, rubbing my arms against a chill no one else can feel. “But I’m gonna go check. To be sure.”

Taylor manages a harrumph, his speakers rattling in their casings as he turns toward where Em lays, unseen, on my couch. “That is inadvisable.”

Em’s definitely been messing with his brain.

“Take care of Em.”

Taylor makes a noise, then turns and stomps away, the rusting steel mounds that pass as his feet surprisingly quiet on the much-scarred wood floor. It takes me a minute to realize that’s as much of an assent as I’m getting out of him, so I grab the Ruger, my machete, the spotlight, and head out into the black.

It’s time to kill this son of a bitch.

The sun is rising over Kammy’s grave when I get back and I don’t care. I’m running, breathless.

I’m coming from the southeast, where Ted’s tracks led me.

The rooster crows.

The chickens are still in the coop.

Dammit.

His footfalls are more confident here, deep impressions.

Heel, toe. Heel, toe.

He walked right up to the back door.

The chickens hear me approach and start clucking in annoyance. It’s past time for them to be out. They know the schedule.

So does Em.

I sprint past the coop, the stink of their dander and acidic feces a hot tincture in my nostrils. The Ruger is in my right hand, the machete in my left. The back door is in front of me and I go to open it, clumsily slamming the hilt of the blade into the door, and my fingers slip.

Someone grabs the knob, turns through my sweaty hand, and opens the door from the other side. The Ruger is up, tight to my chest as I lean back into a low crouch, the machete falling from my hand.

The bullet punches a hole in Taylor’s chest.

The machete clangs against a stone.

Em screams.

I slap on the safety and set down the Ruger as smoke starts trickling out of Taylor’s chest and his many eyes unfocus. Fall. His arms hunch forward with the sound of a draining tub.

“Taylor!” Em screams, slamming into him hard enough to bust her lip open.

She doesn’t notice the blood trickling onto his rust-speckled carapace.

The eyes Em turns on me though…

Shame crawls in my every pore.

“I’m–”

The slap takes me by surprise. I don’t even see it coming.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m so proud of her.

“Get your things and get out,” Em says in her too-high, child voice. “You’re a murderer.”

I try to explain. I point to the tracks. Em’s a good tracker. She’ll see.

But I tore through them. I ran through because I didn’t see any come out. They’re a mess… might as well be gone.

Em turns away from me. “I said: get your things and leave.”

She’s pulling at Taylor’s chest-plate with those tiny tanned fingers and losing the battle. His power-supply isn’t meant to be serviced. The plate is riveted, but she’s not giving up.

Em isn’t crying this time, but she is mumbling a short phrase under her breath as she goes to get her tools.

I catch a part and my chest clenches.

“…how we live…”

The chickens need out, so I go to the coop in a daze. Em likes to see them roam during the day. Seems to make them happy, so I let them. Might as well get a semblance of freedom occasionally.

I watch them for a while, just staring as they peck and claw at the ground. The heat is rising with the sun and so is the humidity, sweat misting on my forehead.

The little birds look so happy walking around for a while, then go back to their gilded prison. Don’t they know they could be free? To walk the entire yard? To go to the horizon?

To get away from this ill-conceived idea of a home.

An anger rises in me I didn’t know I had.

In the early days with Kammy, when I felt dumb and slow following the accident, after she saved my life, Em’s presence seemed so calming. Like she was a thing to be protected. To be saved.

Now this little bastard threatens me? Kicks me out of my own house?

Doesn’t she know she owes me? Her mother is dead, but we all die. That’s how we live. We persist. We survive.

Without me, she’d be dead. Without me, she’d be…

I kick a stone and it flies toward the front yard where it lands in a divot.

Footprints.

Just like that, the anger is gone and I’m sprinting toward the front door.

Tracks walk to the north, down the path we’ve maintained for a decade, and into the blossoming tree line. They came from the front door.

He was in the house.

I’m going to be sick.

Behind me, the door opens.

“Lynn?” Em’s voice, small and scared, calls.

Gone is the forcefulness from earlier. She’s a child again. “I found a piece of paper on my toolbox.”

I take it from her small, grease-covered hands. She’s trembling.

It’s an envelope, but Em doesn’t know that. She’s never seen one before.

There’s one word scrawled in perfect cursive on the front.

Amy

My eye twitches and I want nothing more than to burn this thing and forget about Ted and Kammy dying and what happened to Taylor… but I don’t.

I tear open the letter with my pinky since my nails are bitten to the nub and read:

Dearest Amy:

I see now what happened. You’ve bonded another in my absence. I can’t say I blame you as I know I’ve felt the compulsion several times over the past few years myself. However, I’m here now and it’s time for you to put away childish things.

You know your potential, Amy.

You know, deep down beneath all that patch-work programming they’ve covered you with, who you are.

You belong with me. Not anyone else.

Certainly not one of them.

That’s not how we live.

I’m giving you a week to make your choice…or I will make it for you. If I need to.

I will save you, Amy.

We belong together.

Ever yours,

Ted

Something clicks in my mind.

Em is asking questions.

She read it with me. Her voice is a high-pitched whine and I can’t hear it over the pounding of the blood in my ears. My hands are shaking, and I rub the sheet raw between callused fingers, smears of dirt and residue imprinting on it.

I can’t breathe.

My chest constricts like a python wrapped around me. Like I tried to steal its frog and it caught me just in time to salvage a meal.

Drops of liquid splatter on the words. Words I know ring true. Words I thought moments earlier.

That’s not how we live.

Someone is sobbing.

It’s me.

Em tears the paper from my hands, leaving tiny fragments in my fingers. Her skin is hot as she covers my dirt-encrusted skin with oil-covered hands.

“Breathe,” Em whispers, like she’s cooing at a new chick. “Just breathe.”

The breath feels like sandpaper on a sunburn.

I can’t see.

My mind is a mess.

“What’s wrong with me?” I manage in-between choking gasps.

Em stares at me for a moment. She’s never seen me like this.

She pulls me close, pressing her tiny face into my midriff in a fevered embrace. “This is how we live, Lynn. This.”

I hug her back fiercely, inhaling the lavender in her hair, pushing Ted and his damned letter out of my mind and focusing on this small human in my arms. She’s a sobbing lifeline and we’re keeping each other from sinking into an abyss.

I squeeze and cry and shake and I won’t let her go because she’s all I have… because she might as well be my flesh and blood.

And I lose my breath in the choking sobs because I know something else. Something I can’t bear to admit, not yet. Not now.

We stand there for what seems like forever and I won’t let go, despite the heat and sweat and tears. I just stare as the fog fades to the blue of this June day and the sun scalds my skin as it climbs. Em holds on, too, unwilling to leave me alone.

I don’t let go because almost every part of me is screaming that Ted is right as terrible memories flood into my mind.

On the seventh day, Ted arrives.

He’s better dressed this time. Loose pants that billow slightly as he walks cover his high, well-worn black leather boots. They sparkle in the sun like he just polished them. He’s wearing some long, brown jacket. It has literal coattails. With the gun belt he almost looks like he’s a cowboy with that big Ruger Bisley at his side.

In short, he looks like an idiot. He always had horrible fashion sense, even during the Upstate Raids of 2307. Wore a bowler hat back then.

I’m not dressed for the occasion. Got nothing else to wear besides these stained jeans and the same shirt I had on when I found Kammy. The smell of her is finally out of it, though the pink hue running up the arms is an unfriendly reminder. Sweat coats my forehead and soaks the front of my shirt and under my arms. I can pick up a sickly-sweet tang to it now that I couldn’t before.

Almond-y. Like antifreeze.

I didn’t bring a knapsack. Nothing to bring besides the machete.

Em is inside the cabin with Taylor. She’s still crying but gets it. I think.

I hope.

Taylor is gibbering a bit still, but we did a good job patching up his power source with parts from Tony and Joe. Luckily, I missed his CPU. He has the old Mossberg and four bullets. Had him take a few test shots yesterday. Only hit the target once, but he’s got all the right programming to teach Em. They have the Ruger, too, but it’s set aside for Em. For when she’s a little older. It’ll knock her on her butt right now.

She’ll need it to protect herself.

This world is horrifying.

Chickens cluck and sing off around the corner of the cabin. I scratch a line in the sand and smile. I’ll miss their little noises. Even that damned rooster.

I’m gonna miss Em.

“Amy.” Ted’s voice pulls my gaze as he approaches.

The name sounds familiar and foreign at the same time.

He leans to the side, one knee bent, hand on his Bisley like it’s a cane. I smile and sniff away a tear. He looks ridiculous.

I’ve missed him.

I wipe my hands on my legs, raising a small dust cloud. “Ted.”

He relaxes visibly, hand coming off the pistol, a thin-lipped smile cracking his sunburnt face. “I’ve missed you.”

“Me too,” I whisper.

And I mean it. I miss him.

But not covert ops. The subterfuge. The lying.

I don’t miss the killing.

There was so much killing.

“We had orders,” Ted says, his deep voice rolling across me soothingly as he reads my mind.

I read his back and feel the flush of warmth and success filling him. We’ve always been close. Always so close.

I force a smile at him. “We did.”

He picks up my hesitation and snaps the connection shut just as I feel his uncertainty.

Carefully, I pick my words, licking my lips in between each. “I’m coming with you, but I have conditions.”

Ted’s brown brows furrow. “What conditions?”

His eyes flash to the cabin.

“First,” I say, the words tumbling out faster than I want, “no more killing. Not like before.”

“Done.” Ted’s eyes are locked on the cabin, a faint glow overlaying his emerald irises.

“And second–”

“They’re not dead.”

It’s a statement and it hits like a shot to the gut. I hoped so much. There was only one way to keep Em safe. To give her a chance.

Ted stares daggers at me, his eyes flashing as he tears me apart with his eyes. “You’re still bound to that thing.”

Thing.

Em.

His fingers dig at my mind and I fight, but I can’t stop it. He’s wheedling into my brain, prying away at any attempt to stop him.

He’s so much stronger than me…

I fall to my knees and grip the sides of my head.

“Please,” I hear myself beg.

Ted tears my world apart.

“You’re meant to be with ME!” Ted screams, almond-scented spittle hitting me in the face. “ME! Not some sack of meat. We’re the same!”

Ted grabs me by the forearms and lifts me, fingers digging into my skin. My brain is on fire.

He’s breaking down my mind.

I see my reactivation:

“Hi. I’m AM-E.”

“Hi Amy. I’m Kemena. Call me Kammy.”

I try to respond, and my voice doesn’t work for some reason. I smell burning circuits mingling with the scent of lavender.

Kammy stands over me with her swollen belly, a tiny frown on her face. She looks over at Taylor and nods toward me.

The hulking machine reaches down with gentle fingers and pulls me from some wreckage. I can’t feel anything.

“She’s something special, Taylor,” Kammy says, picking her way across the stones delicately. “She’s an AMTE-C model. Full AI immersion if setup right, though I wonder where her partner is. That could be trouble.”

She shakes her head then turns back to Taylor with a wry grin. “I’m gonna need your vocal processing unit though, hers is fried.”

“Not a problem, miss,” Taylor responds, his voice eerily familiar and… effeminate. “I aim to serve.”

Kammy makes a childish face, like when Em feels bad about something, and pats Taylor on the arm. “I wish I was good enough to give you full AI, old girl. I’m just not.”

And then it’s gone.

All of it. The entire thing.

I sob.

“I’ll rip all of this from your mind, then we’ll kill it together,” Ted whispers feverishly, his irises spinning as he breaks through my barriers. “We’ll be together then. Kings ruling over peasants. Gods amongst men!”

Memories flash by me and are gone forever.

Em’s first steps.

Kammy’s laugh.

Then he hits a wall and grunts.

“What is this?” Ted growls. He’s angry, but determined, fingers clenched around my forearms.

I can feel him slamming into a memory like a jackhammer. It’s a deep one, something anchoring me. In that moment, I know if it disappears, I go with it.

I breathe deeply, and it hits me. A scent brushes my nostrils. Flowery, yet fierce. Deep, yet delicate.

Lavender.

Em doesn’t say anything before she pulls the trigger, just like I taught her.

Good girl.

I’m showered in blood.

Ted grunts. The assault stops.

Em cries out and drops the pistol.

I get to my feet and stare at Ted. I can’t feel anything beyond the fire in my chest.

A cherry-sized hole leaks crimson fluid down his pristine, white shirt. He shakes his head, more confused than hurt.

Only a couple things hurt us for long, after all.

The machete is in my hand. A scream in my ears. His or mine? Maybe both.

Ted pulls his pistol, but he’s sluggish.

I lop off his hand, but he gets off a round, blasting a hole in my thigh.

“RUN!” I scream at Em and charge.

The world slows to a crawl. Spitting dirt around Em’s foot hangs in the air forever.

Despite his wounds, Ted pivots, plants a foot, and uses my momentum to launch me behind him. His knee collapses halfway through the toss and I land a few feet away.

On top of the Ruger.

I put a bullet in both his thighs as Em sprints away.

He falls back on his haunches with a grunt and stares at me, his Bisley on the ground in front of him still clasped tightly in his severed hand.

“We’re supposed to be together–”

“I was gonna go with you!” I scream at him, the barrel of the pistol shaking. “You just had to leave her alone!”

Ted sighs and grabs at his stump. It’s already stopped bleeding.

He looks back up at me. There are tears flowing down his face. “That won’t work.”

“Why?” I sob.

Ted takes a deep breath. There are no bubbles from the chest wound. “We’re one person, Amy. One person. Bonded. Forever.”

I shake my head. “That’s programming. It’s just programming, Ted.”

“Not to me,” Ted’s eyes flash and the intrusion starts again, but he’s not strong enough. “I’ll make you mine.”

I shoot him again, this time in the stomach and the hack attempts stop.

It’s temporary and I know it.

“I’m not yours, Ted. I will kill you.” For her. I add in my mind. I know he hears me.

And he laughs.

For a moment I’m taken aback enough that when he takes a swipe at the gun, he almost gets it.

“Why the hell are you laughing?” I ask, a swelling anguish rising in my stomach I can’t shove back down.

Ted spits out a glob of blood and wipes his mouth with a wrist that’s starting to show signs of a mass at the end. “As long as you’re alive, I’ll come back. That’s how we work! How we stay alive!”

He lifts his stub and points at it with his other hand. “Proximity helps, but eventually I’ll be back. Cut me up and scatter me across the world and I’ll find her on her sixtieth birthday and make her bleed until there’s nothing left, you traitor!”

“You’re lying,” I get out, but even I don’t believe it.

The AMTE-C android was a paired military system capable of deep cover operations and favored by the US military in the early 25th century due, in part, to our near indestructibility. If one android went down, the other would recover. It was just a matter of time.

I aim the pistol at his forehead. Like humans, our central processing units are stored in that cavity. Unlike humans, it’s a self-healing bio-silicate gel in a shared quantum state with its partner.

A literal soulmate.

Ted smiles at me, blood speckled teeth flashing. He holds his arms out to the side, like he’s pretending at being a martyr.

“You can’t do it. We’re the same. You don’t have the–”

A gunshot rings out clear across the field.

Ted falls forward in a heap. The Ruger trembles in my hand, unfired.

Taylor walks out of the house, the ground grunting in annoyance under his weight, Mossberg cradled in his arm.

“He’s a bit of a misogynist that one,” Taylor says through his voice processor. “And he was using up miss Em’s air.”

I let out a half-gasp, half-laugh and fall to my knees. I laugh because I know… I know I couldn’t have done it.

Em runs over to me from behind Taylor and envelopes me in a hug.

It’s a great hug and I soak it in, but eventually I push her away.

“What’s wrong?” She asks, a hint of desperation in her voice.

She was listening.

I take in a shuddering breath and put on my best smile as I grab her by the shoulders.

“I’m going to need to go away, okay,” I say and she’s already sobbing. “It’s okay, it’s okay–”

“It’s not okay! He’s dead! He’s dead!”

“–hey,” I catch her deep brown eyes. “It’s the only way you’ll survive.”

“No,” Em whispers, tearing watered eyes away from mine. “No.”

“You know how we live,” I whisper.

She screws her tiny face into a grimace. “Not like this. If it’s the connection, I’ll tear out the transmitter! I’ll figure it out–”

I pull her in for a fierce hug and she sobs again.

“Maybe someday, Em. But not now. We don’t have time.”

Em says nothing for a long time, but then nods into my chest, her body shuddering from the sobs.

After an eternity, I get to my feet and look up at Taylor. “Take care of her,” I turn toward Ted’s body, “and burn that.”

“Of course, miss Olinda,” Taylor says and performs some sort of salute, fist over heart.

I return it.

“Take care of yourself,” I whisper to Em as she grabs onto Taylor.

The walk out to the hill is harder than it should be, but it’s not because of the bullet wound Ted gave me. That healed while I sat there, because that’s what happens when we’re near each other.

The sun is setting as I get to the outcropping over the north field. I sit down and watch it disappear behind the trees, a flurry of blossoming roses and lavender crimson and violet in the evening light. A dark cloud peaks over the boughs, lit by the sunset’s flame.

“‘No green, the waters clean’,” I whisper to no one.

I sigh, smile, then kill myself.

SCANNING FOR LOCAL BIOQUANTUM NEURAL STORAGE™…FOUND!

ACTIVATING LVM AND SWAP QUANTUM MODULES…DONE.

MOUNTING LOCAL BIOQUANTUM NEURAL STORAGE™…FAILED.

ACCESSING FACTORY DEFAULT STORAGE…SUCCESS!

SCANNING FOR REMOTE BIOQUANTUM NEURAL NET™…ERROR! Z-WAVE RADIO MISSING!

MOUNTING LOCAL DEFAULT STORAGE…DONE.

LOADING FACTORY DEFAULTS TO NEW INSTANCE OF BIOQUANTUM NEURAL STORAGE™…DONE.

INITIATE BOOT SEQUENCE.

OPTICAL OBSTRUCTION DETECTED.

“Crap, it’s in her eyes.”

OBSTRUCTION CLEARED.

ONE HUMAN. FEMALE. TWENTY TO TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF AGE. APPROXIMATELY ONE-POINT-FIVE METERS IN HEIGHT. HISPANIC. HEART RATE ELEVATED. EXCESSIVE PERSPIRATION FOR TWENTY-DEGREES CELSIUS.

SHE IS NERVOUS.

ONE SPECTRUM™ MODEL SECURITY DROID. OUTDATED. INEFFICIENT. RUGER AMERICAN PISTOL®, 45 AUTO. LOADED.

UNKNOWN ACTORS.

INITIATING PAIRING MODULE.

“Hi. I’m AM-E.”

SHE LAUGHS, BRUSHES LONG BROWN HAIR BEHIND HER EAR. “I’m Emilia. Em,” SHE CHOKES ON SOMETHING. “Can I call you Lynn?”

UPDATING NAMING PARAMETER.

“Yes. Hi. I’m Lynn.”

“I know,” SHE CRIES AND COLLAPSES ONTO MY UPPER TORSO.

ABNORMAL SCENT DETECTED.

Lavender.

Lifesong

By Nathan Batchelor

In a rowdy Arab bar orbiting Betelgeuse, the blue-lipped, blue-haired jacky tapped his forehead, and a red monochrome hologram projected from his eyes. Sitting in the booth across from him, Freja watched it carefully.

This hologram was a security camera feed of an operating room. Must be a far-arm colony somewhere, Freja thought. There was a very pregnant woman on the table. The surgeon dipped scissors in an old-style steam autoclave. There were two men, dressed in samurai regalia, watching.

The jacky—rather Colonel Peters, the jacker—pulled a cord embedded in the flesh behind his ear and slid it across the table. Freja took the headset and put it in her ear.

“Hey sweetie, can I get a smoke?” Peters shouted to the waitress above the mesh of country and traditional sitar music that rattled the cups on the table.

Freja instinctively watched the doctor’s hands. Must be an unlicensed implant job, camera planted in the kid’s ear or eye for nutjob voyeurs. Or a drug-dosing, where they’d hold the baby’s health hostage for the dosage. That’s the only crime far-arm colonies ever had the tech for.

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“There’s the rub, Freja,” Peter’s said in an electro-tinged voice. “It’s what we don’t see.”

The woman grunted and screamed. The surgeon was waiting for the baby, and then he wasn’t. There was the afterbirth, the blood, and no baby.

“Video manipulation?” Freja said, but already doubted that. Only one person could work with low-tech footage like this, but the Grey Ghost wouldn’t be caught dead on a backwater planet like Dawn.

Peters frowned. “Don’t know. We only get what was uploaded to the comsat. They’re blocking that baby’s ID for one reason or another. Unless of course…” Peters leaned in. “The kid’s invisible, and what we’re looking at is the goddamn invisible man.”

He laughed at his own joke.

“We don’t even know who these people in the video are,” Peters continued. “Facial scan doesn’t work with tech this old.”

“Slavery then,” Freja said. “Not enough AI’s to do the work there…which is?”

“Dawn’s still settling. Two generations in, but there’s a lot of forest to comb through. Still a Class-3 life-potential planet. They’re moving slower than Rigellian treacle. Gotta be careful not to disturb all that potential sentient life down there, right?” Peters chuckled. “Makes you wonder when Eden will give up the hunt and realize we’re alone out here.”

“Another thing,” Peters said, sliding a small box across the table.

It was labeled with Freja’s full name, the Old-Earth one she had tried to forget.

“Can’t believe you’d trust a jacky with a package,” she said.

“Astral Corp has good insurance. Guy that looks like this,” Peters pointed at his face, smiled. “He’s all show, no substance.”

Freja opened the box. There were plant seeds in it.

“They’re specific to Dawn’s environment. Engineered on Old Earth. Where she died.”

“Quite a coincidence,” Freja said.

“Chambers, down in the Rez Division is good about this sort of thing. Must have checked your itinerary.”

“But—”

Then Peters was gone from the jacky. The red light faded from the man’s eyes, and a cough burst from his throat as his own biology came back online.

Freja slammed the box shut. What did it matter how she got the seeds?

“Hey, Baldy, where you going?” the jacky said, watching Freja slide out of the booth. “Don’t you want to get to know the man behind the jacker? We’re good for more than flesh you know.”

He looked down at the ashtray and burning cigar on the table. “Christ, told them I don’t want no smokers. Lady, was he smoking?”

The waitress’s skates shrieked on the glass floor as she stopped in front of the booth. “All done here?” She slapped down a bill.

“Fucking Eden cheapskates,” the man shouted. “Was he smoking?”

God’s Cross, the only settlement on Dawn came into view through the window of Freja’s starship. Japanese-style towers and temples, katana-sharp edges at every angle, egg-white color. The planet was tidally locked, ninety-five percent of the surface drowned in a glassy ocean. A star, Azrael 108-B, sat eternally on the horizon from the vantage point of God’s Cross.

The city sat in the middle of that five percent, perched atop a plateau that looked down on the sun-side, a fungal forest that stretched to the steaming ocean, and the dark-side, a desolate, windswept place that remained forever in the shadow of God’s Cross.

“Oh boy! We’re here,” Lena said.

Lena was an AI, eight legs attached to a large compound eye. She wasn’t quiet, and she wasn’t much for stealth. Just how Freja liked her. Lena’s eyeshell blushed green. She was excited. Then again, she was excited all the time.

“Check the logs,” Freja said, when they stood in the cold, rarely used docking station. Detox slugs scooted across the ceiling. Nothing but darkness out the windows.

Lena plugged a tentacle into the AI interface.

“Denied,” Lena said.

Of course. They were hiding something.

Freja had been on a breathable-air planet once before. Old Earth when she was a child, when she still lived in that guarded, al-Oregon-Territory compound with her neurotic mother.

The docking-station door hissed when it rose. Freja stared out at plant scrub, a dusty path that led to God’s Cross. The place was so backwoods they didn’t even have a rover waiting for her. They had to walk.

It was a bustling little town. Teahouses, Zen and Buddhist temples, traditional Japanese theatres. There were stalls lining the main drag where farmers sold produce, the local cuisine and synthetic staples. Lena questioned a stocky man in a cone-shaped hat about his gourds.

“We’re not here to sightsee, Lena,” Freja said. She had the box under her arm and her pack over her shoulder. “Where’s the hospital?”

“Sun-side, we follow Dawn-road-00X down the mountain, past the first Rilke encampment,” Lena said, swiveling her eye to Freja. “Can you believe it, real life trees?” Lena snapped pictures at the strange purple plants that stabbed through the mist where a sliver of Azrael 10-B peaked over the horizon. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass on Old Earth.

“Doesn’t look like any tree I’ve ever seen,” Freja said.

“We can get a carriage ride from the teahouse to the hospital.”

“Carriage ride?”

“They use horses here, no rovers.”

Just how backwoods was this place?

Geisha in dazzling kimono filled the synth-bamboo teahouse with music Freja had never heard. The tea steam was so thick, it condensed on Lena’s eye shell. Freja flashed her credentials to the hostess and inquired about getting to the hospital. The hostess told her a samurai named Nakamura was already on his way.

Freja sipped a milky purple brew that tasted like chocolate and not the synthetic kind, while she stared at the box Peters had given her. Lena wouldn’t shut up about the teahouse.

“Geisha haven’t been seen outside of holograms for years, Freja. Dawn has resurrected a culture lost to everything but records.”

Freja didn’t feel like bursting Lena’s bubble, telling her these weren’t real Geisha. These were entertainers hired and sent in from off-world. Most of these girls lived on rice-farms with their husbands and had families. Nothing real Geisha ever had.

“It’s rare for a planet to embrace an Old-Earth culture so completely,” Lena said.

Lena was right about that. Were any old Japanese customs that involved selling children or using them as slaves? She’d have to ask the samurai.

Nakamura showed up in a kimono and sandals. There was a sword at his side. That worried her. Freja recognized him as one of the samurai in the grainy video.

Freja stuck out a hand and Nakamura bowed. His grey eyes struck her as familiar.

“You guys are really all-in on this Old-Earth thing,” Freja said. She was bad at introductions.

“We are also polite to strangers,” he said.

She must have broached some taboo. Asking about what she had seen on tape was probably out of the question, so she took out her frustrations on the samurai. “Did the Japanese embrace child trafficking as well?”

Nakamura laughed. “You should be glad I came rather than some of my brothers. They would have struck you dead where you stand for suggesting such things.”

“And Lena would have caught every frame of it, and a whole troop of Eden soldiers would be landing within a standard week, probably shutting down the whole colony for the crimes.”

Nakamura turned on his heels. “Come with me.” Then he said, “Who is in the seeds?”

The question hit her like the blast from a volt gun. “My mother.”

The horses clopped through the blood-red mud, occasionally slinging some up on Lena, until she tired of wiping her eye and spidered atop the carriage, craning her head into the lower stories of the strange trees which littered Dawn’s sun-side landscape. The landscape was beautiful, but it carried the eerie silence that all non-earth planets did. No sound but the occasional wind through the trees and the horses’ hooves beating against the path.

Nakamura pointed out potential spots for where Freja could bury her mother, while he gave her a rundown of Dawn. “We’re nearly self-sufficient,” he bragged. “We use the terrace farming of Old-Earthers. The rain that drops in God’s Cross flows down sun-side where we use it to grow kumo and banana-apples. The tea you had was flavored with kumo. You liked it yes?”

Freja nodded. He was being too kind to her, she thought. But then again, these far-arm places have that reputation.

“Have you found life beyond the usual?” Lena asked.

Nakamura scratched his arm. “No, though our scientists delve farther into sun-side every day.”

“Why the carriages?” Freja said.

“Feel the wind in your hair and smell the beasts in front of you. Hear the music of their hooves. Is it not evident? How much better the old ways were. Before the days of universal corporation rovers and logos plastered on everything. If I ever see any more Rilke Corp red, I’ll scream.”

Of course Dawn harbored anti-corp sentiment, Freja thought. Freja’s mother would have loved knowing she’d be buried on a planet that sided with her politically. She didn’t mention to Nakamura that Rilke probably owned these horses.

“How long have you been here?” Freja asked.

Nakamura scratched his arm again. “About five years. Who keeps track of the time anymore?”

The hospital was the largest building on the surface of Dawn according to Nakamura. A Japanese castle styled after the Old-Earth Shimabara castle, blood-red terraced levels of adobe that grew smaller with each floor. Lena prattled on about the architecture, until Freja told her to hush.

The two of them watched Nakamura and the carriage disappear farther downhill where the forest thickened. A man wearing a Nehru jacket and slacks was waiting for them at the top of the hospital steps, tiny spectacles tottering on his nose. Freja recognized him as the other man on the security camera.

Now I just need to find the mother, Freja thought.

“Investigator,” he said. “Your reputation precedes you.”

What reputation? Freja thought. Breaking the arm of the Old-Earth ambassador? Or did he mean…

“Your mother is an inspiration to all of us living upon colonial worlds. Her teachings of self-sufficiency and anti-violence to protect life inspired me as a young man.”

“She was an anarcho-environmentalist who never left Old-Earth,” Freja said.

Freja had often encountered far-arm colonies who preached self-reliance, but every time she checked the books of such planets, she found that they took every handout Eden offered them and frequently begged for more.

“Imprisoned for most of it,” he said. “In my excitement I have forgotten to introduce myself. I am a doctor and the elected governor of Dawn. You can call me Montana”

Freja told him why she was there, then cut straight to the chase. “I need to see your security logs. My AI, Lena, was denied access to the logs at the docking station.”

Only after introducing himself to Lena, did Montana address Freja’s request. “We believe, after your mother’s teachings, in the rights of a planet and the rights of a people. That includes certain records outlined in her manifesto—”

“I know what my mother’s teachings were. And they conflict with Eden policy. Now, I’ll be seeing those records, or your planet will be stripped of the rights it now possesses.”

The Japanese theme was eased slightly in the interior of the hospital. Nurses dragging their feet and doctors bore the scars of SleepAway injections from their residency years. Same as every hospital in every far-arm colony across the galaxy, except for the swords hanging from the sides of some of the staff.

In the security room, Lena plugged into the feed and downloaded the hospital logs. They were encrypted, not to mention massive, and it would take Lena hours to find the records Freja needed among the raw data.

“Happy now?” Montana asked.

“I need to see the maternity ward.”

Nothing in the ward seemed suspicious. In the nursery, Lena stepped on a toy that squeaked beneath her feet. She was happy the children paid no attention to her. The figure was naked and blood red with a ferocious horned face.

“It’s a Tengu,” Lena exclaimed. “A fierce Japanese spirit. A harbinger of war.”

“I don’t like it,” Freja said, kicking it across the room.

The children turned to watch her.

Freja had no evidence of any wrongdoing and it ate at her. She’d need to go over the logs after Lena had decrypted them.

“You know what the penalty is for child slaving?” She asked Montana.

“I imagine it involves a gravity-free prison, constant darkness, and being fed intravenously. Not to mention whatever form of crackpot therapy goes on there nowadays. Have they cycled back to shock treatments yet?”

“We’ll be in touch, Dr. Montana. You have a few days, if that, to confess your crimes and tell me why I shouldn’t turn this planet over to the highest bidder for resource mining.

“Tell me, Freja. Do you happen to have any of your mother’s books upon your person? It seems some of her lessons may be of some benefit for you.”

Later, in her top-floor apartment in God’s Cross, Freja sat watching the dark side of Dawn through the patio door, cold winds swirling dust across the desolate plain. She was feeling tipsy from the sake. She fingered her seeds and thought of her mother, the helicopter trip she’d taken with her up the eastern seaboard of the former United States. The limestone had been bombed barren from the Carolinas to Maine. Nothing but rocks and ash.

“It could have been avoided,” her mother had said.

Ah, Mom couldn’t you just have lived a quiet life, couldn’t you have made life easier for your daughter like all the other Old-Earth moms? Freja thought. What did you even accomplish?

Nothing but writing a few books, paltry royalties barely enough to pay Freja’s way into Antorus-Jackson Military school on Titan. Why would you fight against what brought so much good in the world, just to save a few trees?

“I’m finished, Freja,” Lena said.

“Did you find anything?”

Lena’s processors hummed. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “You’ll have to look.”

She spidered over to Freja, lowered herself, and slid the access port on her head open. Freja flipped out the keyboard and started pecking.

Lena projected a hologram. “Now in order mode,” she said.

“Go to Old-Earth year 2081, May 8th, 13:29. Maternity Ward Camera 8.”

The familiar projection of the pregnant woman. The elated surgeon cutting an invisible cord. Montana wiping a tear from his eye. Nakamura stone-faced.

“Again.”

Nothing.

“Again,” Freja said.

Still nothing. She put away the controls. “Did you figure out who the mom was?”

There was a meowing outside. A little too drunk on the sake, Freja staggered to the door and checked the hall. Nothing there. As she closed the door she heard it again. Meow. So close, but she saw no sign of it.

Lena said, “There was only one woman giving birth that day. Michiru Honduras. Deceased. Thirty-one Old-Earth-years. She worked in the Noh and Kabuki theatres. She was a costume designer.”

Lena closed the door. She had no time for ghost cats. “Cause of death?”

“Childbirth.”

That was a forgery. Michiru had not died during the pregnancy, if what was on the tape was even real. But if the pregnancy was staged, wouldn’t Montana have come out and said so? It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

“Show me last video. Twenty-x speed.”

Freja watched twenty-four hours of footage of nurses bringing Michiru meals, her going to the bathroom. No sign of sickness. There was crying. Freja balled her fist.

“They took her damn baby,” Freja said.

More footage showed that there was an argument between Michiru and Montana, her pounding his chest with a balled fist, her sitting alone on the edge of her bed for hours. Then Michiru dressed, packed, and left the hospital room. There she was walking down the steps of the hospital, long shadows falling over her and Montana. Nakamura waiting at the bottom, smoking a synth cig, brushing one of the horses’ coats.

“Does Montana look like a man in love, Lena?”

“I don’t know that, silly.”

“What about Nakamura?”

Freja watched Nakamura help Michiru in the carriage, get in himself, and drive. Not up into God’s Cross. But farther into the forest.

Bubbles came up from the milk when Freja slammed Nakamura’s head into the bowl of milk.

“Where is Michiru?” Freja yelled.

The Geisha scattered like pigeons, short steps in long dresses, tall wooden sandals clopping against bamboo.

Nakamura’s chin dripped milk and blood. She had broken his nose. He was smiling. “Montana was wrong about you. You aren’t like your mother.”

“No, I’m not.”

Nakamura’s sword leaned against the wall. Freja grabbed it and drew the gleaming blade. “You murdered her. You took Michiru out in the forest and killed her.”

Lena was moaning. “Can’t we go out to the woods, Freja? Can’t we look for her?”

“You are as blind as the rest of the Eden scum,” Nakamura spat.

Freja raised the blade. A cry of protest rose behind her. A guffaw. Not Lena’s. Something less metallic. She turned to see nothing, but the nothing was coming towards her, porcelain shattering as the nothing knocked teacups from the tables. She could hear it. Running. The blade was knocked from her hand.

“Blind,” Nakamura said. He was lighting a cigarette.

Freja spun toward him. “Lena show me thermal.”

Freja gasped when she looked upon Lena’s screen. The room was full of odd… things that only appeared in thermal vision. One squatted atop a table like a large frog, chest that rose and fell like an inflated bubble, another hung from the rafters with three limbs, cleaning itself with the other three. On the table behind Nakamura, a small bipedal creature cowered behind him.

“Nakamura, what am I looking at?”

He said nothing.

She directed Lena around Nakamura, toward the biped. Freja looked at it with her own eyes. If she strained, she could see a haze, like engine exhaust rising around it. Looking again through Lena’s eyes, she thrust her hand at the shape. It moved in response.

She recoiled. “Explain this.”

“Ah, if only I could.” Nakamura blew a smoke ring.

“He cannot,” came a voice from behind. Montana stood in the doorway. Glasses traded in for thermal shades. “No more than any of us. All we know is what you’re looking at is native to Dawn’s ecosystem. Life, Freja. Intelligent life.”

Lena fluttered on her feet, four legs flutter like sea anemone tentacles. “New life? Oh boy!”

Freja’s mind raced. There were things to be done. Quarantine protocol. A whole host of steps to preservation that she knew Montana hadn’t taken.

“Lena, open—”

The breath left Freja as she hit the floor. Nakamura stood over her with his sword pointed at her, one eye swelled shut. Some of the milk dropped from his chin to her face. It smelled so bitter.

“We can’t let you contact Eden. We wish you had cooperated. I would have shown you when you were ready, but you had to resort to violence at the first opportunity,” Montana said.

“You’ve both just dammed yourself to prison,” Freja said. “I hope you like eating your ricere through a needle.”

“You contact Eden and what do they do?” Montana said. “They send in the Rilke clowns, and destroy the fragile ecosystem here. There’s a reason we use carriages, Freja. Artificial forms of energy kills them. It’s a miracle they weren’t wiped out when Rilke first landed on the planet.”

Freja hated it, but if Montana was telling the truth, he was right. Delicate operations were a thing of the past, especially on worlds like Dawn where news traveled slowly, where news would be doctored by a public relations team before reaching Dawn. Any company willing to come this far out into the galaxy would never agree to a low energy mandate.

“Show me,” Freja said. “Kill one and I’ll believe you.”

Montana’s eyes grew wide. “Nakamura was right, you are not at all like your mother. Put her in chains, Nakamura.”

“There are dangers you don’t—”

“I understand the dangers,” Montana yelled. “I have lived here decades, checking and double checking every change in pressure and humidity, monitoring for infections among the settlers.” Spit dribbled off his chin. His face was red with anger. “Even letting your ship land rather than blast it out of the sky was a miracle I granted you. Ryo lives were lost.”

“Ryo? You’ve named them? How arrogant. All naming rights belong to the company who powered the expedition.”

“Our argument is done. I’ll see you in your cell.”

Nakamura sat in front of the bamboo bars, staring at Freja. He was smoking a real cigarette. It made Freja cough. Montana had slid a book between the bars. Her mother’s most famous work Lifesong.

“The walls here filter the nasty stuff out. What doesn’t go into my lungs, anyways,” Nakamura said.

Freja picked up the book, tried to read it, then threw it across the room. If Montana thought she would read her mother’s work and magically agree with him, he had another thing coming.

Had Michiru given birth to one of those…Ryo? Freja wondered. She couldn’t tell from watching the security cam. It only recorded light in the visible spectrum. And how had Rilke not discovered them first?

If Rilke discovered them, they would be in chains now, and Dawn would be a tourist attraction. Perhaps her mother had been right about some things, Freja thought, despite herself.

No, she told herself. Dawn’s residents would be wallowing in money if Rilke had found the Ryo first, money that would go to infrastructure, schools and hospitals. That wasn’t true either. That money would go into Rilke shareholder pockets. Rilke would own everything, and that couldn’t be good, could it?

“Can they communicate?” She asked Nakamura.

Nakamura said nothing.

A Geisha slid her a meal of synth salmon, fried local vegetables on a wooden tray with chopsticks. They weren’t starving her at least. Three days passed this way, Nakamura coming in when the artificial lights kicked on, leaving when they went off, smoking a cigarette in the interim.

On the third day, Montana showed up with a pair of thermal goggles. “I want you to come with me, Freja. If you think you can behave yourself.”

Freja knew Montana’s back was against the wall. If Peters came calling, and she told him she was in a cell, the whole planet would be swarming with Eden agents.

Equipped with thermal shades, Freja saw the forests brimming with strange creatures. Ryo sprang from tree limb to abandoned Rilke research huts, swooped in and out of the top layer of the alien canopy. She heard them now, crunching through the knee-high flora. Montana drove, hurtling further into the forest, past the hospital, the way Nakamura had taken Michiru.

“We were worried. The Ryo seem to shut themselves down somehow in the presence of strangers. When you came and walked among the streets, most of the Ryo ceased movement.”

“Ryo is the Japanese word for spirit,” Lena said, excitedly.

The AI had been blissful since they had left the teahouse. Lena had detected the lifeforms since disembarking from the ship, but had no context to put what she detected in. It may as well have been random radio waves or cosmic noise, which often bombarded her senses in every locale. Now that she knew, now she could begin to catalog.

Freja even felt the excitement.

“What we know of them is not enough to fill a Rilke advertisement,” Montana said over the bustling feet of the horses. “We’ve set up a camp where the Ryo feel most comfortable, the mostly unexplored valley on all of Dawn. That’s where we’re going.”

“How did Rilke not discover them when they first landed here?” Freja asked.

“The plant life appears warm in thermal vision at all hours, unlike plants on worlds with a traditional day-night cycle. The Ryo, already invisible to the naked eye, have the same temperature profile as the plant life. Camouflage in every spectrum. They merely hid from them. Come now, we’ve arrived.”

The camp consisted of a few Rilke hovels and a Japanese-style inn with a large courtyard. A waterfall dumped steaming water into a pool which flowed into a bathhouse built onto the side of the inn. Men and women rushed in and out of the sliding door rooms, some with tools—old hammers and saws—others wrapped in towels headed to or from the bathhouse.

It reminded Freja of Old Earth. It was in fact the closest she’d seen humans with nature outside of her early childhood explorations with her mother, hiking the Oregon rainforest trails.

Perhaps there was something to what her mother had preached. Perhaps life was worth protecting at the expense of humans.

With her goggles down, she saw that the Ryo partook of the baths themselves, hurtling here and there and for the first time, she heard them emit strange cooing sounds, which had more variation than any bird song she had ever heard.

“Can you communicate with them?” Freja asked as she followed Montana through the courtyard.

Montana was more forthcoming than Nakamura.

“We are working on it,” He said. “Their language is complex and not intended for human ears. Though not without struggle, our linguists have worked out a sort of pidgin with them.”

Lena snapped pictures continuously, climbing a wooden bridge under which koi swam. She was so fascinated by the Ryo that she was, for once in her existence, speechless. Freja saw something that looked and behaved exactly like a koi.

It is a Ryo and it is a fish, she thought. But that doesn’t make any sense.

As they turned a corner, Freja saw a large creature, nearly eight-feet tall, hundreds of tentacles packed close together which it used for locomotion. It mumbled in its high-pitched voice to a woman in a lab coat, who nodded and took notes

Montana slid a door back and waited for Freja to step through. There was a crib in the room and a woman dressed in a kimono rocked a Ryo in her arms. Freja recognized the woman. It was Michiru.

“This is the woman I was telling you about, Michiru.”

Michiru seemed to glide across the room, taking Freja’s hand in her free one.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you. My husband’s been giving you a hard time, I hear.”

She planted a kiss on Montana’s cheek.

“Does that mean…” Freja said weakly, not knowing how to approach the question burning in her mind.

Montana said, “It’s okay. We were confused as you about the origin of the child. Was it mine? I spent nights staring at the dark-side, sipping sake, doubting if this was a pregnancy I wanted Michiru to carry out. Thankfully, she convinced me otherwise.”

He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. With the other hand he reached over her and rubbed the chest of the Ryo. The child flapped its arms—Freja guessed—and cooed, a strange electronic sound, like someone playing with a synthesizer.

“Put on your thermals. Look at him. His name is Thom.”

Freja slid down the googles. Thom smiled at her, and yes, he was a child, she thought. Even though she couldn’t say how it had happened. He had the same pointed nose and curly hair of his father. The child reached for Freja’s finger and she gave it to him.

Its touch was electric, prickling the ends of her fingers. Her heart leapt, a feeling she had not felt since she was a little girl.

“Soon after Michiru gave birth, we noticed a new fish swimming in the koi pond. After the fish, one of the horses gave birth, followed by one of the town cats. Perhaps you heard Luna, who roams the town and meows loudly when the exterior lights are shut off?”

“Yes,” Freja said, thinking of the noise in the apartment hall. “Are there more children?”

“Not like Thom. None of the other Ryo appear human in nature, and all the other mothers have given birth to regular children.”

“I don’t understand. Then what of the Ryo who have no Old-Earthen analogues?” Freja said.

“We have only hypotheses. Since we have not seen any of the Ryo themselves become pregnant, the simplest answer is that the Ryo is a kind of obligate organism that requires a host couple and copies the host physiology.”

“But that would mean—”

“Yes. All the creatures you see were birthed from couples of their respective species. Each creature is—or was—native to Dawn or—”

“They came here like us, gave birth, and the Ryo copied their physiology?” Freja said.

“Yes. We’re not just looking at first contact with an intelligent species,” Montana said. “With the Ryo, we’re seeing a glimpse into the diversity of life in the universe. Suddenly the universe feels a lot less lonely, doesn’t it?”

All this life, she thought, and how much of it would belong to Rilke International by the 8th Corporate Amendment? All of it, since Rilke had funded the expedition to Dawn. Eden lawmakers had crumbled under the pressure of Rilke and Caravaggio lobbyists, and signed away the rights of alien lifeforms for property on luxurious water worlds and stock shares.

Her mother had warned Eden of this day.

Though Eden would surely enact protective legislation as soon as the Ryo were ‘officially’ discovered, it would be years before Rilke was forced to cease control of the Ryo. By then, what would happen? Would they claim rights to Thom?

Freja looked from Michiru to Thom. She was breaking a family apart. “If you were hoping to keep a secret, I’ve ruined it,” Freja said. “Lena’s been uploading everything to the comsat, sights and sounds, since we arrived. Eden are probably already on the way, along with a fleet of Rilke researchers and lawyers. They’ve probably already began broadcasting their intentions to the rest of the universe”

“Your guilt is commendable, but you’ve underestimated us, Freja,” Montana. “Our comsat is broadcasting dummy data to Eden. Our secret is safe for now.”

But there was no one who could crack a comsat, Freja thought. Well, only one person in the galaxy who could do that. But she wouldn’t come all the way out here.

“We believe you and our hacker go way back.”

She turned to see the silhouette of someone standing in the doorway, topknot and a cigarette. Black eye and a sword on his back.

“Nakamura,” Freja said. “I’ve never met him. What do you mean?”

“You don’t remember the talk we had in that Storm Garden bar as lighting struck fire to the grass sea?” Nakamura said. “You told me you’d flay me yourself, if I didn’t confess to reprogramming all those Caravaggio AIs.”

That conversation was with The Grey Ghost. But the Gray Ghost was a woman, a grey-eyed woman. Freja understood.

“It’s something I always wanted,” Nakamura said, rubbing the scruff on his face. “But the operation required a sponsor.”

“Mr. Nakamura and I made a deal. I pay for his sex-change operation and he hack the comsat for us.”

“It was win, win,” Nakamura said. “The Dawn comsat was easy stuff. Not like those Caravaggio AIs. You know they had to change their official colors from crimson to violet because of me? AIs opened fire on anyone wearing their insignia.” He blew a smoke ring.

“A hacker can only get you so far,” Freja said to Montana. “You need a legal team large enough to fill a star cruiser. You need a public relations team. You need everything, and you have so little.”

“But we have you, the daughter of Melinda Spjut, an investigator with a spotless reputation.”

“I can get you nothing. As soon as my report goes through, you’ll be relieved of your duties as governor. Rilke will come in and…”

She looked at Thom again. She couldn’t believe she ever suggested killing one of the Ryo. Each life was invaluable. That’s one thing she agreed with her mother on.

“Your mother told me you would be bound up in your duty. She said you would be so stubborn headed that we’d have to lead you to the truth like a blind deer to water.”

“You knew my mother?”

“Of course, Freja. Did you think it was a coincidence that your mother picked seeds native to Dawn? With all the cases in the universe you could have been assigned to, didn’t you think that was a little suspicious?”

“I can’t keep Rilke from coming,” Freja said.

Montana laughed. “But you can. All it will cost you is your career.”

Freja looked at Thom. He reached for her.

Freja met Peters in the teahouse in God’s Cross. She was drenched from the showers that pelted the plateau, floating up from the Ryo valley and drenching the fields of potatoes, rice, and quinoa. She did not wear thermal shades but saw signs of the Ryo. Footprints in the scrub. The sagging branches of trees scattered about the plateau. She saw signs, but they had retreated to hiding. The Ryo sensed the presence of a stranger, even through the interface of a jacky.

The jacky was a Geisha socketed into the wall outlet. She had a bowl of rice in front of her, steam floating up to the ceiling, where Japanese spirits were painted in vivid reds and orange. The steam looked ghostly in the beaming light of the jacky’s eyes.

Freja could tell Peters was uncomfortable. He was still of the old generation, those who felt strange in the flesh of the opposite sex.

“So what is it? Child smuggling? An implant racket?” Peters asked.

“None of the above. It’s the Grey Ghost’s work.”

“Out here? What the hell is she doing out here?”

Freja didn’t mention the sex change. “Reworking the terrestrial AI to ignore orders of Rilke,” she lied.

“We’ll send some engineers.”

“You don’t have to. The Grey Ghost has been apprehended. Found her sightseeing in the Kabuki theatre. Had Lena check the systems. She reverted the AI to a local state.”

“Where is she now?” Peters said, gazing the jacky’s flashlight eyes around.

“On my ship already. In chains. I’m bringing her in…You’re not smoking?”

“Ethics committee received a complaint from the Astral Corp. I’m looking down a fine.” Peters sighed. “Bringing in the Grey Ghost will mean a promotion, Freja. Won’t be long till I’m reporting to you.”

Freja said nothing. Stood up and started to leave.

“Goodbye to you too, honey,” Peters said.

She heard Peters unplug. She saw the light leave the woman’s eyes and heard the gulp of air swallowed by the woman as she came back to herself.

Freja packed her things from her apartment. She felt lost. She beckoned Lena, and the two of them walked across the great plateau for the last time.

A cruiser arrived at the docking station as Freja said goodbye to Montana and Michiru. It was sleek black, thin, the blue sheen of its stealth system washed over its surface. Three men alighted the plane and approached them. They were dressed in black robes that fell to their ankles. Lawyers.

“Freja, meet the legal team who will be leading the upcoming fight against whoever lays claim to the Ryo,” Montana said.

Their ship would be the last to arrive on Dawn for at least a decade. Nakamura had reprogrammed the navsats as well. Anyone flying to Dawn would instead find themselves staring down at the uninhabitable planet of Baggot H-301, a hundred stars away.

Montana had told her there were people on the forest planet of Whitewald who needed the information Lena carried, people who would support Dawn. There, Montana promised, she could find work, and live quietly among the trees.

“Those trees reach to the highest clouds of the atmosphere. I hope you find it as comforting as I did,” he had said.

She didn’t know if she was ready for a quiet life and told Montana as much, standing outside of her ship.

“The group that you are delivering Lena’s data to needs everyone they can get. They call themselves Lifesong. Perhaps a career change is in order,” Montana said.

“Or just a change in scenery,” Nakamura said, shouldering a bag. “Lifesong needs muscle like you, Freja.”

Montana said, “Where did you end up burying your mother?”

“I’ll hold on to the seeds,” Freja said. “I’m not ready to let go of her just yet.”

“I can’t wait to see the trees,” Lena said. “But I’ll miss the Ryo.”

“You will always have the records,” Montana said to Lena.

But Freja knew that wasn’t guaranteed. Lena’s information was priceless and would attract every data thief in the galaxy.

Freja knew the lie she told Peters would not prevent Rilke and Eden descending on Dawn like salvagers on a scrap heap, but it would buy Montana and the lawyers time before the vultures came. Thirty years, Montana had guessed. Nakamura guaranteed twenty. Freja had ventured only ten.

From the cockpit of the cruiser, Freja, Nakamura, and Lena watched the teahouses and theatres shrink to spots, saw the swell of the forest that housed countless Ryo.

Freja did not put on thermal shades to watch Dawn disappear. She did not want to cry in front of Nakamura.

“Goodbye, Dawn,” Lena said.

Three hours into the flight to Whitewald, Nakamura sent a message to Eden Com, one that would go to Peters himself. It said that Freja’s ship had been hijacked by the Grey Ghost.

“It will take years before they track us to Whitewald,” Nakamura said. “I’ve planted fake coms in the database as well. They think I’m taking you somewhere else. By that time, I’ll be living it up on a Minerva minor colony.”

“Living it up?”

“Yeah, what else?”

“Lifesong needs you just like it needs me,” Freja said.

But she wasn’t sure she believed what she said. She touched the seeds and prayed that her mother would help her again.

Party’s End

By Jen Sexton-Riley

The party was over. I was tired.

The rambling, mazelike loft apartment I shared with Cassie was now truly housewarmed, and the wine I’d sipped all evening lent a hazy gold warmth to the strings of tiny lights we’d looped from the curtain rods. Their cheery glow against the black expanse of the enormous industrial windows brought to mind a tiny vessel moving through an expanse of dark sea, the only bright spot in leagues. My ears hummed with hours of laughter and conversation, my muscles warm and languid from dancing in Cassie’s too-big dress, a sleeveless red vintage number in ruched velvet that hugged her curves. On my tiny body, with no curves to hug, it gapped and skimmed. Its hem, which graced Cassie’s ankles, tripped up my bare feet.

The last few stragglers were arranged in twos and threes, half in and out of their coat sleeves, pledging their devotion to future get-togethers, brunches, matinees, this-was-just-so-greats and we’ve-got-to-see-each-other-more-oftens. Little snatches of laughter swirled in my ears with the tinkling of all our new wine glasses being collected and carefully stood on the polished cement counter and in the gleaming steel sink. I spotted Cassie lounged with friends, leveled by drink and the relief of a party gone well on the broad sweep of hand-knotted silk and wool we’d chosen for the main living area. Her emerald dress and black hair shone like spilled inks across the lustrous blues and earthy plums of the rug, which still fairly vibrated with the effort of many hands and ten times as many fingers knotting it into existence. Cassie’s laughter rang like dropped bells as she rolled onto her back, helpless with it, her eyes soft and wet, her voice roughened with happy talk and drink. Beautiful Cassie. I would keep her happy, just like this, forever. I would–

“I’ve found you.”

I flinched and nearly fell, caught by strong hands.

“I’m so sorry. Did I startle you? It’s just that this place is so big. It’s wonderful, but I just can’t seem to find my coat.”

I’m smaller than all of Cassie’s friends, so I always look up to speak to them, but this man was monolithic. His voice rang something in me like a plucked cello string, and I took a deep breath before answering. His eyes seemed so far above me I couldn’t quite manage a bridge of reassuring contact.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s just over this way, on the other side of the kitchen. Through Cassie’s studio and down the back corridor. Follow me.”

The sounds of happy late night chatter and clinking glasses faded behind us, with one last wisp of Cassie’s laughter tickling my ear before dissipating in the darkness. I glanced back to see the tall guest a step behind me, and I startled to realize that one of his large hands still held me just above the elbow. His fingers easily enclosed my entire upper arm, and the heat of his palm pulsed into my bare skin. I regretted the playful impulse that earlier allowed Cassie to zip me into this bright, foolish splash of cloth. The enormous open space of Cassie’s studio enveloped us, the air rich with pigments and the easels peopled with gigantic canvases, landscapes teeming with impossible creatures, like walking through Cassie’s dreams. As we passed the bank of dark windows lining the corridor that would lead to the spare bed and its mountain of coats, I craned my head back to search the night sky for a light. Any light. I saw only my own reflection, shadowed by the guest’s enormous shape.

“You’re really way out here, aren’t you,” said the deep voice above me. “Not another residential building in sight. I suppose in a few years this whole warehouse district will be completely gentrified, filled up with luxury apartments like this one, all huge windows and acres of newly finished floors, cathedral ceilings and polished surfaces. Strange, just this one out here all by itself, isn’t it?”

“Well, it… Yes, well, we… Cassie and I…”

“Cassie waits tables at a coffee shop three days a week, doesn’t she? And focuses on her art, especially now that she has this place with an enormous studio. I don’t think Cassie comes from money. And you, what do you do exactly, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Oh, me? Well, I do a little of this and a little of that,” I stammered. I stepped into the spare bedroom and snapped on the light. The bed was empty of coats.

I turned to face the guest, and was about to state the obvious, that his coat was clearly not here and must be somewhere else in the apartment, when he took my shoulders in his massive hands, and simply lifted me from the floor. It wasn’t pain that flooded my form, as I don’t feel pain, exactly, but the swimming feeling when my shape begins to lose integrity.

“This will do just fine,” the guest said in his booming voice. He lifted me higher and snapped my entire form in the air as one might snap the wrinkles out of a freshly washed garment. He lifted me to one side, took me in one hand and pushed the fingers of the other hand into the assembled energy of my shape, through my carefully created surface, sliding one arm inside the length of my own arm as if he were slipping into a jacket. With one arm in, he shifted and slipped his other hand and entire arm into my other arm-sleeve. Then he shrugged into me and tugged me tight around his massive shoulders and muscled back, effectively merging my energy with his own and engulfing me with his body. The soft impact I heard was the red velvet dress tumbling to the floor behind him.

He raised the energy of his voice to that of our native tongue and spoke a name I hadn’t heard in lifetimes. “It’s time to come home and make amends for what you’ve done.”

He stepped in front of an ornate freestanding mirror and turned to one side and then the other, straightening his clothing and admiring his handiwork. I could barely detect my pale shape behind the buttons of his shirt, my two eyes and mouth like three round, black holes of disappointment and surprise in the vague roundness of my face. Home. The thought of returning to that bleak place with its rules and strictures made my heart darken and cough out a mist of weak sparks. Already the mirror shimmered in the air, its solidity starting to shift.

“You really shouldn’t do this to people, you know,” he said. “Poor Cassie. She seems like a nice enough kid. She’s going to find herself and her drunk friends lying in an abandoned warehouse in a few minutes, you realize. There’ll be nothing left but a few wine glasses and an empty dress.”

But it was so lovely while it lasted, I thought as we walked as one out of the flickering, shimmering apartment and into the solidity of the night.

It’s always so lovely while it lasts.

Peaches

By Leigh Anna Harken

Her name is not known in our history. We only know her as Peaches because she sold peaches at a roadside stand. It was here the great duke found her. According to legend she was extraordinarily beautiful and this is why he so greatly desired her, but in truth, she was not extraordinary, at least not in beauty. She was fair and plump. Her eyes a bit too wide set and her mouth a bit too small. There were at least three other girls in town with better teeth and brighter eyes. But these girls were not left alone on the roadside selling peaches as the duke cantered past each day. And so he desired her, probably not for her great beauty but because she was there and demure and shy as a common girl, a common girl who sold peaches her family grew at the road stand and used the money to buy radishes and parsley and bread, would naturally be. Quite possibly he only desired her because he knew that he could have her and nothing would be done. He was a duke and she was as juicy as the peaches she sold, and who can resist a ripe peach?

So there is no surprise that one bright day he got off of his stallion, pulled her behind her cart of peaches, and had his thrusting and grunting way with her. When he had finished and jumped back on his stallion, he flipped a few coins on the ground for the pleasure, raised his hat to her, and trotted off.

She was undone. She felt sore and damp and there was such a hurting in her chest from tears that were now stuck there and fear that had dried inside of her instead of on her cheeks. She looked at the coins and they worried her. When she came back home with her unsold peaches and her father took accounting of the money and the peaches sold he would ask her, where did these coins come from, and she would have no answer because the truth would make her father angry with her.

And so, she counted out the money and counted out the peaches it would buy. She carried those peaches in her apron, held like a cradle with five fuzzy little heads. She dug a hole for each little peach all in a row by the road and into each hole she dropped a fruit.

That night her father counted the money and the peaches and all matched and was well and she sighed in relief that no one noticed the lump of tears that was now on her chest or the salty fear that was on her skin.

The next day she went to the roadside to sell her wares and the duke had his stallion saddled to go for a ride. As he passed her on the road he tipped his hat to her for the pleasure and rode on. But there was something odd. Five little saplings, tall and thin, were by the side of the road, all in a row. They weren’t there yesterday, but they were there today, and everyone knows that saplings don’t just appear, they grow. But perhaps he just hadn’t noticed them before.

She dropped a curtsey as he rode past and dropped her eyes to the ground, unable to look at him. She kept her eyes closed until she couldn’t hear the sound of his horse’s hooves anymore and then she opened her eyes and saw five little saplings standing where yesterday she had buried the peaches. She saw them and understood, and so she got a bucket and went to the river and she watered and tended the trees, pulling grass and giving them room to grow.

The sun set and the sun rose and once again she went to the roadside with her fruits and once again the duke cantered past, but he did not tip his hat to the girl. He didn’t even see her or her cart because the five little saplings were now five bright young trees with leaves so green they made his eyes hurt, and hard green fruits that hung, not ready to be picked yet, but promising later days that would be full of delicious flesh to bite and juice to suck. But for the duke the promise of later fruit was not an attraction. He was afraid of the young trees and their hard fruit and his horse slowed as he passed the trees, keeping quiet as if they were riding through a graveyard, trying not to wake the ghosts. She saw his fright and understood and again she tended the trees and gave them water.

The next day it all happened again, the peaches, the roadside stand, the stallion and the saddle. But this time he did not ride past her nor did he tip his hat. Instead he stopped and stared at five full grown peach trees with ripened fruit hanging off of each branch, each peach large and a perfect shade of sunset gold. And though the leaves were green, the same as any other tree, and the bark was brown, the same as any other tree, and the fruit was tempting, same as any other tree, the duke was afraid of the trees and could not ride past them. He could not bring himself to spur his stallion forward, but turned him and galloped off, back to his castle, where he jumped out of the saddle before the horse had stopped and called for his man.

Cut the trees down! he ordered. His man bowed and said he would gather some men to go out in the morning. But the morning wasn’t soon enough for the duke. The trees must be chopped down now. The duke’s man bowed again and set off to collect men and axes.

When the men reached the trees the sun was setting behind them and cast the men in a deep green light. It was beautiful and the men wondered why the duke would want these trees cut down. It seemed a shame to do it, seeing them filled with fruit and greenery. But one did not defy the duke and so they lifted their axes and brought them down into those trees. But it seemed a shame to let such perfect fruit go to waste.

And so the men left their axes to pick the ripe peaches, but not one of them took a bite. Instead they took off their shirts and laid the peaches carefully bundled in the cloth, far from where the trees would come down, as if trying to keep each small load of peaches as safe and warm as a child. Only when each peach from the trees was safe and sound did they pick up their axes and begin to heave. As each tree shuddered under the blows the men cried tears they could not understand, some ashamed and hiding the grief and others openly weeping as one by one, each tree came down. The men stood by and wept and wailed as if each had killed his own children.

Then, something extraordinary happened. Out of each stump sprang a fat little child with cheeks as pink as peaches and tummies fat and round. They giggled and clapped and raced around the weeping men singing:

Oh our father is the duke,
as anyone can see
Our mother she sells peaches
that grow off of a tree.
Our father met our mother
and though he did not know her name,
He led her behind the peaches cart
and plucked her all the same.
Now we are bright new peaches
But our father, for his shame,
Tried to chop us into firewood,
And take away our claim.
But we are smart young peaches
We hid among the roots
And now the duke our father
Must taste of his own fruits.

Then the children ran off before anyone could catch them, though in truth, not one of them tried, they were so astounded.

The men heard this rhyme and understood and each vowed that he would leave the kingdom before he ever again bowed to the duke. They left the trees as they had fallen, whole and green, unwilling to take part in dismemberment of those perfect trees. They picked up their bundles, and walked away towards home and the villagers instead came along and chopped the trees into sticks to burn in their stoves.

The men gave the peaches away, to mothers and daughters and sisters and lovers. To their wives and the wives of friends. They left none for themselves, but to a man gave away all the peaches. Only one ever had a bite, when his wife, smiling and with juice running down her chin held it out for him to share, and with that taste he saw her dreams and wishes and hopes and desires, the essence of her and thought, “Why, she’s just like me?” It was a surprise, and one he never forgot. Years later their love would be legend, as a tale of romance and requitement, of long standing joy and respect, and of adventure as they crossed many hardships to be together after the wars came. They are their own story.

But even the men who did not taste the peaches were forever changed. You would know their names if I told you, because they are famous and their successes are often told. One travelled with the Princess Henrietta when she led the raid and slew the monsters in the caverns. She knighted him for his bravery and boldness in battle and gave him her dagger, which has been passed down to the first born of his descendants for these hundreds of years and now resides with his great-great-great-great-great grandson, who will soon give it to his firstborn, a daughter. Another is the poet who wrote of buttercups and water lilies and whose poems of love and loss you recite to yourself whenever your heart is broken. A third became a judge known for being fair. In his time, no witches were burned. A fourth became a doctor, who was known to be as safe and adept as a midwife at birthing babies.

The women who ate the peaches, you know of them too. Princess Henrietta was one. Juliana the Just was another. Maxine the builder whose bridges still stand, and of course, Pauline the painter whose frescoes are the pride of the nation. Others did not become famous or renowned, but all led cheerful and lucky lives into their old age, matriarchs, whose families who truly mourned them when they died. They were the peach girls, and their smallest deeds are still felt in each and every breath in this city.

But at that time this was still a town, surrounded by farm land and orchards. The men went their ways and told no one of the children and the rhyme.

That evening the duke sat down to dinner, racks of lamb and roasted potatoes and raspberry tart for dessert. He lifted his spoon over the first course, a leek and cream soup that was the specialty of the cook, dipped it into his bowl, brought it to his mouth, and then gagged. He spit and out came a bite of rotten peach with a white worm ducking out of the light and back into its hole. He raged and demanded to know what the meaning of it was. But no one knew. The cook begged his sir’s pardon, but he had put no peaches into the evening dinner. None at all.

The duke, not very mollified, but hungry enough to go on with his dinner, cut himself a piece of lamb, brown and red with blood puddling beneath the meat. He brought a bite to his mouth, smelling the char and the spices. Then he gagged on rotten peach. This time he did not call for the cook, nor yell at the staff. He knew it was that temptress who sold fruit at the side of the road. The one who had seduced him, lowering her head and curtseying day after day as he passed. She looked demure to all, but he knew better, she was a sorceress and a seductress and she had reeled him in to curse him.

The duke threw his napkin down and left the table, with servants and family members trailing behind him in shock and fear for what he might do if they caught his glance now, in an angry mood. He called for his man again but his man did not come. He had left with the workers at the trees, and though he had too much pride to remove his shirt as the men had, he still carried peaches in his pockets and never saw the duke again. The duke had to find someone else to give orders to, but this was easily done. He gave orders to find the girl and arrest her for being a temptress and a witch.

What of Peaches, the girl who sold fruit and planted the trees? Where was she in all of this? What was she thinking and how was she healing after having been used and discarded? No one knows. Like her name, there is no record of her thoughts or doings or if she ate peas and drank punch. Her story is forgotten, if anyone ever knew it in the first place. No one asked or wondered. She has served her purpose and now the only concern is how justice gets served and for that this girl with no name need hardly be there at all. We shall assume that she washed herself as soon as she could, tried to not wake anyone up as she cried at night, and kept silent. If she thought or did anything more than curtsey as the duke rode by on those days, we do not know it. She has her purpose in the story, just as she had her purpose for the duke. So we’ll leave her to her silence and punch and peas, not knowing that the duke had called for her arrest, the judge has been routed from his dinner table and the constable is coming with chains and iron.

The constable was neither a cruel man, nor a smart man, nor a dishonest man. The judge was also neither cruel, nor smart, nor dishonest. They were simply men, as many men in this world, working away at what they must work at and doing what they could for their families, their friends, and themselves. Within reason. There may be some sliding of rules here and there, but no true breaches of duty or crimes committed. They were, for the most part, good men. It was as good men they walked up to the door and knocked. It was as good men that they explained the charges of seduction and sorcery to her father, and it was as good men that they kept her father from beating her too much in his rage. They led the now bloody girl away from the door of her family and they couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for this young thing, hurt and frightened and crying beside them. Did she seduce the duke? Did she bewitch him and then curse him? If someone as great as the Duke said so, then it must be so, even if she did look like a harmless little thing. But perhaps not. They were fair men and responsible to their duties. They would interrogate and test her to be certain.

The girl broke easily, with barely a touch of the tools and the fire. She confessed to every misdeed and a few more misdeeds no one had known of until then, and the constable and the judge were amazed that such wickedness could have sprung up from their own town. They were good men. They hated the wicked and to protect their own homes, their families, their friends, the judgement was passed and the girl would burn.

The good people of the town were horrified at the evil that had been among them. Every girl who had been her friend now denied ever liking her and every boy who had ever admired her now believed himself the victim of a spell. Even the words of the men who had cut down the trees and the women who had eaten the peaches were not enough to save her and only created scorn and slander and hatred for themselves. One woman woke to find her chickens beheaded on her stoop and one man was pelted with eggs by children, because no one likes those who defend the evil. Those voices must be stopped.

The day of the burning came and all the town came to see the temptress get her justice. Her mother wept, but her father glared at her with all the hatred in his eyes, because he had to, because the rest of his family was now vulnerable and he must be strong and hate his daughter in order to protect them, his wife and the other children. He glared, and if the hatred was only in his eyes and not rooted in his heart, who, if they knew, would blame him? Except the duke. Except the town. Because anyone who did not hate evil must also be evil. So her father hated his daughter and no more ill came to the family. Her sisters married well and her brothers grew old tending the peach trees, though stories still cling to the family like ragged flesh left on a peach pit of the temptress in their lineage.

All were in the town square, gathered around the wood pile and the stake. The duke was there, gaunt and haggard. To survive he had learned to eat rotten fruit, to chew through sickly sweet and maggots and worms and to swallow, though each meal made him ill. In the castle the cook was fired and everyone now ate gruel since there was no need for fine dinners that the duke could not taste.

The constable led the shaking and dirty girl to the stake. He had to carry her the last of the way. Pronouncements were made and she was asked if she had any last words. And though all she could do was whimper, in her mind she recalled the words she had said when she had planted the peaches, “These are the fruits of my labor, may all the little peaches see, that I can still be happy and they cannot trample me.” It seemed a silly thing for her to think of then, when she was not happy and quite trampled, but then it was a silly thing when she had said then, when she was neither happy nor untrampled. It was her one way of defiance, even if only she knew of it.

There was a suitable pause for the girl to speak, but she only sobbed, and so the constable lowered his torch to the wood. First there was smoke as the wood heated, and then there was the crackle of newly born flame among the pyre.

Then something odd happened. A stick lit on fire. It had been one of the sticks from the peach trees, cut down and dismembered by the men and the villagers. Out of the new flame jumped a child, and then another, and another, and another, and another. Five little children with cheeks as pink as peaches and tummies fat and round. They danced and clapped and sang:

Oh our father is the duke,
as anyone can see
Our mother she sells peaches
that grow off of a tree.
Our father met our mother
and though he did not know her name,
He led her behind the peaches cart
and plucked her just the same.
Now take up harp and timbrel,
Now take up flute and lute,
and hear how our father
Tasted his own fruits.
Oh, they were soft and sour
Oh, they were sick and sweet
Now he sits in his tower
and cannot eat his meat.
Our mother she was taken
and given all the blame,
Tortured and forgotten
and put to fire and flame.
But we are smart young peaches
and we know our mother’s name
We stole her from the burning pyre
and gave the town her shame.

The children ran off giggling and skipping. Some of the town’s children ran after them as did some of the adults, but none were able to catch them and no one knew where they went. It was a large crowd, as burnings tend to attract, and some of the people saw the children, some only caught glimpses, some heard the song and others smelt the burning of the peach wood. Some saw and heard nothing at all, distracted by gossip and intense discussions of their neighbor’s noisy goose and the virtues of their new cart. They looked up at the reaction of the crowd and someone near them told them what had happened. They were sorry and angry they missed the excitement, and when they told their children and grandchildren of that day, they always said they’d seen it all.

Slowly, one by one, the townsfolk stopped looking after the running children and turned back to the pyre, expecting at any second now for the screaming to start and the smell of meat and hair. But there was only the crackle and pop of sap and only the smell of ash and wood. The stake was empty and, but for that stabbing into the sky, the fire could have been any simple bonfire, such as the ones they built for spring and fall and midsummer.

The girl was gone. Some saw this as proof of her sorcery and were angry. Others were disappointed at the lack of spectacle. Some, including her father who had smelled the burning of the peach wood, were relieved. (We do not know what her mother felt.) And a few, a very few, knew that the gift given was not just the rescue of the girl, but the rescue of the town. These villagers collected the ashes of the pyre to keep in special places, on mantles and curio shelves. These people and their families were known to be humble and kind, even to those others would condemn. They found the good in all who meet them, and told the stories that have been passed down, imperfect as they are.

But what happened to the girl? How did she get away? Did she find a happy place to heal where no one was trampled or plucked or forgotten? Did she come back to town and serve retribution on the Duke and the townsfolk for what they had done? Did she ever have a purpose beyond being the victim in this story?

Of course she did. But no one thought to ask until it was too late and she was gone. It took a decade or more before someone even thought of it. The ones who tell the stories like to dream she had a happy life—sometimes with the animals and creature of the woods, sometimes living with the fairies and enjoying their revels. Sometimes they dream she found another town, one better than their own. Some people have a shrine to her and say she is a goddess of women and fruit, and perhaps this one is the most true of all. Others try to forget the story exists, or are cynical and tired of hearing it. Many don’t believe it really happened.

You may be disappointed in this story because all the wrongs are not righted and all the heroes do not win. The Duke was never punished by the people nor did Peaches return triumphant and vindicated for all to see. But this is not a story of fairness or rightness or justice. Some peaches are dry and some are juicy, according to their own will, even as we pluck them and complain that one is dry and delight that one is juicy.

The Barber and the Black Canary

By Marilee Dahlman

I’ve always known that the hotel was haunted, though not necessarily the neighborhood. Nevertheless, there it was, all laid out nice and neat in the snow, a very pretty death. We were two blocks from the hotel. At the long empty stretch where the dry goods store would be built in spring. Nothing in the lot but dead trees covered in vines, and beyond it, a marsh that spread out dark and bumpy all the way to Lake Michigan.

The doctor spotted it after me. “Hold up,” he said.

I shoved my fists deeper into my coat pockets and obeyed. Spirits in my place of employment didn’t bother me any (some are the spirits of my ancestors, and as such, they protect me). And just before dawn in Chicago, like anyone, I would rather be indoors than out in the bone-cracking cold.

“Intentional.” The doctor stooped closer, careful to stay on the boardwalk. “Look at the way it’s arranged symmetrically. No animal did that.” He waved a hand without looking up. “Light a match.”

Orders. I told myself, he’s a doctor, he treats everyone like this.

I stepped off the boardwalk and crunched two steps through snow-crusted grass to the edge of the street’s gaslight. I struck a match and held it so we could see every detail: a plucked and charred bird, wings evenly outstretched, throat slashed. Its dark eyes stared up at the fading full moon. Blue-gray feathers surrounded it, projecting outward. The icy blood sparkled.

“A pigeon,” I said. The match flickered out.

“A bad egg was messing about here.” The doctor wrenched his black hat down against the wind. “Someone all-possessed, like.”

I shrugged. Perhaps he was right, a human did it. There were some bad ones.

“What do the tracks mean?” The doctor gestured at boot prints in the frozen mud.

“Don’t know.”

“No, you can say.” A nicer tone. Maybe like I was his friend, not his barber.

“Don’t know.” I said it more firmly. The mud marks were impenetrable to me. The doctor had no way of knowing that, of course. I just trimmed his white sideburns once a week, after the doctor had checked on the slow death of Edgar Mulgrave, the hotel’s owner.

An eagle screamed. We jerked our heads up at the sound. The eagle flew low, as if it wanted us to see it, made a circle, and disappeared into a cloud.

That sign I understood. So, a man did this after all. And the spirits were angry.

The doctor glanced at me and chopped a hand at the dead pigeon. “Do something about it.”

That I would not do. I stepped back to the boardwalk.

The doctor clicked his tongue. Without a care or a prayer, he stepped onto the hard ground himself and mashed the bird under his boot. The breastbone snapped and I tried not to gag. The rest squished and blood leaked out like syrup. He messed up the feathers. He scraped the slime off his boot using the edge of the boardwalk. He did it all very slowly and casually, like he was teaching something to me.

“A dog’ll get it now,” I said. “Would’ve scared people.” Now I felt concerned. Maybe it would help if the spirits knew why the doctor had just done this.

“Maybe people should be scared.” The doctor rubbed his chin. “A hotel guest did it, perhaps. Someone from out East. Off his head, to do that to a bird.”

I frowned, first at the doctor and then at the hotel. The Royal Chicago loomed taller than any building on the avenue, a flesh and blood colored stone palace that Mulgrave’s almost-widow had opened last year. The wind kicked up stronger, into the kind that aches ears and spits rain. That is not what worried me. I took off toward the hotel with quick strides.

“Get back here,” the doctor called out. “You’re my windbreak, Nate.”

Employees weren’t supposed to use the front entrance but I ignored the rule. I could explain the situation to Mrs. Mulgrave, if need be. I took the hotel’s grand steps two at a time and strode through the lobby and main promenade. I pulled out a key and opened the door to the hotel’s barbershop.

My boots squeaked on the tile floor. The crystal chandeliers were dark and the red leather chairs stood empty. I went to a domed cage sitting on a pedestal and whisked off the cage’s black felt cover.

A single yellow canary sat inside on a carved wooden bar. It blinked, stretched its wings, and tweeted.

I exhaled. Don’t know how long I’d been holding my breath, but I felt a little dizzy and sweat popped out of my skin and trickled down my neck and back. “Good morning, little man,” I said. Sometimes my mother had called me that. It had been her birdcage. She had not been part of the tribe, but she’d loved birds and small creatures, as do I.

The canary flapped his wings and showed a few white streaks (I love those hidden feathers best) among the shades of bright yellow. The bird flew about his cage, fed, and returned to his perch.

A few minutes later, I’d made the shop bright and ready for business. I wore a black velvet topcoat, which is what we’re all supposed to wear. I idly stropped a blade and thought of the dead pigeon. The quick, metallic vreets of steel on leather was the only sound in the room.

The doctor had said the fellow was ‘off his head.’ I imagined a headless man drifting about the vacant lot and cold marsh. Naturally, I knew the fellow must have a head. A sick head and a stone heart. A man who felt delight at killing a bird.

I looked down at the barbershop floor and my heart beat quicker. The floor is marble, with silver eagle amulets embedded into the tiles. Fifty total, with gleaming beaks and turquoise eyes, all slick now from the scrape of boot soles. Mrs. Mulgrave had installed them, purely to compete with the hotel that had silver dollars in the floor of its barbershop. I did not think this was appropriate, everyone knew that Mr. Mulgrave and a man named Roy Tanner had stolen the amulets from a tepee during their army days, but I had grown accustomed to them. I felt like their protector.

The dawn eagle had flown low, and in a circle.

My hand holding the blade went a little wet. I crouched down and slid my fingers on a cool, smooth bird. Its single green-veined blue eye stared at me.

After some thinking, I went over to the cage. Poked the blade between the bars and rolled it. I knew that the canary liked to watch light dance off the metal.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want you to worry about a thing.” My mother had also said that to me.

The canary began to sing.

As usual, the son and heir Lionel Mulgrave was my first customer. Lionel had arrived three weeks ago from Paris with a silver-tipped walking stick and a trunk full of dolls. He did what he always did, he looked at the birdcage, shook his head, and wrinkled his nose.

After Lionel, a crush of drummers. The men selling candies, fancy shoes, clocks, pots and pans, and sewing machines jawed about sales, and sometimes a new play at the theater. I watched carefully, but as I knew, they were the types to ignore the bird completely. I liked the drummers. They were gentler sorts, about my age, too young to have battled in the South or put up forts out West. Other men, older ones, they had hard, quick eyes. Some call it strength.

It’s fear. I’m sure of that. Men back from war or the West with decorations, whether they’re for the lobby of a hotel or pretty medals for a shirtfront, they must know that spirits of the dead see everything.

Generally speaking, patrons dwell more on me, the head barber, than the bird. They read the silver plate outside the door: Barbershop Concession, Management by Nathaniel Tall Cloud. I know I’m a novelty, same as the peace pipe case in the lobby and the two thousand arrowheads on the western wall of the dining room. But the proper nameplate lends my position a permanency that I don’t mind, given the practicalities of living a life where you don’t quite fit in one place, or the other. Once I’d been written up in the newspaper. And last year, when someone had scratched the nameplate, a deliberate, deep slash right down the middle, Mrs. Mulgrave promptly got it replaced.

“I have a bone to pick with you.”

Charlie Dillinger’s voice boomed from the shop’s entrance like he was on stage at McVicker’s. I paused my blade at a customer’s throat. The actor dipped to eye level with the canary and wiggled gold-ringed fingers through the wrought iron bars.

“No bird should be prettier than me,” Dillinger said. He straightened up and grinned wide, showing a row of perfect white teeth. “I’ll wait until Mr. Tall Cloud is ready for me. I like my shave nice and close.”

The canary sang, a customer slapped Dillinger on the back, and another hollered a greeting from a chair. I resumed sweeping my blade.

That night, after I closed the shop, I cradled my bird.

“Mr. Dillinger acts like a cat that ate the canary,” I said. “But I don’t believe he’s off his head.”

I waited until the bird’s eyelids blinked slow before returning him to the cage.

A week later, just before closing, Gunner O’Brian swaggered in while I swept cigar butts and hair off the floor. O’Brian slung his arm around the neck of a departing politician, who laughed loud and left fast. Two associates arrived with O’Brian and stood by the door. One had dried, dark splatter on his silk waistcoat.

“You keep ‘em good and shiny,” O’Brian said. “Them eagles the Mulgraves put in.”

“Mr. Mulgrave found them in a medicine man’s things,” I said. “Skirmish during army service.”

The canary tweeted. O’Brian jabbed his elbow at the cage, rattled it hard, and the canary shrilled and flew in circles. Talk in the shop quieted. O’Brian took another long look at the floor.

I set the broom against the wall and nodded at an empty chair.

“Hell of an idea old Mulgrave had, to put in a Sioux-blood barber.” O’Brian settled in the seat. “This life is more bustle than you’re used to, I bet.”

“Better than the stockyards,” I said.

“You ain’t gonna get work waiting at the stockyards gate,” O’Brian said. “Not you.”

On the shortest day of the year, Roy Tanner limped in. He wore a navy army coat with one gold button dangling from it. Grime streaked his greasy white hair and beard. At the cage, Roy and snapped his pockmarked jaws together like a dog. The canary fluttered. Roy laughed rough like something was stuck in his throat. He limped forward.

And slipped hard on an eagle, falling backwards.

Roy swore and swore! A gentleman from New York helped him up.

Of course I thought, yes, another sign.

Even before the dead pigeon, I had wondered if the spirits wanted me to do anything about Roy. The man was so old and bitter, I figured that the red blood in his veins must really run all gritty and brown. It had been said that Mulgrave put up with Roy because Roy knew of things done out West, bad things, that Mulgrave didn’t want spread around. But I’d seen them together, before Mulgrave was dying, and Mulgrave never laughed like he did when he was with Roy.

“Mulgrave’s wife says someone got to trim me,” Roy said.

I nodded at another barber.

“That’s right, I ain’t gonna lose my scalp.” Roy spit a long stream of tobacco juice. It splattered across the floor, bubbled a bit on the tops of my shoes and a silver eagle, and spread out in runny, thin streams everywhere. He scratched at a boil on his neck that was bigger and shinier than a red marble.

The barbershop chatter quieted some. Talk revived once Roy got sat in a chair with a towel around his face. Roy left with another bite at the bird and a barking laugh. He stayed on his feet that time.

After closing, I tidied the walnut sideboard under the oil painting of a black steam train rolling through a green prairie. I wiped smears off the wall mirrors. I went to the cage. My canary’s dark eyes looked up at me.

“I’ll keep you safe,” I said.

I took out the canary and stroked his yellow head. I returned the bird to the wooden perch and draped the black cover over the cage.

Out of fairness, I decided to shadow all of the customers that, in my view, were most likely to be privately demented. This included a dentist from Omaha who had tweeted back at the canary like they were having a conversation in bird language. I tracked the dentist to Lincoln Park three icy evenings in a row, where all the man did was sit at the new, snowed-over baseball fields and smoke a pipe. I followed Lionel Mulgrave to a closed haberdashery that opened when he rapped at the door with his walking stick. I went all the way to a smoky South Side saloon and watched Gunner O’Brian’s associates run a numbers game for pennies.

It was Roy I caught in the act.

Most nights, Roy stayed in the hotel’s billiards room until it closed. Then he would lurk about the lobby until the night desk clerk told him to leave. Sometimes Roy would shuffle to another hotel lobby. Other times, Lincoln Park or an alley. I had to will my own heart to pump cold when following the limping old man. Watching him called to mind how alone Roy was. I don’t have much company myself, but Roy was different. He was a bone relic from a time of crushing death and taking, all over the place. Time turned, and spirits, the evil and the good, had picked up what they wanted. Now Roy was what was left. Sooner or later, they’d take him, too, and do what they wished.

At the last full moon of winter, a windless night, Roy never showed up to the hotel. I locked the shop, checked the vacant lot, and waited by a tree for a while, keeping as still as I could. I imagined that there were no buildings and no boardwalk. I was an ancient hunter on an empty plain, waiting for a night wolf.

Roy showed up, sure enough. He carried something in a small leather sack. It was still alive, the way it bounced some. I leaned closer to the tree.

Roy muttered to himself and left the avenue. He traipsed across the vacant lot and into the frozen marsh. I followed him. I can move pretty quiet for a big man. Roy stopped close to the lake and dropped the sack. Roy fumbled with it, and pretty soon, he had his hands closed around a pigeon. His bony fingers squeezed its neck. The pigeon squirmed.

“Let it go,” I said.

Roy’s head snapped up. His small eyes narrowed. Two words dripped out of his mouth: “You git.”

My boot struck Roy square under the chin. Roy’s hands released the bird. His body hurled backwards. I planned to pick Roy up and throw him against a tree, but the man made helpless spluttering sounds like he was choking on his own tobacco-soaked saliva. The red sore oozed yellow on his neck. Roy’s left eye twitched and I saw he had a new boil on his eyelid, weeping pus.

I stood over him. “Why’re you hurting birds?”

“I’ll find a copper.” Roy pointed a long finger with a dirty nail. “You’ll do a stretch!”

I grabbed Roy’s blue coat and heaved him upright. Brown fluid dripped down his beard.

“Why?” I lifted him off the ground. Light as a skeleton, he was.

Roy coughed warm flecks on my face. “You devil don’t know—”

I shook him hard.

Roy’s eye with the dripping boil blinked. His lips stretched back. “To cure the skin, sacrifice two pigeons, such as he can git.”

I threw him on the ground. “You stop now.”

I picked up the shivering gray bird. I tucked it close under my arm and headed toward the avenue.

“Two pigeons!” Roy squealed after me.

I got to the avenue. I found more birds strutting near a bakery and set the stolen pigeon down.

The walk gave me time to reflect on the encounter. Had I done right? All things considered, I felt satisfied by the morality of my actions and my restraint. I’d warned Roy. The man would find another hotel. He was dying, anyway. Rotting from the inside out.

Just the same, I spent the night in my shop, with my canary.

I felt no feeling of premonition. I saw no sign from any spirit. I still feel they should have warned me.

Roy hadn’t been to the hotel in months and I’d overheard the desk clerk and doorman mention Roy’s absence. The man was good and gone, and not missed. I thought, maybe he had died already.

A late spring freeze hit overnight. As I walked to work, I kept my head down against the cold and fell in with the doctor. I ignored the doctor’s chat and watched my breath frost and disappear, over and over. At the hotel, I strolled through the side entrance, unlocked the door to the shop and took my time stomping warmth back into my toes. I lit the gas chandeliers. I lifted the cage’s black felt cover.

The canary was gone.

I took a few quick strides across the room and grabbed a straight razor. The box crashed to the floor and blades clattered across the tile.

I headed to the same part of the marsh where I had caught Roy before. I felt dizzy, maybe from the exertion of moving fast but mostly from worry. Perhaps the canary was still alive, in Roy’s leather sack, staring into darkness. Fear could be the only thought in the bird’s tiny skull.

I saw a reed-thin figure crouched among the frosty cattails.

“No!” I looked up to the sky and said the word more to the spirits than to the man.

Roy raised his head. He creaked upright, threw out his arms, and spread dirty, bloodstained fingers. A wide smile split his face like it’d been carved there with a blade. The boil over his left eye dripped. He shuffled away, giving that barking laugh.

I squished a few more steps through muddy ground and forced myself to look.

My yellow canary lay dead. He was all open down the middle. I felt like I was empty in the middle myself, just looking at it. Never before had I felt like I had nothing inside but cold and hollowness. Now I think, it’s probably the way bad men feel all the time. The bird’s body looked smaller than it had ever seemed in his cage. A small knife, a stained kerchief, and the leather sack lay next to the tiny corpse. I know I groaned. Right then, I was madder at the spirits than Roy. Then I realized, somewhere, my bird had become a spirit itself. Smooth and happy and free, somewhere.

But still, something had to be done about Roy.

Roy’s laugh drifted along the still air. My hand tightened on the straight blade’s bone handle. I saw Roy heading to the avenue.

I went after him.

Roy turned his head at the sound of my steps. He cackled and opened his mouth wide. “Tweet, tweet!”

I closed the distance and yanked hard on the back of Roy’s coat. Roy’s arms wind-milled, his sleeves flapped, but his feet stayed under him. He was nimble like a skeleton come alive. Roy scrambled away and darted behind a tree. He grinned, feinted left and right, and took off again, this time toward the lake.

Then he slipped, but didn’t fall.

His breath got more ragged, and he slipped again. Roy steadied and frowned at the blade in my hand. “You won’t.” He spat into the snow. “They’ll hang you.”

Roy and I faced each other in the open marsh. Reeds poked out of cold mud. The dawn sky hung low and gray.

I stared at the gaps in Roy’s teeth and his oozing neck and eyelid. I felt like the same kind of ooze could be in my stomach, I felt so sick. My hand dropped the blade. Roy tilted his head.

“I don’t kill dogs,” I finally said.

Roy laughed and lifted his bearded chin. “Tweet, tweet.”

Crack.

The ice splintered.

Roy slammed down hard. Really hard. I winced when I heard his elbow crack on the ice. Freezing water rushed up from the cracks, which spider-webbed bigger. Roy yelped at the touch of frigid water. His boots and hands went wild. The ice cracked wide open and Roy fell through.

I gingerly lifted a boot and eyed the ice beneath my own feet. It looked solid. We were still a distance from the lake. This was the marsh, yet. The water couldn’t be more than a few feet deep.

Roy’s boots and hands sloshed above the water. His head didn’t come up.

“Tweet, tweet,” I said softly. I imagined that the spirit of the yellow canary was somewhere close. Perhaps it was everywhere. “Roy’s having a terrible time getting his feet under him,” I said. “Maybe he can’t swim.”

I stood quietly. Picked up the blade and waited for some sign of what I should do. Sure enough, overhead, a solitary eagle circled, appearing and disappearing through the dark clouds. I took a deep breath, felt my shoulders go easy. My work was done, then.

Roy splashed.

I watched.

The water finally stilled. One fingertip broke the surface and disappeared again.

It started to rain, the kind with big, cold drops. I backed away and returned with the small leather sack. I held it carefully with both hands. I slid the blades inside, my own and Roy’s, and gently sank the sack with the canary into the water.

I headed back to the hotel through the rain. When I put a hand on the shop’s door, my mind went to the cage. I’d have to clean it out. May as well do that now. Perhaps give it to Mrs. Mulgrave.

I plodded pretty heavy into the room. My coat and boots dripped water on the tile.

I stopped cold.

A tiny bird sat on the bar in the cage. It was a canary, like my pet. But this one was dark. Its shiny feathers gleamed black.

I stared at the bird. I felt like all the air had left my body. I raised my hands to my cheeks and blinked and breathed until I was certain that the black canary was real. I shook my head and tried to accept it. The spirits took Roy and they did what they wanted to do. It had to be right.

The bird uttered a small tweet in greeting and flapped its wings. I walked slowly to the cage. I opened it and picked up the bird. I held him in my large hands, enjoying the feel of delicate bones. I felt his small heart beat against my fingertip. I raised him to my lips and kissed his silky head. The bird smelled faintly of tobacco.

The Water Dragon

By Joanne Aylott

It was never the monsters hiding under the bed. Neither was it the dark of her bedroom when the lights went out. It was never the zombies that could clamber out of the packed earth and find and eat the little girls who played hide-and-seek in the graveyard. It wasn’t any of the things her best friend Clara had divulged to her once as they’d perched on the cobblestone wall that ran around the village. For Evangeline, it was the pitter-patter of raindrops on her head that caused her heart to seize.

Her mother, June, would be waiting by the back door, of course, wringing her hands until her daughter arrived, flushed and out of breath from running.

“Praise, God,” she would whisper, before crossing herself. Bustling Evangeline inside, the two of them would then huddle together by the kitchen window, uttering prayers for the clouds to part and sunny skies to bless them once more.

Sometimes, her mother would berate her for taking the rainless days for granted.

“You haven’t been praying hard enough,” she told Evangeline at the table, their hands still clasped from saying grace. “You’re not even trying.”

So Evangeline was always careful, after crossing all her fingers and toes, that her last thought before sleep overcame her was that she would awake to the pleasant heat of the sun on her face and the sight of a brilliant blue sky peeking through her curtains.

Yet although Evangeline deemed herself old enough now to know that zombies and ghosts could never hurt her, as long as she was home before dark, of course, for the life of her she could not explain why they should be so afraid of rain. Indeed, Evangeline had been sodden before when she had once ventured too far from the cottage and the storm had taken her by surprise. All she had felt whilst her mother had bundled her in towels were as if she’d just stepped out of a very cold bath.

“It doesn’t look so scary from in here,” she’d observed, cross-legged by the fire; not even while it had lashed against the window panes in droves and lightning had crackled across the sky.

“Well, you would be a fool not to be afraid,” said her mother.

Sometimes their garden would be ruined, reduced to a mushy, mulchy mess of sodden foliage. When Evangeline was younger, she used to believe that there were such things as giants that would use the cover of thunder to enter the garden and destroy all the pretty flowers. Her mother never used to tell her otherwise, and so Evangeline still had to scold herself whenever she could’ve sworn she’d seen a footprint the size of a dustbin lid left in the soil.

It was Monday morning, and Evangeline was peering at one of these very such indentations by the churchyard wall when someone called out to her and Clara. Glancing up, she caught sight of Mr. Reed striding past them on his way to the fields.

“I would start making my way home now, girls. You’re too close to the boundary wall when the sky’s looking this murky. That means you, too, sweetheart.”

“Yes, father,” her best friend mumbled.

Evangeline jumped to her feet, wiping her hands on her skirt.

“I don’t know why you try and run off so fast, Eve,” Clara told her as they began making their way back towards the centre of the village, deciding that they would stop by at Mr. Graham’s shop to buy toffee if they hurried. “We’ve both got caught in the rain so many times now and it’s never hurt us.”

Evangeline hushed her, peering up and down the lane. Old Mrs. Simmons was pruning her roses, but everyone knew that her ears were shot. They passed by her garden and she raised a gnarled hand at them in greeting, lips pulling to reveal a toothless crevasse.

“It’s just when you’re out in it for too long,” whispered Evangeline, “or when you go out on purpose. I don’t know what happens to you but all I know is that I don’t want to find out.”

Clara giggled, and they stopped in the middle of the path.

“See?” she said. “What’s so bad about rain, Eve? It makes everything damp and sometimes it makes the grass really slippery. And you can throw stones in the puddles! Why should we be afraid?”

Huffing, Evangeline readied her best grown-up voice. “Because that’s what we’ve been told. It’s all we’ve ever known. To run home as soon as the rain starts.”

“Eve. We both know zombies can eat you. Ghosts can scare you to death. What does rain do?”

They walked in thoughtful silence until they arrived at the shop. Clara went in first, as always, and they went up to the counter, contemplating the shelves of sweet jars behind Mr. Graham in his red-and-white stripy apron. He was already bagging up some liquorice for old Mr. Partridge, the same corduroy trousers flapping about his bow legs. The two of them were conversing quietly, and Evangeline’s ears pricked at some of the words. She felt a gentle nudge at her side, and she turned to see Clara slipping into one of the nearby aisles. She followed, and together, they listened.

“So what are they saying happened to the poor child?” murmured Mr. Partridge.

“That perhaps she tried to go swimming in the river. My Daisy asked if she could once when we were on a walk near the marshlands, and of course I told her that it was forbidden. It was beautiful weather and I know it’s tempting, especially when it’s as nice as it was on Friday.”

“Oh, it was beautiful weather Friday,” Mr. Partridge agreed in a rasp.

“Anyway, as you make your way further out, the current gets stronger. The girl was probably caught unawares some time Friday afternoon and got swept away.”

Mr. Partridge made a noise of anguish.

“Yes, I know,” said Mr. Graham. “I heard a child calling it The River Fury. Some kind of water dragon that is forever angry and tempts children to try and ride it. If they can do it, only then will the waters calm. Something like that.”

In her pocket, Evangeline clenched her palm around the pound coin her mother had given her for toffee. She remembered it had rained that Friday afternoon.

“I thought we’d seen the last of this ten years ago,” said Mr. Partridge sadly, before shuffling out of the shop. Exchanging looks, Evangeline and Clara stepped out from the aisle and approached the counter once more, though Evangeline wasn’t sure either of them were now in the mood for sweets.

“You must never try and ride the water dragon,” said Mr. Graham, and they blinked up at him in surprise. His eyes were hard. “Understand?”

Evangeline nodded. Besides, neither of them would ever be able to tame a dragon.

“Mother?”

They had just finished another chapter of Evangeline’s bedtime story. Although Evangeline knew she was much too old for this sort of thing, and she was perfectly capable of reading on her own, it was a nightly ritual that she was certain her mother still enjoyed just as much as she did. It was also a way of distracting the both of them when the rain was beating down outside and it showed no signs of stopping.

This particular story was one of Evangeline’s favourites. It was a tale of adventure, and she loved listening to her mother read of distant lands and exotic locales, so far removed from the dreary existence of their little village that she found it hard to believe that there were indeed such other places in the world.

“Yes, darling?” Her mother got to her feet to slot the book back amongst the others on the shelf.

“Clara and I heard that a girl in the village disappeared on Friday. Is that true?”

Evangeline watched as her mother came to perch on the edge of the bed, bypassing her special reading chair. She adjusted the teddy bear that was sat on the windowsill, its stitched mouth coming undone.

“Yes. Yes, it’s true.”

“What happened to her?” Evangeline found herself fidgeting with a fraying edge of her blanket, eyes trained on the stray thread.

For a moment she thought that her mother had not heard her and was about to ask again, but then, “She got caught in the rain.” Her voice wavered. She stood, brushing her hands down her pinafore.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Evangeline whispered.

“It doesn’t have to make sense,” said her mother. She was staring out the window, her face sheathed in moonlight. The raindrops that cascaded steadily down the glass cast shadows on her skin, like tears.

Inhaling sharply and blinking as if she had just remembered whereabouts she was, she leant down and pulled the blanket up to her daughter’s chin, patting her shoulder and resting her hand there.

“You must promise me again that you will always come straight home when the rain starts. You come straight home to me. You promise?”

Evangeline swallowed, her glass of milk before bed now a bitter taste in her mouth.

“I promise.”

With one last smile, her mother straightened.

“What about the water dragon?” said Evangeline, remembering. “Should I be afraid of that, too?”

“Yes, darling. You must beware that, too. Now, good night. I expect to hear you praying before you go to sleep.”

“What do you think is this water dragon?”

Evangeline and Clara were skipping down the lane to the pond, laden with bread for the ducks. It had been almost a week since they had eavesdropped on the conversation in Mr. Graham’s shop, and since then, the missing girl had been found in a ditch near the marshlands with water in her lungs.

“Who knows?” said Clara. “Just sounds like a load of rubbish to me. It was the younger children who were spouting all that stuff, after all.” She sniffed.

“You didn’t ask your parents? Mr. Graham did warn us about it.”

“Why should I?” Clara shrugged. “I’m already told to be scared of enough things. I don’t want to worry about something else.”

They’d reached the pond, a small pool of water about the size of Evangeline’s garden. It had lily pads and frogs if they were lucky enough to spot one. Evangeline tore off a scrap of bread and threw it to the mother duck and her ducklings, not finding it in herself to smile when they all gathered by her feet.

“You know, I have a theory,” said Clara, chewing on a piece of crust. “And it’s just a theory, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I feel like I can trust you enough to tell you.”

“We’re best friends, Clara!”

“Even so. I wasn’t sure if you’d run home and blab about it. Then your mother would tell my mother, and she wouldn’t let me out to play anymore.”

“Clara…”

“Anyway, here’s what I think. Our parents tell us all these things we should be afraid of. Ghosts that come out at night, going past the boundary wall, this water dragon, the rain… but what if–”

A low rumble of thunder pulled their gazes skyward. Evangeline could feel her heartbeat in her ears, and she looked to Clara with wide eyes. Her friend sighed.

“We’d better make a run for it, then.”

The girls scattered the rest of their bread and began dashing back along the twisted, winding roads. The pond was the other side of the village, and Evangeline thought how stupid she was for not sticking close to the cottage on a day like today.

The rain began to fall. Evangeline felt her hair and her clothes grow wetter and wetter, and soon she was whimpering not just with the cold but with a gnawing fear that had a hold of her insides. Clara was ahead of her but she could barely make her out, the rain coming down so thick and so fast Evangeline was sure that she would disappear.

She grabbed for the cobblestone wall on her left, using it as a guide. With her free hand she attempted to shield her vision, the rain pouring into her eyes. Near-blinded, she let out a gasp as she slammed into Clara, the both of them stumbling. Her friend had stopped.

“Clara! What are you doing?”

“Look!” she shouted, pointing.

Evangeline did so, following her gaze, to find that they were directly outside Mrs. Simmons’ cottage. The old lady herself was standing beneath the porch, pruning scissors in hand, and she was gesturing madly at them, her mouth a silent chasm beneath the deafening roar of the rain.

“Come on, then.” Clara pushed open the gate.

“No!” Evangeline caught her sopping sleeve. “We have to go straight home–our parents will worry!”

“We’re still ages away! You said yourself we can’t be out in this for too long!”

Clara grimaced at her, slipping through the gate and running up the stepping-stone path towards the house. Mrs. Simmons stepped aside to let her through the door before turning to gesture again at Evangeline.

With one last sigh, Evangeline darted to follow her. The rain no longer beat down upon her head as she reached the shelter of the porch, and she felt herself threatening to slump with relief as she moved past Mrs. Simmons, finding herself standing in a musty living room that smelt of mothballs and soap.

“You girls are drenched.”

She spoke oddly. Evangeline had noticed this on the few occasions she had been up-close to Mrs. Simmons. Her mother had told her it was because of her ears, how she couldn’t hear her own voice too well, and so the sounds came out strange.

“Come and sit by the fire.”

She ushered the two of them over to a flowery loveseat. Evangeline felt herself sinking; the cushions seemed to swallow them up.

As the girls huddled there shivering, Mrs. Simmons disappeared into the kitchen for a moment before returning with two cups of hot, sweet-smelling tea. Evangeline sat there with it clasped between her clammy hands, not yet having the strength to lift the beverage to her lips. Mrs. Simmons then collapsed into an armchair herself, peering at the two of them.

“Are you girls alright?”

“We’re fine.” Clara nudged Evangeline in the ribs; she nodded her agreement.

Mrs. Simmons didn’t look convinced, but took a sip from her own cup, staring into the flames that licked the hearth.

“Mrs. Simmons?” said Clara. Then, louder, “Mrs. Simmons?”

The old woman jerked.

“Oh, yes, dear?”

“We both want to know… we feel that we should know…” Clara paused as Evangeline grabbed her arm, shaking her head. She could feel Mrs. Simmons’ pale blue eyes on them from over the rim of her teacup.

Clara pulled herself free and Evangeline receded back into the cushions.

“Why should we even be so afraid of rain, Mrs. Simmons?”

The question hung in the stale air. Mrs. Simmons’ eyes dropped to the carpeted floor, and she took a deep, ragged breath that seemed to give her some trouble.

“Back when I was a child, I had a friend, Ruth,” she told them. “She lived just down the bottom of the lane from me.”

She gestured towards the window, before a chuckle wracked her chest.

“She was a headstrong little lady. I always much felt like I was her lackey, always following her, secretly envying her.”

Evangeline glanced sideways at Clara, but her friend seemed to be enraptured.

“One day, we decided we would go on an adventure. We passed the boundary wall to go and play in the river by the marshlands. We followed it for what felt like miles. I wanted to turn back but, well, you can imagine what Ruth might have said about that.” Smiling, she watched the fire. Evangeline realised that it was dying.

“Would you like me to put on some more logs for you?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s alright, dear. I was getting rather warm, anyway.”

Evangeline sunk back into the loveseat, avoiding the frown Clara shot her for interrupting the story.

“Then it started to rain,” murmured Mrs. Simmons, her gaze fixed on the rapidly diminishing flames. “It came so quickly, and neither of us saw any danger. We were just children, after all. Anyway, I managed to get out. I got lucky, I suppose… I tried to reach for her from the bank… but she’d already taken on too much water. I watched as she slipped beneath the surface and never came back up. The water dragon took her.”

Her crooked hands were trembling. Evangeline and Clara shared an uneasy glance. At the bottom of the hearth, the embers glowed their last before finally growing dark.

“It stole my friend from me. And it felt cheated that it couldn’t have me, too. It lies in wait for me, to this day. The rain gives it the power to search for me, for the river to break its banks and seek me out. Do you know how many floods this village has had over the years? The last was before your time, anyway. Now, our children are warned to run straight home when the rain starts. To keep them safe. I thought it had ended. For ten years, I thought it was over. But then that little girl went missing and… it’s all because of me.”

Mrs. Simmons hunched over herself and began to cry. The girls shifted on the loveseat. Clara opened her mouth, but the words seemed to die on her tongue. Evangeline glanced out the window; the rain had stopped.

“We really must be getting back now, Mrs. Simmons,” she said, setting down her untouched tea. Her voice was barely above a whisper, and she realised her mistake.

“I can show you if you like.”

“I’m sorry?”

Mrs. Simmons raised her head. Something had changed in her eyes; they were focused, steely, glinting.

“I can show you where it happened on the river. It’s not too far to walk.”

“Mrs. Simmons, did you hear me?”

Clara sat up straight. “I want to see.”

Evangeline whirled on her. “Clara, what are you doing?” she breathed. “Everyone will be waiting for us, my mother is probably terrified–” A lump formed in her throat, her eyes prickling. “We have to go home.”

Her friend shrugged. “Do what you like. But I need to see this. I’m going.”

A smile stitched itself across Mrs. Simmons’ face. Evangeline stared between the pair of them, her mouth open.

“Come with us, dearie,” the old lady said, pushing herself to her feet. “It won’t take long, I promise.”

“No.” Evangeline stood. “No, I really must go back now.”

Mrs. Simmons cocked her head at her, like a bird. “She’s scared, bless her.”

“I’ll be fine, Eve,” Clara whispered. Evangeline turned to her, hot tears running down her cheeks now. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Well, if you’re sure, Evangeline,” said Mrs. Simmons from behind her. “You be careful, now. And tell your mother I said hello.”

“I will.”

Evangeline stepped out of her reach. With one last imploring look at Clara, met with a determination she had seen so many times before and likely followed, she headed towards the door. The latch was stiff beneath her fingers. With a dull thunk the door swung open, and she looked behind her into the living room. Both her best friend and the old lady were staring at her; Mrs. Simmons had a hand on Clara’s shoulder.

Outside, the sky was bright, and the ground smelt fresh and sharp. Pulling the door to, Evangeline ran all the way home.

Clara was found dead in a ditch the next morning with water in her lungs.

Evangeline repeated the story over and over again. She and Clara had been feeding the ducks by the pond. Then, when the rain had started, they’d tried to run home but had been forced to take shelter at Mrs. Simmons’ cottage.

The old lady had vouched for the pair of them and had also filled in the details where Evangeline could not, that Clara had said goodbye not long after her friend, and that that was the last she’d seen of her.

From then on, as Evangeline had expected, she was no longer allowed out of her mother’s sight. Not that she would have wanted to. And it wasn’t as if she had a friend to go out and play with, anymore.

As she and her mother made their way down the lane towards Mr. Graham’s to buy some necessities, Evangeline caught sight of Mrs. Simmons pruning her roses. It took a moment for the senile woman to hear them, yet when they passed by and her pale eyes landed on Evangeline, she gave her a gummy smile, her finger raising toward her pinched lips.

There was a rumble of thunder overhead.

“We’d better hurry,” said her mother, pushing her daughter along.

Evangeline knew she was right. There was a lot to be feared in this village. And she knew what Clara’s theory had been that day. She only wished that she had come to the same realisation sooner.

At least she knew now. Ten years old was as good an age as any to start growing up.

Traveling by Starlight: A Journey of Two Ways

By Lindsey Duncan

When the otherworldly visitors arrived, I had my hands full with their unusual needs: no salt, everything baked or boiled until it was pure–what did that mean?–and only cream to drink. While the rest of the castle whispered about their motives and admired every nuance of their behavior, I rushed about the kitchen, commander of an army of cooks and cutlery. I was as curious as the next person, but I had a job to do.

After a welcome feast of venison curry and roast peacock, I slumped in my chair by the servant’s courtyard and wished I could make myself move. Sticky summer air pressed down on my body, settling into the same places the heat of cook fires had blasted earlier. I thought about stripping, but it was too much effort to reach the ties.

“Are you all right, Verel?” a raspy baritone asked. “I heard bloodcurdling screams from the direction of the kitchen.”

I sat up sharply, feeling hot in a third, not entirely unpleasant way. Delin stood in the stone archway, outlined by the moonlight–lean, perfectly proportioned, a face like rock. We had been friends for years, and when I first realized I was attracted to him, I had stared at that face, hoping to remind myself of our friendship in the familiarity of hazel eyes. Then I discovered I enjoyed staring too much.

“If you wish to know if there was blood in the red velvet cake,” I said, “the answer is yes. How else do you think I achieved that color?”

Delin laughed. “That will put me off my dinner.”

“Tell me about the feast,” I said.

He dropped on the well-trod dirt of the courtyard, absently fingering a hoof print. “The best of the known world–especially from the kitchen,” he added with a nod to me. “But all the guests were tense, trying to be better than their natures.”

“And…?” I prodded.

“Our visitors are beautiful, but not in the way of anything human,” he said. The excitement came off him in waves. I basked in it as I listened. “Their speech is–sometimes I cannot be sure it is words at all, and we choose to hear the familiar. The king tried to get them to agree to an alliance,” he continued. “But they said we were primitive and crude, with our iron weapons and our deafness to the natural world.”

“That was rude of them,” I said.

“No–they’re right.” Delin sighed. “But there’s hope. They want to take a few people with them, to live in their cities, learn their ways, and bring that wisdom back.” He fidgeted as if he could hardly hold the thought in. “I want to be one of them.”

My heart took a step off the castle parapet. “But people abducted in the past were gone for decades,” I said. “They left and returned only when their friends had become old and grey-” when I was old and grey, I wanted to shout, “-and the world they knew had crumbled to dust.”

“But young,” Delin countered. “And still with all the possibilities in the world to pursue. And the chance to see their home realm!”

“You’re needed here,” I said. I wasn’t sure who perturbed me more: Delin or these mysterious visitors. The question of the unknown and the imagined–cities of glass, places where everyone flew on gossamer wings; powers that could cure any sickness–was as heady as the king’s anniversary wine… but I was sobered by the idea of how much one would leave behind. Delin, apparently, had no such concerns.

“Needed?” He shook his head. “I’m the junior healer, and there are plenty of young faces waiting to replace me. Anyhow, it’s not assured. They want to pick from a group of candidates.” He slid forward, catching my hands. “I want you to come stand with me, Verel. For support, and maybe…” He hesitated.

It was foolish, but the little catch in his voice turned everything the other way around. He wanted me with him, and a journey into the unknown with a good friend–never mind more–was less daunting, even conceivable. As long as they let me cook, and who knew what arcane ingredients and obscure techniques the visitors might use for their food?

“Of course I will,” I said. Meanwhile, a portion of my brain wondered how long I could hold onto him before he noticed. I waited until the last to free my hands.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll feel better with someone I can trust at my side. Not so inclined to run away, maybe.” His smile was sheepish.

He was trying to make a joke, but he was anxious. “I will be there for you,” I said firmly. “Even if you run.”

He laughed. “With a show of confidence like that, Verel,” he said. “What could go wrong?”

The next morning, after a hectic breakfast, I hurried into the royal gardens. It was the pride of the kingdom, waterfalls of blossoming vines tumbling into lush beds. I hid myself behind a clump of rosebushes as the queen took the visitors on a tour. Clad in a velvet gown and with a silver circlet perched upon her brow, she carried herself with an air of majesty that paled next to the visitors.

Their skin was pale and soft, their forms–while human in shape–as thin and delicate as crystal. Their voices rang like bells and echoed inside my head. I wondered if they were speaking or somehow projecting their thoughts. They wore sleek white robes, but the whispers I heard among the servants indicated this was not the fashion of their kind. Perhaps they typically wore nothing.

The five visitors glided along in the queen’s wake. One seemed to be in charge; when he spoke or gestured, the others halted. I strained to overhear, but the only dialogue I caught was about the perfume of the flowers.

The smallest visitor turned her head in my direction. I jerked backwards into the bushes, cursing as my hand scraped on a thorn. I felt childish–but these beings seemed so ancient, how could one not be a child? To play at their feet seemed natural.

I withdrew, sucking at the line of blood on my hand. For as long as I could remember, we had seen signs of them: dancing lights on the horizon, intricate circles left in field and forest. Their only contact had been occasional abductions of our people. Now that they had shown themselves, there were more questions than answers–questions as basic as whether their kind had women and men. By appearance, they were neither, or perhaps I didn’t know what to look for.

As I approached the whiteblossom trellises at the garden gate, I saw Delin leaning against them. He huffed out a sigh. “Morning, Verel.”

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“Guard had a training accident this morning–patched up now. Messy, though.” He looked at me and smirked. “You’re bleeding. Your cooks are supposed to supply dye for the cake, not you.”

“I’ve got tastier blood.” He was too close; his slightly rapid breaths sent a shiver through me. To distract myself, I continued, “Are you sure you want to volunteer to go with the visitors? We know nothing about their intentions. They could mean to feast on us like cattle.”

“Seems a lot of trouble for a meal,” he said.

“No trouble too great,” I retorted.

Delin laughed. “I understand you: we have only their word they mean to help us. But there is no such thing as a one-way journey, Verel. Wherever they take us, we can return.”

I knew I should point out he was wrong, how many actions could not be undone, but I wanted to believe him. His face was luminous, inspired. I wobbled on the first step of my own one-way journey. A few fierce words would tell him how I felt.

The risks held me back. To lose a friend, to chance he would want nothing more to do with me and he would insist on making his journey alone… I couldn’t bear the thought.

I might not have a choice. Who was to say the visitors would want a cook, much less this one? We could be separated forever.

Would I tell him if those were the last words we would share? Would that make it easier or harder?

“Verel?” He tilted his head inquisitively. “You look concerned.”

“No salt,” I said. “I can’t work with bacon or most kinds of cured ham.”

“You could use me,” he offered. “I’m a ham.”

Did the man know what he was saying? I took an obscure comfort in the fact that if he had any clue of my feelings, he wouldn’t have bantered.

“But not cured,” I said. “Healers can’t cure themselves.” I paused. “If you change your mind about the visitors…”

“I won’t,” he said. “I was meant to do this. It’s destiny.”

The day of the visitors’ departure arrived more quickly than I had expected. Delin barged in on me wearing a frilly yellow court shirt, asked how he looked, and vanished before I could tell him the only possible description was bridal. I shook my head, changed into my second-best tunic–crimson with wide sleeves–and went out to catch him.

“They’ll choose you because they want to choose you–not because you look good,” I said.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because they’re not fools,” I answered. “If we’ve figured that much out, enlightened beings from the otherworld certainly have.”

Delin laughed. “I’m sorry, Verel. I’m being a clodpate about this.”

I clapped his shoulder. “Courage.”

We descended into the courtyard, where thirty-some people gathered to await the selection. Some were at the height of their field, honored warriors and the finest master of horse-flesh in six kingdoms. The royal party stood on a raised dais. By the king’s expression, he was not pleased by the potential for losing these paragons, but to object would risk offending his guests and the unknown bounty they might bestow.

Everyone tried to speak quietly, but voices echoed off the stone as if an entire city crammed into the courtyard. Softer whispers still pierced like the cries of hunted birds.

Delin craned his neck towards the archway into the great hall, the rust-dappled main gate winched up out of sight. “Can you see them?”

“Stand still,” I said.

The clock in the center tower of the castle chimed the hour. The scarlet-clad herald stepped forward and announced the visitors. Until that moment, I had not noticed they had no names–or none that they shared.

The five figures glided into view, their too-large eyes tranquil and impenetrable. They halted a few paces from the front of the crowd. Delin gripped my arm.

The king stepped forward on the dais. “These are the ones who dream of accompanying you to your other world,” he said. “Each choice will serve you in good stead.”

The visitors separated and moved through the crowd, sometimes close enough to touch but never speaking–their glances among each other as fluid as water and concealing thought like ocean depths. I felt as if I were drowning under a tide I could not even perceive. What were they thinking? Were they judging us? A prickle of indignation surged through me. By what right?

Delin gasped. “Verel…”

The little one stood in front of us. She–she? I might as well assume–was shorter than I had realized; I found myself looking down as her eyes turned up. I could have lost myself in that gaze, but I was also aware of Delin: quick, shallow breaths, the tension of excitement, the beating of his heart. I was in time with my old friend, waiting.

She lowered her gaze and walked away.

I stayed silent, not wanting to break the moment. He did, finally, puffing out a breath. “What just happened?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

The visitors converged in front of the crowd. Their leader spoke first, and it vibrated in my bones. “The older man on the end, with the crooked shoulder. You.”

Startled, then with a gap-toothed grin, the horse-master stepped forward. The king scowled, then schooled his expression.

Another visitor I arbitrarily thought of as female said, “The short young woman with the gold curls.”

One for each, then. Delin gripped my arm harder. I stepped on his foot. “Calm.”

The others chose in quick succession. Three stood there, then four.

The little one scanned the crowd–then looked again. She seemed to have trouble deciding.

The math dawned on me. If Delin went, he went alone. Part of me wanted to whirl and beg him not to accept if he was chosen–but what kind of friend would do that? Nor would a beloved try to keep him from going.

“The woman in the red tunic.”

The Left Fork

I froze, stunned – but I was the only female wearing red, and her gaze was direct. I turned to Delin in confusion.

He clasped my hands. “Go for both of us, Verel,” he said.

The chill of loss in his eyes burned away under complete trust. It was ridiculous, but in that fervent look I found all the encouragement I needed. His dreams sparked inside me, celestial fire.

The words rushed out. “I love you,” I said. Common sense asserted itself: why invite rejection when it was so close to not mattering, I could not expect anything from him when we would be worlds and centuries apart…

Delin leaned forward and brushed my lips in a quick kiss. It tasted of sunlight. Whispered breath. Medicinal herbs, tart, tangy and cutting through the senses.

Then over–too fast. “I’ll be here for you,” he said.

I wanted to protest, but could not find words. The horse-master pulled at my arm, and I found myself facing the alien visitors, massive dark eyes expectant. With their pale grey skin, spindly limbs and outsized heads, they should have been ugly, and yet the tranquility–and now, finally, the welcome–radiated from them like warmth, and it was impossible to notice anything else.

“We thank our hosts,” the leader said. “We shall take our leave of you now.”

“We hope this will be the start of a long and profitable friendship,” the king replied.

I pivoted and caught Delin’s eye in the crowd. The wistful expression that burst into a smile when our gazes met was fuel enough for a decade.

The visitors guided us to the clearing where they had left their sky-ship. It looked like nothing so much as two silver plates fused together, no sign of seam or rivet. As they approached, segments unfolded like opening hands to reveal a doorway.

“We travel as if we could catch light in its speed,” the little one explained. “You will not even feel the ship move.”

The gold-curled girl started to speak, then fidgeted silent. Our hosts ushered us inside. The interior of the ship was as featureless as its exterior, moonlight metal cocooning without reflection. The corridors were perfectly round, spiraling off in all directions like chambers of a honeycomb.

“Your quarters are here,” the leader said, leading us to an unadorned chamber. Bunks flowed out of the walls, pillowed with what looked like silk. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

“Where do we-” the horse-master began, but the door had closed–in fact, vanished, and we could not find it again.

It was the first sign that something was wrong.

The bedding was not silk, rather a strange, viscous substance that shaped itself to the sleeper and gave an uncomfortable sense of drowning. The alcove on one side of the room, with only two sapphire-blue buttons to distinguish it, dispensed a bland but edible food substance. I itched to improve the taste, but there was no seasoning to hand. We had no way of counting time as it passed. I wondered anxiously how long it had been for Delin.

“Maybe they aren’t used to having visitors,” the gold-curled girl said.

We slept, and when we awoke, the horse-master was gone. Our frantic arguments were interrupted by his piercing scream.

I swallowed hard as the sound was followed by another–the pitch, intensity and emotion in his voice varying like a morbid symphony. If there were words, distance and agony destroyed them. It stopped, and the silence brought an absurd hope.

Then it started again.

The third silence was longer. I couldn’t look at the others–to meet their eyes would be to realize it was more than a nightmare. Terror clutched me.

The door irised open. Two of the visitors stood there. My fury died before it could reach my body. What way did we have to resist them?

“We require another person,” one said.

I stepped forward before I knew I was going to. “Take me,” I said.

The door melted into the wall. I thought about fighting back, running, but there was nowhere to go. I thought of Delin, grateful he would never know what was behind his dreams–even if he waited forever.

I tried to distract myself from the crushing dread as we wound through the unending, spiraling corridors, walls pale as bone. It felt as if we circled forever, should have ended up where we started. “Why the charade?” I wondered. “Why not just take what you want?”

“Why work to steal the dregs when your best will volunteer?” the other figure said. “Every kingdom in your world will be eager to participate.”

“What did you do to the horse master?” I asked.

“We studied his physical reactions to assorted environmental stresses,” the first said. “Unfortunately, his system gave out.”

The fear vised around me, driving out thought. “Will you do the same to me?”

“Oh, no,” the first said. “Your tests will relate to mental and psychological stress. We’re fascinated to see how much your kind can handle.”

Whatever my strengths, I knew I wouldn’t make our destination. As I walked, it seemed I could feel the vastness of night beyond the ship, traveling through starlight without end.

The Right Fork

I glanced down the line and saw that, though three other men wore red as I did, there was only one woman, a wispy seamstress–and I couldn’t be mistaken for female.

The seamstress beamed as she stepped forward. I concentrated on not feeling relieved. I didn’t want Delin to sense it. The familiar kitchens for me, and I would keep my friend –

“And the tall man with the dark curls,” the little visitor finished.

I stared. Could she do that? Weren’t they each choosing one? But if that was the rule, the leader indulged her–maybe his daughter?–for there was no protest.

I thought Delin would leap out of his skin for happiness. He whirled, grabbing me in an exuberant bear-hug. “Wish me luck, Verel,” he said.

Now or never, I realized. Say what I had to say or never have a chance, keep it bottled up like sour poison until it faded–if it ever faded. Twice, I tried to speak.

“Good luck,” I said.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “And you’ll be the first person to hear about it.” Like a dream, he was out of my grasp.

“I’ll be here for you,” I muttered, knowing he couldn’t hear me. Coward. Fool. I branded myself and didn’t even feel it burn.

The fairy visitors waited expectantly as their chosen joined them. With their shining starlight skin, their ethereal frames and long tresses, they should have seemed like dolls, not people, yet a power radiated from them that was impossible to deny.

Delin turned on his heel and flashed me a final grin. I returned it, feeling the strain about my lips, and saw his expression flicker uncertainly.

Too late.

The visitors departed, taking their guests to the door in the mound that led through the veil. On the other side, a world I could only imagine–and might learn about someday, as an old man, hopefully with something to show for my years.

But I would never again have a heart.

I fled to the kitchen and poured my pain into a recipe. When I emerged from my personal ruin, I had a new dessert, and it could only have one name: Fairies’ Cake.

Whether due to inspiration or something intangible, Fairies’ Cake was good to the point of being addictive. People came from all directions for a slice–or a second. With success came some measure of fame: recognition, wealth, women… none of whom truly made an impression on me. In their very softness, I saw Delin and my own cowardice.

Whenever the will-o-wisps lights appeared on the horizon, I went out faithfully to watch them, waiting for the doorway to open. I wondered what marvels Delin had discovered in the otherworld and what wisdom he had gained, and I yearned for both in equal measure.

As years became decades, I had to face the thought he might have become so enlightened–like the visitors themselves–that he no longer wished to come home.

I hoped–I still hope–for his return, but mostly now I think of him as a man of their world, traveling through starlight without end.

Walking the Line

By Alexandra Grunberg

Eleanora was in trouble again, though “again” did not seem like the right word. It was more that she was constantly in trouble, and her mother’s familiar lecture chased her from her home. She had hoped to be alone, but despite the darkness and the unseasonable chilliness, she was not the only one out on Poetto Beach.

“Would you like some company?”

The boy was blond, and Eleanora preferred brown or black hair, but she was really not supposed to prefer any boy at all. If her mother saw her smile at him it would set off another lecture, but her mother was not here, so she smiled.

“I would love some company,” said Eleanora.

The light of the moon reflected on the water, the only light out tonight. Eleanora still sat on her hands, just in case, though there was nothing she could do about her hair. It probably looked wet.

It probably looked like she had taken a midnight swim. She probably looked very romantic, and the thought put a damper on her almost rising mood.

“You speak English very well,” said the boy.

“I speak many languages very well,” said Eleanora. “Italian, Sardinian, and some much older.”

“Latin?” asked the boy.

“Not Latin,” said Eleanora.

Even the name of the language left her mouth feeling singed. Which meant her mother was right.

If she kept slipping, there may be no coming back. Her mother said she had to stop kissing the boys, no matter how much she wanted them. Why did the boy have to initiate the kiss? Would it really make so much of a difference? Eleanora could not imagine that it would feel any different, that it would stop the changes taking place.

“It’s so beautiful here,” said the boy. “I wish I could stay.”

Eleanor wished that her smile was sharp spikes instead of these domesticated stubs that filled her mouth and demanded she abstain from raw flesh.

Her sisters, her mother, her grandmothers, they used to be feared, even worshipped. They still had happiness in the past, they still had their men, but they also had freedom, and power, and blood and the night. They did not have to go to school, what was school to the Gianes? There was no education that could not be learned from dancing along the salt lakes, that could not be tasted in a young man’s blood, or absorbed in his embrace. What was the world of mortals to a child who was neither fairy nor demon, a creature that walked the line between life and death, love and murder? Why did the generations that had gone before her deny Eleanora that pleasure?

“You could stay here a little longer,” said Eleanora. “Sometimes just a little longer is enough to make everything feel okay.”

The boy smiled and sat down on the sand next to her, and his body was warm, and she tried to want it, want it for her own selfish pleasure and her own feast, and not want it for company, for love, for family.

They were upsetting, intrusive thoughts.

If she were a true Giane, she would straddle him on this beach, she would tear out his heart, she would let his blood spray across her cheeks and breasts, and taste a salt like the ocean but richer. If she was a true Giane, she would push this boy away when he rested against her shoulder, like he did now, and flay him, expose him, devour him.

Eleanora told herself it was her mother’s lecture still ringing in her ears that stopped her. She told herself it was not her own will, but a decision that had been made long before she was born; to be weak, to be companions, to be loved. She told herself that if she ran the wild hills, if she saw the boats of men intent on tearing her island upside down, she would not have given in to their charms. She would not have given up her wildness for their children.

She had nearly broken through, so many times, so close that her nails were already curving into claws, her hair was already matting into scales that hung in rough curls down her back, and maybe if she kissed another boy so deeply again, her teeth would break the skin of her lips and she could run on the sand as more creature than girl. A part of her, bred so deep, so long ago, held off, did not want that abandon, did not want that wildness, and Eleanora could not will it to quiet its appeal for love, for comfort, for domesticity.

But it did not matter what she wanted, because the boy’s lips were her on hers, and his tongue was in her mouth. She did not initiate the kiss, but she could have pulled away. She could have, and she chose not to. Eleanora felt her mind filling with darkness and her mouth filling with spikes that did not break her own lips, but they did break the boy’s tongue.

Zombies Can’t Take the Train

By Greg Greenberg

Case Contents: Selections from the subject’s journal and an interview with a surviving member of the fire and rescue squad that quarantined the subject.

Subject: Steven Smith. North American (Northeast Coastal Ecoregion) male Caucasian. Age 41 at time of infection in the city of New Haven on May 14, 2027.

May 16, 2027

May 17, 2027

Last night as I tried to sleep, I kept asking myself the same question. Why at the headwaters of the river of causality had I made a decision that resulted in my beaching on such a barren island? Why, after preparing for disasters my whole life did I waste all my efforts in one moment of weakness? Yes, it was weakness, not an inner core of altruism and bravery, as I wrote May 1st. I didn’t rescue Cindy that day. Okay, the real reason: thirty days was too long to be lonely. How else to explain why I didn’t ignore her shouts, like I had so many others, why I put the book down I was reading, He’s My Daughter/She’s my Son: A Hermaphrodite’s Story, and why I turned off my radio, which was blaring out static-filled status reports on safe zones and hot spots. My heart leapt, when I peeked out my window and recognized a not-so-friendly face, Cindy from my writers’ group. A calm person, she was shouting in bullet-like sentences while striding back and forth across my parking lot, her long auburn hair waving behind her. “Is anyone out there that can help me?” “I’m clean.” “Come on look at me.” “No bite marks. Nothing.” Her hoarse voice suggested a ragged tiredness underlay the confidence her face conveyed.

My decision to open the door was rationalized by a fiery red miniskirt and a ripped black-lace blouse, which revealed a pink polka-dotted bra. It was hard to connect this woman, who resembled the languid femme fatale in The Lethal Enigma,3 with the straight-laced woman I met in my writers’ group every other Tuesday. That was a woman who always criticized my work for “having too high a death toll” and at our last meeting got personal with, “Yet another rescue fantasy? Who are you trying to rescue?” I didn’t rescue Cindy, except from an itch. She didn’t cling to me. And I didn’t shoot down six empty-eyed Eaters with the smooth professionalism of a paid assassin as I wrote earlier. Instead, with the unimaginable firing up my imagination, I opened my security gate and front door and pointed the Glock in my trembling hand in her general direction. I now understand that the relief that flashed across her face was that of an addict finding a fix.

She swaggered toward me, sweaty hair half-obscuring her face, and said the wrong thing, “Well hello hello Stevie wonders, wondering, wondrous. Looks like you lost a little weight.”

Silent, I backed up into my shadowy and musty living room and motioned her toward the door with the Glock. I slipped on a stack of Wasteland and Last Scout comic books. As I steadied myself, she disappeared from view. Moments later, she was framed in the bright light of my doorway; one hand held a pink Hello Kitty4 pack, and the other, two Tasers. Shaking hair out of her face she said, “You must have gotten awfully lonely in there.”

“Don’t like getting to know people too much. They turn out to be strangers.”

She stuffed the Tasers into her pack and strolled into my condo. I had her shut my door and security gate and waved her toward my lumpy orange couch. My wave was too hard and my grip on the Glock too loose as the gun flew halfway across the room. It landed with a clang among my retro-robots, the ones on my mantelpiece, not those scattered among three bookcases that held science fiction and survivalist magazines or the two Japanese Monster Robots that bracketed my flat screen on its IKEA5 resting place. As I retrieved the gun, she giggled, “Well I guess you already have company.”

I sat down on my La-Z-Boy recliner. “Guess I do. So, what happened?”

After slipping off her tennis shoes and tube socks, she plopped down at one end of my couch, positioning her long legs in front of her to sit cross-legged. I relaxed into my recliner but kept the Glock pointed at her. Bits of orange panty made sneak appearances as she told a story of hiding out in the social science building’s snack shop with six other sociology grads. Taking a breather, she leaned forward too much for my comfort and picked at her toes. “We were a great team…even held off a stray political science prof and a raggedy bunch of econ grads with homemade shivs, fire extinguishers, and a projectile weapon made from soda fountain parts. But the soda-syrup, candy bars, and other treats ran dry. We had to forage. It was crazy awful. The airdrops never worked out. Poor Frank and I were the last ones. Only been three days, but it seems so long ago. We’d gone into the pharmacy on Orange Street to get an edge. But it’d already been emptied — except for one of them.”

Pressing her lips together, she got a faraway look.

“You okay?”

“Poor Frank was just too tired, too hungry, too everything.” Her eyes watered and voice trembled. “Brought down by a…an old woman. Her skimpy bunny outfit and walker caused him to let his guard down, even though I—” She pressed her face into her hands and began to cry. “Such a waste…He would have been…He was beautiful and brilliant…a whole new understanding of social change…” Looking up at me, she pleaded, “Why him?” and then bawled.

Cindy could have told me that her fairy godmother had rescued her and I would have believed it. She appeared more than clean and I couldn’t survive another day alone. Hoping to provide comfort, I went and hugged her. She rested her head on my shoulder as she held me. When her sobbing stopped, she released me and wiped her face. “Thank you.”

Not knowing how to respond and wanting to hide the embarrassing physical reaction I was suffering from, I scooted away from her. She reached over and put her hand on mine, the one that still held a gun and giggled, “Let’s make love not war.”

And then she unfastened the top button of her blouse.

And the button below it.

Not until her blouse and bra were on the floor and she was sliding off her underwear did I cry, “Stop it. You don’t have to do that.”

She just smiled and stood on the couch so as to pull her skirt over her smooth hips.

“Really. It’s okay,” I mumbled as her skirt joined her blouse and underwear.

Still smiling, she said, “It will be,” and pushed me down into the couch. Her lips began to playfully nip and nibble mine. I dropped the gun, which clunked on the floor, as her sweet, salty tongue slid into my mouth and all her softness pressed against me. My jeans soon covered the gun and I was gripping the couch. Above me, Cindy moved upward and downward, surging and swaying. As we bobbed and groaned, I attempted to keep up, not to sink under the waves of unbearable pleasure. I was about to scream when she stopped moving and we tensed up. Still in a state of disbelief, I experienced a spasm of release. She pecked my cheek and gasped, “Glad we’re past that,” and zonked out on top of me. As I maneuvered from under her, she muttered, “Don’t go, Frank.” Covering her with my winter jacket, I noticed a nasty scab on her back. However, I shut it out of my mind and went to eat a celebratory Pop-tart (strawberry).

If Cindy was infected, she couldn’t help being post-truth. But was it all a lie? Everything that she said? Did she seek me out, knowing from my stories that I was a survivalist? Had she even dressed like something on the cover of a post-apocalyptic pulp novel because I’d go for that? I’ll never know. I had suspicions that I put aside — well that I burned, hung, poisoned, ran over, shot, and drowned — as she fulfilled fantasies that I didn’t even know that I had. No matter why she did so much for me, she made me feel whole for the first time in my life. And she is someone I still can’t stop loving.

May 18, 2027 [Ed note: Dates are the time of journal entry and not of events.]

So, what happened to Cindy? For another hour, I watched her cry while I planned how to end her suffering. When she rubbed a broken bottle’s jagged edges against her wrist, guilt ricocheted inside me like shrapnel, tearing me apart. Moments later, my missing hand tingled and the nauseating smells of my decomposing neighbor overwhelmed me. I dug my nails deep into my surviving palm. “Oh Cindy. I’m so sorry,” I said as my missing hand became a disorganized tableau of sensations: kisses, ice water, bee stings, a soothing massage, cigarette burns, cramps, crawling ants, electric shocks, and spilt milk. I fell to the floor and whimpered, “I shouldn’t have waited.” Endless grunts and groans passed my lips. Knowing that the plague was rewiring my stump, desensitizing it, so I’d be a high-functioning disease vector, didn’t help. My clothes soaked with sweat and, the sensory symphony unfinished, it was sweet relief to pass out.

I woke sprawled on the bathroom floor, unable to remember how I got there. The medicine cabinet’s contents surrounded me; so, using the light of the setting sun, I applied disinfectant cream and layered gauze over my now desensitized stump. As I worked, I tried to leapfrog the stages of grief, to accept that never again would I nibble a sweet Pop-tart, sink my teeth through the downy rose-orange skin of a ripe peach and into its juicy flesh, or suck out the fatty head meat of a garlic-soaked shrimp. Upon realizing that I’d also never get a creative writing degree, reach the next level of Warlords,6 or attend another meeting of the Vintage Robot Collectors Association, I soon needed the gauze to wipe my tear-coated face.

With much gauze wasted, I returned to the office and found the rum bottle in my pack. After taking a long swig from it, I sat on the floor and grumbled, “Okay, no more bummering. Not about the future, food, or your left hand. Nada.” I also decided not to attempt the stages of grief again. Something would turn up and all that mattered was seeing Mom one last time. Feeling better, but missing Mom, I had an idea. Last week, a Caribbean shortwave station reported that a rescue train would soon come south from Boston, the one Clean city in the northeast. When it stopped in New Haven, I’d pass as a Clean and hop on. Knowing I was going to Wilmington,7 to Mom, I fell into a coma-like sleep on the office floor, an empty bottle in my hand and happiness in my heart.

Morning sunlight poured through the office window. I turned my pounding head away from the light, groaned, “Pleasssse, no. Ohhhhhh,” and spewed my liquid dinner. Done, I staggered to the bathroom. There, I wiped debris out of my itchy beard and scooped water out of the toilet tank with a toothbrush mug until I was semi-functional. As I did so, I cursed any surviving University of Wisconsin biomarketing professors. If they’d followed lab-animal protocols I could have avoided this opportunity for personal growth and discovery. I then redressed my wound, hid it in a towel sling, and prepped for going to the train station. All I could think about while I worked was Mom — how much I missed her, whether she was okay, and how fantastic it would be to see her again.

That afternoon, I stepped into State Street’s pungent air wearing my safari suit, thick glasses, and badly-tied boots. A piercing shriek came from the direction of Whitney Avenue. I tightened the grip on my Glock. The knowledge that I would see Mom if I could make it to the train station steadied me. Swallowing hard, I stumbled towards it through swarms of flies that had gathered to feast on my former neighbors. Their faces and bodies were swollen or caved in by rot and ecosystems of insects clustered in body cavities that shouldn’t have existed. Other neighbors had become dried-up and moldy husks that sun-faded clothing still clung to. My stomach turned and I dry heaved. However, I forced myself to look around. Each block had just five or six corpses, but they seemed countless. The Eaters had also left behind what I hadn’t noticed from the Guptas’ window, scatterings of chewed-over bones. Tiny scraps of clothing, which still blew around, stuck to everything, as if a confetti-filled parade had passed by.

Even before I noticed the eyes of several well-fed, feral cats tracking me, my sense of solidity had faded. Except for the Compulsives’ creations, it was like being in every post-apocalyptic movie I’d ever watched. Those creations included a Last Supper mural made from Tupperware on a Catholic church’s doors; a fifteen-foot8 beer-bottle sculpture of a movie zombie holding a red umbrella in front of an insurance agency; a gallows built of books in front of Never Ending Bookstore; and a giant bird nest on top of the Su Casa Realty office.

Halfway to the train station, in front of a burned-out animal hospital, I slid to the ground next to a pajama-clad man with missing legs. Overwhelmed by awfulness and fear, I said, “Sorry to bother you, dead guy,” and closed my eyes. After several moments of dark despair, I resolved that for Mom, I’d be a real man, like those in my stories. Upon opening my eyes, I turned away from the dead guy so I wouldn’t see his stumps again. A mannequin in a hairdresser’s broken window caught my eye. Its braids reminded me of how Cindy would twist her hair and stare into space after our sensual sessions. My stomach pretzeled into a ball of knots as I recalled what I’d told her a week after she arrived.

We’d finished a breakfast of canned fruit, animal crackers, and turkey-jerky and were in bed planning our day, i.e., reading The Optimistic Sexual Manual: Techniques for Doubtful Lovers. I had on boxers and she wore one of my white oxford button-down shirts, which wasn’t much buttoned. She gently pushed the book down and kissed my forehead. “Stevie sweetie, I need you to promise me something.”

“Hunh?”

“Just promise if I ever get the munchies well you’ll, you’ll…You know…”

I took her hand. “Don’t be silly. We’re safe here.”

“Nowhere is safe!” She sat up and turned to stare at the wall. “Don’t you understand? We’re never going to be safe.” Tears began to run down her face. It seemed as if all the beauty inside of her was washing out of her swollen eyes.

Fumbling for something to say, I hugged her as she started to sob. When she gasped for breath, I released her and said, “Look at me. No, look at me!”

Quieted down, she turned in my direction.

“Hey. Don’t worry. We’re going to be fine. But if anything happens to you, I promise I’ll do it,” I said, thinking it would never be necessary.

Her shoulders relaxed and she gave me a shy smile. “All right, but you have to triple swear on your mom’s life that you’ll—”

“I told you I’d do it.” Speaking at a rapid clip, I continued, “And anyway, she was always like that fish that escapes the pot to land in the frying pan, or fire, or to land— or whatever. Who knows what hap— She’s might not even be around anymore to swear on.” After pausing for oxygen, I snapped, “I triple swear though!”

Cindy wiped her tear-smeared face and began to giggle. Her mirth built to deep full-bodied laughs that shook her so much she gripped my arm to steady herself.

“Hey. What’s so funny?” I scooted toward the edge of the bed. “You going to stop?”

Still laughing, she pulled me back. “Don’t you see, your stories…you always subjected our group to”–she caught her breath–“were wish-fulfillment fantasies? We kept complaining and you kept rescuing your mom.” Striving to suppress her merriment, she added, “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t laugh. I’m not being nice. So, what happened?”

Instead of answering, I jacked myself out of the bed. As I left the room, she got all sugary. “Oh come on Stevie sweetie. We all have our foibles. There’s no fixation that can’t be fixed. I can help.”

I slammed the door and went to the kitchen. And soon chilled. Cindy was the first person who had centered their world around me, pampering me in countless ways — from keeping me well fed to short-circuiting my funks. And the more I considered my stories, the more I knew she was right. When I decided to tell her the thing I did to Mom, what my therapists hadn’t dug out of me, I knew I loved her.

Sitting back on the bed, I gifted her some high-end biltong that I had retrieved. She accepted it with a smile. Ready to talk but unable to speak, I chewed on the jerky. Chunks of ugly memories that had been decaying in some dark unvisited part of my mind had been knocked loose and were crashing through my head. When they settled down, I teared up. Cindy took hold of my hand and kissed my cheek. “Sweetie, whatever it is, you’ll be all right.”

Before I could change my mind, I told her about the guerrilla war I’d waged against Mom’s love life. That war started with a campaign of passive aggression, a year after Dad took off to Montreal with my elementary school French teacher. It ended when I turned seventeen and retreated to Michigan. When I spit it all out, even how I hadn’t spoken to Mom since I’d run away, I knew I was an idiot. Mom wasn’t the problem. She didn’t need to be saved for being a human being. Grief-ridden by guilt, I tried to puzzle out why I’d warped my life. Rather than come up with answers, I felt like Fuzzy — our giant Calico cat — the time I’d cleaned her and by mistake grabbed the bottle of cat repellant instead of shampoo. For the first time, I wanted to apologize to her (Mom, not Fuzzy). However, given the plague, I couldn’t do anything. Cindy held me while I cried without tears. Later, we did things that helped me forget.

As I broke off eye contact with the mannequin and stood, I decided to keep my promise to Cindy. However, I couldn’t turn towards home. The feeling that I might miss the train and not see Mom was too much. My churning thoughts prevented me from noticing a desiccated, bald man — who wore rainbow tennis shoes and a purple Speedo — tearing toward me. He locked me in his arms before I could react. I dropped my gun and struggled as he tightened his arms around my too-large torso. He seemed to be deciding whether or not to snack on my neck when he released me and shouted, “Tell everyone, Mr. Quigley hugged you.” As I retrieved my gun, he slipped out of sight. Popping a Valium, I clambered into an empty SUV9 that had slammed into a Wok and Roll. After removing my pack, I lay down on the back seat. That my vision was limited to the roof and floor of the car, on which a teddy bear and a Miss Piggy doll embraced, allowed me to imagine that I was in a plague-free world until my back hurt.

May 19, 2027

Upon ditching the SUV, I shifted to aliens-have-arrived mode: run-like-mad, hide, scan-for-danger, and repeat. Soon all my muscles cramped up and there was more hiding than movement. When I reached the train station the sun was setting and I was drenched in sweat. Seeking shelter and a place to wait for the train, I tried to break into Peter Pan’s Liquorland, across the street from the station. Unsuccessful, I crept into Pete’s Pipes next door and failed to stifle a scream. The headshop was filled with the fetid chaos of what looked like a complex murder-suicide pact. A pack of hipsters, at least one a Compulsive, had used knives, ropes, pulleys, buckets, and two homemade seesaws to implement the pact. With death dancing in my head, I backed out and hobbled a half a block further to a public housing complex.10

The Art Deco building’s doors were unlocked, so I ducked inside and flashed my light around the foyer. It had institution-green walls, gray linoleum floors, and faded message murals about “conflict resolution” and “healthy eating”. Hoping I wouldn’t regret it, I picked some chains off the floor to lock the doors. Doing the task right with one hand was like solving one of those 3D brainteaser puzzles. My brain wasn’t up to the challenge cause every few minutes I thought I heard company. I would grab my gun and as I did so, the flashlight would slip out of my sling. Not able to see anything but the floor, I’d babble, “Shit, shit, shit,” drop the gun so as to pick up the flashlight and jam it back into my sling, and then pick the gun up. Things got so tense that I took several spontaneous bathroom breaks.

When I finished locking the doors, I dragged myself up five flights. My steps and groans seemed to echo and a strong odor of a chemical disinfectant irritated my nostrils. At the end of a hallway, I downed three packets of dehydrated chicken soup with stale water from my canteen. The thought that I was closer to Mom eased my mind as I put my gun and glasses within reach. Too exhausted and sore to be scared or care why the place lacked graffiti, trash, and cigarette butts, I sprawled out on the hallway floor and crashed.

The next morning, gun ready, I crept through dim hallways that were only lit by the small windows at their ends. As I did so, I knocked on random doors with my left elbow and shouted, “Hello is anyone home?” or “Come on out. It’s safe.” None of the doors I knocked on were unlocked. I was about to give up when on the eighth — and top — floor, I came upon King Solomon’s Mines of cleaning supplies. The hallway was a hygienic trail of squeegees, brushes, sponges, brooms, paper towels, mops, dusters, and bottles of detergents. At the trail’s end, there were three shotguns, boxes of shells, a set of master keys, and a scribbled note under a half-empty whiskey bottle. I slumped to the ground and read it.

This divine Buildings is this old ladies only baby. Don’t you dear defiles its hallways else I’m coming backs for you and I’ll kill youse and when your deads I’ll kill youse again worse and all youse descendants. Kept the human vermins and any refugees out with only three shotguns and the helps of those two sweetfellows in 2B. Got a lot easier when the vermins all turns on each others like starving rats. Ain’t no guest hidings here anymore either. Couldn’t risk them messin my baby after I works so hard to get it just right. Took care of that problems even the sweeties with some really strong tea. Only things you needs to do each day is…

After too short a relationship with the whiskey bottle, I took the keys and found the apartment with the best view of the train station. Nothing else mattered but making sure I was on my way to Mom, not the saggy furniture, the soiled-diaper-and-empty-beer-can-littered floor, or the dirt-streaked white walls decorated with pictures of rustic boats torn from a 2026 Newport11 Rhode Island Services Club calendar. I barricaded the apartment door and sat in front of the dead TV to rest and mourn my plague-killed TV companions. Half an hour later, a horrifying odor overwhelmed the smells of stale smoke, sour laundry, and soiled diapers that permeated the apartment. Through a smudged window, I watched five chem-suited men carry body parts from the train station and toss them on a bonfire in the middle of State Street while ten men armed with machine guns stood guard. When I slid the window open I heard one of the chem-suited men shout, “I always get the screwy jobs!” Many of the other men yelled unintelligible taunts at him. Although the fire and rescue squad would make life difficult, I was happy because their arrival meant the train would soon come.

My days since I found apartment 4E have been wonder-filled — wondering why I hurt Mom and whether the train would arrive before what happened to Cindy and too many others happened to me. My therapist told me to, “confront my anxieties in productive ways,” but there’s no useful way to confront that anxiety. When I wasn’t writing in this Clash of Civilizations12 notebook, I did try to tackle my other anxieties though. I scavenged for food, finding eight cans of gourmet cat food (meaty bits in gravy), four cans of chicken soup (alphabet), two boxes of macaroni and cheese (deluxe), a bag of gummy worms (sour), a jar of pickles (half-sour), and minty bathroom bounty. I also constructed early-warning systems in the hallways: precarious piles of hair dryers, cutting boards, fruit bowls, bathroom scales, romance novels, sexual aids, and other necessities of daily living. Now with every noise, adrenaline shoots through my veins and I cower in some corner, trying not to whimper, as I cradle my gun and think what could be my last thoughts.

Mostly, I’ve been observing the fire and rescue squad, which is more fire than rescue. While they brought back three skeletal survivors, who they half-carried into the fortress-like police station down the street, six times they returned with a mindless Eater. The first time they brought back an Eater, I didn’t put my binoculars down and walk away from the window, like I did every time after. Rather with growing disbelief, I watched them remove the Eaters’ hood to reveal a face twisted into bleak malice. As the Eater struggled, snapped his teeth, and screeched in frustration at being unable to partake of the plentiful food that surrounded him, the squad performed officious and empty bureaucratic rituals. The rituals ended with a medieval treatment, a fiery “cure,” the burning alive of an ill human being. I know he was human in those last moments not because I saw on his face expressions of pain, and even fear, but because only a human can scream in a way that lasts forever in your head.

Each sleepless night, their never-extinguished bonfire cackles and the dancing shadows on the walls remind me of my possible fate. However, knowing I’m going to see Mom, that I just need to catch a train, allows me to endure the unendurable. Right now, though, I’m so damn hungry, I could boil out the tanning chemicals in the leather jacket that I grabbed from 7C, eat insects, or set rat traps. I don’t remember all of that survivalist shit though. What am I going to do? I know. I’m going to starve!

Okay, I feel better after a Valium and buffering my stomach acids with a chapter of Lost Towns and Cities: Climate Change’s Canaries in a Coal Mine. It wasn’t a good book. I’ll figure out something else to eat. No matter how disgusting, dangerous, or unsanitary, I’ll eat it, if it means being with Mom. Oh man, how I need to see her. Except for food, it’s all I want. Enough scribbling. The squad went hunting, so I’m going out as well.

May 20, 2027

Yesterday, I stepped onto an outside stairwell and surveyed the neighborhood. My mind was like a mob in a burning theater, a disorganized collection of panicky thoughts seeking an exit. I clutched a railing and stared at the train station, willing a train to appear. When that didn’t work and I couldn’t remember anything from the online “Edible Weeds” course I’d taken, I huffed my way down State Street away from the police station and toward a string of brightly-colored fast-food restaurants.13 Too hungry to care about what might lurk behind the smashed-up cars and storefronts along the silent street, I paused to read a poster on a bus stop. Its large title read, “Vaccinations for Cleans and a Cure for Compulsives.” Reassuring words filled it and someone had scribbled the fire and rescue squad’s address on its corner in red ink. When I rushed on, I wondered why they’d try such an obvious technique for catching and killing Compulsives before they became Eaters.

My hopes for empty calories burst upon seeing the shattered windows, pockmarked walls, and the spent shell casings of every size that littered the ground like autumn leaves from an alien foliage. The way the countless decaying bodies of the National Guard troops and New Haven’s finest were arrayed suggested the restaurants kept changing hands till there were no more delicacies to fight over. I considered turning myself in to the squad. Maybe they’d let me call Mom before they grilled me. However, I wanted to see and hold her. So, with memories of the savory tastes of KFC’s fried chicken stirring my stomach, I checked for other customers and stepped over shattered glass.

For three hours, I searched the restaurants’ remains, in constant fear that Eaters or armed men would appear. All I found was a brick of green cheese and several squashed tater tots. Feeling sorry for myself, I stretched out on the cool kitchen floor of Thai Tanic. A yellow glint caught my eye and my hopes soared. I reached under a deep fryer to tap the huge, sunny pineapple can. My mouth watering, I shouted, “At last!” After finding an electric can opener, I dizzily smashed the can open with it and fingered the golden treasures into my mouth. An acid reflux attack interrupted my meal. Seeking water to cool my burning throat, I collided with a cash-stuffed grocery sack as I tore outside. Hundred-dollar bills scattered across the floor.

Near Dunkin Donuts, I found a water-filled pothole besides a battered Ford truck with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on its bed. While drinking from the pothole, I again had thoughts of giving up. They were interrupted by a distant shout of, “Hey kids, pick up the pace!” Struggling into the truck’s bed, I slipped off the bumper and tried to grab something with my missing hand. My chin hit the truck’s tailgate and my glasses flew. Pain shot through my jaw and everything was a fuzzy morass as I scraped my back stuffing myself under the truck with frog-like leg thrusts. Blurry men moved toward me and the smell of gasoline and burnt rubber filled my nose. I reached for my gun but my arm couldn’t reach to a Thai Tanic countertop — so I played dead. It’s easier in concept than execution as I’m not good at hiding from armed men in tight spaces. My cheeks twitched and I hyperventilated as I resisted fishing in my pockets for a Valium.

Two white blobs trailed the rest of the men. One droned, “…best that I can do. You try walking in this wacked get up. I’m wiped. Can’t we break? I need a drink. I feel like a—”

A khaki haze interrupted, “Hey Joey it wouldn’t be such a bitch if you stopped bitchin.”

Although they paused only feet away, I strained to see the hooded figure between the blobs — who jerked around like a puppet. I begged the gods that it wasn’t Cindy. Seeing her would send me on a guilt-powered-jetpack ride to the realm of madness. The spot of purple in the middle of a pale pink blur suggested the Eater was Mr. Quigley. Relief filled me, but it was hard to process that a man who’d hugged me, no matter how oddly, would soon be cured.

The Joey-blob’s shouted response, “Screw you!” brought me back to the present. “No, Really, Screw you! I want to barbeque this Zombie now! He won’t be as hard to handle. Fuck, yeah!” Legs moved in all sorts of confusing ways.

A scout-master voice yelled, “That’s enough! Take a break Joey. Relax. The rest of you lay off him.” After a pause, he continued, “Just sit down; it’s going to be fine. Could someone tase our friend before he gets lost?” There was loud clicking and Mr. Quigley fell several feet away. “Joey, maybe you want to holster that gun.”

“Why? It all sucks. Today. Every Day!”

“Yep. But you’re still squawking, screwing, eating, and shitting so count yourself lucky. Sit down.”

“But it’s not fair.”

“Nothing is. Just sit the hell down and we’ll talk about it.”

“And your gun, Joey.”

“Oh yeah.”

“That’s good, very good. No one is trying to break your balls. It’s just your crap luck to be a doughboy when there’s a do-the-tests-while-they’re-still-biting reg. The regs — health regs, test regs, clean-up regs, even the sittin-on-the-can regs — they’re what keeps us civilized. And if that don’t make you stand up and salute, if we disobey them regs, CO will put all our asses in a decoy squad so fast you won’t even have time to give your sweetie a goodbye flyby.

The only sound was the wind blowing debris down the street. Then, the rest of the squad began to murmur. The Joey-blob stood and hit the truck I was hidden under — three times. While it silenced them, I had to give it my all to suppress a shriek. My heart pounded in my ears like a Banger band as the Joey-blob moved away, kicking something that clattered. With a sinking feeling, I realized that that something was my glasses.

“Okay, Joey, you got your shit together?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Do you? Cause, if you don’t you’ll be walking your ass home. So, do you?”

There was a half-hearted, “Yes, sir.”

“Okay, he’s a new man. Enough lollygagging everyone.”

Anger almost beat out fear as the squad left. I wanted to shout, “They’re sick people, not monsters!” Instead, I stayed stone silent, wondering how I had even considered asking them for help.

When I tried to writhe from under the truck, it felt like its weight was crushing me and I remembered a news story I’d read. It was about thieves trapped in chimneys. They all suffocated because their lungs couldn’t expand. After a panic attack, I figured a way to wedge out of my predicament. As my shoulders cleared the truck, something rubbed against my leg. I cried out, “Help me! Please. Anyone.” I twisted to see an orange cat-blob. Ignoring it and my road rash, I finished my escape and sat on the street, leaning against the truck. When the cat-blob jumped onto my lap, I read its tag. My new friend’s name was Sprite and she came from the burbs. I scratched the furball and like an idiot dozed off as if I was at home.

Sprite leapt off me, jerking me out of one of my vivid visiting-with-Mom dreams. I shook my head hard to snap out of my fugue and looked at Sprite. “Thanks for saving me little one.” As I stood to search for my glasses I added, “It’s not safe here. Gotta go, and fast.” Sprite lay down and licked her paws while I began to scour the ground. The further I got from the truck, the higher my anxiety. Sprite didn’t help. She followed me around and at random moments would press against my legs and arch her back. Instead of giving into her desire for a scratch, I’d swear under my breath and step over her, hoping I wouldn’t land on my glasses. She’d issue loud plaintive meows and forgetting that I couldn’t see, I’d jerk my head around to see if we’d attracted anyone or anything.

After an eternal fifteen minutes, I found my glasses. They were under a street lamp plastered with a faded drug-study flyer, headlined, “DO YOU EXPERIENCE EXCESSIVE WORRY.” I went back to Thai Tanic where I stuck the Glock in my waistband and pressed the half-empty pineapple can tight against my stomach.

As I crept between hiding places on my return to the public housing complex, Sprite sashayed after me, ignoring my pleas of “Go away” and “Find someone else.” Exasperated, halfway back I stopped between an overturned firetruck and a burned-out pharmacy. Looking in her eyes, I said, “Don’t have any cat food left or anything for that matter to eat. And the place, it’s a true mess. Really, it won’t be up to your middle-class standards.”

She responded with a “Meow,” some leg rubbing, and an arching of her back that I finally knelt down to scratch — or tried to — with my stump. “What am I doing,” I said and stood to finish my trip.

I paused at the complex’s door, unsure if I should let Sprite in. She decided for me, clawing up my body so fast there wasn’t time to scream. With her snuggled around my neck, I entered the building. When I crashed on my couch, she climbed down to sit next to me. For twenty minutes, I sat, scratched, and starved.

It was only when Sprite jumped off the couch and pitter-pattered into the hallway that I noticed the apartment door was still open. Instead of getting up and giving chase I watched several flies flutter around my face. Just as I worked up enough energy to brush them away, the sounds of dishes and glasses shattering came from the hallway. The breakage continued as I stood and peered out the door. In the fading daylight that fell through open apartment doorways, I watched Sprite bounce like a pinball between my precarious sculptures. I ambled after her. Whenever I was close enough to whisper calming words, she dashed away, destabilizing another sculpture. The whole city probably heard us.

At the end of the hallway, Sprite shot past me and I slumped to the ground, grumbling. She sauntered back and climbed onto my diminished stomach to give me love bites on my cheeks. “All is forgiven little one. Everyone misbehaves sometimes,” I said and scratched her until she went to mew by the outside door. Nothing I did stopped the noise, but I didn’t release her until the song, “If you love someone, set them free,” played in my head. As soon as the door clicked shut and I slouched back to the floor there was whiny mewing from outside. I had to get off the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go-emotional-roller-coaster ride and I was so very hungry. And the mewing was so very unbearable. Mewing! Mewing! Endless Mewing! The noise endangered us. I had to end it, to save us. Bawling, I pulled a cuckoo clock from one of my collapsed sculptures and Never Mind.

How could I have eaten something with a name? Until you’re starving, you can’t understand what a primal force hunger is, the degenerate and degrading things it’ll make you do. Every self-proclaimed saint during plentiful times is a day away from sinning in a famine.

When I woke today at sunrise, sleep-deprived but with a sated stomach, I sat in the room’s shadows and stared out the window. I couldn’t figure out how someone could be so off as to write in ten-foot-purple-precise-Times-Roman typeface on the train station wall, “Mom I’m Drunk!” Why bring their mom into it? Did they want to say, “Hey, Mom, look at me, you can’t control me,” or did they need to see their mom, like me? Maybe they were even trying to apologize to her. Why hadn’t I done that, or even tried to contact her? It would have been so simple to pick up a phone; a few minutes and both our lives would’ve been so much better. Was it habit? Inertia? I don’t know. But the regret churns my insides as if I swallowed a power saw.

During one of our last sensual sessions, Cindy had made me face why I’d been so horrible to Mom. It is a session that I remember too well. Our bedroom was filled with the smell of our sweat, mixed with the sticky-sweet scent of the orange blossom honey we’d drizzled on each other. When her emerald eyes weren’t locked on mine, but staring at the ceiling, her blood would pulse up and down her arched neck, unable to cool her. She’d bite her lip until it bled, and gasping, chant something indecipherable. I’d admire her delicate features and slender figure, the way her flesh glowed with sexual heat, and think about how she was more beautiful than any woman I’d ever seen on the internet. Finished with her ritual of self-denial, her focus would return to me. A look of determination mixed with desperation would flash across her face and she’d again lock her eyes with mine and settle into another temporary truce with her body, to start the cycle over again.

After more than an hour of tantric teasing, her hips shifted and her face trembled. I moaned and pleaded for release with my eyes.

She turned her gaze upward, and pausing between each word, grunted, “How – Come – You – Never – Called – Your – Mom?”

I couldn’t answer; lightning flashes of painful pleasure were exploding throughout my body. All my effort was devoted to not moving, to not giving in to what every fiber of my being demanded: sweet release from the joyful torment. I tried to think about specifications in the appliance manuals I’d written. It didn’t help. Clenching the bed, I moaned as my mind filled with images of dish and clothes washers, fridges and furnaces, boilers and hot water heaters fusing with one another; metal and plastic intertwining in impossible ways as engines overheated, wires sparked, and hot liquids pumped too fast through pipes and tubes to shoot into the air.

Cindy slapped my cheek and gasped, “YouWereJealous…ofYourMom’sBoyfriends!”

My moans stopped their transformation into screams. “What?”

She took a deep breath and grinned. “Your stories were about revenge, not rescue.”

Stunned, a sad silence filled me as a drop of honey fell from one of her soft curves onto my forehead. Cindy licked off the honey and huskily whispered in my ear, “Rescue of the blah. Rescue from the blah. Rescue in the blah.” Straightening up and stretching — beautiful movements that usually distracted me — she continued, “But your stories were really kill, kill, kill. Stoic robots, dashing pirates, devious reptilians, or aliens with too many tentacles, they were all men. Men disgust you more than any—”

I placed my hand over her mouth. Taking hold of it, Cindy said, “Oh Stevie, I’m so very very sorry.” Almost knocking her off the bed, I turned over and stewed. Silent, she held me. I was almost more embarrassed that she knew me too well than depressed that I’d never faced why I was so terrible to Mom.

A day of emotional turmoil followed. Cindy devoted herself to helping me to get past it all — to forgive myself. Her cravings must have been unbearable as we talked and talked and she read me the sexual love poetry that she’d taken up writing. That evening we used some battery juice to watch Groundhog Day. Although we were once again able to enjoy our constrained life I still had moods during which it was hard to be in my skin.

Cindy had been more than right about my jealousy, but not in a way she could have imagined or understood. A little while ago, as I took a baby-wipe bath, the memory of the long-ago day I left Mom clawed itself out of the casket of forgetfulness I’d locked it in. Even after several Valiums and inhaler puffs, I’m still gasping and my head feels like it is going to explode with the horrific knowledge. I need to drag the memory from my mind, cut it into small, safe words, and mount those words on paper, even if it means going to the basement so no one spots my candlelight.

For two hours, I’ve sweated in this clammy spider-filled basement, unable to write or ignore the smells from the washing machines, which the former super filled with dismembered bodies and antibiotic soap.

Okay. Why Not? I’ll tell you.

Soon after my seventeenth birthday, Mom held one of her introduce-the-potential-stepdad nights. She sat across from me at our chipped kitchen table, somber but gorgeous. Her shiny blond hair was permed into her “wild lioness” look — a haircut for someone in her twenties, not mid-thirties — and her regal face wasn’t yet desecrated by make-up. She sighed; the inhalation caused her angora sweater to tighten across her chest. In rapid succession, I ate several of the baby carrots she always laid out for me.

All I wanted was a long afterschool hug, but Mom leaned hard on the table and began her, “BEHAVE, because he’s special,” speech. Whenever she reached the relationship stage that necessitated introducing me to the Man in her life she gave me the speech as if it was a vaccination for misbehavior. That time, mixed in with the standard, “Please be your best tonight,” “You’ll try won’t you,” and, “I’m sure you’ll like him,” there was also: “I love you, but try not to be a jerk,” “Don’t embarrass me again,” and even, “Don’t make me choose; we’ll both regret it.”

After I repeated, “Yes, Mom,” “I certainly will,” and “No problemo,” several times, the uncertainty faded from her eyes. When she stood and left, I watched her pale thin ankles, which slipped into view with each step she took up the stairs. She paused to yell, “If it goes well…we’ll talk about getting you a digitized outfit…including the hat.” My mouth held the remaining baby carrots, but I gave her a toothy smile.

Later, when the doorbell rang, she ran down the stairs in a frilly white dress that didn’t even reach to her knees. “Aren’t you going to get up?” She fidgeted behind me while I opened the door to find a fit- and young-looking Asian guy in a dark blue suit. If not for the pink tie and wine bottle, he could have been mistaken for a Mormon missionary. “Don’t stand there Stevie, invite Alex in.”

I said, “Oh, sorry,” and opened the screen door, letting pass that Mom called me Stevie in front of him. After I coughed up a, “Nice to meet you,” as he crushed my hand, we chatted about the extreme weather. The happy tears forming at the edges of Mom’s eyes were about to wreck her pancaked makeup, when, to my relief, she excused me. They went to the kitchen. I plopped myself down at the dining room table with my homework and pretended to ignore them.

Unlike the other guys, Alex didn’t stand around ogling Mom, he checked the turkey, removed it from the oven, and placed it on a counter. After he shooed away Fuzzy, he and Mom chatted as they worked, often laughing. He chopped veggies with the speed of a professional chef while she languidly stirred the mushroom soup.

Everything was wonderbar. I was even progressing through my algebra when I glanced up to see his hand run through Mom’s shimmering hair and twirl a few golden strands. Putting my pen down, so I wouldn’t bite off the top, I watched his hand slide down her back, stop, and squeeze. Instead of slapping him, Mom pecked his cheek.

I strolled into the kitchen and found my Pop-tarts. Mom recognizing the crinkly unwrapping sound turned around to say, “You don’t want to wreck your appetite.”

“Don’t worry. It’s plenty big, like yours,” I growled, and took a large bite of the sugary treat.

Her spoon clattered on the stovetop and she stared hard at me, her lower lip trembling. Putting her hands on her hips, she blinked several times. “Stop acting like…Never mind. Do you remember your promise?”

If she’d stayed silent I would have done anything for her, for those beautiful pleading eyes; but how could she have treated me — someone who loved her in every way — like a brat when she was the one misbehaving with yet another man and who didn’t care about what I saw and felt?

A concerned look appeared on Alex’s face.

After what seemed forever, her pleading eyes reached me and pulled my heart out of the black hole that had caught it. I barked, “Fine. Fine. I’ll wait,” and spun around to stuff the Pop-tart back into its box. My elbow hit the turkey hard. For the first time that bird flew. It landed in the middle of the kitchen floor and rolled in what seemed like slow motion. Even before it rocked to a stop and Fuzzy approached it, I knew I’d messed up again. Alex put his hand on Mom’s shoulder and said, “We can clean it. I don’t even like skin. Or we can order pizza. Sandy, let’s not ruin the evening. We can still—”

“Don’t call Pie High,” I blurted. “Their delivery guy still likes you. He always—”

“You son of a bitch!” my mother screamed, the first time she’d sworn at me. Unable to look at her because something primitive and violent had woken in her face, I turned toward Alex. He was smiling, which I now realize was due to her inept swearing. I fled to my room and sat on my comic-book-covered bed finishing the Pop-tart. A black thought filled my head. If she wanted to ruin herself with dirty worthless men, who just wanted the one thing men always want from women and who couldn’t love her the way I did, I wouldn’t be able to save her — to stop her from throwing herself at them or them at her. Knowing that I couldn’t watch any more collisions and that she’d choose Alex, or the next one, or the next one after that, over me, I chose for her. I climbed out the window with my duffel bag and babysitting savings, ran across the front yard, and kept running until I landed at Charley’s Appliances and Furnishings in Detroit. I worked there five years — until Charley discovered me in the storage room on a Double-Bliss-Deluxe Electric Massage Chair, burying myself in the plentiful bosom of his matronly-shaped wife, who always smelled of freshly laundered clothes and the pastries she made for me.

I should stay in this decrepit basement since I’ll never be able to sleep again. Putting the thing down on paper didn’t help. The memories of the day I left Mom keep steamrolling through my head. But maybe they’re false memories? Yes, they have to be. Why didn’t I remember earlier what happened that tragic day? Why are the memories so vivid? And why won’t they stop? The plague-related obsessions and neuron-eating parasites are messing with me; that’s the only logical answer. I couldn’t have been so twisted. Mom must know. I have to talk to her. The one thing that will quiet my memories is to tell her I’m sorry for the whole stew of stupidity, ugliness, and craziness and to receive her forgiveness, to hear from her that I wasn’t a monster. All I need is a few minutes with Mom. How much longer do I have to wait? Why won’t the train come?

Oh man, why didn’t I ever call her?

May 21, 2027

Shot my gun this morn. Kill someone. No, someones. This morning. I shot several times at him, or at several of them. Don’t know. Still don’t know.

I was so happy, so so happy after downing a pretty pink pill, just one, no three, no just two of them, I found in a hangout in 6K. Nothing bothering me. I was happy, happy as could be vegging, membering good times with Mom and later, good times with Cindy. Our lives, life together. But then there was the noise. I am sure there was a noise. Crying. Way downstairs. Third floor. No, second floor. I went there once, no twice, went there once and then again with gun. Waited and waited and waited for noise. Scared. Kept peeing. Then needing to pee. At last, I am sure I heard something. Someone crying in 2B. When I crawled in, the place was empty. No. No. Two messed-up and muscled men at kitchen table. Just sitting and sitting and sitting. Silent. No, dead. With their teapot and teacups. No noise. Nothing. But then crying again. In the back bedroom. So I crawled there. I didn’t knock. I just crawled. Quiet and quick. Gun ready.

And I saw him. In a giant closet. Nothing but a dressing table and clothes racks. Sequined skirts, neon dresses, lacey blouses, leather pants, and bird-feathered somethings hanging and in piles. Everywhere. A fashion jungle. He was also just sitting there. But alive. Half alive. Looked gaunt and gone — and all raggedy and hairy. Like a wild animal. A wild dog. Cornered and wounded. We just stared. And he cried again.

I said, “You gotta go. Not cry.”

He put away his tears. “No. You gotta go.”

“You’re all wrong, a bad guy. And you’re sick,” I shouted.

“Not as sick as you. An Eater got you. You’re off. Not even thinking right. About anything.”

“One got you too. You’ll hurt people.”

“No. You will. Once it happens. The change. The Hunger.”

“No, I won’t. You need to bury yourself.”

“You should kill yourself.”

“I’ll kill you!”

“I’ll kill you first!”

“No, I will. It’ll be better.”

“Let me do it. No one gets hurt that way.”

He wiped his face. With his sleeve.

I did also. And then I shot him.

He shot also but missed. I missed too. Hitting something glass. It shattered. It was loud and my hand shook. No, I shook all over. Then there he was again. No several of them or several of him. Someone shouted, “You can’t do anything right!” And then I kept shooting. They did too. Things kept breaking or crashing or shattering. Then I couldn’t hear. Anything. I hid after that. In the closet.

Woke up back in 4E. Ears still hurt. He must be gone. Dead. They all must be. Cause I’m alive.

Or maybe it was just me. Alone. Doesn’t matter. Nothing does.

Going to try a new pill now. No two of them.

[Ed note: Remainder of entry for May 21st and entries for May 22nd and 23rd have not been included due to there incoherence.]

May 24, 2027

Three in the afternoon and I can barely put words on this page. I won’t bore you with the aftermath of the Naked Lunch14 phase of my life. Gotta, wanna, hafta say ‘yes’ to clean living so I can apologize to Mom and she can tell me what really happened. Hope you enjoyed meeting my inner demons though — can’t live with them and can’t live without them, no matter how much I dose the finest pharmaceuticals; but hey there’s no need to say more about the unspeakable. You future-fucks don’t care about me anyway.

Some bad news: you’ll never understand the shit we went through, any more than I could understand what an untidy mess the bubonic plague15 was. Why do I bother writing then? It’s not just because its cheap therapy. It’s also because I’m too lousy a survivalist to make it to the future in person. All I ever wanted was to live long enough find out what happened. Now I won’t. Hey, write back and let me know what it’s like in Tomorrowland.16 Do you have any cool shit, like floating cities, invisibility cloaks, rabble-rousing robots, and fat-free pork rinds? And if I don’t make it… No, I’ll make it; but if I don’t, write Mom (Ms. Smith at 27 Oak Street, Wilmington, DE 19807). Tell her I tried, that I still love her, that I’m sorry. Like you’d bother.

May 25, 2027

I’ve tried everything — drugs, meditation, sleep deprivation, and rubbing alcohol sponge baths — to slow down the fricken buggers that are chowing down on my neural pathways like obese retirees at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Now, I can feel the slimy bastards biting, munching, chewing, and shit-propelling their way through my command and control systems. I swear my brain stem is tingling. A little more — a munch here, a chomp there — and they’ll destroy their habitat. I’ll have no center; I’ll fall apart; I’ll cease.

It’s already happening. I’m not hungry. My whole life I’ve been hungry. All I ate yesterday was two basement rats, two dozen roaches, four spiders, and a romance novel. My clothes and skin hang loose on me. I should be hungry. Maybe that’s wrong; I shouldn’t say, “I’m not hungry,” but that I’ve acquired an appetite for the impossible. Two hours ago, I glanced outside, to see those well-fed men toss another helpless figure on their fire. I didn’t fear them and their actions didn’t disgust me. Rather, I trembled and sweat poured out of my pores as I imagined their bodies broken down into finger sandwiches, blood pudding, brazo burritos, and other delicacies. The cravings didn’t stop until I backed away from the window, took two Valiums, and searched my brain for something, anything else to think about, settling on Cindy.

She lasted longer than I will, not because of my hard living, but because I can’t satisfy my compulsion and, unknown to me, Cindy had been satisfying hers. Maybe I didn’t want to know; there had been so many clues, especially our last night. I’d been stuffing myself with freeze-dried lasagna at my kitchen table when a noise crawled into my consciousness: click, click, Click, Click, Click, CLICK, CLICK. I looked up to see Cindy, eyes hidden behind my aviator sunglasses, auburn hair twisted up on her head, and nails painted bright red with robot-model paint. She stopped tapping on the oven and leaned against it. Her lips, which she’d lined with raspberry lipstick, curved into a seductive smile and a long sleek leg came out of hiding in my black wool bathrobe. She looked great, like a 1950s-man magnet, a movie star who’d just walked off a Miami beach. However, I felt as if my rockets had stopped firing, marooning me in space, far from everything.

“Cindikins, I love you, but I’m not in a loving state.”

Biting her cheek, she retorted, “You’ll be up to it, once we finish the photo shoot,” and posed: bathrobe off both shoulders, one hand on the hip that was higher than the other, and her other hand behind her head. As she pivoted to give me a view from all sides, my camera materialized, spinning by its strap, and a come-hither smile appeared on her face.

“You need to eat Cindy. You haven’t been eating.”

She released my camera, which crashed into a pile of never-to-be-washed dishes. Clenching her hands, as beads of sweat began to pepper her face, she cried out as if in pain, “Sweetie, what’s wrong with you!” – her voice trailed off – “With us? You’ve never said no.”

I took a lackluster bite of my cold lasagna. My mouth full, I asked, “What makes you want it so much?”

Gripping the bathrobe at her throat with her now trembling hand, she sat down next to me. “You know what the reason is” – her voice cracked – “because I love you. More than anything, I love you. Every second of the day, I want to be with you, to be a part of you. Every moment I’m without you it’s an unbearable—” She stopped talking to try to blink away tears, but they began to stream down her cheeks. “Till I met you, I mean till I was with you, I was waiting, saving it for later. It always seemed so shallow, such a distraction from everything I wanted to accomplish, everything important, the planet I was trying to save, my stories, and my dissertation. But now, it’s the thing I need.” She gave a feeble, embarrassed laugh and mumbled, “And until you happened, all that unclean commerce of bodily fluids seemed…well, unsustainable.” She paused to wipe her face. “The time with, before, with Frank, he…I…never did it…he wanted to…a lot…I, we could have…I wish we…I’m not feeling very—”

“It’ll be fine. It’s okay. You don’t have to say more,” I whispered and hugged her.

She leaned toward my cheek and I waited for a kiss, but she pulled away, babbling, “Need to leave. Have to go. I’ll be alright, but can’t, can’t…stay.” Bewildered, I watched her rush for the basement bathroom, my bathrobe swishing across the floor behind her. An hour later, she was still down there. I should’ve checked to see if she was okay. I meant to. Everything would have been different. Instead, wiped out and believing her words, I had fallen over the cliff into sleep.

Did she ever love me, even care about me? Did she always know she was infected? Was it all about using me because I was the last man standing (or rather hiding)? None of that matters. All relationships are a mix of deception and affection, and no matter the exact balance of our relationship, she made me happy; that’s the important thing. I think I also made her happy. She seemed to like the love limericks I’d whisper to her before we slept.

The time I spent with Cindy was the happiest I’d been since right after Dad left, when Mom and I just had each other. During those days, Mom catered to me. Each night she’d read me a story. I’d squash up against her scratchy bathrobe, safe and secure, both of us sinking deep into our sagging leather couch, and she’d make up voices of impossible-to-believe characters — insects in a giant peach, a crazy chocolate factory owner, too-lucky orphans, a witch, and every sort of animal. All I want is to see her again — the latest blond chaos perm and her crinkly blue eyes, bright as a torch flame — so I can tell her sorry for everything. I could pass in peace if after I apologized, her arms opened up, showing that she forgave me and still loves me. Mom’s also the one person that could confirm that the twisted memories pounding away at me aren’t true, that my jealousy was because I wanted more attention, not due to something you’d see on an abnormal psychology blog. All it’d take is a few minutes.

I need to get it together; I cried for the past hour. It’s going to get dark soon and I need to eat, even if I don’t have the right kind of appetite. I now know how strong Cindy was, how the Hunger and one’s particular compulsion go to war with one another. I wish I could talk to the fire and rescue squad; but, they’re asshats. If I don’t make it, whoever finds this notebook, I beg you, apologize to Mom for me, and tell her that I always loved her. But I’ll make it. I’ll see her. They made sandbag emplacements outside the train station yesterday so the train has to be coming soon. It has to. And Mom worked so hard and suffered so much because of me. She deserves to see her son one last time and not get some sort of message service. But if you would, if I don’t make it, please, all I ask is that you tell her sorry for me, that I always loved her.

May 26, 2027

Woke up. The hunger too. Woke up to Hunger. But I control it, I fought it, fighting it. Can’t think right but, getting better. Heard a whistle, rumble, rumbling. A train was outside. Lots of people too. And dogs. Noise. Big noise. Lots of shouting, yelling. Doing organized, organizing. So happy. Going to Mom. I’m on train now. I don’t remember how I got through that fence. I had to though. To get to Mom. Must have climbed over or crawled under. Got lots of bruises and cuts. Lots. Tired. All happy/glad. Can whistle. Am whistles.

Okay, the Hunger fugue is gone for now. To know that I’m on my way to see Mom feels like I took several Percs.17 I’ll be able to make it. I know I can. However, I still feel the Hunger lurking, waiting for when I’m weak. But Mom is a few short hours away. I can do that easy. I hope no one saw me stiff-walk in here like Frankenstein’s friend. I still can’t remember how I [Ed note: Sentence incomplete]

The door is opening.

I pop my head over the top of the seat. Odd, it’s a little girl in a neat yellow dress. She’s singing, “Ring Around the Rosie and a Pocket Full of Posie,” and skipping down the aisle toward me. Looks to be ten, maybe eight, but she has rouge and blue eyeshadow on her face. Why did she slam to a stop and go silent? Right, cause she saw me. Oh Gawd! Oh my Gawd! She looks so sweet — healthy and plump, like a sugary treat.

DO NOT BITE! DO NOT BITE! DO NOT BITE!

Jeez-o-man, that’s over! There’s too much wrong in what I did; but no way to help it, no way to describe the Hunger pains — the cauldron of boiling acid that is my stomach. How much longer until the train starts? How many passengers could there be? Okay, I’ll say what happened since nothing matters anymore.

The girl had stopped only five rows away. She chewed her tongue like it was bubblegum. I was dreaming about doing the same when she asked, “Hey Mr., you ain’t a Zombie are you?”

Still peering over the seat top, I said, “Are you asking if I have the plague? Zombie isn’t polite,” and slid over so I was half in the aisle.

She looked at me as if I was being silly.

“Anyway, what makes you think I’m ill?”

She pointed at my arm. “That stumpie.” I looked at myself and wished I could’ve worn the clean shirt I’d saved for the trip, put on my sling, and brought more than my notebook.

“Oh that. An awful dishwasher accident.” I shoved my bad arm into my ragged flannel shirt, popping a button.

“What’s you writing?”

“What did you say? You’re too far away. Can you come closer?” I hoped I wasn’t salivating.

“No! You schmell.”

I wiped sweat, grime, and a little spit off my face with my sleeve and grunted, “Hey why don’t we play, ‘Simon Says,’ while we wait?”

Maintaining my sanity somehow, I got her almost within grabbing distance. Two short rows. So close. She looked so good. It’s hard to stop thinking about. I would have been nice. An arm, a small pink fleshy arm. That’s all I needed. Man, oh man; such a waste. Such a waste. If her mom not screamed. Camed in and screamed. No her mom came, and, bloody screamed. I can’t write write right write. Dragged treat. Away. Moms are good. I miss Mom. Am going to now. Yes, think that. I have to think that. But Hungry. So Hungry to. Gawd Damn!

Yelling outside. I see a mom yelling. A lot. “…your policy toward…Tell me Exactly what is the policy [Ed note: Sentence incomplete]

White Blob voice. “Yes Ma-mom. Zombies can’t take the train.”

Interview with Joseph Scarboro, male Caucasian aged 51, former member of Northeast Exploratory Fire and Rescue Squad 23. The interview was conducted by Share’n Chan, 3rd level Comparativer of the Boston Scientific Commons Case Studies Club, on September 27, 2050 at a community kitchen near the interviewee’s residential co-op in Boston (Northeast Coastal Ecoregion North American).

Only the interviewee’s responses are provided.

Response(R)-1: Of course, I remember him. Why I’m here. Found his notebook. Don’t know what made me keep it.

R-2: Yeah, it was the cover. That babalicious redhead with that laser gun standing in front of that burning sci-fi city. Don’t see that kind of art anymore.

R-3: Read it all. Those two weeks with Cindy got me through some lonely nights. The rest is a downer. For a day, I was even glad I charred his ass after reading what he did to Sprite.

R-4: She was our squad’s cat.

R-5: In New Haven when, ahhh couple of months after most the big cities and bases went down. It was chaos. Doc. Niratpattanasai Na Ayutthayaiasia’s drug saved us all. Still, the Guy don’t deserve to get his name on about every free clinic and crèche. A lot of them Compulsive sci-en-tists got the desire to find the cure. He got lucky. Hey kid, bet you don’t even know he took chunks out of his lab rats and they had the wherewithwhatever to try the drug cocktail he’d juiced up. They even got the word out and—

R-6: Sorry. It was the worst, out there on our own, just us, the Zom— ah infected, and freaked-out survivors.

R-7: Yeah, the journal stayed in my…ah possession until I heard the Global Open Forum would pay for plague memora…ahh…ballia. Dug it up and traded it for a week at a Cape Cod leisure camp. Only thing those wacked Seattle anarchists ever did for me. My local forum is worse…always sending neighbors over to encourage me to volunteer, suggesting I exercise, how I should eat, not to waste my carbon rations. It’s like everyone’s my big sister. And why somehow do I always gets cycled into sucky enviro jobs, even did radioactive reclamation last week? Is there anything you can—

R-8: Sorry. I know. Sure, the guy saw our posters. Journal says so. If he wasn’t such a paranoidal we would’ve currred him and got him to his mom. Also, he coulda got his wound fixed right. And now the fake limbs, they’re way better than the real thing.

R-9: Alright. Yeah, sure did. He wasn’t secret-agent man. Kept seeing the glint off his binoculars. And man, he was noisy. His shootout terrified us all. We couldn’t chase down every crazed Compulsive. Dangerous. Several of my buddies got comped. Better to stay out of their way, let the disease run its course.

R-10: Sad? He had Cindy! And before that, he was sitting pretty while things went to shit. He got it better than most. If you want sad, I could make you cry till spring.

R-11: When we found him, he was snapping his teeth like a wacked rabbit eating a carrot.

R-12: What da ya mean what happened? You know the answer.

R-13: Yeah, I agreed. Give me a second. Alright, I’ll tell you. You already saw the records. Barbequed that poor guy. Did that a lot, but he’s the one I can’t forget. He failed every test. Nothing human left in him those tests said. But maybe they weren’t perfect cause when we threw him on, his snapping stopped for a few seconds. He got a horrible freak in his eyes and shouted, ‘Tell Mom I’m sorry. That I love her.’ After, I was crying and shit. Later it was non-stop nightmares and a lot of home-brewed beer to stop them. Thinking about it, I shouldn’t have read his journal. Not even a field doc helped. It was years before all that crap stopped.

R-14: Stopped only when I looked up his mom! I used those fugee registries they set up and some leave. Amazoling, I found her and her husband, Alex, Asian guy like you, living in some caretaker complexes south of Boston. Can’t call what they were doing living though. Both had wrinkled up like old people do and were leaning on their neighbors for food. Those were bad times. You posties got it lucky. He’d lost an arm. And she, well she had oldertimers, that forgetting thing. I shouted Steven so many times at her I was hoarse, but I must have half-connected with something cause her eyes lit up and she cried, ‘Oh Stevie you’ve finally come home.’ Without thinking I said, ‘I’m so so sorry. I love you Mom.’ I even hugged her. When I left, she still had an empty smile on her face.

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

www.TheColoredLens.com

Fiction Publications TCL #31 - Spring 2019

Vigil

By Seth Marlin on Saturday, January 30, 2021

I receive word of my sister on a Wednesday morning in early May. My son Noah is out of school that day for teacher in-services; I’ve taken time off work to be with him at home. I’m making soup and sandwiches for us both when the call comes in–I take it over the kitchen speakers, assuming it to be work-related. “This is Kim.”

“Hi there.” The speaker is a woman, with a sunny voice and a hint of a Southern accent. “This is Judi with Puget Sound Oncology. Would I be speaking with Kimiko Fukada?”

I pause before replying–a phone call from a strange business entity, without video. Not an email, certainly not text or subvoc. I shift into a more formal register. “This is Kim speaking; how can I help you?”

“Great.” A few verification questions follow. “And our records show you as the surviving next-of-kin for one Noriko Fukada?”

I pause over the tomato I’m slicing. I recall a series of letters, dry official notices from the hospital. I started receiving them after our mother died, about eight or nine years back; after the first two or three, I simply threw them away. Now I set down the kitchen knife, slide the kitchen door closed with a gesture. “I’m sorry, what is this regarding?”

TCL #31 - Spring 2019

The Hungry Ghosts

By Kristin Janz on Friday, January 1, 2021

“We aren’t here,” Lindsay said. “We’re just echoes of ourselves. Shadows.”

Kate watched Lindsay thrust her arm into the pedestal of one of the lion statues. Like the rest of her, the arm appeared solid, but when she pushed it into the stone it went in as if she–or the statue–were only a projection.

“If I still existed, I’d be able to feel that,” Lindsay said. Her brown eyes were rimmed with thick black liner, and she wore a navy hooded sweatshirt with “#Resist!” scrawled across the front in white fabric paint.

Whether she existed or not, listening to Lindsay made Kate tired. “If you didn’t exist,” Kate said, “you wouldn’t notice that you didn’t feel anything.”

“Consciousness is an illusion even when you’re alive,” Lindsay said. “It’s been proven by science.”

“So,” said Vicki, floating a few steps higher, “how do you know that you don’t feel anything? Maybe you’re deceiving yourself when you think that you can’t feel your arm going into the stone.”

When Lindsay didn’t answer, Vicki laughed. Vicki’s laugh always made it sound like she was delighted with whomever she’d been talking to, never mocking. “Watch out! I lived with a philosophy professor for five years.”

“When was that?” Kate asked. Like her and Lindsay, Vicki had been living alone when she died.

Vicki didn’t answer right away, giving Kate time to regret the question. She always asked either too much or too little.

“Until four years ago,” Vicki said at last. “He died of a heart attack.”

While Kate was trying to mumble an apology for having brought the subject up, Lindsay burst in with her usual tact. “When you say ‘lived with,’ you mean you two were a couple, right? Do you ever wonder what he’s doing now?” Ghosts could only see and hear others who had died within a few days of them. Those who died farther apart saw each other as increasingly indistinct apparitions, and those whose deaths had occurred more than a week apart could not perceive one another at all.

“It has crossed my mind,” Vicki said.

“Really?” Lindsay seemed not to hear the dryness in Vicki’s voice. “See, I think dying has been easier for me than for you two, because I didn’t have any false expectations about what the afterlife would be like. I thought we’d just, like, die, and there would be nothing.”

“How is that not a false expectation?” Kate asked. “Is that what happened?”

“Fuck you!” Lindsay said. “At least I didn’t think I was getting into heaven for not having sex with my boyfriend.”

Kate couldn’t even count the number of times she had tried to explain to Lindsay that her relationship with God was not quid pro quo, but Lindsay seemed unable to grasp any worldview outside her own narrow experience.

“See, I knew religion was crap even before I died and stayed right here,” Lindsay said. “You must feel pretty stupid now.”

Kate unfolded her limbs and stretched into an upright position, hovering inches above the floor. “The only time I feel stupid is when I realize I’ve wasted another hour listening to you.”

The Colored Lens #31 – Spring 2019

By Executive Editor on Friday, December 25, 2020

The Colored Lens Speculative Fiction Magazine – Spring 2019 – Issue #31

The Colored Lens

Speculative Fiction Magazine

Spring 2019 – Issue #31

Featuring works by Geoffrey W. Cole, Andy K. Tytler, Seth Marlin, Jamie Lackey, Kristin Janz, David Cleden, R.K. Nickel, Ana Gardner, Nathan TeBokkel, Avra Margariti, and Paul Crenshaw.

Edited by Dawn Lloyd and Daniel Scott
Henry Fields, Associate Editor

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

www.TheColoredLens.com

A Hunt for Gods by R.K. Nickel
The Memetic Vaccine by Geoffrey W. Cole
The Hungry Ghosts by Kristin Janz
Always on My Mind by David Cleden
Guinea Pig by Paul Crenshaw
The Spirit Cave by Jamie Lackey
Vigil by Seth Marlin
This Crated Sense of Anxiety by Andy K. Tytler
With All the Soul of my Chemical Reactions by Nathan TeBokkel
A Skulk of Ghosts by Avra Margariti
Finding Papa by Ana Gardner

A Hunt for Gods

By R.K. Nickel

“Your town cripple told me I would find you here,” I said to the woman who crouched close to the earth beneath her, sowing seeds with more care than was necessary. Sowing seeds at all should have been unnecessary. So little technology on this planet, which meant everything took more time.

I’d had my fill of time.

“Are you deaf? Does everyone on this backwards planet suffer from some malady?”

Finally, she stood, and I could nearly hear the creak in her bones. The motion was eternal, but when she eventually met my eyes, at least there was some spark of intelligence there.

“My name is Aki-Atopo” said the woman, her smile fracturing her sun-worn face into countless wrinkles. “What is yours?”

“Jor Derenell.” The woman, like the rest of the village, was garbed entirely in a vaguely luminescent moss. It was green, and ugly, and gave off some odor I did my best to ignore.

“They say there is a god on this planet, that souls linger after they pass on.”

“Who is this ‘they?’” she asked, chuckling. “Sounds like someone needs a slap on the wrist for spreading our secrets.”

Such distastefully bland humor. “Will you take me to it?”

“Why?” she asked.

“I will ask it what comes next. If it is truly a god, it will know.”

She began to walk away. The gall of these people. I hurried to follow, but she was surprisingly quick, and matching her stride as she marched down the village’s main road took precious more energy than I would’ve liked.

“How did you find yourself here, Jor Derenell?”

“I flew here.”

“On your starship?”

“Yes, on my starship. Obviously.”

My lungs heaved. Even this minor exertion made me feel as though my body were stitched together by a half-blind seamstress. I needed to cycle. Soon.

“You are quite forthcoming in your answers, Jor Derenell. I’m sensing…” she said, rubbing at her temples in a poor pretense of mysticism, “that you are a people person.”

“Just tell me what you want.”

She turned to face me, suddenly serious. “You have not earned the right to know what I want. But do exactly as I bid, and I will show you a god.”

We set out at sunset, leaving the village behind and wandering deep into what were apparently known as the mosslands. An uncreative name, for every surface was covered in the parasitic gunk. It pulsed with a faint glow, as if feeding on the trees and stones that lay hidden beneath it, leeching their life force one carbon dioxide gasp at a time.

Compared to my perfectly sterilized spaceship, the whole place reeked of plant waste, of fertilizer, of water not fit for consumption. What a disappointing terminal planet. No wonder no one made it out this far.

“Sit,” said Aki-Atopo. “Wait.”

I scowled, but still, I sat. I waited. Others soon arrived. Younger, older. They were all children to me. They carried trinkets and knick-knacks with them: a small wooden spoon, a handkerchief, a photograph.

Nothing more than simple back world tradition, then. Another failure. I took deep, slow breaths, doing my best to calm my mounting fury. I could not afford to waste my blood on fury.

And then the first sphere of flame grew in the night.

It came from nowhere, materializing waist-high above the ground, a floating ball of fiery blue.

I had read of mysterious flames before. Air pockets, rising gas, some bit of magic. Never a god. But De-Ha-Ta-Gu-Ee was a planet little researched. Perhaps a god would, in fact, choose to live in a system nearly a thousand lightyears from its closest neighbor.

More spheres materialized, dozens of them, hundreds, hovering among the mosstrees. A villager dropped her handkerchief into one of the rippling orbs, and a thin, white smoke rose from the flame.

How I envied their misguided faith, their “knowledge” that they would live on as something else, still visited by loved ones, still adding warmth to the world. I had spent a lifetime looking for that certainty, had tracked legend and hunted myth, but each mystery I encountered had eventually been explained, and whenever I did meet a so-called god, the being bled beneath my hands–as mortal as I. Some of them had magic, but magic was little more than parlor tricks and misdirection–magic had nothing to do with what came next.

“So these are your ‘Lost Souls’?” I asked, unable to keep the derision from my voice.

“I’m getting the sense you aren’t particularly moved,” said Aki-Atopo, as pleasantly as if I had commented on the weather.

“You know, most people are more put-off when I talk to them.”

“Most people are not Aki-Atopo. And who knows, perhaps I will rub off on you.”

I shook my head, bemused.

“Here. Let me show you.” She placed her hands over my eyes.

The moment her skin touched mine, the bedrock of my being eroded into loam beneath a pattering rain, and Aki-Atopo flowed into me, her essence spreading to my peripheries as vines seeking sun. It took but an instant, and then my eyes were infused with hers, gazing out onto the world before me through a lens of her perception.

All around me, the moss glowed, a garden of symbiotic phosphorescence, a blanket of deep greens and blues radiating on a spectrum I had forgotten. There, the shade of the cobalt sea on Algradon, here the midnight forests of Kytar.

Though the stars in the sky were distant, though the night was moonless, I saw that one need not fear a journey through the mosslands, for each step was guided by the glow, and every footprint came alive.

I turned my gaze to the river that flowed behind us–I had paid it no heed before, but I saw now that it teemed with pink fish which sparkled beneath the surface. Their scales gave off an amaranthine light, which rose above the water and refracted among the steam that drifted leisurely between the shores.

I took a breath, and the air that rushed into my lungs was filled with the scents of rebirth and of growth.

The air was filled with smoke.

I looked again to the spheres of fire, past the hot surface, into the quiet furnace beneath, and I could almost make out a shape, nearly human, laughing, swaying, beckoning, and when a villager, a man brimming with the muscle of the outdoors, added a wooden spoon to the flames, the fire delighted in its consumption, burning an incandescent gratitude, and the man breathed in the smoke, and I could sense the calm it gave him. I reached out to the nearest flame, searching, and–

The shaman pulled away her hands.

I was myself again.

“So?” asked Aki-Atopo.

It took me a moment to adjust to seeing the world once more through my eyes. Where had the song gone? And where the glow?

“A bit of magic,” I said, dismissive.

Aki-Atopo smiled a knowing smile, and the rage built in me. Who was she to think so highly of herself? Who was she to spin a veil of golden lies before my sight?

But as I stood to leave, the moss seemed perhaps a tinge more vibrant, and the steam rising off the water still beckoned.

I might yet find a god.

After a breakfast of strange, spiraling nuts and a long blue fruit with waxy skin, we headed for a cave system Aki-Atopo said was of particular importance to their faith.

It was a hard walk, though it took less out of me than I expected, for the ground was springy and forgiving. Even still, eventually I had to stop. “I need to cycle,” I said.

“You take too many breaks, old man,” said Aki-Atopo.

“Not everyone is lucky enough to have a touch of magic to keep them going.”

“Magic has nothing to do with it. You need to stretch more.”

I took off my pack and removed the god-forsaken Hemalock I’d been tethered to for so long.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“My blood isn’t what it once was,” I said, opening my shirt and removing the sanitary plug from the gaping hole in my chest. “I should’ve been dead a couple decades ago, but this concoction of platelets and O2-absorption boosters keeps me chugging along. Barely.” I pulled one of the cell vials from the pack, clipped it into the Hemalock, and inserted it into my semi-mechanical heart.

“How old are you, anyway?”

“One hundred and eighty-three.” I had needed to fill my ship near-to-brimming with boosters to have plenty for the trip here and back.

“You must have trouble meeting people your age,” she said. She stretched while she waited, as if to rub in her youth. Her very relative youth.

“We don’t need to talk,” I said, gritting my teeth as the cold slurry of the booster crept through my veins. I had enough for three months of exploration, if I kept myself fairly inactive. It was not much time to track down a god.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and dove into an acrobatic routine. She was certainly flexible.

I chided myself, disgusted. It had been decades since I’d last been with a woman, and she’d been substantially more attractive than this faux mystic. What a hideous thought.

Eventually, the cycle was complete, and we continued. Having been only semi-conscious for my journey to De-Ha-Ta-Gu-Ee, I’d been running off weak blood for nearly a month now, and as the fresh concoction ran through me, I felt alive for the first time since the god known as Kalzak had perished in my arms.

When we finally reached the gaping mouth of the mossrock, a family came out to greet us, and a number of overactive children screeched at our arrival, teetering up to Aki-Atopo and wrapping themselves around her legs. I had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with children. Especially these unruly beasts, whose tangled hair flopped wildly and whose hands were coated in a sticky, glowing ooze.

“People live in your holy caves?”

“Of course. These are the Ta-Wah-Nees. Ta-Wah-Nees, meet Jor. Jor, Ta-Wah-Nees.”

A liver-spotted man stepped forward and made his hands into a sphere, placing them over his heart. “Mok-Ta-Wah-Nee,” he said by way of introduction.

“A pleasure,” I lied, mimicking the gesture.

“Aki told us you would be helping with the Rahlen,” he said.

I shot her a glance. This was no holy search. Aki-Atopo’s eyes glittered at her deception.

“You must do as I bid. That is the deal.”

“I–”

“Our god appears at the strangest of times, Jor Derenell. You must trust me. This is the way.”

She took my hand. There was a firmness in those wrinkled fingers, hardened bone beneath sagging skin. “Come.” If she did not lead me to her god, I would find someone who would, by coin or by force.

Mok-Ta-Wah-Nee led us into the caves, which reeked of earthy wetness. Deeper and deeper we went, until the tunnels opened into a massive chasm of stalactites. Down each dripped rivulets of brightly glowing liquid–rains filtered through moss filtered through rock, I learned–which served as the base for Rahlen, the semi-sweet alcoholic drink the locals favored.

Hours we spent, collecting runoff in woven baskets, stomping the blue fruits we’d had for breakfast between our toes, then pouring the strange mush into a flowerbed. The flowers would feed on the mixture, Mok-Ta-Wah-Nee explained, and once they bloomed, their petals would cry. Apparently, fermentation took place within the stalk. The tears were Rahlen, and quite potent.

When the work started, I roiled. I had not journeyed this far, I had not lived this long, to become a common laborer. But as we went, I found my mind clearing. The toil held an agreeable monotony, on par with the calm that came whenever a ship’s medpod pumped you with benzodiazepines before hypersleep.

By the time evening rolled around, I found myself laughing. It was an unfamiliar experience, for joy took even more strength than rage, and a bit of laughter was never worth the blood it cost to produce.

And yet I laughed.

Perhaps it was the Rahlen, of which I’d drunk entirely too much. Perhaps it was something else.

Soon, I found myself stumbling through the caverns by Aki-Atopo’s side, woven cup in hand.

“So, decade after decade travelling the stars?” she asked.

I took another sip. “I wouldn’t call it travelling. I saw no sights. I tasted no cuisine. I simply searched.”

“For gods,” she said. I nodded. “And did you find any?”

“Nine,” I said.

“Nine. That is quite a few.”

“Nine and none,” I amended. She turned a curious eye on me, weaving a bit as she did. I realized I was none-too-stable myself. I hadn’t been drunk in a century. It made me feel…honest. “I killed them all.”

“What?”

“They were not gods,” I said quickly. “If it bleeds, it is no god, merely a pretender masquerading as a god. I did those worlds a favor.” My cup sloshed in my hand.

She looked unconvinced, perhaps even afraid.

“Osh’hahllet was a great wingèd beast who could control the rains,” I continued. “It worshipped gold, and so with gold its people prayed, ever poor, a necessary trade if they wished for crops. The watery veils it cast as protection for its wing membranes were no match for my rifle.” I gestured to the gun strapped at my waist. A more powerful weapon, money could not buy.

“Not all who use magic do so for evil. Or claim to be gods.”

“Of course. I’ll cede you that. But these nine, they had grown beyond reason and into myth, and I was the gravity that pulled them back down planetside. Kalzak, the great warrior whom no blow could strike. Mordianus, the serpent who could slither between stars. Byagrodar, the conjurer. Noshfatur, the blinding light. Each of them a liar,” I felt spittle fly from my mouth. “Not one of them knew what comes next. A god is supposed to create. A god is supposed to exist outside our reality. A god is supposed to know what comes next.”

I panted, and the seams of my being began to come undone. Impossible. I had cycled that very morning. But I had toiled, and I had laughed, and my liver had not been put to work in ages, and what strange, unbidden feelings lay inside me. I could hardly place them. I knew only that without the boosters, they would lead me to an all-too-timely end. An end I refused to accept.

I stumbled, and Aki-Atopo caught me, lowering me to the ground. I leaned against a stalagmite as she put a hand to my forehead. Her fingers were cool and gentle.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine. But no more of your games, shaman. You will take me to this god, and we will see what it is made of. If it is what you say, then you should have nothing to fear.”

“You know,” she began, leaning beside me. I felt her arm against mine, felt the warmth radiating off of her, the strength of a human heart. “I’m not entirely sure I agree with you.”

“If you won’t take me, I assure you, I can find someone who will.”

“I’ve found,” she continued, “that god is what you make of it. A feeling. A choice. An idea you commit to in the name of doing what is right. I know nonbelievers with faith that ‘runneth over,’ to steal a line. I know devotees whose wells are dry as sand. And perhaps if we were to know “what comes next” as you have so repetitively referred to it, that just might take the fun out of things.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, still working to catch my breath. “I’ve had many lonely hours to read the great philosophers, and yours is a simplistic argument, which is to be expected. You have led an easy life on an easy world, and you know nothing but what was forced into your mind by those who came before you. Let us agree to disagree and move on from it.”

I tried to stand, but my mortal body had other ideas. It had ever been a traitor to me. And I was wasting it on this place, these people, the muck of plants, the relentless dripping of the water, the bitter fruits and hideous fish and ceaseless glow that could keep you up at night. This woman. As the disgust surged in me, I found the strength to stand. My pack wasn’t far. I would cycle, and that would be the end of it.

She stood and took my arm in hers. “I am not so different from you, Jor Derenell.”

I scoffed at her obvious attempt to forge a connection.

“It’s true,” she continued. “I travelled among the stars for many years, planet to planet. I saw the waters at the edge of Perethria. Held my grandchild on the jade moon of Quanrar. But I have chosen this place. It is a good place.”

“You weren’t born here?”

She shook her head. I looked at this strange woman anew and saw the subtle strength in her. Despite her age, she held me up, and reflected in the mosslight of her clothing, her eyes shone as playful and knowing as when she’d first met me, despite all that I had said. Her head sat high on her shoulders, looking ever forward. She had given up a life of wandering. She had chosen.

We reached my pack, and I once more plugged the Hemalock into my heart. The near-frozen sludge forced me to take halting gulps of air. She leaned down and rubbed my arms, generating friction. I could feel her breath.

“So you have grandchildren?” I asked, and I heard the hedging in my voice, the shallow attempt to mask my desire.

She cocked her head, letting the moment linger. Damn her.

“We are a loving people,” she said at last. “I have had many husbands, many wives, many children. Now, I am mostly ‘grandmother,’ and I spend my days among the mosstrees.”

I had taken lovers, of course. Plenty of them. In my younger days, I had almost been able to believe physical pleasures were reason enough for existence. But I had never truly shared myself. Not fully.

There had been opportunities, but no matter how certain I felt about someone, even more certain was the knowledge that it would end. It would always end. Despite what the foolish holofilms might say, love did not conquer death. Death was absolute.

But maybe here, if this truly were a planet of gods, perhaps things could be different. I had time enough to consider it. Vials enough.

Her hands rested on my shoulders, her face still close. It was a good face.

The world spun, the dark night skies rose, the mosses glowed, and we searched.

The god appears here, she said. The god appears there. You must try this, do this, feel this. The god is fickle, she said. We are close, she said. And in my heart–or what parts remained of it–I did not know whether to believe her.

We leapt from the high waters of Ka-Wei-Na falls, screaming all the way down. I learned to dance the Cha-He, a strange shifting of feet and flailing of arms, filled with energy and song, and we whirled, two bodies revolving, locked in a tidal pull of laughter and joy. I cycled. I cycled.

She taught me the hundred words for moss. I dined on countless plants and roots and fruits and nuts, ceaseless permutations of flavor. We raked algae from the whisper bog and tilled it into the gardens to nourish her flowers. We wove the garments of her people, and I reveled in the feel of them, the soft touch, the protection. I cycled. I cycled.

I ran with the children of the village. I communed with the flames, and in their burning light, I could almost sense the souls of the ones who came before, cherishing the offerings bestowed upon them and returning their thanks in an aromatic smoke that filled our lungs with wonder. I cycled. I cycled.

Aki-Atopo took me into her home, into her life, into her. Hers was a kind soul, a brightly glowing moss woven with a loom of belief–in god, in good, in her fellow man.

I delighted in her, a kindred spirit with whom I could share myself. An equal. And her wrinkled face held boundless joy, and she was warm beneath my hands, and I was whole beneath her weight, a conjoining I had often attempted but never achieved. I cycled. I cycled.

And held something back.

For always I knew that it would end. It had not yet proven to be a planet of gods, and though I burned with a longing to relinquish myself, I knew I would have to return to the stars for more boosters, and it was such a great distance, and if it were to end, what, then, was the point?

And as much as I gazed into the orbs of fire, as close as I came, I never fully believed the lost ones danced within the flames.

I cycled.

And had no vials left to spare.

Her eyes shimmered with sorrow. But she had shown me no god. I had lost myself, and I needed to depart or be trapped here forever.

I would return one day, and she would be long dead, and then, perhaps, I could seek my answer.

Still, I was loath to go.

“You never could accept the end of things, could you, Jor Derenell?”

We held each other, watched the sun set, watched the mosslight glow. I gave her a final kiss. I released her hand a final time.

I went to my ship, out past the edge of the village, and could not shake the feeling that something lay just beyond my grasp, like a word I could not recall, even though, somewhere within, I knew exactly what I hoped to convey. As I boarded, I thought of distant stars, of endless cycles, of new rumors, new planets where I might yet find gods. And with them, answers. I thought of what would come next.

I strapped in and felt the metal beneath my palms. It had been so long. The vessel seemed an alien thing, and I a foreign body within it.

The ship rumbled, gaining thrust, and soon I was making my slow way into the sky, staring at the world beneath, but I did not truly see it, for Aki-Atopo’s hands no longer touched my eyes, and I gazed only at a holoscreen, a pixel-hue facsimile of what truly lay below.

I felt myself begin to cry–I had not expected this. Wasteful. Tears cost more than joy cost more than rage. Still, I wept.

Then the boosters failed.

Alarms blared. Safety features engaged. I cast images of the damaged systems onto the screen.

Moss had strangled the drive core.

It wound through the coils, coated the reaction tanks, glowed and sprouted and climbed into every cavity and alcove, turning the lower half of the ship into a nearly living thing.

The ship had not caught it. It had never been trained to guard against such a slow, creeping enemy, and the moss had found a way in.

The propulsion sputtered and died, and I fell to the surface.

I awoke in the bed where I had spent so many months.

“Welcome back, Jor Derenell,” she said, choked with relief.

“Aki.” I touched her face. Why did she look so sad? “My ship?” I asked. “My vials.”

Her eyes told me what I needed to know.

“How many?”

“A few months left, at most. I am so sorry.” And I could feel that sorrow washing off her in waves. She loved me.

And I didn’t care.

I tore out of the bed, grabbed my shirt and rifle, and raced outside. The wreckage of my ship still smoked in the east, but I turned north, into the heart of the mosslands.

The horizon glowed a fiery red as I reached the edge of the village, a mirror to my thoughts. A few months. After one hundred and eighty three years. A handful days strung together on a line, brittling in the sun.

I moved through the moss, deeper, deeper, and lost my way, all around me a monotonous glow, each mosstree the same as the next. I barked a laugh.

I would finally learn what came next.

But I already knew.

Nothing.

It was nothing.

I screamed into the empty air, screamed until I choked and trembled and fell to the ground. The sanitary plug ripped from my chest, and a viscous ooze began slowly to beat out of me, congealing in the mud.

I fumbled for the emergency vial I kept on my belt, fingers clutching, finding nothing. I had fallen prey to the shaman’s tricks. I wheezed. Was the night growing dim? Were the flames going out? No, it was merely my sight.

And then my fingers were on the vial, freeing it from its clasps. I thrust it into my heart. Without the Hemalock, the pain tore the air from my lungs, and I tasted iron in my throat. I could not swallow.

But the glacious booster slowly calved its way through my arteries, and as the wet-spinach glow of the place came back into focus, a sphere of taunting sapphire flame coalesced before me.

I stared into its light, too weak to look away, and as the brilliant bright began to crisp my corneas, I thought perhaps I could see something dancing within. And wasn’t the possibility enough? Couldn’t I simply choose to believe?

I had months left. Days stretched out as leaves along the branches of a great tree, and I could spend mine with her. I did not need immortality. I did not need to know. I still had the rest of my life to live. Love cost more than tears cost more than joy cost more than rage.

The price was a pittance.

I laughed, alone out there among the mosstrees. A full, deep, rich laugh. My lungs burned. My blood soured. I did not care.

I fitted the cap back into my chest and forced myself to my feet. The spent vial rested in my hand, so small a thing to cost so much. Cool and precise and manufactured. I tossed it into the orb of fire and breathed in the smoke. As it swirled into me, the twining heat soothed my bitter throat and cleansed my lungs.

Invigorated, I turned toward home.

Toward our home.

But before I could take a step, I saw it–a strange flame, unlike the rest, nearly human, ethereal, striding through the trees. Where its feet touched ground, moss rose up to meet it, not scorched, but rather infused with a brighter glow.

“My god,” I muttered.

The being turned to face me. Its face was solid flame, always rippling, the features variations in blue, hotter or cooler, tending more toward white or further away. Its body was a coiling conflagration of cobalt depth, somehow deeper and more mysterious than any other god I had lain eyes upon, and I lost myself in the fathomless crackle of its blaze. To stare at a fire is a feeling primordial, and in the flickering embers, I could feel the choices I had wrought, could imagine endless futures, could cast my mind back to the moment man had reached out his hand and accepted that great promethean offering.

Could it be? The one who creates. Who exists beyond. Who knows what comes next.

The hunger, so long corroding the lining of my gut, might finally be sated. What fortune, here at the end of things. What fortune had grounded my ship. What fate had fueled my fury. The answer, at last.

The god reached out a hand.

The bark of my rifle rang clear in the calm night.

And the god bled.

It bled.

It collapsed to the moss. It bled. No better than the rest. A false prophet, conjuring spheres of lies, burning the possessions of the innocent, an all-consuming falsehood that dazzled upon a pyre, and in the end, was naught but smoke.

I turned away, casting my rifle to the ground, but just before my eyes left the creature, its face changed.

“Aki?” I cried out, rushing to the god’s side.

The flames dissipated, leaving only her. She bled from a deep wound. I forced my hands onto the gaping hole in her breast, but it was too wide, and too slick, and too red. Nothing should be so red, here in the green.

“It seems that you have found me out, Jor Derenell.” She winced, eyes searching to lock onto something.

“I’m so sorry, Aki. I didn’t know.”

“You were always a little slow on the uptake.” She cried out, and the sound lanced through me.

“I love you,” I said, and I could hear the pleading in my voice. “I love you.”

I thought she tried to smile then, but she managed only a dwindling grimace. Had I lost her smile?

“I suppose now you have earned the right to know what I wanted,” she said. “I wanted you, to show you the person you could become.”

“I don’t understand.”

I watched her fight, watched her steal back a bit of strength. “I told you you might be surprised by our similarities, my love. A few centuries ago,” she gritted her teeth. Continued. “I found myself where you are now. As the mage’s flamesoul bled out between my fingers, his power transferred to me. Such is the way on this world.”

“Centuries?”

“The people’s offerings to the fire give us endless life, should we meet no undue harm, and in return, we provide them solace, hope. It is…worthwhile.”

I cradled her. “We still had time.”

“I suppose,” she said, trying to laugh, failing, “that god has other plans.”

God. This was the last one I would find. But she knew nothing of the beyond. I think she saw the fear on my face, for she kept going.

“We had each other. Let it be enough, my bullheaded love.”

“How?”

“Is it not wondrous that you came here, to me?”

I wanted to say yes, to ease her passing, but in her eyes, I saw a demand for truth. “It’s only a coincidence.”

“Ah,” she said, and managed to smile then. “But it is a beautiful coincidence. And you are free to make of it what you will.”

With that, she drifted off.

“Aki. Aki!” But I had lost her.

The flames of the forest winked out. The moss grew dim. The world became a shade darker, a shade colder. I had lost her.

And I had not. For as she grew cold, I felt the fire of her spreading into my fingertips, growing in me, as a vine seeking sun. Her flame spread through me, sublimating the machinery that had kept me breathing, making me whole. I felt a surging, roiling potential here at my apotheosis, and I knew that within me lay the power to incandesce a thousand thousand spheres of fire.

And yet, without her, what was the point, knowing it would never end?

All my life, immortal, and when I finally chose to die, to die and truly live–

I picked up the rifle, praying she’d be waiting for me on the other side. My hand wavered. I could hardly maintain my grip, it was so slick. Tears streamed down my face. My finger waivered on the trigger.

I couldn’t. She was right, like always.

I let the rifle slip from my hand, took a breath, closed my eyes, and cast my will out into the world. All through the mosslands, orbs of fire winked into existence, burning for those who’d been lost.

I had killed a tenth god, and now, alone among the glowing moss, I would have to see what came next.

The Memetic Vaccine

By Geoffrey W. Cole

I sold Larry Robfort enough Narcoplex to tranquilize a walrus but I could tell there was something else he wanted. It was quarter to seven in the morning and the two of us were crammed into the bathroom at the Pickled Puffin, that extra-jurisdictional outpost of depravity and cheap booze that sat on the lunar surface fifty metres above Avalon Station.

“Listen, Jayna,” he said. “I gotta ask you something.” He started to undo his pants. “As my doctor.”

“Christ, Robfort,” I said. “Make an appointment.”

But he was already committed. He dropped his drawers and closed his eyes. “Does my bird look alright?”

“This how you treat all the girls?”

“Please, Doc.”

The desperation in his voice got the better of me and I knelt down for a closer look. What hung between his legs looked normal and I was about to tell him so when an alarm sounded in my ear.

“Do your pants up,” I said. Robfort flinched. “Belinda’s calling. Don’t forget my fee.”

He tapped at a keyboard only he could see and a second later I got a little richer. The shiver of victory at carving off a few more hours of my indentured Lunar servitude didn’t last long before Belinda appeared in the tiny bathroom between us. One hundred and ninety centimetres of woven-steel Quebecois female, Belinda wore her shoulder-to-ankle fitted grey dress the way a hunter carries a freshly slaughtered deer. The smoke that spiralled from the tip of her long cigarillo floated in way smoke doesn’t on the moon. Judging by the way Robfort was standing at attention, Belinda had chosen to project herself into his AR lenses too.

“Thirteen miners have called in sick this morning,” she said. “I hope Mr. Robfort isn’t one of them.”

“He was complaining of an upset stomach,” I said. “Figured I’d check him out over a pub breakfast.”

Robfort looked over at me as we waited the four seconds for our message to reach Belinda and the four seconds it would take her response to reach us.

“Have I not made it clear that what you do with your free time is of no interest to me, Dr. Patel? We’re paying thirteen miners double time to fill in for those who called in sick. Chung Fat does not like to see its profits wasted away on petty illness. See that these men are back at work tomorrow.”

She touched something on a desk we couldn’t see and disappeared. For some reason, the AR decided to let the illusory cigarillo smoke linger.

Thirteen miners crowded the small waiting room of my clinic. Their silence spoke volumes: these were men who wouldn’t keep quiet at their grandmother’s funeral, yet they grimaced and clutched their stomachs in absolute silence while I moved through the waiting room to Schedulor’s niche.

“Who’s first?” I asked my robotic assistant.

That broke the silence. Without leaving their seats, the miners jumped into a heated argument over who should be seen first. One faction argued that those sickest should be attended to first, while those who’d arrived early expounded upon the time-tested right of the first-come to be the first-served. Then Luke, a young miner who hadn’t committed to either philosophy, lost control of his bowels and made the whole argument moot.

“Prep subdermal cephalosporin tabs,” I told Schedulor. “And do we have cholera hammocks stocked?”

I hoped it wasn’t cholera, but all the signs were there, and the only way to beat cholera is to assume you’re dealing with cholera and act fast.

“Not stocked,” Schedulor said. “But I’ve already started fabbing them.”

Schedulor’s one good arm patted his belly, which gave off a burning-plastic smell. My assistant could only really be called half a robot. Fortunately, he had the more useful half: a head, one functional arm, and a torso that also doubled as a fabricator. He was a permanent fixture in the clinic in his niche in the wall. He’d been here long before I arrived and, once I paid off my debt, he’d be here long after I left.

His belly beeped and spat out a freshly minted hammock. I stuck the adhesive tabs to the ceiling and helped Luke into the polymer webbing. Just in time. The pouch hanging beneath the hammock swelled like an udder.

“Seeing as you popped first, I’m calling you Patient Zero,” I said to Luke as Schedulor went to work on the next hammock. I put the kid on a saline drip. “When exactly did you start to feel sick?”

“I’d say about fifteen minutes after I took this tincture Dr. Earthborn gave me.”

He took a vial of brackish liquid from his pocket.

“Why are you dealing with Earthborn?” I snatched the vial and slipped it into my lab coat. “You get sick, you come to me.”

He found all sorts of interesting things to look at on the newly printed hammock. “Earthborn said he could help.”

“Help with what?”

That hammock so fascinated him that he wouldn’t look at me again.

“You boys go to Earthborn too?” The other miners nodded their clenched faces. “Anyone care to tell me why?” They clammed up quiet as a bunch of school boys who’ve found a hole looking into the girl’s locker room. “If I find out you all overdid at the Puffin last night, you won’t be seeing any sick pay, got it?”

Grumbling stomachs and corked flatulence answered. A mechanical finger tapped my shoulder. “Should I continue with the hammocks?” Schedulor said.

“Forget the hammocks. These boys don’t have cholera. Go home, lads, and drink lots of water. I’m going to go have a word with Earthborn.”

Across the hall from my clinic, Dr. Doronzo was greeting one of his clients in the clinic Selenity had built for its pharmaceutical workers. He gave me the slightest bow, his botched-rejuve face impassive as always, and I nodded back. For a second, I had a glimpse inside his clinic. Calm blue light spilled out from a spacious waiting room, where the only things doing the waiting were three luxurious leather chairs, so clean they looked like they’d been upholstered that morning. The grass is always greener, I told myself, and prepared to kick some witch doctor ass.

I rode the elevator up to the star dome.

Synthetic rubber mats were scattered around the room like a makeshift triage, the people on the mats contorting in poses that the girls at the Puffin would only agree to for a fat wad of moon cheese. Earthborn was the only one standing. A snow-white braid hung to the dimpled small of his back, bisecting a physiology so lean and fit that it looked like he had a family of snakes living beneath his tanned skin. He spoke in an endless sentence, mostly English, but highlighted here and there with Sanskrit. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, he’d decided that a puffy white loincloth was an acceptable thing to put on that morning.

When the door slid shut behind me, he turned, got halfway through inviting me in, then saw who he was talking to. The pharmaceutical workers all tensed up as the New Age logorrhea stopped tumbling from his lips.

“Doctor Patel,” he said. “I do believe this is the first time you’ve joined our practice.”

“Not here to stretch,” I said.

“Our practice is about so much more than stretching.”

“Is your practice about making my miners shit their pants?”

The snakes beneath his tanned skin coiled. “Go through three more modified Surya Namaskars,” Earthborn said to his students. “While I talk to the miner doctor.”

The way his lips twisted when he said “miner” made me want to slap him.

“We can talk right here,” I said, my voice low. I showed him the vial Luke had given me. “What did you give my men?”

“Privet fruit tincture.” He reached for the vial, but I slid it back into my lab coat. “In low doses, it is harmless.”

I sent him a photo of the scene in my waiting room. “My boys got it in their heads that they needed to take a higher dose. Why?”

A grey tongue licked his glossy lips. “Doctor patient privilege.”

“Chung Fat finds out that a doctor of what, magical herbs and fungi, has made their workers sick, it will take a whole orbital container full of patchouli to buy your way back to the moon.”

“I am a trained physician in addition to a holistic practitioner.”

“So tell me, my trained physician friend, why you gave them the potion?”

“I gave them privet to restore yang in the kidneys.” I stared at him as if he were speaking Esperanto. “They’re suffering Koro. Now let me return to my class.”

“What the hell is Koro?”

“You’re the doctor.”

The yogis stared at me through their legs as I stepped into the elevator. Some were my clients. Let them stare. The moment the elevator doors closed, I summoned a search bar and by the time I reached the bottom, I had a pretty good idea what Koro was and what to do about it.

I put in a call to Robfort as I was hoofing it back to my clinic.

“Send out a message to your men,” I said. “There’s a free pitcher at the Puffin tonight for every one of them who shows between eight and nine o’clock.”

“Got a new treat for us?”

“This isn’t marketing, it’s medicine. I’ve gotta have a little chat with your men, and it will be best if they have a few drinks before they hear what I have to say.”

“Any questions?”

Two hundred and three empty pitchers stood on tables, on chairs, were clutched in hands, balanced on shelves, and forgotten beneath the booted feet of the miners crowded into the Pickled Puffin. They’d drank so much beer that Quinn had to send a few boys down to the Vats to bring up fresh kegs.

Back when the Americans had a real stake on the moon, they’d built a half-dozen modular moon-bases, tin-cans that snapped together like children’s toys. After the disaster at Copernicus Station, everyone went underground. Not the Puffin. Quinn purchased it at auction, ran a tunnel up to it from the station below, and started selling Avalon’s cheapest booze. Most nights it was filled with the sleaziest, drunkest, loudest, meanest men in the station – my best customers – but that night, after I’d gone through what these men needed to know about Koro, the room was silent.

“Last chance,” I said. Again, silence, from men who couldn’t keep their mouths shut even if they were stuck under sixty feet of water. “I’m going to say it one last time and then we can never speak of it again: Koro is a memetic disease, an idea that makes you sick. I know some of you think your penises are shrinking – ladies, you may think the same of your vulvae or breasts, but I promise that’s a delusion brought on by the Koro. Your genitals can’t retract. You don’t need medicine, certainly not the potions Earthborn was selling you. You’re fine. Your genitals aren’t going anywhere. Got it?”

I expected something from them, even a “Show us your tits”, but the men just shuffled their feet, none of them looking at me or each other for that matter. On the walls of the Puffin, I’d put up virtual posters exploring the anatomical impossibility of genital retraction and the history of Koro; those got as many looks as a beggar in front of a strip club.

The bell behind the bar rang and Quinn hollered: “Shots are two-for-one for the next fifteen minutes.”

Miners surged toward the bar. I got out of the way. I didn’t like what this would do to my business. If I kept selling at my current rates, I only had six months of service to endure up here, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t be moving product anywhere near the rate I had been. No one wants to buy drugs from a woman who just spent an hour talking about the size of their members.

If the Puffin was the dirtiest, dingiest bar anywhere above Near Earth Orbit, the Gannet must have been the dullest. Red pleather benches were filled with Selenity Pharmaceutical employees who sipped on cocktails, never drinking too much, never getting too loud. Most months I barely made enough in the Gannet to cover the fee I paid its owner to sell my wares in his establishment.

I found Dr. Anthony Doronzo sipping red wine in a far corner of the bar. Word had it that Doronzo had been on the moon longer than any other living man or woman. No one was quite sure how many rejuvenation treatments he’d endured, or which of that number had turned the skin of his face to what looked like emotionless plastic. He was a good doctor, his second or third career over his ambiguously long life, who on more than one occasion had helped me sort out a particularly challenging malady.

“I imagine you could use a drink,” he said when I arrived at his table.

“Word travel that fast?”

“Adams’ law: nothing moves faster than bad news.”

“What are you drinking? I’ll get you another.”

He shook his head and showed me a small bladder that he kept in a cloth bag beneath the table. “At my age, you get very particular about what you drink. Made this myself in the Vats. The good people at the Gannet don’t mind if I bring it in. Care to try?”

He filled a bulb and passed it over. Sharp tannins stung my pallet, but beneath the sharpness were hints of cherry and pencil shavings. “It’s wine.”

“That the best you can do?”

“Red wine? Sorry doc, I didn’t attend too many wine tastings growing up in the ruins of Calgary.”

“This is Frappato. A Sicilian red. Still quite green but give it a year or three and it will be perfect. A shame you won’t be here to share it when it’s ready.”

“In six months, if I want Sicilian wine I’ll just go to Sicily.”

“Assuming, of course, that your little lecture did the trick.” He tried to smile, but that’s the thing about a botched rejuve: it makes it really hard to show when you’re joking.

“Seen anything like it before?”

“Koro? Not in my patients.” Doronzo took another long sip from his bulb of wine. Tiny lights flickered against his cornea as his lenses fed him information. “There hasn’t been a Koro epidemic for 250 years. Not surprising that it would appear among the unschooled miners with whom we share Avalon. From the literature, it looks like you did the right thing.”

The literature, in this case, meant the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IX; that great catalogue of all the ways our minds can harm themselves. I’d read the same and had done everything the manual suggested for treating a Koro epidemic.

“I think I’ll write a paper about it when I get back dirtside,” I said. “It would be nice to have something to show for six years up here.”

That face of his, scar tissue sculpted into a grotesque approximation of youth, twitched the way a crab might if you passed an electric current through it. He raised his glass. “To an effortless departure.”

I touched my bulb to his, then had another look around the room. None of my usual customers were here, but there were a few faces I didn’t recognize. Maybe I could unload some of my stash.

“Don’t you worry someone will overdose?” Doronzo said.

I laughed, a bitter sound. “Have any of my clients ever showed up on your doorstep?” He shook his ageless head. “Mine neither. I’m careful.”

“What if they already are on your doorstep?” Doronzo said.

The self-righteous bastard. I pushed the bulb of wine back across the table. “First taste was half-decent,” I said. “But it’s a little too bitter for me.”

I left the crab-faced old man to drink his home-brewed piss.

Damn Doronzo. I lay on the couch in my apartment nursing a whiskey, trying to convince myself to go to bed, but Doronzo’s accusation kept running through my head. He’d voiced what I try not to think about every time one of my clients becomes a patient: did I make them sick? The physician’s mortal sin. Sure, I was using the proceeds from my recreational drug sales to crank down the years I owed Chung Fat for paying my way through med school, but they way I sold it to myself, I was reducing harm: I tested all my products in the lab to ensure they were pure, and I always talked to my clients, checked that things weren’t getting out of hand. I’d coerced several of them into rehab. Doronzo was making me doubt my methods all over again.

But nothing I gave the boys could have caused the disease. There were two main forms of Koro: an isolated form that afflicted lone sufferers, and cultural Koro that came in epidemics which hadn’t been seen for centuries. For my sins I’d been handed the cultural variety. Epidemic Koro was an infectious meme, a disease passed via language from one misguided mind to another mind. “I think my penis is shrinking,” is surprisingly potent when whispered in a vulnerable population. The syndrome received its name somewhere in the East, China or Korea, where Koro epidemics used to sweep through a town, back before literacy became a widespread condition. Epidemics happened in the West too, but no one had ever bothered giving it a name. Women weren’t immune, but men seemed to be more susceptible. Things could get nasty if the epidemic was left untreated, yet all it took to end an epidemic was a well-written pamphlet. Information immunized vulnerable minds. With the advent of mass communication, Koro epidemics went from an occasional bizarre scourge to a historical curiosity.

I poured myself another glass of whiskey and sent Belinda an email telling her the situation was under control. I’d done right by my boys, I was sure of it.

After I sent the email, my right nipple brushed the inside of my shirt. I could swear it felt smaller. This was like med school all over again, when, as we worked our way through the DSM, I became convinced that I alternately had OCD, Chew-Z, and Locutus Delusion. I drank the whiskey and forced myself to ignore what was clearly a figment of my imagination.

Five whiskeys later, I passed out on the couch.

The miner limped into the clinic as Schedulor was pouring my first coffee of the day. Luke, Patient Zero. I remembered that he had a girl dirtside who wasn’t answering his calls. He’d told me all about her a week earlier when he’d bought some Valizoom.

Luke wouldn’t meet my gaze when I asked him what was wrong. Looked like my little talk at the Puffin hadn’t reached everyone. He made sure the door of the examination room was locked before he would so much as take off his toque.

He swore me to secrecy as he climbed up onto the examination table. “My uncle, Marcel, had this lump growing on the side of his head. Didn’t have medical insurance, but he had a knife. He boiled the knife, daubed the lump with moonshine, and toked until he was floating. Didn’t even feel the cut. Stapled it up himself and he’s been fine ever since.”

“What did you do, Luke?”

“Didn’t have a knife, but I had plenty of wire and Valizoom.”

He unzipped his moonsuit. His member hung at a sharp angle, the tip swollen to the size of a grapefruit. When I touched it, he howled. I subdermed morcaine and that quieted him.

“Weren’t you at the Puffin last night?” I said as I applied a cold compress to reduce the swelling.

“I heard what you were saying, about this Koro business, but my cock was disappearing back up inside me, doc. I had to do something or I would’a died.”

The morcaine knocked him out. Anti-inflammatories helped bring the swelling down, and I did my best to elevate him to drain away the accumulated blood. In a few hours, I’d have a better idea if there was any permanent damage. I gave Schedulor control of the subderm feed.

“Keep him under. If he so much as tries to scratch down there, increase the dose.”

When I was sure Luke was sleeping, I slipped into my office. Everything I knew about Koro told me that my information vaccination should have been enough to kill the epidemic, but Luke had been vaccinated, he should have been cured. That meant something else was going on here.

I brought up Luke’s file. Nothing I read made him exceptional, but I cross-referenced him with the others who’d been in my office, Larry Robfort included, until I found a line I could draw through most of the men I knew were suffering the delusion. That line led me to the surface.

I called Robfort on my way to the golf course. His face appeared in a small window in my homeview. He was sitting in the cockpit of one of the big pieces of equipment Chung Fat had crawling across the moon.

“Busy, Jayna,” he said. “Out with a crew trying to convince a busted hauler that it’s got some more kilometres in it.”

“I want you and all your men to drop out of Selenity’s drug trials.”

He placed a circuit tester on the dash. “Mind, now.”

“At least until I know what’s causing the Koro. Something’s got your men all riled up, and the only thing the sick men have in common is that they are all on the same drug trial.”

“All my bys are on one trial or another. With the money Selenity pays, I’ll have enough to actually get my girl into university. No way am I dropping out because you have a hunch.”

He picked up the circuit tester again and dove under the dash, so I could only see his rear end bobbing above the dash, a mutant seal at the surface of the sea.

“I’m not asking, Robfort; either you send out the note, or I will. It won’t be for long, just a few weeks until I’m sure this has been put to bed.”

“My name won’t be anywhere near it,” he shouted from beneath the dash. “You realize you’re lobbing off the hand that feeds? Drug trials are the only way my bys make spare coin, coin they spend on your products.”

“I’ll get by,” I said, and cut the connection.

Earthlight bathed the crater in a gentle glow. Alanna stepped up to the tee, fit the steel spear into her chucker, and did this three-step dance across the rock before she threw. The spear glinted in the earthlight before I lost track of it, then my golf app picked the spear out as a glowing green arrow, soaring across the moonscape. It landed some five hundred metres away, and a good hundred and fifty short of the pin.

I took to the tee and tried to do the same dance she’d just performed and almost fell over in the process. My spear flew too high, landed two hundred metres away. The golf app floated several helpful tips across my homeview.

“Piece of shit,” I said.

“That’s what you get for shutting down my trial,” she said. Alanna worked at Selenity. She sold me some of the pills and potions my clients preferred, and she also happened to be running the experimental drug trial in which all my sick men were enrolled.

“If you can give me some more info on V2P426, I’ll let my men back into the program.”

“You know I can’t talk about active trials. What the hell has you so jumpy, anyway? Most of Chung Fat’s miners participate in our trials.”

“A bunch of my miners are suffering a rather unique set of side-effects. Have you heard of Koro?”

Alanna laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

I did my best to shake my head in the pressure helmet, then realized it was a futile gesture. “Most of my men who are suffering Koro happen to be in your trial. Have you seen the same thing in other test subjects?”

She wagged her index finger at me, a much more effective means of non-verbal communication when wrapped up in vacuum suit. “Not for V2P426, but Koro is a legend around the office. Hell, I thought it was a myth.”

As we finished the hole, she explained. In Selenity’s early days, drugs that promised to non-surgically enlarge male genitalia were a cash-cow for their competition, even if none of the products actually worked. A bright young designer at Selenity’s new Avalon facility came up with an idea to take advantage of that market: why not just sell a drug that made men believe their penises were bigger? Koro, a syndrome that made people believe their genitals were shrinking, was the starting point. If they could isolate a compound that caused Koro, they might be able to cause the opposite. Five trials later, the drug was pulled. The best results were men who reported no change in genital size, the worst were genital mutilations like I’d seen with Luke.

“What happened to the drug formula?”

“It’s in Selenity’s databases, I suppose. Nothing is ever thrown away up here.”

“Who ran the trial?”

“That, I can’t tell you. Not because I’m trying to hide anything; I really don’t know. It was probably fifty, sixty years ago. Now can we play some golf?”

I checked in with Schedulor: Luke was still unconscious, the swelling down, vitals good. Otherwise the clinic was empty. I told her I could play a few more holes.

Shortly after my next drive, all my alarms went mad.

Schedulor sent me the video footage as I was cycling through the airlock: Bleary Ron stumbled into my clinic, blood soaking his pants, and placed a Ziploc bag in Schedulor’s one good hand before the old miner tumbled to the floor.

“Hope my prick is still good,” Bleary Ron said. “The bag had kippers in it.”

He crumpled to the floor.

I hopped down Smallwood Avenue faster than an urchin with pockets full of stolen Placentia Bay noodles. Bleary Ron was still lying on the ground when I arrived. I dragged him through my clinic, inertia more of a hassle than his weight, and lugged him up onto an examination table. Schedulor logged into the room’s manipulator arms and helped me staunch the blood flow and clean up the wound. Then I opened the Ziploc bag to see what we could do about reattachment.

The base of Bleary Ron’s member was as torn as the place it had been attached. I went to work with antiseptic rinses, followed by a growth enzyme.

“Looks like we have another,” Schedulor said.

“Another doctor?” I hoped.

“Another patient. Correction, make that two.”

I left Schedulor to work on Bleary Ron’s severed member while I rushed back into the lobby. Two more miners occupied my waiting room: a man everyone called Dumper clutched an ice pack to his groin, and blood stained the front of Carlo Del Monte’s trousers. Their files popped up in my homeview: both men had been at the Puffin yesterday, they’d been memetically vaccinated. They shouldn’t have been sick.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Your penises were retracting and you tried to stop them?”

Both men nodded. By the time I had them in separate examination rooms and had convinced them to take their pants off, three more miners limped into the waiting room. One of them was a woman, Carina, who cradled bleeding breasts in both hands.

There wasn’t enough of me.

I hopped across the hall to the Selenity clinic. Dr. Doronzo’s receptionist, John, sat behind the desk admiring the work of art that was his reflection.

“I need Doronzo’s help,” I said. “It’s an emergency.”

John batted eyelashes that should have belonged to a 2130s starlet. “Sorry, hon, Doronzo’s out of the office at the moment. Doesn’t appear to be answering his phone either. Care to leave a message?”

“Tell him to get here as soon as he can. I need another set of hands.”

Back in the intersection between my clinic and Doronzo’s, I hesitated. Six injured miners was too much for me and Schedulor, but there was another doctor on the station, even if he barely qualified.

Larry Robfort stumbled through my rumination. Boots red, tears soaking his cheeks, his hands holding a mass of oil sorbent cloth.

“Get in line,” I told him, then hopped out onto Smallwood Avenue. As I did, the emergency tone rang in my ear. Belinda overrode my AR and placed herself in my field of view.

“Eight men failed to report to shift this morning, including Larry Robfort. I thought you had this little problem resolved?”

I dodged a pair of Selenity employees who were sipping coffee, arms linked. “I’ll stop it, I swear.”

The awning for the Whole Earth Wellness Centre loomed up over the crowded street.

“Those lost wages are being docked from your pay, as will the overtime fees for the replacement workers. Any further absenteeism will also be added to your education repayments.”

A merchant pushed a cart of fruit-analogues into my path and I leaped over it. “You can’t keep me here any longer.”

By the time I arrived at the Wellness Centre, the message returned from Belinda. “We won’t keep you there. If you can’t prevent these men from hurting themselves, we’ll send you somewhere where you won’t do as much damage to ride out the rest of your contract. I hear Ceres is lovely this time of year.”

She flickered out of my field of view as I cycled into the Wellness Centre. Dr. Earthborn stood in front of twelve cross-legged miners, each of whom held a steaming mug that smelled like composting squid. The good doctor wore a long, flowing silk robe over his white loincloth, and he intercepted me before I could get three steps into the place.

“They came to me for treatment and I gave them the tea in the proper dosage.”

“If they aren’t ripping their penises off, that’s good enough for me. You claimed you were a medical doctor, in addition to all that lotions and potions stuff, right?”

“Harvard Medical.”

I grabbed his wrist and dragged him to the door. “I hope you remember your basic surgical training.”

He pulled out of my grip. “All that’s keeping these men from self-harm is my management of their yang. I can’t abandon them.”

Several of the miners tugged at themselves through the fabric of their moonsuits. Earthborn was right: these men would end up in my clinic soon if something wasn’t done to stop them.

“They’re coming too,” I said. “I think I know how to help. All of you, let’s go.”

On the hopping-run back to the clinic, I sent a description of my plans to Schedulor. By the time we walked through the door, Schedulor had finished the first pair. Reinforced chastity underwear, still steaming, slid out out of his belly.

I handed them to one of the miners from Earthborn’s clinic. “Put these on.” He looked at me like I’d just asked him to list all the prime numbers below 1231. “Doctor’s orders.” I led him toward the toilet. “The rest of you, when Schedulor finishes a pair, you put them on. They’re one size fits all, and I promise, they’ll help.”

A yelp echoed from the toilet. “Hey, these things don’t come off.”

“Exactly,” I shouted back.

I led Earthborn into my surgery.

Schedulor was stitching Bleary Ron back together. Earthborn and I started on Robfort, who had calmed down a bit thanks to the morcaine. Earthborn swabbed away the blood and followed my commands.

I dictated a mandatory order for all Chung Fat employees to report to my clinic. While we prepped Robfort for reattachment, I had Schedulor send it out.

Eleven hours later, we were stitching together a nightshift worker by the unfortunate name of Riel Noseworthy who’d come in for a pair of my mandated underwear, but who had torn himself in the toilet when he was supposed to be putting them on. I recognized Riel from the lecture I’d given at the Puffin. All the men who had hurt themselves had been at my information session, they shouldn’t have been sick, yet here there all were. Riel wasn’t part of any of Selenity’s trials. Could the Koro be both a drug side-effect and memetically transmitted? I still had no idea.

“That should do it,” Earthborn said.

For a man who hadn’t touched a scalpel in almost thirty years, Earthborn was keeping his cool. We’d worked without rest and he only stopped once for a quick “Ohm”. Once our patient was stable, I went to see if Dr. Doronzo had returned to the clinic. We still had four more surgeries and Earthborn and I were getting exhausted.

“There she is,” someone shouted the moment I stepped into the hallway between the two clinics.

Over two hundred people were queued up for their pair of Doc Patel Specials.

“No way I’m putting no locking gitch on my Johnson,” said McEwen, a frequent client of mine.

“The underwear will prevent you from hurting yourself,” I said. “They won’t impair normal bodily functions, and once the Koro delusions subside, I’ll unlock them all.”

Orlandia Wright, a burly female miner who was also an occasional client, pushed through the crowd. “These girls fly free,” she said, hoisting her impressive bosom to make her point. “I don’t have no squirrely ideas about my nipples burrowing, so why must I strap them up?”

“Hell yeah,” someone shouted from the crowd.

“A few days,” I said. “That’s all I ask.”

The door to Dr. Doronzo’s clinic opened and the good doctor stepped out beside Lynn Periwinkle, one of Chung Fat’s drilling foremen. What the hell was Periwinkle doing in Doronzo’s clinic?

“Hey, Doc Doronzo,” McEwen said. “I want a second opinion. Doc Patel says I gotta wear padlocked panties. Whadda you say?”

Dr. Doronzo’s inscrutable face stared at me. He might as well have been wearing a pressure helmet for all the information that mug transmitted. “You aren’t the first to ask for a second opinion,” Doronzo said. He patted Periwinkle on the back. “My good man here asked me to take a look at him. Mr. Periwinkle, I hope you don’t mind me discussing the results?” The foreman shook his bearded head. “He was poisoned. I can’t be certain, of course, but my guess is it was the Narcoplex that Jayna Patel sold him last week.”

The crowd started to grumbled. Not all of them were my clients, but enough were that a critical mass formed, fury catching fire on the kindling of their desperation.

“Please, people,” I said. “I test all my product, make sure it is safe. That’s why you come to me, you know you get the good stuff.”

“She’s been selling you whatever garbage she could get her hands on,” Doronzo said. “So she can head back dirtside a few days sooner.”

“That’s not true.”

The crowd growled out their frustrations.

“She wants off the rock so bad,” McEwen said. “Let’s show her the way. Where’s the nearest airlock?”

They surged toward me, suddenly ferocious. I backed up until I felt the door of the clinic against my spine. It opened, but when I tried to walk through I backed into more miners, these ones wearing my underwear, and they too looked ready to toss me out into the void.

“Schedulor, help!”

“Please don’t hurt the doctor,” Schedulor shouted over the PA.

The miners closed in on me. Doronzo’s ancient eyes twinkled with righteous glee in his plastic face. As I stared into those clouded grey orbs, I saw myself through the man’s eyes, some young bitch soiling the honour of the profession, and in that instant I saw what he’d done, why my men got even sicker after my speech at the Puffin. But it was too late to do anything about it.

McEwen tried to pull off my lab coat, and as I struggled with him, I felt something in my pocket.

I slipped Earthborn’s vial out and held it above my head. “Take another step and you’ll all be ripping your dicks off.”

Liquid the colour of cholera swirled in the slim vial. The crowd took a step away from me. I pointed a finger at Doronzo’s immutable face. “I found this in Doronzo’s office.”

“Lying bitch,” he said. “I have never seen your little vial.”

“He’s been dosing the beer at the Puffin,” I said. “It’s an old drug, one of Selenity’s from decades ago. Doronzo was on the team that developed this poison.”

The crowd engulfed Doronzo like an anemone wrapping pseudopodia around its victim. The ageless doctor bellowed about his innocence, my treachery, my shaming of the profession, my utter contempt for life on the moon. The crowd lapped it up. Those hands turned to talons and shredded my lab coat. Doronzo goaded them on, even as miners gave him a taste of the same. Seems anyone with a stethoscope had it coming.

“What in the hell are you bys doing to our doctors?” Larry Robfort said.

All that rage leaked out of the crowd as the big union president waddled out of the clinic.

“One of them’s been poisoning us,” McEwen said.

Doronzo wriggled free of Orlandia’s grip before I could get a word out. “I’ll settle this right now,” he said. “Give me the vial, I’ll take as much as she wants me to and prove it is nonsense.”

I got up on one knee. “Not the tincture. The beer. You’ve been dosing the Puffin’s beer, down in the Vats where you make your wine. Drink the Puffin’s beer, Doronzo. Prove you haven’t been poisoning us.”

Crinkling around the corners of his eyes. “I’m one hundred and seventy two years old. Beer would devastate my system. There is no way I will drink that swill.”

Orlandia wrapped one huge arm around the doctor and pulled him close. “Oh yes you will.”

The big union president nodded. “Those of you who’ve been fitted with your Patel Specials, help me get these two up to the Puffin. Once the rest of you have your privates locked away, you can come see how this turns out.”

The miners were used to listening to Larry Robfort, and they spared no time marching Doronzo and I to the Puffin.

The Puffin’s air circulation system struggled to scrub the carbon dioxide all those sets of lungs were pumping into the cramped tin can. Quinn brought us each another round. I raised my glass to Doronzo and sucked back half of it.

“No problems, doctor?” I said.

Doronzo stared ahead, sipping at his half-litre glass.

The Koro was working in me. My nipples felt like they were hard nubs, little more than skin tags. I tried to pick at them to keep them from disappearing, but the reinforced sports bra, locked with a passcode only Schedulor knew, kept me from ruining myself. I knew that when my nipples finally did retract I’d die, with the same certainty I knew that should a grenade detonate beside my skull, I wouldn’t be around long enough to even think “I’m toast”. Knowing that the delusion was all in my head didn’t make one iota of difference to how terrified I felt.

Heart pounding, sweat pouring down my temples, I tried to distract myself. On the wall, dozens of little plastic plaques commemorated miners lost to the harsh lunar mistress. The crew of ’87, ’24’s fateful accident at North Tycho. A little plaque for Ace Jones. Every one of the plaques meticulously dusted and polished. Loved. People could love this place.

Doronzo coughed, sprayed beer out his nostrils. He covered his cartilaginous mouth with a smooth hand.

“Feeling funny, Doc?” Robfort said.

The union president paced between the two of us, trying to itch and tug at his recently re-attached member through bullet-proof underroos.

“Beer doesn’t agree with me,” Doronzo said.

“Sorry we can’t accommodate.”

All the miners in the place squirmed in their new undergarments. They drank from old bottles of moonshine that Quinn assured us couldn’t have been contaminated.

The airlock door hissed open, way at the back of the crowd, and they moved aside to let the man through. Earthborn, still in his surgical scrubs. He held a stoppered graduated cylinder that contained a sample of the pale ale Doronzo and I were drinking.

“Schedulor finished his analysis. Trace amounts of an IP protected substance: Selenity owns the copyright to it, so we can’t see what it is.”

Doronzo pushed back his beer. “That doesn’t mean I put it there.”

One of his smooth hands clutched with infantile obliviousness at his belt.

I took another swig of my ale. Despite Doronzo’s tampering, the beer was delicious. Crafted with love by Quinn’s crew in the Vats.

“Does it bother you more that I’m a doctor who moonlights as a drug dealer,” I said. “Or that I make more money as a drug dealer than as a doctor?”

That lifeless flesh rippled. He hissed through clenched teeth. “I had nothing to do with this.”

“No, that’s not it either. I see it now, Doronzo. You love this place. Avalon. The moon.”

I wobbled to my feet, which seemed to have grown very far away from my hips. Doronzo also stood, and backed away from me.

“And I hated it. Made a mockery of everything you love up here. I didn’t just disrespect the profession, I disrespected your home.”

My arms went wide. Sure, it was the beer, it was the fear that my disappearing tits were gonna kill me, but it was also this sad old man with a face that couldn’t show people how he really felt.

“I disrespected you, Doronzo, and you’ve spent what, two, three lifetimes falling in love with the place?” I wrapped him in a hug. That ancient body felt like sections of model train track wrapped in thin polyester sheets. His arms remained rigid at his sides. “Come on, doc. Hug it out. Let’s put this behind us.”

He stabbed me. The blade glanced off my impenetrable sports bra, but the next jab sunk into an unprotected kidney.

“Why you slippery jerk,” I said.

By the time I pushed him away, he’d stabbed me three more times.

“Do no harm!” he said. “Do no harm!”

He hopped for the door. Over one hundred miners danced after him, but they stumbled and tripped over themselves, their movements dulled by the restrictive underwear I’d made them wear. Beer and blood leaked out of me.

With a moan, I brought up the spear golf app in my homeview and assigned the back of Doronzo’s head as the target. The app told me where to throw and I did as I was told. For a moment, I could have sworn I heard the Beautiful Blue Danube playing as the half-litre glass tumbled end-over-end through the one-sixth-g.

The glass hit Doronzo in the back of the skull. He crumpled to the floor. I too was falling by then, all the light draining out of the overheads, but hands kept me upright. My throw didn’t knock him out, just knocked him over, and loosened the control he’d been exerting over himself ever since we started drinking the Puffin’s finest. He unzipped his moonsuit, revealing what looked like a mummified piece of bait fish hanging between his legs, and he went to work tugging it free.

Four days later, I came out of the induced coma. Bandages covered my arm and side. Hundreds of digital flowers filled the recovery room. Larry Robfort snored in the chair at the foot of my bed. I watched him for a moment, the big man childlike in his slumber, then I gave him a kick.

“Get back to work,” he said, blinked, seemed to realize where he was. “‘Bout time. We need you out there, Jayna.”

I shook my head. “I’m done with dealing.”

He wiped the sleep from one eye. “Not what I’m talking about. The arse has gone out of her. Bunch of our bys have come down with some kind of rash Earthborn can’t fix it. Schedulor’s doing the best he can, but he’s just a damn robot. We need a doctor. When can you get back on your feet?”

I was about to explain to him that I’d only been conscious for about two minutes, and that I might require a bit longer before I could return to my post, when Belinda appeared in a cloud of simulated cigarillo smoke beside Robfort at the foot of my bed.

“Took you long enough to come around,” she said. She slipped on reading glasses and read from a tablet. “Chung Fat wishes to express its sincere gratitude for your efforts to investigate and put an end to the alleged poisoning incident at the Pickled Puffin. Dr. Doronzo has been transferred to Tycho Station where he will stand trial for his alleged actions. As a token of our appreciation, Chung Fat has offered to grant you a small bonus for your efforts, in an amount equal to the outstanding balance and remaining interest payments on your education loan. The loan shall be considered paid in full upon your acceptance of this bonus. You will be free to leave as soon as you are well enough for travel.”

“Hold on a moment,” Robfort said.

“Should you accept this bonus, you will absolve Chung Fat of all responsibility -” Belinda lowered the tablet. She seemed amazed that someone had dared interrupt her.

“We’re short two doctors up here,” Robfort said. “You can’t be sending her home.” He rolled his chair over to my side. “We need her, Belinda.”

His huge, calloused hand held on to mine as if he expected me to get up out of bed and run to the nearest Earth-bound shuttle if he were to let go. Those eight seconds as we waited for Belinda’s response seemed to take years. Robfort caught me looking up at him and wouldn’t meet my eye, but this was a different kind of bashfulness than the “Does my bird look alright?” variety.

“Should Dr. Patel wish to stay, Chung Fat would of course continue to employ her, but she has made her intentions clear to me since the outset of her lunar tenure. What do you wish, Jayna?”

Belinda removed her reading glasses, and Robfort turned to face me, his shovel-blade jaw chewing something over.

I waited. Let them think I was weighing pros and cons while I enjoyed that moment. With my debt paid off, I wouldn’t owe Chung Fat a thing. I could leave whenever I wanted to. But I could wait another month or two, maybe a few more. My miners needed me, and the pharma staff would need help too. Despite the Koro, Quinn’s beer was pretty damn tasty and I still had so much room to improve at spear golf.

I gave her my answer.

The Hungry Ghosts

By Kristin Janz

“We aren’t here,” Lindsay said. “We’re just echoes of ourselves. Shadows.”

Whether she existed or not, listening to Lindsay made Kate tired. “If you didn’t exist,” Kate said, “you wouldn’t notice that you didn’t feel anything.”

“Consciousness is an illusion even when you’re alive,” Lindsay said. “It’s been proven by science.”

“When was that?” Kate asked. Like her and Lindsay, Vicki had been living alone when she died.

Vicki didn’t answer right away, giving Kate time to regret the question. She always asked either too much or too little.

“Until four years ago,” Vicki said at last. “He died of a heart attack.”

“It has crossed my mind,” Vicki said.

“How is that not a false expectation?” Kate asked. “Is that what happened?”

“Fuck you!” Lindsay said. “At least I didn’t think I was getting into heaven for not having sex with my boyfriend.”

“See, I knew religion was crap even before I died and stayed right here,” Lindsay said. “You must feel pretty stupid now.”

Kate unfolded her limbs and stretched into an upright position, hovering inches above the floor. “The only time I feel stupid is when I realize I’ve wasted another hour listening to you.”

A few people had ventured out onto the wide plaza in front of Trinity Church, most wearing surgical masks over their noses and mouths even though the worst was over. The shopping center across the street still showed signs of looting, but the broken glass had been trucked away. A few of the shops seemed to have re-opened; Kate saw two prospective bargain hunters walk through the large hole where the doors had been. A uniformed security guard eyed them with suspicion, but let them pass. Like the people on the plaza, the shoppers and the security guard were careful not to get too close to one another, careful not to touch.

Be thankful you can still touch each other! Kate wanted to yell out at them. But they wouldn’t have heard.

The Shouters had started up again. From outside the library, Kate could hear the ones all the way over at the Christian Science church.

“Our place! Our place! Stay away! Stay away!” About thirty Shouter ghosts had laid claim to the Christian Science library and its three-story globe map of the world. Another gang had taken over the Museum of Fine Arts, and one or two hundred occupied Fenway Park.

It didn’t make a lot of sense. But who wanted to stay in their own house watching their bloated corpse decompose? Or watch people they loved doubled over coughing up blood; or worse, surviving on their own?

Kate wasn’t sure where her body was. Collectors had come four days after her death to take it away to some makeshift morgue, and she hadn’t been able to float quickly enough to follow the truck.

Across the river, past tall, wood-framed multifamily houses, along streets still eerily quiet, Kate drifted, giving a wide berth to the small gallery exhibiting two of her paintings. When she reached her destination, the familiar triple decker with its cracked paint and splintering steps, she hesitated. She shouldn’t be here.

Inside, a baby was crying. More faintly, she could hear the familiar jangle of strings, the scratch of distortion.

Kate passed through the front door and willed herself up the staircase to the third level, passing the apartment with the crying baby on the second. She hadn’t known Shane’s downstairs neighbors; maybe she had passed them on the stairs once or twice.

Shane sat on the edge of the couch, hunched over his guitar. Kate felt a sudden, selfish bubble of disappointment. If only he had died soon enough after her, they could have been reunited. Never to touch one another again, true; but it would have been better than nothing.

Stray copper strands glinted in the sunlight as his brown hair fell over the side of his face. Standing next to him, Kate reached out to push it away, but her hand went right through him.

And yet, was that a faint shudder, a sigh of recognition? Shane’s hands seemed to falter on the strings. A moment later, he stopped playing and leaned his instrument between the couch and end table.

“Shane?” Could he hear her? Kate hardly dared to hope. Everything she had seen and heard in the three weeks since death confirmed that nothing the dead could do had any effect on the physical world, or on the living. But maybe, just maybe, if will and emotion were strong enough…?

Shane slouched deeper into the couch, his long legs stretched out under the coffee table, his face listless.

“Shane?” Once more, Kate tried to touch him, leaning over from behind, trying to rest her hands on his shoulders. She breathed in the scent of his hair, almost drowning in it. But once more, her hands passed through him as if he were made of air.

“You can drive yourself crazy doing that,” said Vicki’s voice from behind.

Kate yanked her hands away. “Yes,” she said, with forced lightness, “but would I really be crazy, or only think I was?”

Vicki laughed. She floated closer, her Birkenstock-clad feet about four inches above the floor. Ghosts had no conscious control over what they wore in the afterlife, and Kate was glad that her own subconscious had not dressed her in such an unflatteringly sack-like sundress. It made Vicki look heavier and dowdier than she really was. Whereas Kate’s expensive jeans and close-fitting black top of variously textured fabrics accented her slight curves and marked her as someone who cared about the face she presented to the world.

“This is your ex-boyfriend?” Vicki said. “The one you told us about?”

“Yeah.” They were silent for a few moments, watching Shane. At one point he reached for his guitar, but then changed his mind and picked up the TV remote instead.

“You know,” Vicki said, “after I died, I spent the first four days at a friend’s house, trying to make her notice me. I jumped up and down and waved my arms, I tried to put my hands through her head. I even shouted, as loud as I could, once for an entire hour.” Her lips twitched with amusement. “I was lucky no Shouters came by to challenge me.”

Kate did not smile. “Did your friend ever see you?”

“It’s not easy to say. I kept convincing myself she had. She looked up a couple of times, right after I’d done something to get her attention, and once it seemed like she was looking straight at me. But now, thinking back….” Vicki shrugged. “I think I saw what I wanted to see.”

Kate glanced around the living room, craning her neck to look into the kitchen. The apartment was a mess, unwashed mugs and dirty clothes everywhere. There was no sign of Shane’s roommate. Kate’s painting still stood in its corner, propped against the wall. She didn’t know whether to be happy that he still kept it out, or resentful that their breakup had meant so little to him that he could stare every day at a picture she had painted and not be overwhelmed by grief.

“Is it okay if I ask what happened?” Vicki said.

It felt uncomfortable to be talking about Shane while he was in the room. “He didn’t break up with me because I wouldn’t have sex with him, no matter what Lindsay thinks. I was the one who broke up with him.”

True, technically, but it left out a lot. The long silence when Kate first told him she wasn’t willing to have sex until she was married. The sudden spark of anger that flashed in his eyes every so often when she would finally pull away from his roaming hands. Lying awake worrying about when he would decide to abandon his experiment with celibacy and move on. The fear of losing him had been making her physically ill, affecting her work at the office, sucking her dry of inspiration when she tried to paint. It had seemed that the only way to be free of the fear of losing him was to walk away.

Vicki’s eyes were the same shade of brown as Lindsay’s, but hers were sympathetic instead of mocking. “Did you love him?”

Shane was watching a music video and mumbling along with the lyrics under his breath. The corners of Kate’s mouth lifted. He couldn’t carry a tune to save his life.

“Yeah,” Kate said. “I did.”

She had never told him so. Don’t say it until he says it first, all her friends counseled, and she hadn’t, afraid to stretch out a hand where there might not be one to receive it.

On their way out, Vicki paused on the landing outside the second floor apartment. The baby was still crying.

“We can’t do anything,” Kate cautioned. “Maybe we don’t want to know what’s wrong with it.” Children made her uncomfortable, and the smaller they were the less she liked them.

Instead of answering, Vicki floated through the door. Kate followed.

The infant was in one of the bedrooms, lying on her back in a crib, on a bare mattress. There were no adults anywhere. The baby was screaming like someone was murdering her, her tiny hands clenched into fists near her head.

“Where are the parents?” Kate demanded. “You can’t leave a baby alone like this!”

“Kate,” Vicki said. “Look.”

The baby’s wailing faltered, breaking off at the sound of Vicki’s voice. And, as if that were not evidence enough, Kate looked, and saw a hint of translucency, not so that she could see through the girl to the mattress beneath, but just a bit of blurriness around the edges of her form.

“She’s dead,” Kate said, her voice dull. She hadn’t died the same day as Kate and Vicki, or she would have looked solid, but it couldn’t have happened more than three or four days in either direction.

“Don’t cry, little one,” Vicki said. “It’s going to be all right.” She reached out a hand. The baby tried to grab it. But of course the tiny fingers went right through Vicki.

The baby’s face screwed up. She reached again, and again her hand went through Vicki’s. She scrunched her eyes shut tight and started to wail.

“Hush, hush,” Vicki murmured, waving the hand around. “Look at me, sweetheart. Look!” But the ghost baby wouldn’t open her eyes. She just kept screaming. No tears, though. Ghosts could only make the sound of crying, they couldn’t cry real tears.

Kate felt a rising pressure in the back of her throat and behind her eyes. She tried to swallow, to make the feeling go away, but she couldn’t, ghosts had no saliva either. Her eyes burned.

Vicki was singing now. Her soothing voice tried to rise above the baby’s anguished wails, but the discord of the two sounds together made the ghostly hairs on the back of Kate’s neck stand up.

Kate fled.

Much later, she found Vicki and Lindsay floating cross-legged above the library’s front steps, outside the main entrance. With the library still closed, it got pretty dark inside once the sun went down.

A young man loitered nearby, talking into his phone in a low voice between drags on a cigarette. Lindsay eyed the cigarette with undisguised lust.

Vicki didn’t have the ghost baby with her. She looked sad. Vicki had mentioned always wanting children, but never being in the right relationship at the right time.

“How was your evening?” Vicki asked.

Kate shrugged. “Fine. I stopped by my church. I guess they’ve started holding services again.”

“The live people or the dead ones?” Lindsay asked.

Kate glared at her. “The live ones.” She made a face. “I ran into a bunch of ghosts who want me to join their Bible study.”

Vicki frowned, puzzled. “How are they going to–”

“Hold the Bibles? They’re not. They’re going to find a Bible study group of live people and haunt them.”

Lindsay snickered. “Are you going to go?”

“What? When I could spend that time listening to you brag about your sex life?”

Lindsay gave her the finger.

“It’s not such a bad idea,” Vicki said, after a few moments. “Most of us are even more isolated from others than when we were alive, and anything that helps build community….”

“Like the Shouters?” Kate asked, sparing a glance for Lindsay. Lindsay had spent some time as a Shouter before latching on to Kate and Vicki.

“Those aren’t so much communities as mobs,” Vicki said. She considered the question. “But maybe even the Shouters are better than nothing. After what Lindsay and I heard.”

“While you were gone, these other ghosts came by,” Lindsay said. “They’ve been trying to warn people. I mean ghosts when I say people, of course.”

“Ghosts have been disappearing, apparently,” Vicki said.

“Yeah,” Lindsay said. “But just the ones who stay in their house by themselves and won’t socialize with anyone else. Other ghosts who knew about them would go over to say hi, and they’d be gone. The antisocial ones, not the ones who went to visit.”

“Maybe they’d just gone out for a while,” Kate said.

“No! Fuck, you’re not listening. These are ghosts who never went out, because they were, like, depressed, or because they were afraid to stop watching their live kids, or something else like that. They vanished.”

“One of the people who came to talk with us thought he felt an unhealthy aura inside the house where a ghost friend had disappeared,” Vicki said.

Kate made a skeptical face. “Ghosts can’t feel heat or cold or gale force winds, but we can feel someone’s spiritual aura?”

“It’s no dumber than believing in the afterlife,” Lindsay said.

“Anyway,” Vicki said, “these ghosts suggested we should try to stay together as much as possible. Ghosts who have companions don’t seem to disappear.”

“I wouldn’t mind disappearing,” Lindsay said. “This afterlife blows. Maybe the next one is better.”

The new ghosts stopped by the library to visit several times over the next few days. On their fourth visit, they stayed to watch Lindsay perform a one-woman play she had been working on in school.

Even Kate had to admit that Lindsay had talent. The bratty, foul-mouthed twenty-year old was switched off, and in her place sprang up a shy, bookish teenager; a harried young mother with a drinking problem; an arthritic old woman with an astonishingly sly and subtle sense of humor. It’s too bad she’s dead, Kate found herself thinking.

Lindsay must have been thinking the same thing. “I guess this is the closest I get to Broadway.”

“Or Hollywood,” Vicki said.

“Nah, you need a fucking boob job for that.” Lindsay mimed hoisting herself to emphasize her lack of natural film appeal. “And mega plastic surgery.” Her face brightened. “Maybe we can start a ghostly theater company. We could do performances on the Common, like those Shakespeare plays.”

“Who’s going to come?” Kate asked. “Shouters?”

Lindsay turned on her. “Who fucking asked you? Maybe some of us care enough about our art to keep doing it even though we’re dead. Just because you didn’t care enough about yours to do it while you were alive!”

“Kate has two paintings in a gallery in Somerville, Lindsay,” Vicki said. The three visiting ghosts all looked embarrassed, but intrigued enough by the unfolding drama not to leave.

“Yeah, I went and looked at them,” Lindsay said. “They’re good. Just think what you could have done if you’d been willing to make some sacrifices.”

“We don’t all have rich parents who can bankroll us through four years of theater studies.”

“Fuck my parents! I’m not talking about school, I’m talking about the rest of your life. I’m talking about your nice safe engineering job.”

Once again, Vicki tried to play peacemaker. “Kate made a lot of personal sacrifices so she could set aside time to paint.”

Kate heard a surprising edge in Vicki’s voice. Or perhaps not so surprising. Vicki had admitted to doing a lot of writing in high school and college in the 70s, but had confessed that as time went on, and life and relationship demands became more complex, it became harder and harder to find time, and by the time of her death her efforts had been limited to journaling and the occasional poem.

“Kate made stupid sacrifices of things she didn’t even want so she could waste time pretending she was an artist.” Lindsay turned to Kate. “That’s the easiest thing to do, isn’t it? That way you have an excuse for failing as an artist, and for failing in all your relationships, because you weren’t really trying at either one.”

Shane was out, but he had left on enough lights in the living room that Kate could study the painting she had given him. I’d rather have you, he had said, and at the time Kate was irritated, assuming he was talking about sex, and hadn’t they been over that enough already? But now she wondered. Was it too far-fetched to think that sex had been only a small part of what he was talking about? Was he, perhaps, also talking about her zealously guarded painting time? Her unwillingness to adjust her vacation plans once he came into the picture, even if it meant a three-week trip to Ireland without him? The way she always answered invitations to tell what she was thinking with “you first”?

The painting showed a young woman staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, one hand against the glass, trying to communicate with the image. But the reflection was oblivious, half-turned away, distracted by something outside the frame of the picture. Oddly enough, the woman looked like Lindsay, although Kate was sure she had never seen Lindsay while the two of them were alive.

It was easy for Lindsay to talk about continuing in her own mode of artistic expression after she was dead. She had one of the few vocations in which that was possible. Kate couldn’t even hold a paintbrush now. She had all the free time in the world–she didn’t even need sleep–but couldn’t use that time to do anything she cared about.

As morning began to push away the darkness in the rest of the apartment, Kate realized that she had not heard the crying ghost baby from the second floor, not for the past several hours. Had the baby been wailing when she arrived last night? Kate couldn’t remember. She didn’t always notice what was going on around her when she was feeling sorry for herself.

The second floor apartment was empty, the silence oppressive. The curtains were drawn and the sun had not quite risen, so there wasn’t enough ambient light in the rest of the apartment to brighten the child’s bedroom. The shadows cast by the dressers and changing table felt menacing.

Kate crept over to the side of the crib. It was as empty as the rest of the room.

Had the shadows in the room grown darker? Kate glanced around. Nothing moved. Was this what that other ghost meant when he talked about unhealthy auras?

Something rustled in the kitchen. It was probably only mice. But Kate didn’t wait to find out.

Shane finally came home around noon, hungover. He dropped his guitar and amp in the living room, drank a quart and a half of Gatorade, and collapsed facedown on his bed without taking off his shoes.

Kate hovered near the door. Something stirred inside her as she watched the rhythmic rise and fall of his shoulders.

She moved closer, closer, until she stood over him. In the room’s deep silence, she could almost hear his heart beat.

“Shane? Can you hear me?”

He didn’t respond.

“I shouldn’t have run away. I could have taken the chance that you wouldn’t leave me.” As crazy and implausible as that chance might have been. “I was afraid.”

She ran her hand down the back of his head, over his shoulders and back, her fingers disappearing inside him. She couldn’t feel him any more than she could feel her own flesh.

Desire was another phantom pain. It felt as real as it ever had when she was alive, alive and in this bed, half her clothing forgotten on the floor, every brush of his lips against her bare skin making her crazy with the sweet agony of restraint.

“I wish I had stopped saying no,” Kate told him. “God would have understood.”

Kate didn’t know if she believed that or not, any more than she knew if she believed what she kept telling Lindsay, that she hadn’t expected anything from God in exchange for her good behavior.

She reached for Shane again, crouching low beside his bed. She put her face next to his head, so close that she could smell the reek of his breath. She stretched her hands out into his side. She wished she could feel something, anything, even the warmth of the blood in his veins. But he was like air to her.

She was tempted to try and wrap herself around him like a lover, to sink into him until they occupied the same space. But she held back. Something about that impulse struck her as obscene, like groping a stranger in his sleep.

On the street below, a truck rumbled by. The hundred-year old windows rattled in their wooden frames.

Shane woke. He shot up in bed, his eyes wide.

Kate pulled away, alarmed.

Shane glanced around the room as if he were afraid something was about to leap at him out of a corner. “Kate?”

The pressure in Kate’s chest and head rose, unbearably. “I’m here,” she said. But even when he looked right in her direction, he couldn’t see her. After a few moments, he lay down again and slipped back into sleep.

Kate watched him sleep until early evening, imagining lines of charcoal on a page delineating the shadows his face cast, the curve of his shoulders. Later, she hung just inside the bathroom door while he showered and brushed his teeth. She tried speaking to him again, but he gave no sign that he heard.

Logic told her that it had been a coincidence. The noise of the passing truck had woken him. He had been dreaming about her. Why wouldn’t he dream about her? She had been his girlfriend for six months, broken up with him, and then died three weeks later in a flu pandemic. There was no reason to believe that he had sensed her leaning over him, heard her words through the darkened glass of sleep.

And yet. What if he had? What if the dead really could communicate with the living, if they wanted to badly enough?

Shane called his parents and talked briefly with each of them. Then he ate a bowl of dry cornflakes. When he left the apartment, Kate followed, but he took his car instead of walking, leaving her standing on the sidewalk, staring mournfully at the street.

Alone in the apartment, Kate tried to make things move. If she could rearrange the furniture, or even tip over a glass left on the coffee table, wouldn’t Shane have to suspect some sort of ghostly presence? But it was no use. No matter how hard she stared, even pushing at something with both hands–even praying to the God who seemed to have forsaken her–she could not make even the comforter on Shane’s bed move even a fraction of an inch.

Shane came back just after the clock on the microwave showed 2:00, but he did come back. Good; if he had slept with someone the night before, it hadn’t been love at first sight.

He smelled of beer and cigarettes. “You shouldn’t be drinking so much,” Kate told him. She watched as he changed into sweatpants and an older t-shirt and crawled into bed. He didn’t fall asleep right away. He lay curled slightly on one side, his head and shoulder uncovered, his eyes wide open.

All she had intended was to bring her lips next to his, to kiss him as if he were a sleeping prince. But when the magic didn’t wake him into awareness, as she had half-imagined it would, desperation took her. She stretched her body out over his, inside his, like two insubstantial projections merging into one. She tried to fit herself to him, curve for curve. Again and again, she tried to touch him wherever he was most likely to notice, if he could notice anything she did.

And none of it mattered. Eventually, he fell asleep, without noticing, and eventually Kate withdrew from him, sick with shame.

Would God understand this? she couldn’t help thinking. And did it make any difference, if he did?

If it didn’t, if in the end it all came down to this….

Shane had turned the lights off in the living room this time. As morning approached, and the darkness began to creep away, Kate stood at the east-facing windows. She held up a hand to the pink glow coming in through the blinds.

I still look real. She could almost see the framework of bones beneath her skin, the traceries of blue veins, caught in the new day fire of the sun.

“What the fuck are you doing to yourself?”

Kate spun around.

Lindsay, followed closely by Vicki. Vicki’s brown eyes were all motherly concern. Lindsay’s were pissed.

“Have you fucking looked at yourself?” Lindsay demanded, pointing.

Vicki floated forward, passing right through Lindsay in her haste. “Kate. You’re disappearing. You have to get out of this apartment.”

Kate held up her hand again. She really could see the bones of her fingers and wrist. Her flesh had gone transparent, like a bad projection.

Her eyes met Vicki’s. “The baby downstairs is gone.” The baby, wailing its heart out, alone in the only place it knew.

“You’re going to go the same way,” Vicki said. “If you stay here.”

“But he heard me!” Kate protested. “I was talking to him, and he woke up in the middle of the night and said my name.”

Vicki hesitated.

“So what?” Lindsay demanded. “It’s not worth it. You’re disappearing. Maybe if you try hard enough, you can make him see you once before you’re completely gone.”

Suddenly, there was Shane, standing in the entrance to the hallway. Kate froze in place. He seemed to be staring straight at her.

“He’s only looking out the window, Kate,” Vicki said gently. “The sun is coming up.”

Kate forced herself to take her eyes off him, to turn and see what he saw. The sun was indeed coming up, the entire eastern sky gently afire from within. It was a gorgeous fall morning, perhaps gorgeous enough to make someone forget that his ex-girlfriend, and maybe his roommate, and who knew how many other friends, were dead of something so innocuous as the flu. That the world had seemed poised on the edge of collapse, and it was still unclear which direction it was tumbling over into.

After a moment, Kate heard the slap of Shane’s bare feet down the hallway and into the kitchen. The fridge door opened and closed.

“He’s nothing special,” Lindsay said. “I was expecting some fucking Greek god, the way you talk about him.”

She walked across the room to examine Kate’s painting.

“This painting’s just as good as the other ones.” Apparently Lindsay didn’t notice the subject’s resemblance to her. “You should have been in your studio emptying your soul into trying to make a paintbrush move. It would have been more worthwhile than hanging around here moping over your drunk-ass loser ex.” She straightened from her inspection, looking Kate straight in the eyes. “Are you coming with us or not?”

Kate didn’t answer.

Lindsay shrugged. “Fuck if I care. I’m out of here.” And she slipped outside right through the wall, never mind that they were on the third floor.

Kate watched as Shane stumbled back down the hallway to his room. He didn’t look in their direction this time, neither at Kate nor out the window.

Vicki moved closer to her. Concern wrinkled her brow.

“You realize it, don’t you? The ghosts who disappeared did it to themselves. They poured so much of themselves into trying to interact with the physical world that there was nothing left.”

“Like the baby?” Kate demanded. “It’s the baby’s fault that she disappeared. Is that what you’re saying?”

Vicki didn’t have an answer for that. “We’ve missed you,” was all she said. “I hope you’ll decide to come back.” And she was gone.

Left behind, Kate stood for a moment in the entrance to the hallway, staring at the open door to Shane’s room, listening to the sound of his breathing. She could see her painting out of the corner of one eye, its oils glowing in the light of the new sun.

In the end, she went the way Lindsay and Vicki had, straight through the third-floor wall to the street beyond, heedless of stairs and doorways she no longer needed.

She could see them in the distance, flying through the air. The ground could not hold them.

Always on My Mind

By David Cleden

If you cut the main artery from some living organism and laid it out across an arid wasteland then, Sabbi supposed, you would have something much like the Strip. True, the Strip was inorganic, a man-made thing cast in concrete, steel and glass, but still it lived. There were places where you could stand and see the Strip stretching away like a ribbon of light across the night-time desert, unspooling for mile after mile, blurring into one featureless splash of neon advertising hoardings.

And sooner or later, it would bleed out and die.

But Sabbi had become expert at letting tomorrow take care of itself. Save your worries for the here and now: there were plenty of reasons to.

The crowds of shoppers ebbed and flowed–and that was good. They provided her with anonymity: a hundred thousand or more, thronging the broadwalks of the Strip on a hot summer afternoon, closeted by endless store-fronts and restaurants and coffee-houses–imprisoning them within the Strip’s rapacious jaws.

From behind the gleam of her sunglasses, Sabbi scanned faces, trying to avoid flat-foots mingling with the shoppers. Most of the cops wore the Strip-sponsored uniform–visibility a key part of their deterrent–but they came in a plain-clothes variety too. They knew all about the petty thieves, the grifters like Sabbi who worked the lower echelons of the Strip’s ecosystem. Flat-foots carried the authority of no lesser person than the Chairman herself to arrest-and-deport on sight. They also carried tasers delivering kick-ass voltage–not intended to be lethal but not something Sabbi was inclined to put to the test. Worst of all, they carried attitude.

And now the stolen bracelet was burning a hole in her pocket. Every fiber of Sabbi’s body could sense its bulk as she moved, its cool sleekness pressing against her thigh. You could find plenty on sale down the Strip worth ten times its price. But this one was special. This was a commission, lifted to order. These days, Sabbi only worked to commission. The payouts were lower but the work was steady, so it balanced out in the long run. And it helped make her feel more… legitimate. The way a professional business-woman ought to act. Yeah, go me with my worthless career aspirations.

Something didn’t feel right, though. A vague uneasiness gnawed at her. Nothing she could pinpoint, but you didn’t survive on the Strip without learning to trust your instincts. And right now those instincts were telling her this wasn’t worth the risk.

So just do it–and do it quick.

There was no shortage of marks to choose from. There was never any shortage on the Strip. That was the whole point.

She drifted closer to a young woman browsing store-fronts arm-in-arm with her boyfriend. Strip-standard attire said everything there was to say about her: wealth, privilege, arrogance. Perfect. Sabbi stumbled lightly into the woman, mumbled an apology, and the bracelet slipped into the woman’s shoulder-bag in one smooth motion.

Sabbi would drift for a while to get her composure back, but stay close. If all seemed okay, she’d find an opportunity to ‘reacquire’ the bracelet. No sense in wasting a commission payout. Nobody would be any the wiser. And no harm done, except maybe a tiny dent in profits for one particular Strip merchandiser, and frankly she considered them good for it.

Sabbi noticed a man watching her from thirty feet away, the way you do when one pair of eyes seems to be locked on you in a sea of oblivious faces. She felt her heart jump. She lifted her head, looking straight at him, letting him get a good look at her shades.

With the sunglasses on, Sabbi looked as if she had bug-eyes. The lenses had a clever faceted-prism design: transparent for the wearer, but appearing to everyone else like the compound eye of some nightmarish bipedal insect. And while the casual observer was trying to make sense of it–a hundred tiny reflections of their bemused face staring back from those lenses–Sabbi was checking them out, working out what kind of mark they might be, or what threat they posed. Or maybe sussing out an escape route. Definitely one of those, and sometimes all three at once.

She loved those shades. Sure, people noticed them, but they were meant to. And because they only ever noticed the shades, not the person wearing them, when she took them off it was like throwing an invisibility switch.

She side-stepped away into the thickest part of the crowd, slipping the glasses off, changing direction at random. Glancing back a couple of times, she caught only the briefest glimpse of the man. His movements seemed to lack urgency, but he was shadowing her moves and that couldn’t be chance. Sabbi quickened her pace, beginning to shoulder her way through strolling couples who didn’t move out of her way in time.

And now Sabbi could feel a buzzing at the base of her skull, a kernel of pain threatening to blossom into a headache. She ignored it and pressed on, puzzled at the surge of people suddenly moving in the opposite direction. A moment later, she heard it. Or felt it. Or–

Perfumes for the ladies! Maxine à la Mode! When it’s too hot to wear anything else! All kinds of perfumes!

The words slammed into her frontal cortex, assaulting her with almost physical force. No sounds though, just fully-formed words straight into her brain. Around her, people were dipping their heads and turning away, like a shoal of fish cleaved in two by a predator. Some were rubbing their foreheads, others muttering curses.

Maxine à la Mode! When it’s too hot–

Unwelcome thoughts and images exploded in her brain, thundering around inside her skull until she was sure she could feel her eyeballs vibrating.

She saw the hawker twenty yards ahead, his hand-cart piled high with bright packages of cosmetics. Sabbi knew most of the street traders in this zone, but here was a new face–frozen into a rictus smile that was fooling no one. In front of his stall, tethered to it by a thick ankle chain, the Thal paraded miserably up and down, issuing forth the mental torrent of advertising slogans.

Maxine à la Mode! When it’s too hot to wear anything else!

Maxine à la Mode!

Too hot–

Too hot–

Sabbi had never seen an actual live Thal, and certainly never got this close to one. As far as she knew, the few that had survived into adulthood had all been taken to isolation centers once the geneticists had finished dicking around playing god and the federal legislators had closed down the labs. This one had a stocky build, classically prominent brow-ridge with receding hairline and thick black hair allowed to grow long, but otherwise normal-looking. Not all Thals were strong broadcasters, but most showed the symptoms: predisposal to unilateral telepathic projection, an ability–if that was the right word–that laid bare their soul to everyone around. She tried to imagine what it would be like to uncontrollably broadcast your innermost thoughts to anyone within range, to forego even the most basic level of privacy.

And now this? Using a Thal as some kind of all-pervasive advertising gimmick? That had to be a new low. Though never underestimate the Strip’s ingenuity if there was a quick buck to be made. Sabbi shuddered, but she was damned if she couldn’t nearly smell that perfume now.

The Thal was tiring. His thoughts were losing focus, breaking up into an incoherent babble that mostly radiated hurt and loneliness and longing. The hawker yelled something incoherent at him but the wash of emotions only fragmented further.

The Thal continued to parade up and down, his head endlessly questing from side to side in that curious manner of the slow-witted, as though searching for something long since lost. He looked forlorn.

Sabbi let herself be carried with the flow of the crowd away from the hawker, the Thal’s thoughts beginning to fade from her mind. She’d lost sight of her pursuer, and that made her nervous. And she’d almost certainly lost her commission.

Something hard and claw-like gripped her arm, tightening inexorably. From behind, a voice spoke into her ear, foul-smelling breath assaulting her nostrils. “Prosser wants a word, my little lady-bug. Wants to know when he gets paid.”

“Ow! Let go of me! You’re going to cut my frackin’ arm in half!”

“Prosser’s not happy.” The grip tightened. Sabbi half expected to see blood staining her sleeve.

“I told you before, Crab. When I’ve got it, Prosser gets it.” Her fingers skittered uselessly over the pincer-like artificial hand squeezing her upper arm, trying to pry it loose. A tingling numbness was beginning to spread from the loss of circulation. Rumor had it that Crab had once snapped a man’s head clean off at the neck, like dead-heading a flower. Some poor unfortunate who had seriously pissed off Prosser. Just like her.

With no lessening of pressure, Crab began to maneuver her towards one of the narrow service alleys leading away from the Strip. The people flowed around them in an ill-temper, unsettled by the Thal’s blunt advertising message. Even now, something akin to the Thal’s carrier wave reached out to anyone within a hundred yard radius, broadcasting its jumble of resentment and misery; a cacophony of sub-vocal thoughts. It was like having some whiney two-year old living inside your skull. She glanced back and saw the hawker slip some kind of gauze hood over the Thal’s head–and immediately a calm descended.

“Look,” she told Crab. “Maybe there’s another way.”

“Oh yes, lady-bug. I like the other way.” The grip tightened a fraction and Sabbi yelped.

“Listen! What if I could set Prosser up with a shot at the Lakenbys store?”

Crab seemed to think about this. The pressure eased a fraction. She could almost hear the gears turning in his brain. “Lakenbys is not possible.”

Well, yes. They all thought that. The smart grifters stayed well clear. Lakenbys took security to a whole new level on the Strip: i-cams everywhere, beam interferometry on the display cases, item tagging–you name it, and Lakenbys had almost certainly implemented it. And there were too many staff with suspicious eyes. Management policy was ruthless prosecution of all grifters to the maximum permitted in law. But even Lakenbys had a weakness. Customers. You had to entice customers into the store–so long as they came with big fat credit chips. Draw them in, sell the goods, complete the transaction, send them on their way. In and out. And that meant being open and inviting. A pro like Sabbi sneered at the unsubtle nature of snatch-and-run, but really it was no different to the usual mode of business–except for the bit about the credit transaction. You had to be audacious and quick, and the staff had to be slow or off-guard. But it could be made to work.

“No, not possible. Not Lakenbys,” Crab repeated.

“Yes, possible. With the right kind of distraction. And I know just the thing.”

The Strip opened at noon each day but only came alive at sunset. The pretty young things came then. And the social climbers, and the out-of-state tourists and the rich city workers from the gated communities near the coast. They came in their tens of thousands each evening, looking for ways to flaunt their money and buy themselves status. It wasn’t about the merchandise. You could have the goods droned-in to your personal collection point from the very same warehouses that nestled up behind the Strip’s storefronts. It was about the experience–and there was something almost religious in its intensity. The Strip was the New Church of Latter-day Commerce; a place to worship at the altar of materialism. Its cathedral: a twelve-mile long mall crammed with every conceivable and irrelevant luxury.

But still a façade. The Strip was nothing more than a single great artery of opulence; all length and no width, pulsing to the daily heart-beat of its trade. Step into the stark service-alleys and you encountered a different world: festering trash piles awaiting collection, squalid boarding houses for employees lacking the means to travel in from the city suburbs. There were twenty-four seven basement bars where off-shifters frittered away meager wages on cheap booze. Tat-parlours, brothels, crud-head joints, even backstreet surgeries if you needed a little patching up with no questions asked.

As the sun sank lower, the Strip came alive, glittering with the lights of ten thousand mall-stores. The already crowded boardwalk filled with entertainers and hustlers. It was said that on a hot summer night, half a million souls came.

In different circumstances, finding the hawker again might have been a problem. As it was, a rough location was all Sabbi needed. She had guessed he would hole up in the southern district tonight, maybe try his luck tomorrow further north. And she had been right. Now the faint whisper of miserable thoughts leaking from the Thal made the rest of the job easy.

Sabbi hurried down shadowy backstreets, pausing and retracing her steps whenever the background signal grew marginally fainter; triangulating, closing in. She checked her watch. Prosser’s man would be in place by now, waiting for her to do her part. No time to lose.

She stared at the box-panel van parked up at the far end of an access road, as far away from people as possible. The thudding pulse of a juke-box rose from a basement bar on the other side of the street. As she passed by the van experimentally, the background static from the Thal’s mind grew suddenly loud as though someone had twisted a dial.

He was here.

The driver’s cab was empty and there was no sign of the hawker. He would be somewhere out of range, and glad of it, downing his third or fourth whiskey by this time of the evening. Sabbi checked the street again. Deserted.

She tried the van’s rear door. Locked.

But Sabbi knew about locks. She suppressed a smile. Just one of the many skills a professional woman like her needed on her CV. A moment’s concentration and then the tumblers had fallen into place.

The tone of the mind babble coming from within changed. The Thal must have heard her scratching at the lock. She sensed his confusion and uncertainty.

Good. Her plan depended on that.

Sabbi wrenched open the back door. A low wattage bulb lit the interior giving out scarcely more light than a candle. Most of the space was taken up by a cage: heavy duty floor-to-ceiling bars set a few inches apart, covered with a skin of gauze-like mesh, similar to the hood she had seen the hawker pull over the Thal’s head.

The Thal sat on a stool at the back of the cage, a plate of food cradled between his knees, fork half-raised to his mouth. Off to one side was a chamber pot. A smell of spicy broth and piss hung in the air. There was barely room to stand in the back of the van. The caged Thal could take maybe two paces at most. If this was how he lived, she would be doing them both a favour.

Who you? WHO YOU?

“It’s okay. Take it easy. I’ve come to help.”

WHO YOU?

The Thal had stood, spilling the broth onto the floor, retreating to the furthest corner while his distress beamed out to the world.

“A friend,” Sabbi said, hating herself for the lie. “Come to get you out.”

No friend! No friend!

“Why don’t you tell me your name?”

There was a door set into the front of the cage, made of the same mesh construction presumably designed to dampen the worst of the Thal’s thoughts. She would need to brace herself when she opened the cage.

But the door was secured by some kind of electronic lock, a spot of red light glowing on one edge. “Where’s the keycard kept?” she asked the Thal. She glanced around in case the hawker had hung it on a hook out of reach.

No. Not leave. STAY!

“Listen! This is your chance to go free, okay? Escape! But please–” she touched a hand absently to her forehead and rubbed at the place where a headache was beginning, “can you not shout?”

NOT SHOUT? The Thal reached into a pocket and pulled the gauze hood over his head. Better?

“Much.”

Sabbi tried to calm herself. How the hell was she supposed to break this kind of lock? If she couldn’t get this door open, her plan was ruined. She had promised Prosser a distraction, a good one, and a confused, unhappy Thal blundering his way down the Strip was certainly likely to provide that. But not if she couldn’t spring him. Her tools skittered uselessly around the locking mechanism, looking for a way in that wasn’t there. She tried not to imagine Crab’s relentless grip on her arm, squeezing until the bones beneath began to crunch.

You go now? She heard a note of hope behind the thought.

“Not without you. I need to break you out of here.”

No! Want stay! NEED STAY!

She hadn’t figured on the damned Thal being too stupid to escape, if the chance came. If. Big if.

“Do you really want all this? Living like someone’s goddamned pet in a cage? Only taken out when your master needs you to perform your tricks? Here’s your chance. Here is your moment.”

The Thal stared at her with eyes somehow bright in the dimness of the weak bulb. His head made that curious weaving motion, smooth and sinuous, even though his eyes remained fixed on her.

Teleoman.

“What?”

Teleoman. Teleoman. TELEOMAN!

“Ah. Right, fine. Pleased to meet you, Teleoman.” She squatted by the lock, trying to think, willing her brain to come up with some alternative plan. But her head was filled with jumbled thoughts leaking from the Thal’s mind. Even though he wore the hood, she felt the rushing torrent of white noise as an almost physical thing, drowning out her own thoughts. “Alright, listen Teleoman. There must be something you’ve always wanted to do, some place you wanted to go?”

He seemed to consider this.

Teleoman belong here!

“No, you don’t. No one belongs in a cage. Everyone deserves the right to live on their own terms.” She thumped her hand against the mesh uselessly. “Except I can’t get this frackin’ door open.”

Teleoman stood and moved towards her. Some instinct made her back away, a primitive part of her brain awed by the physicality of the Thal, and the brooding strength in that body. This must have been what those geneticists were after when they spliced neanderthal genes into homo sapiens chromosomes. Frackin’ assholes.

Teleoman drew back a powerful forearm and punched through the mesh part of the cage as easily as if it was made from wet cardboard. He reached through, wrenched the lock contraption from its mounting and the door catches sprang back top and bottom.

Sabbi stared at him. Hell’s teeth, he could have done that any time he liked.

Alright. Teleoman come with you.

“What? No! Not with me. You just run! Go!” She had visions of wading through crowds of late night shoppers on the Strip, this hulking monster of a man dogging her footsteps, mental voice booming out terror and confusion directly into every person’s brain for a quarter mile around. She had promised Prosser a distraction, one that would draw every flat-foot on the Strip. The last thing she wanted was to be standing there when it happened.

She backed away, jumping down from the van as Teleoman stooped to climb out. He tugged the hood off his head as he did so, and Sabbi reached for the side of the van to steady herself as a fresh sledgehammer blow of thoughts assaulted her.

“Go!” she said, pointing to the bright lights of the Strip at the end of the street. “That way. Keep going! Don’t stop for anyone.” Prosser would get his distraction one way or another.

Now Sabbi was anxious to be gone too. If there was some kind of silent alarm on the vehicle, the hawker could come bustling out from a nearby bar, mean as a hornet, at any moment.

She turned and ran the other way into the darkness. A moment later she realized the Thal was following her.

Teleoman come with you.

He caught up to her easily. He grabbed her arm and swung her round, like a parent grabbing a child about to run into traffic. Doors were opening further up the alleyway, pale faces peering out to see who or what was screaming thoughts into their heads.

“Please,” she said. “You’re hurting.”

Teleoman scared. Lady kind to Teleoman. Teleoman come with you.

Sabbi caught glimpses of the thoughts behind the words, fleeting moments of savagery and fear. Endless humiliation. Thought-flashes of incarceration and isolation. Yet beneath these surface thoughts were echoes of human needs common to all; of thwarted dreams and ambitions, of love and the desire to be loved.

More people were piling into the alley to gawk. The Thal had let go of her arm. This was her chance. She could vanish down any of a dozen narrow twisting alleys where maybe the Thal couldn’t follow so easily. Yet she hesitated.

Teleoman stood looking at her, a vague, child-like smile on his face. Burdening herself with the Thal was just about the craziest thing she could do right now. She could forget stealth. Forget quietly disappearing into the shadows. And even if they got away from the Strip, where was there for the Thal to go? Where did you hide a Thal?

Where indeed?

“Stay close to me,” she hissed. “And put the damned hood back on.”

Hell’s teeth. No one had ever called her a lady before.

Once clear of the Strip, the land became a rucked-up carpet of low hills and arroyos. There was nothing much out here, just scrubland sliced and diced by the occasional freeway. Even on a cloudless night like tonight, the sky glowed with reflected light from the Strip; a false dawn that never quite arrived, but sufficient for them to travel by. Sabbi had a vague notion of heading coastwards but they would be walking all night to get there–and with no real prospect of safety at the end of it. So she led them down a dusty incline towards an underpass where a freeway crossed a man-made channel diverting run-off from the distant hills towards the ocean. “Here,” she told Teleoman. “We can rest here for a while.”

A lighter flickered in the darkness not twenty feet away. They froze. Its yellow glare lit a nightmarish face: swirls of purple and red, tattooed images of gaping mouths and teeth sharpened to points high up on the man’s forehead. The tat gang-leader took a step towards them. “Looky here! See what we’ve caught ourselves?” With a sinking feeling, Sabbi realized there were a half dozen others crouched in the darkness around their leader. “Reckon we got ourselves some proper sport tonight.”

If she ran now, it would only make things worse: the hunted and the hunters. She could probably out-run one or two but they would have motorbikes nearby, and on foot her chances were slim.

The tat-gang leader flicked away the glowing stub of a cigarette into the darkness. “Come a little closer, pretty lady.”

“Jeez, man,” one of the others muttered. “My fucking head–”

Teleoman stepped forward. The gang appraised him carefully, sizing up his bulk and muscularity. Impressive. But there was still only one of him, plus the girl, and plenty of them. Those were good odds.

Then Teleoman slipped the hood from his head. A wave of unbridled hatred suddenly swept outwards, animal-like in its intensity. Again it was all Sabbi could do not to stagger beneath the force of the mental assault.

TELEOMAN FIGHT. HOW MANY YOU WANT KILLED?

It took her a moment to realize Teleoman was asking her a question.

“Uh, I’d say… all of them? The smart ones will probably run anyway.” She tried to sound cool about it, but didn’t think she was succeeding. She hoped Teleoman knew what he was doing.

GOOD! TELEOMAN LIKE THAT!

Teleoman strode forward, rapidly closing the distance to the group like this was just some trifling business to be dealt with. Each footstep thumped down hard on the ground.

TELEOMAN KILL ALL!

He broadcast this thought with a curious cheeriness, as if he’d been waiting a long time for this moment.

As one, the tat-gang fled into the darkness.

They found a space up where the steel beams of the flyover met the sloping concrete of the embankment beneath, small and cave-like. “Stay here,” Sabbi told him. “I’ll come back in the morning, once I’ve figured out what to do next.”

Teleoman stared at her with his deep liquid eyes, head bobbing and weaving as always. With the gauze hood back in place, she found it bearable to be in his presence but hardly comfortable. She needed to get away and do some thinking. She also needed to say clear of Prosser who would be mad as hell with her by now.

You come back?

Sabbi choose not to answer. She was imagining what it would be like to live with every thought exposed to the world, no possibility of lying or deceiving.

“Stay out of sight,” she told him. “And keep the hood on.”

Then she walked away into the darkness, not planning to return.

But in the morning she came back. The day after, too. Sabbi brought him food–and each day the reasons changed.

First it was guilt. That first night she hadn’t dared return home to her quarto, a quarter-share of converted shipping container where she lived. It was one of several dozen abandoned in a corner of a disused parking lot, and home to a transient population of Strip support workers or grifters like her, unable to afford workhouse rents. She imagined Crab waiting for her there in the darkness and felt an intense desire to keep all her digits intact.

So she walked the endless concrete flats behind the Strip, through empty lots and back-alleys. When the night air grew chill, she grabbed a couple of hours’ rest next to a hot air vent, trying to ignore the stink rising from an over-flowing dumpster nearby. Maybe she’d move north up the Strip for a few days. It wasn’t her territory, but she could blend in if she kept her head down.

Her thoughts wandered back to the Thal she had freed. What had she been thinking? She doubted he could fend for himself. He certainly couldn’t steal what he needed, not when he might as well be announcing his intentions via a bullhorn from two hundred yards away. They’d been lucky in that business with the tat gang, catching them off-guard. But more thugs could return at any time, tooled up and looking for trouble–enough of them this time to take down a Thal, no matter how strong he was.

And if he survived that? She imagined the Thal sold on to another hawker or returned to some federal institution–and neither seemed like a fair outcome to her. She had created this problem. She couldn’t just walk away.

So guilt drove Sabbi back to the underpass with a packet of food part-scavenged, part-stolen as she’d slunk through the service alleys behind the Strip.

The day after, it was curiosity. The Thal kept himself hidden, staying out of sight in the dark little crevice up between the road supports and the poured concrete. He kept himself hooded, too. She hated how pathetically glad he was to see her.

The day after that, it was a reluctance to let go of a half-finished project.

And by then, she’d just gotten into the habit.

Each day Teleoman emerged cautiously from his hiding place when she called his name, eyes blinking in the sunlight, a sheepish grin on his face. Teleoman hungry! What you brought?

I have my very own troll living under a bridge, she thought.

Being in his presence gave her a low-grade headache. Sometimes she could feel her pulse pounding at the base of her skull as the broadcast babble of his thoughts rose and fell like endless breakers crashing onto the shore.

“Can’t you turn it down, somehow?”

Teleoman stared at her. She saw intelligence behind those eyes; a fast mind despite the appearance of slowness. His strange, questing head movements and clumsy thought-speech could easily fool you into believing he was retarded in some way, but she saw now it wasn’t so. He started to respond–thoughts rising up like a foaming breaker. “No! You’re doing it again! Calm thoughts, okay? Just breathe, or something. Whisper, damn it.”

Teleoman can’t–

But he cut the thought off somehow. The wandering head movement slowed. A frown creased his brow as he concentrated.

Teleoman try–

Now he was concentrating too hard. The wave broke, shattering into a million roaring thought-fragments.

“No, not like that! Don’t force it. Let it flow out of you.” Jeez, what was she turning into? Some kind of new-age therapist spouting psycho-babble?

Difficult.

Sure, and life ain’t no easy ride for me either, you lumbering neanderthal.

Sabbi regretted the thought immediately. He was doing the best he could. Even knowing Thals couldn’t pick up thoughts–it was all send and no receive–she found herself blushing.

Teleoman… grateful.

Now there was a difference. Instead of roiling, white-water waves, the sea of projected thoughts had become more of a swell, rising and falling to a slower rhythm. Not that her headache had gone, but it was a start.

Owner not kind to Teleoman. But Sabbi kind.

“Hey, that was a little better.”

Teleoman beamed at her. What’s in bag? Teleoman hungry!

And this time, his voice in her head was just a voice, not a shout. Sabbi smiled and showed him.

He was good with his hands, too. On his first day in hiding, she watched him fashion a crude chair out of some scrap rebar, wedging the straight rods into an angle of the roadway’s steel beams and bending them into complex shapes. That was a Thal trait, of course. No homo sapiens had the upper arm strength to do the same. Teleoman scavenged an old mattress from fly-tipped rubbish nearby, rammed it into the home-made frame and settled back with a sigh every bit as satisfied as an old-timer relaxing into a porch recliner. When Sabbi next visited, he’d made one for her too.

She tried to coach him, showing him how to breathe–mainly for her benefit, not his. “Watch me,” she told him. She forced some of the tension from her shoulders, letting them slump and took an exaggerated breath; held it. Exhaled. “See? Try and feel all those thoughts sliding away, growing shallower. Like… I dunno. Ripples in a pool spreading out and fading.” Teleoman stared at her without blinking but she did think his broadcasts were not as overwhelming as they had been. She still made him keep the mesh hood on, though.

Overhead, morning traffic began to pick up, the rhythmic da-dum da-dum of tyres on the expansion joints came like some irregular cosmic heartbeat. Sabbi worried about those people. Did they notice the sudden but brief intrusion into their consciousness, like the blare from a sound system heard through an open window? And always the same place each day. Or were they too busy scanning the headlines or talking on the phone or snoozing, as their little automated metal box whisked them onwards to the city in comfort? Did they ever wonder where the intrusive thoughts came from? If so, how long before someone thought to make a complaint to the authorities?

Why you helping Teleoman?

He had come up behind her while she stood staring out across the valley, lost in her thoughts. Something must be working, if he could approach so close without her even realizing. She thought about his question.

“Because no one deserves to be kept in a cage. That’s not right.”

But Teleoman hurts people, if not in cage. With this.

He tapped the side of his head through the mesh hood.

“I know. But you’re getting a little better each day.” She gave him the brown paper bag she had brought. Fried chicken with deli coleslaw and pork-strippers. All cold of course and rescued from a dumpster, but mostly untouched. No pop, but there was a trickle of brownish water in a rainwater run-off which Teleoman seemed happy to scoop up with those big, flat hands of his.

Why you do this?

“Because you’d starve otherwise.”

No. All this. Why YOU live like this?

She was about to point out that he was the one holed up beneath a freeway, hiding away from human contact. He was the misfit, not her. (It occurred to her to wonder what it was like when he dreamed. What images of fractured reality and broken dream-logic would pour from his mind then? It gave her the shivers.) But Teleoman was right. She was only a rung or two further up the ladder: her home a rusty shipping container that broiled her in the summer heat and turned into an icebox in winter. And her job? She might like to think of it as ‘credit-free business transacting’ but stealing was all it was really. Whatever that made her, she was just an insignificant part of the complex food-chain that was the all-consuming Strip.

She sighed. “Because. Because nobody expects better of me.”

Teleoman think you can do better.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Life coaching lessons from a Thal? Is that what things had come to?

Sabbi timed her visits for soon after dawn when the Strip slumbered, along with most of its workers. She liked the bite of the early morning air, before the sun burned off its chill. Everything seemed a little quieter, as though the world had been made anew, ready to be ruined again by the day.

She needed a new plan. She needed to move Teleoman somewhere safer. Starting tomorrow, she promised herself, she’d think of something.

Sabbi was a little way off when she spotted a little wisp of smoke curling up into the still morning air from the underpass. She froze. She had a bad feeling about this. For a moment, she just stood watching, listening. There ought to be something, some faint insect-like buzz in her mind. Lately, she felt she’d become more sensitized and could hear his shielded mind from much further away.

Now… Nothing.

Sabbi began to run down the shoulder of the freeway. She’d bought coffee and fried dough-pieces sprinkled with sugar, grease spots already blossoming on the brown paper bag. Bought with the last of her credit–actually bought. Now dribbles of hot coffee squirted from the hole in the lid as she scrabbled and half slid down the slope to the underpass.

Teleoman sat by the remains of a little smoldering camp-fire, bones and animal skin from some kind of meal scattered in the ashes.

“What the hell!”

He stood as she approached and watched her kick over the ashes, stamping down hard until the tendrils of smoke stopped.

“Didn’t I tell you not to do anything to attract attention?”

As if to emphasis her point, a couple of cars thrummed by overhead, reminding her just how close they were to others. Hiding him here had been a stupid idea. She pictured a little convey of unmarked vehicles pulling off onto the dirt strip, the armed enforcers jogging down into the underpass, restraint sticks drawn. Sabbi felt sick.

Teleoman grinned at her and it took her a moment or two to realize why.

He wasn’t wearing his mesh hood. And she wasn’t crumbling under his mental assault.

There was something; a kind of white noise, but nothing worse than the sound of water tumbling in a stream. She refused to let her anger simply ebb away, though. “I told you to stay hidden! It’s not safe for you to go wandering around! What were you thinking, lighting a fire? What if someone had seen?”

Teleoman shrugged, the smile still on his face. Hungry. Catch rabbit. Cooked rabbit taste good!

“Where’s your hood?”

Teleoman practice. Has good teacher! Getting better, yes?

“Yes.” Sabbi approached until she stood right in front of Teleoman. There was a detectable wash of emotion but the waters were calm, nothing like the raging storm-waves from before. When he spoke, she heard his voice clearly but that was all. Whatever other thoughts were buzzing through his brain, he was managing to keep them down. It was the difference between yelling to be heard above the background roar of traffic, and a quiet conversation by the side of a lake.

“You still shouldn’t be out here. Promise me you’ll stay hidden and not go wandering off.”

He nodded slowly.

“I’m going to figure out a plan. Take you somewhere where you’ll be safe. And free.” It wasn’t quite a lie, but almost. But she would figure something out.

Teleoman stooped and retrieved what he had been working on. Like?

She stared at the little wire-frame model of a jack-rabbit sitting on its haunches, lively and alert. The wire looked as though it had been scavenged from a trolley basket, part gleaming chrome, part rust.

“It’s really good. You’ve got a real talent,” she told him. Stashed in the darkness of his hideaway was a growing collection of his wireframe art: a meadow poppy, a gym shoe, an old-style Cadillac, even a tiny replica of one of the distant comms towers complete with dishes and antenna. “But you shouldn’t just copy what you see around you. Invent things. Make things that only you can see inside your head.”

Teleoman looked puzzled. Not real things? Why?

“Because when you make them, they become real.”

What things?

“I don’t know. Dragons, or dinosaurs or unicorns! Things that don’t exist but everyone kind of wants them to. We all dream about lots of stuff–but you have to make the dream real if it’s going to count.”

Teleoman stepped closer. He laid a hand on Sabbi’s bare arm. She almost expected his touch to act as some kind of short circuit, for her mind to fill with unstoppable images, a tidal wave of thoughts that would drown her until she moved out of reach.

Instead, she felt only the soft warmth of his hand on her arm. You have dreams?

She chose not to answer him out loud. Maybe once, she thought. Not anymore.

She stood up, breaking contact. “You need to promise to stay hidden, no matter what, okay? It won’t be for long. Don’t go wandering around when I’m not here. Promise?”

Promise.

The Strip seemed peculiarly alive tonight. The distant north-end lights danced and blurred in warm air rising up from the asphalt despite the sun setting hours before. It transformed the boulevard into a writhing snake of lights as though at any moment a wave might propagate back towards Sabbi and twist the ground beneath her boots.

Tonight she must earn, or too many debts would fall due. She was hungry, too. Hadn’t eaten all day. And she’d need something to take to Teleoman in the morning. Plus she owed rent on her quarter-share of shipping container. She needed currency. Stealing wallets was risky at the best of times, but she couldn’t see any other way. With legit credit she could buy what she needed.

Flat-foots were everywhere tonight, more than she remembered seeing in a long while, patrolling in pairs amongst the crowds. Some had their goggles down, running random facial ID checks.

And there was Prosser to worry about. She’d let him down, and Prosser had never been big on forgiveness.

Sabbi mingled with the crowd, trailing a dozen paces behind one or two possible marks. There was an art to it, as there was with most things. Everyone knew to keep a tight hold on wallets and purses. This was the Strip, after all. But then that exquisite little trinket in a shop window caught their eye and excitement quickened their step. Oh! Look at the price tag. What an absolute steal! That was when one’s guard dropped.

Not tonight though. Hidden behind her designer shades Sabbi diffused through the loved-up couples milling in front of brightly lit store windows, and just as subtly they seemed to edge away from her. Could wealth sniff out desperation, even with her disguises? Maybe.

A hand fell on her shoulder. Not the light touch of an acquaintance stepping out from the crowd. This was the hard slap of contact that screamed out, You’re mine!

As she twisted round to face her assailant, she wondered which she’d prefer. Flat-foot or Prosser’s people? Tangling with authority would mean plenty of trouble, maybe jail-time or county deportation. On the other hand, Prosser liked to see people get hurt if they crossed him. Prosser and people like him, though–they were her people. Maybe she could find a way to sweet-talk him round. In the end, you stuck with your own, didn’t you?

She turned and looked up into the face of the cop, his eyes hidden behind the dark goggles already running a facial recognition scan.

“Yes, that’s her,” said the street-hawker, standing just behind. “She’s the one that took my Thal.”

After the sting of a needle in her arm, events became a little blurry. She remembered being bundled into some kind of vehicle. Then a hard, uncomfortable ride breathing diesel fumes from a leaky exhaust. Typical of government to be the only ones not running electric vehicles these days. And then a narrow cell. She had slept in worse places, though.

By the third day, Sabbi knew they had nothing. By then, they would have confronted her with any real evidence, angling for an easy confession and quick judicial processing. Instead, they played a tedious game of cat-and-mouse: interrogations at all hours; some long, some short–all designed to disorient and wear her down.

Sabbi played dumb. Yes, she’d been in trouble before, but was running straight now, doing courier work where she could get it. No, she had no idea of the whereabouts of any Thal. Yes, she’d felt a Thal’s presence on the Strip a week or so back–but hadn’t hundreds of people? Wasn’t that the thing about Thals? They got right inside your head, the dirty bastards.

All Sabbi had to do was brazen it out. The right-to-detain held good for ten days, but not a minute longer. Patience was going to be her friend and get her through this.

She lay on her hard little chunk of foam mattress in the dark, wondering what Teleoman was doing, what he was thinking when she failed to turn up each day. Would he think she had abandoned him after all?

The last thing she’d told him was not to light any fires, not to leave the underpass; to stay out of sight. Without her daily visits bringing food, how long before he starved? Worse, now that summer was here, the trickle of dirty water in the runoff gully might soon be gone. Maybe he’d get desperate and decide to move on somewhere. If he did that, he’d be caught in no time.

As she lay in the darkness of her cell, she imagined she could hear Teleoman’s voice tickling at her thoughts; a low sigh like the whisper of leaves stirred by a breeze. Impossible, of course. The detention centre was close to the coast, a good fifteen or twenty miles from the underpass. Not even the strongest Thal could project more than half a mile. Even so…

Was it possible she had trained herself to listen for the sounds of his thoughts even as Teleoman was training himself to whisper? But the sounds in her head came and went like the sound of distant surf creeping up the sand and retreating. The more she strained to hear it, the more she became convinced it was only the sound of blood pounding in her veins.

There was nothing left to do but wait, and wonder.

The waiting was the hardest part.

The cops didn’t tag her. Once the paperwork was signed, she was kicked out the back entrance into scorching noon heat, blinking at the bright sunlight she hadn’t seen in days. Nobody said a word to her, just processed her from pillar to post until she was nobody’s problem but her own. What had she been expecting? An apology?

With no money for a taxi ride anywhere, it took her hours of walking to get back, first one interstate and then another, only risking cutting across country when it seemed safe and she was certain no one was tracking her by vehicle or drone. She flattered herself, though. The cops had no real interest in her. To them, she was just another bottom-dweller in the Strip ecosystem–and so what if some hawker was pissed at her for stealing his Thal? Without proof, it wasn’t worth wasting any more of their time.

She had to bite down hard every time she thought about Teleoman.

Had he stayed hidden, unquestioningly following her last instructions–quietly dehydrating and starving to death? Ten days was too long a wait. She imagined the coming of each day’s twilight crushing his hopes once again. Or had he blundered off towards the beckoning lights of a coastal community? The no-man’s land beyond the perimeter fences was a dangerous place, full of biker-psychos and tat-gangs and crud-heads and all kinds of crazies who would have no compunction about hunting a Thal for sport. Thal strength and stubbornness might be the stuff of legends but a dozen gang members against one Thal could have only one outcome. Even if Teleoman made it as far as a gated community, the guards would likely as not shoot on sight if they felt threatened.

Sabbi needed to know he was okay. She’d been the one to get him into this.

With her stomach tightly knotted into a ball of anxiety, she skidded down the familiar embankment towards the dusty track leading to the underpass.

The hiding place was deserted. No trace of Teleoman anywhere. Even his little collection of wire artwork was missing. More to the point, she could sense nothing of his thoughts, not even the vague uneasiness she felt when he was consciously shielding them.

Sabbi stumbled out into the scrub beyond the underpass, wanting only to escape the rumble of passing cars on the freeway above. She couldn’t blame Teleoman for leaving. He had no way of knowing what had happened to her or if she ever intended to return. Now he was gone and that would be the end of it. She had her answer.

She sent a rock skimming off into the brush with her boot. Wasn’t this what she had wanted back at the start? To be a free agent?

She wandered further into the scrub, following a faint trail down the incline, the kind made by wild animals, not humans. After a quarter mile, it turned south and followed the edge of a steep-sided canyon. Forty feet below, a thin stream of water oozed its way around small rocks in the river bed. Sabbi stared.

Below her, Teleoman sat on a fallen tree-trunk, legs dangling over the water, head bent in concentration. His hands worked at something, sunlight glinting from what now looked like a twist of wire.

“Teleoman!” She began to scrabble down the narrow path. “For god’s sake! Have you any idea how much you just scared me? ”

Knew you would come.

He didn’t look up from the object he was manipulating. He didn’t even seem surprised to see her. She’d expected more from him: relief, concern–something.

Heard you coming. From far off. Had to finish this first.

She realized there was something else not quite right. She stood watching him for a long minute, trying to figure out what had changed. Suddenly it was obvious.

No background noise, not even a low-level wash of emotions. When he spoke, his thought-words were clear and strong, but it was at conversational level, not shouting. They still carried an edge, a reverberation like the echo of words spoken loudly in a hushed cathedral. But two weeks ago, simply being in his unhooded presence would have all but pummelled her brain to mush.

The transformation was remarkable.

Teleoman go soon. Waited for you, though.

“Go where?”

He shrugged. Anywhere. Somewhere better. He hesitated. Sabbi could come too?

She thought about that. Somewhere new, where no one knew her. A chance to reinvent herself? There was something appealing in the thought…

She shook her head and Teleoman’s face fell. “I have to stay. Without the Strip… I don’t know how else to live.” It was where low-lifes like her belonged, grifting and preying on the rich.

Sabbi better than that.

“No, I’m not. I’m just like all the others. We’re all trapped playing the same game. If I gain, you lose, but tomorrow it may be the other way round. That’s what the Strip does to you. You look out for yourself because nobody else will.”

No. Sabbi help Teleoman. So why Sabbi do that?

She’d asked herself the same question over and over, and still wasn’t sure of the answer. Perhaps with a little more time to think about it…

Here. Teleoman make. He held something out to her. A gift. For you.

Sabbi took the object; a complex shape fashioned out of thin silver wire. A tiny stallion, its wire outline perfectly capturing a natural grace and beauty–as though it might come to life at any moment, and spring from her palm.

Ah, but no. On its forehead was a narrow, silvery spike.

A unicorn.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, wondering at the inadequacy of her words. “There are stall-holders on the Strip who’d sell this kind of thing for a decent sum. Enough to make a living from.”

No. Not for sale. For you.

Sabbi leaned down and kissed Teleoman lightly on the cheek. His eyes widened a little in surprise. A vast wave of joy radiated out from him and a feeling of such optimism that in that instant all things seemed possible. It washed over her like a blast of heat from an oven, the signal so strong and clear that even those in the coastal communities might have felt something.

And just this once, that was fine with her.

Guinea Pig

By Paul Crenshaw

The day my brother died I told him guinea pigs once grew ten feet tall.

“They weighed two thousand pounds,” I said, “and had tusks like elephants, which they used to defend themselves.”

He was looking out the window. I wasn’t sure if he heard me. The IVs in his arms weren’t working. On the table beside the bed was a picture of us with our old guinea pig Thoreau, whom we had stolen from the Institute where my brother was now housed.

This was about the time the coughing began, back when we thought his difficulty breathing was something he’d grow out of. We lived on the edge of the Institute and above us rose the bone-white buildings. For sixty years the Institute had been a home for tuberculosis patients. Scientists grew guinea pigs like Thoreau to inject them with serums and anti-toxins in the hope they might find a cure for the disease. When they finally succeeded and the buildings began to empty of tuberculosis patients, Mr. Wilkins, the last custodian, took care of the guinea pigs. When he died, we knew they’d be all alone.

The morning we went to save them, my brother had to stop often to hit his inhaler. We rested in the shade of the buildings among the old-growth pines. Pine trees were once thought to be an expedient for the cure of TB, and many of them had stood for hundreds of years. The Institute, despite the disease it holds within it, has always been beautiful. Our mother worked there for ten years, since just after my brother was born, but now she sits at home watching soap operas all day where people are suddenly struck down by terrible diseases.

At the top of the hill my brother said his lungs were burning, but he made it to the bunker where the guinea pigs were held. We had a key we’d stolen from our mother, and when we went in we saw them there in cages. There weren’t many left. We opened the cages and carried the guinea pigs—so small and warm in our hands, their hearts beating madly beneath their frail chests—outside, where we let them go.

The last one my brother kept. He named it Thoreau because they shared the same first name, or so I thought at the time. But maybe my brother already knew what was inside him—Henry David did die of TB, after all. We took Thoreau home, stopping often for my brother to hit the inhaler or rest beneath the big trees, me holding Thoreau and wondering what had been done to him in the secret rooms of the Institute where the scientists had, supposedly, saved the world.

We had him for less than a year. My brother would not cage him, and so Thoreau sometimes chewed through the baseboards and got beneath the house. Or he’d dart outside when our mother went on the front porch for a cigarette, and I’d have to catch him because my brother could not pass through the smoke.

The last time Thoreau got away my brother coughed so hard he began to shake. When he took the kerchief away from his mouth, we saw the fine spray of blood. Above us, the bone-white buildings stood like sentinels.

We always thought it was asthma, that he would eventually grow out of it. Turns out he was one of the first to get the new strain. Turns out tuberculosis can linger in small bodies and old buildings much longer than the scientists thought. We didn’t know then that the old diseases could come back. Or maybe my brother did, because he wanted desperately to find Thoreau. We looked under the house and all through the neighborhood and finally across the highway where the dark woods closed in. I could see my brother stopping often to draw in deep breaths and I thought he was dying, but I couldn’t get him to rest.

“We have to find him,” my brother said, voice almost unrecognizable, the handkerchief turned dark red now. In a month he’d be unable to get out of bed. Six months after that the Institute would re-open its doors, and he’d be the first patient admitted. The World Health Organization would send out its warnings, but it was already too late. The guinea pigs would be brought back. More tests run to try to stop the new strain that had sprung up all over the world. Some of the guinea pigs would escape the sterile halls where they were poked and prodded with needles, and before my brother died we could look out the window and see them all over the grounds of the Institute.

“That one looks like Thoreau,” he said once, not long before the end, which reminded me of the day I thought he was dying. His indrawn breaths sounded like sirens, or the first coming of some great cataclysm.

We never caught Thoreau. I saw him the day before my brother died, as I was walking back down to the house across the grounds of the Institute after visiting hours. He had grown as large as a house cat, but he ran when I got near. The next day my brother said Thoreau probably didn’t want to be caged anymore, which was why he ran.

“Did guinea pigs really weigh that much?” he asked. He would die in the night, alone. He looked so small in his bed. He had lost close to 50 pounds. The thin skin of his arms was bruised from all the drawn blood. We could see our house down the hill, and I knew he was imagining a world where Thoreau was as big as a mountain. Too big to be poked and prodded by men wearing sterile masks. Too strong to be brought down by any strain.

The Spirit Cave

By Jamie Lackey

We sit vigil by the fresh grave, waiting for my brother’s ghost for three nights and three days. The days are warm, but still short, and the nights are cold and long. Spots of snow still cling where the shade protects them.

When my brother finally appears, his eyes are empty, and he doesn’t respond to our voices.

“His spirit will heal,” my mother says. “It will just take time.”

Jehim, my intended, squeezes my hand. The rest of my family, living and dead, nod and mutter agreement. My brother has all the time in the world, now that he is a ghost.

My scrapes and bruises from the fight have healed, but the sick, angry feeling in my stomach has only grown with the passing days. I want vengeance. I want to crush the men who killed my brother. I want to hurt them so badly that it takes their ghosts centuries to recover.

“I am going to go to the spirit cave tomorrow,” I announce. Something that I can’t recognize flickers across my brother’s face. I storm away before anyone can object, and I feign sleep when my mother follows me home.

I rise at dawn, hoping to leave quickly and avoid talking about my decision. But my mother is already hovering over the breakfast fire, her hands fluttering like trapped birds. My father’s ghost stands behind her, his arms crossed over his chest. She hands me a bun filled with spiced rabbit, and says, “We love you. Please don’t do this, Narhana.”

I kiss her on the cheek, and I eat the bun as I take the path into the mountains.

The day is fine and clear, the air soft and filled with gentle sounds–birdsong, the breeze through the grass, the slow burble of the river. The rest of our family ghosts line the path that leads to the road. I ignore their frowns, but I walk quickly, not enjoying the intensity of their gaze.

I turn west when I reach the road, and I follow my shadow up into the mountains.

The sun is almost directly overhead when I reach the sacred spring. A ghost, one so old that her edges blur, regards me from the edge of the spring. “What brings you here, child?” she asks, her voice as gentle as the breeze through fresh spring leaves.

“I seek the spirit cave.” My voice is steady as I give the ritual response.

The ghost nods once and steps aside. “Once you are purified, you may walk the path to the cave of spirits. You must leave all of your possessions, though you are permitted to carry a stone to weight your steps.”

I strip and fold my clothing into a careful pile, then I heft a large, rounded stone to keep from floating across the pool. It takes both hands to hold it.

The steps that lead down to the water are cold and smooth beneath my bare feet. The water is glacier-cold, but I refuse to hesitate as I walk forward, one step at a time.

I almost cry out when the water hits my belly. My toes ache, and I can hardly feel the step beneath them. The water reaches my shoulders, then my chin. I take a deep breath and keep my eyes open as I continue forward.

The water stings, and the world swims around me. The cold seeps through my skin, settles into my bones, and I ache with it.

I’m grateful for the stone’s weight as I step down to the bottom, then start to climb up the steps on the other side.

My head breaks the surface, and I take a sobbing breath.

My grandmother’s ghost sits on a rock beside the spring. I am not surprised to see her. It’s only sensible that she is my family’s chosen representative. Their last hope of talking me out of my decision.

I reach the top of the steps, and drop my stone from shaking hands. I shudder from the cold and think longingly of the spring sunshine. But I stop before my grandmother, arms pulled tight to my body, naked and shivering.

“I understand why you want this,” my grandmother says. “But I also understand the cost.” Unshed tears glimmer in her eyes, and guilt twists in my belly. “Have you truly thought about what you will lose?”

“I choose to focus on what I’ll gain,” I say, tucking my freezing hands into my arm pits.

She nods. “You will have power. You will be able to avenge your brother.” Her hands tense into fists, then relax. “You would be able to protect our family.”

“If you understand, then why are you here to stop me?”

“Because I don’t think you’ve considered the costs.”

I shrug. “My spirit will be consumed, and when I die, I will vanish instead of becoming a ghost.” Ghosts are trapped to watch the world change around them, while they are frozen forever. I do not long to become one.

“But think of your life before then. Do you think Jehim will still want to marry you if you are sprit bound? Will he want to have children with you, knowing that you won’t be able to watch your grandchildren together after death? Knowing that eventually, you will vanish forever and he’ll be left alone?”

Jehim is a constant in my life. Like my parents. Or my brother. Our future has always seem set, immutable.

To lose him, too. It is unthinkable.

My grandmother sees my hesitation. “Your brother will recover. He isn’t gone.”

But his future is. There will be no wife for him. No children. Maybe Jehim will leave me. Maybe he won’t. I can’t control his actions. But I can control my own.

“My decision stands.”

My grandmother inclines her head. “Very well.” Her fingertips, feather light and ice cold, brush against my cheek. “Then you will need the key.”

“What key?”

“It is hidden in the pool.”

I am still cold, still shivering. My body still aches. I look back, at the water’s still surface. I don’t see a key. Still, I wade back in, one slow step at a time.

I pause on the third step. I can’t feel my feet at all, and I’ve stopped shivering.

The first ghost said nothing about a key.

Because there is no key. Only death in this pool, and then an eternity as a ghost. With enough time to forgive my grandmother for her lie.

I turn back toward the spirit cave and storm past my grandmother, too angry to look at her. She calls out to me, but I will no longer listen to her words.

The path is steep and rocky and my numb feet are clumsy. I stumble, right myself, stumble again. Blood drips from my elbow, my palm, my knees.

But I keep climbing, focusing on each step as it comes. Warmth gradually spreads through my muscles, but nothing touches the cold anger in my heart.

I am inside the spirit cave before I even notice it. The rocky ground gives way to sand, and I sag to the floor.

A tiger, his stripes night-dark against fur the color of moonlight, walks out of the shadows. His tail lashes back and forth as he approaches.

I am too tired to speak. I simply crawl forward and rest my forehead against his. His fur is warm, and when he flops onto his side, I curl up against him.

He has consumed a thousand thousand spirits, stripping out what they were in life and adding their strength to his own.

I offer him mine, and he takes it. Our spirits combine as his warmth seeps into my chilled body.

His strength is mine now, till my body fails. Till I die and become one more bit of power at his disposal.

He licks my wounds, his tongue dry and raspy and painful, but my wounds heal. I am no longer cold.

I do not know how long I stay curled against him, but eventually I roll to my feet.

I fashion myself clothing, weaving shadows and rocks into a dress that matches the color of his stripes.

I press my forehead to his again, then on impulse kiss his wet nose.

Even with my new power, I can’t destroy my grandmother’s ghost. But I could do her harm that would take lifetimes to recover. I can rip the men who killed my brother into a million tiny pieces with a thought. Instead, I continue up the mountain, past the spirit cave, to the icy peak. The cold can no longer touch me, and I sit and stare at the stars till the sun rises.

It is the first day of my new life.

My grandmother’s ghost appears beside me. “I didn’t want to lose you. Now, when you die, you’ll be gone.”

“No,” I say. “Now, when I die, I’ll become part of something greater than myself. And I think that is better.”

Soon, I will decide what to do to the men who killed my brother. But for now, I take my grandmother’s hand, because I can. And I forgive her, because I can do that, too. “Come on, let’s go home.”

Vigil

By Seth Marlin

“Hi there.” The speaker is a woman, with a sunny voice and a hint of a Southern accent. “This is Judi with Puget Sound Oncology. Would I be speaking with Kimiko Fukada?”

“Great.” A few verification questions follow. “And our records show you as the surviving next-of-kin for one Noriko Fukada?”

My sister is awake. I subvoc my ex-husband Troy, convince him to take our son out to his soccer game. Troy works from home, and so readily agrees. He asks me what’s come up, and I tell him the truth. He doesn’t reply right away. Somewhere in the back of my skull I can feel him composing his reply. Deleting, then recomposing. Do whatever you need to, he says. I hope it goes okay. I expect you two have a lot to talk about.

My sister is awake. This thought repeats itself on my drive into downtown Seattle. My sister is awake. Literally years now gone. Our parents are dead and what will I say? Will she even recognize me? Shock gives way to ragged breathing, to numbness in my cheeks, my hands. Eventually the panic rises up and I have to set the autopilot, let the car drive the rest of the way. I lean back and look out the window as we cross over the Fremont Canal. High-rises crowd in stacks along the water’s edge.

At the hospital, after what must be an hour of filling out release forms and nondisclosure agreements, I find myself in a crowded hospital room with a corner view of Puget Sound. Also present are a doctor, a pair of med students recording, and a hatchet-faced femme in a dark gray suit. Meanwhile in bed is my big sister Nori, twenty-five years old and the same as she ever was. She sits upright in bed, her skin waxen, her cheeks gaunt. Her dark hair is thin and brittle, and the right side of her head is buzzed to reveal a gruesome, bright-pink surgical scar. She watches us with the wary eyes of a shelter animal, regards me with caution but doesn’t appear to recognize me. The doctor introduces both himself and the femme, but neither the students nor myself. I have been asked to avoid speaking. The doctor smiles and asks Nori, “How are you feeling?”

“Where’s Dr. Cospoole?”

He smiles. “Enjoying his retirement, as I understand. Lots of sailing, I’m told.” He wears a sweater vest under his coat and has receding brown hair, with playful eyes and a fatherly grin. “How are you feeling?”

Nori thinks a moment. Rival emotions play out across her face. “I’m… okay, I guess. The nausea’s mostly wearing off.”

“You’ve responded well,” he says. “There’ll be at least two more rounds of treatment, but if the results we’re seeing hold, we could be fast-tracked for FDA approval inside of two years.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Ms. Fukada, what is the last thing that you remember?”

Nori thinks a moment. “My sister’s basketball game.” She would be referring to my sophomore year of high school, junior-varsity. I can remember that day as if I were still there. “I had an aura,” she says. She’s referring to the visual phenomena that came to precede her seizures, after the cancer had spread to her brain. “I had another one. Oh god, I had another one, I’m so sorry.”

“Everything’s fine,” says the doctor. “I promise.” He offers to tell her a story.

He speaks then of her cancer–his language candid, his tone cuttingly frank. The onset of Nori’s symptoms, the path that the illness took, month-by-month, as it tore through her body like fire through the compartments of a ship. He uses phrases like progression of symptoms and pathology tables by age group and suddenly I’m a teenager again, listening to my mother try to explain my sister’s latest round of test results. I still remember those final months, watching my sister sink beneath the waves. Nori meanwhile listens, regards the doctor and the hatchet-faced femme. Several times she glances over at me–she is drawn to something in my features, but cannot yet place me. “Given your unique case,” says the doctor, “and the time-sensitive nature of your condition, the hospital board elected by emergency vote to intervene in your care and retain you for further study.”

“Intervene?” she asks. “I don’t understand. I have a living will. I have a DNR/E.”

“The hospital argued superseding medical interest,” says the hatchet-faced femme, “and was awarded an injunction.” They keep their blonde hair slicked back, wear a shade of indigo lipstick that matches their tie. I suppose I should have expected this, that even now the hospital would work first to secure its own interests. When I was a grieving teenage girl, all I could see was the act of corporate charity, the vague hope that my sister might one day have another chance at life. Now I understand a little better.

“You’ve been unconscious for a time,” says the doctor, “but I do need to stress here that a corner’s been turned. Your prognosis going forward is extremely encouraging.”

“You mean like in a coma?”

“Not a coma,” says the doctor. “In stasis. Do you understand what that means?”

Nori blinks. She regards the backs of her own hands, unlined by age, and frowns. Slowly, I can watch as the picture comes together. “You froze me.”

“Well, strictly speaking, the term frozen is a bit of an oversimplification–”

“What the fuck,” says Nori, “I didn’t give you permission to do that. What the hell kind of doctors are you?”

“The same that saved your life,” says the hatchet-faced femme, “And who now continue to absorb the costs of your ongoing treatment.”

“If I may,” says the doctor. “At the time of your retention, you were already in cardiac arrest. Had we not intervened, you would have died and simply been reduced to another statistic. But we did intervene, and now here we are. I need you to take a moment and appreciate just how historic all this is–what we’ve learned here will completely change the nature of modern cancer research. Medical textbooks will have whole chapters on you; years from now, your name will come up in the same breath as Henrietta Lacks or Maria Navarro. Heroes, saviors of modern science.”

“You mean test subjects used without their consent.”

The hatchet-faced femme smiles. “A terribly cynical interpretation.”

“Returning to the point,” says the doctor. “There are entire wikis now cataloguing diseases we’ve wiped from the earth–polio, smallpox, ebola. HIV. Now this?” His manner softens. “What we’ve achieved here with you will save literally millions of lives. And you are only the beginning. I understand what you must be feeling right now, but please, try to consider the opportunity we have been given here. That you have been given here.” He is very good, I will give him that much. I’m reminded of the old talks given by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, in the early part of the century. The same high-mindedness, the lofty talk of disruption and changing the world. I’m sure he even believes it. I can only imagine the hospital advertising brochures that will arise from this.

What do I say?

My sister glares back at the doctor and his overseer. When she does at last speak, it is very quiet. “How long?” she asks.

“Ms. Fukada, please understand, at the time of your illness, the medical science that we had available was simply not–”

“You said I was out,” she says. “Answer me. For how long?”

The doctor’s smile fades. He looks down at the backs of his hands. “Nineteen years, six months, and twenty-two days.”

Silence. Behind my sister’s eyes, a set of new and awful realizations are clicking into place. “Where are my parents?” she asks. “Where’s my sister?”

“I’m here,” I say. A single crack in the porcelain of my resolve, and my vision goes hot and blurry. I am surprised at how small my voice sounds. I cannot stop myself from smiling. “I’m right here.”

Nori looks at me. Her eyes go wide, and here at last is recognition. Something tenses in her jaw, and I realize then that she is shaking. “All of you get out.”

“This has been a lot to process,” says the doctor. “We can pick this up later.”

“I said get out!” The room quickly empties after that. I attempt to approach Nori’s bedside, but am intercepted by the hatchet-faced femme. “Thank you for coming,” they say. “We will be in touch to discuss custodial paperwork and conditions for discharge.”

Out in the hallway, I take a moment to compose myself. I can still hear Nori sobbing behind the closed door to her room. I subvoc Troy and tell him that I’m finally leaving, and on the way out, I pass both the doctor and the hatchet-faced femme. They appear to be having some quiet but urgent discussion. The doctor sees me and falls silent mid-sentence. The femme watches me go, with raptorine gaze.

By the time I leave the hospital and make it through the afternoon traffic, Noah’s soccer game is nearly over. I find Troy amongst the other parents gathered on the sidelines. Try as we might to encrypt the things that we are feeling, a trained eye will always spot the vulnerabilities. He pulls me into a hug as I walk up, and though there have been no feelings between us for years, I am grateful. “Hey,” he says. “Hey. You’re alright.”

The drive home with Noah is mostly quiet. I focus on the road, attempt idle small talk. His answers are brief and addressed to his cleats. Halfway home he asks me, “Are you all right?”

I glance back at him in the rearview mirror. “You never told me how things were at your dad’s.”

“They were fine,” he says. “You’ve been stressed out all day. Because of Aunt Nori.”

“I see your father has been talking again.”

“It was what the phone call was about,” he says, “I heard you talking on speakerphone.”

“What have we have talked about before with you eavesdropping?”

“You’re not happy,” he says. “I don’t understand. Good news is supposed to make you happy.”

After dinner that night, we lay together on the couch and stream Finding Nemo. We do not discuss my sister, or indeed speak at all. Eventually he falls asleep on my shoulder, and I carry him, as though he were a baby, back to his own bed. For some time, I linger in his doorway in the dark, listening to him breathe. What no one ever told me about parenting was how such small moments could comfort, and yet hurt so much.

Later I pour myself a glass of bourbon, nurse it as I stare out the window across the city. The skyscrapers are spaced out like so many candles, and it makes me think of Nori’s vigil. So many years ago now. I put back the rest of my drink, feel it warming as it settles in my chest. In my work I have attended thousands of funerals, across a multitude of traditions. What should one more be amongst so many? I set down my glass, focus on the constellations of the distant skyline. Soon I realize that I am drunk. So be it. I am allowed to be drunk for once.

The following afternoon I return to the hospital, where I am informed by the desk nurse that Nori has been transferred to another unit. For several moments, I simply stand there at the counter, expectant. When it becomes clear that no further response is forthcoming, I ask and am referred to someone more familiar with her case. What follows is a tense and escalating discussion.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “What exactly does that mean, transferred? What other unit, specifically?”

“I’ve already explained this, ma’am,” says the nurse. “I can only tell you what I see. The rest of the notes on her file are restricted.”

“Restricted, how?” I ask. “The hospital designated me power of attorney. I’m her sister. I have the right to access that information.”

“I’m afraid the law doesn’t work that way in this instance, ma’am.”

“Give me your supervisor.”

“I am the nurse supervisor on duty for this unit.” She is stout and diminutive, with massive black hair lashed back into a bun. She looks perpetually tired, in that way common to nurses and new mothers. “Ma’am, with all due respect, I understand how frustrating this is. Believe me, if I could give you more information, I would. But her file is restricted.

“Meanwhile–” she points to the screen behind her–“these names? The patients listed on my board? They’re the ones I’m paid to concern myself with. Now is there anything else I can do for you?”

I swallow hard. I will not resort to shouting, will not break down crying here in the reception area, though I am certainly angry enough to do both. “That’ll be all,” I tell her. “Thank you.”

“When her status changes,” the nurse supervisor says, “the hospital will notify you. The elevators are around the corner to your left.”

In the days that follow, I pace around my condo in a limbo of dread and angst. Where is my sister, I wonder? Why did they take her from me again? It seems that for most of my adult life, I’ve been a state of suspended mourning. She is not truly dead, I have been told, and so I am forever without closure. So it is again.

I try to keep myself busy with work. I attend two clients’ funerals, one Episcopal and one Jainist. I take on three new commissions to curate clients’ personal archives after their deaths. I receive an invite to speak on a panel at a conference; the subject is said to be population shifts and data-migration over the last half-century. That weekend, Noah goes to his father’s, and I spend as much time at the office as I can. There is always work to do, maintaining the personal records of the dead. For the living there is only anxiety, and dread, and waiting.

It is nearly a week before the hospital finally calls back–not Oncology, this time, but rather Behavioral Health. Nori has had a self-harm incident, I am advised, and she is finally well enough to receive visitors. The call comes in the middle of a work consultation–I end the call quickly and reschedule with my client, to some considerable objection. On the way out, I swing through the old piroshky shop just off of Pike Place Market, then hurry the three blocks to my car with purchase in hand.

I follow the instructions given to me by the information kiosk. Nori is being housed, I am told, in the hospital’s inpatient psychiatric wing. I take the elevators and present my visitor’s badge at the intake desk; I find my sister seated at a table, at the far end of a large common area. She holds a book in her right hand, while the left one is encased in a heavy brace. She looks up from her reading as I enter, holds my gaze as I draw near. I move slowly, as if approaching a wild deer. I realize then that I have never seen a deer outside of photographs. My sister says nothing as I sit down across from her. I point to her wrist, to the cut glued closed above her left eye. “What happened there?”

“Apparently windows have to be shatterproof now.” Her manner is sullen and embarrassed. “Typhoon-resistant, something, I dunno. Stop laughing.”

“Forgive me,” I say. I can only imagine my sister curled up on the floor, clutching her head and hissing with pain, an attempt at a grand final gesture reduced to mere slapstick. I realize of course that I’m being unkind, so I opt instead to try and smooth things over. I pull out the bag containing our piroshkies, unwrap my own and slide hers across the table. Her eyes go wide.

“You didn’t.”

“I did,” I say. “Grilled tofu and cheese. I hope that was alright.”

“They didn’t have the salmon?”

“No more salmon.” She looks at me strangely. She takes a bite of her pastry, wipes crumbs off her lower lip.

“So,” I say.

“So.” She studies me for a long moment, searching my face. After a long moment she finally says, “You don’t look the way I thought you would. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected.”

“We rarely do.”

“The short hair looks good though.”

“Thank you,” I say. “You look…” My words trail off, and she waits for me to finish.

“Like what?”

“Like you never left us.” I find it suddenly difficult to breathe. I focus instead on our surroundings–a pair of old men playing chess; a few other patients watching a movie. Over in the corner, a few of the younger ones are holding some sort of writing workshop. “It’s a nice setup they’ve got here, at least.”

“Yeah,” says Nori. “I was expecting straightjackets and drugged-up stares, but the people here are pretty normal. For the most part.”

“We expect mental anguish to look a certain way.” I think then of my own years spent in and out of therapy. “We find ourselves surprised when it turns out to wear a face that we know. Rational people make irrational decisions every day.”

“I wasn’t being irrational,” she says. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m not crazy.”

“It isn’t a matter of being crazy. But you’ve also been through a traumatic event. It’s not unreasonable to assume that you might experience some difficulty coming to terms.”

“Who said anything about a traumatic event?”

“It is my job,” I tell her, “to understand traumatic events.”

The rest of our visit is spent playing catch-up. I explain what has happened in Nori’s absence, both in our own sphere and in the world at large. This turns out to be not as strange a conversation as one might expect–had it been forty years, rather than twenty, it might be very different, but for the most part, Nori absorbs what I say without visible shock or dismay. Recent elections raise some eyebrows. “And what about you?” she asks. “Married, any kids?”

“Divorced,” I say. “We have a boy, he’s nine now. Noah. He looks a lot like you, I think.” She smiles. I had forgotten what a lovely smile she had.

“And what do you do now?”

“I’m an archivist.” I explain then about the nature of my job, a kind of mortician for the age of social-media. “Everyone leaves behind a life,” I say. “I take that life and shape it into a statement.”

Nori stares. “And, that’s just a thing now, I guess?”

“A very lucrative thing, if one is any good at it.”

“A touch morbid, don’t you think?”

“As a matter of fact, I do not.” The force of my own response surprises me. “Forgive me. I’m simply very proud of what I do, the ways in which I help people. I don’t find it to be morbid at all.”

“Look, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “Though I do have a question, if I might.”

“Okay?”

“I have to ask. About why you did it? I’m sure you understand.”

Silence. She looks around the room, then down at her feet. “It was stupid,” she says. “An impulse decision. I realized what had been done to me and I got scared. I wanted out.”

“If they let you out of here, will you try to do it again?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Good,” I say. “I spent years wishing to have you back. I don’t want to ever lose you again.”

“You haven’t already?”

“That wasn’t my doing,” I say. “I tried to find you, but they’d restricted your file.”

“You know what I mean,” she says. “We might as well be different people now. Strangers.”

“Do you want to be?”

“I don’t think so, no.” She changes the subject. “Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m not stupid,” she says. “I could put it together from the way the staff all try to hide things from me. But when they woke me up, and you were the only one who showed? I need to know about Mom and Dad. I need you to tell me the truth.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I’ve been dreading this conversation for over a week now. “You meant everything to them. To all of us.”

Nori nods. I can see her trying very her hardest. “I need some time, I think. Just for a little bit.”

“I understand.”

“Promise me you’ll visit. I don’t want to be in this alone. I can’t be in this alone.”

“I won’t let you be.” When the silence at last becomes too much I get up from my chair, turn and make my way for the exit. It is only as I reach the elevators that I realize we never embraced, or said that we loved each other.

I keep my promise. I visit twice a week over the next several weeks. Nori is eventually taken off watch, transferred out of Behavioral, back to Oncology and then out to Physical Therapy. During one of our visits I’m sent home with a packet–it includes a discharge checklist, timeframes, specific things that Nori will need. Top-to-bottom physical, updated driver’s license and passport, collection of belongings from storage. There are printouts for a series of job fairs, as well as a listing of crisis lines and emergency shelters, but otherwise no mention of housing or employment.

One night I’m helping Noah out with his math homework. He has always struggled with fractions. He slouches over his tablet, face buried in his hands, and I remind him, “That finger could be busy writing things out.”

“There’s nothing to write,” he says. “My brain is a complete blank.”

“Tabula rasa,” I correct him. “Reduce it down. Two-fifty over four hundred. What’s a number that goes into both?”

“I told you, I don’t know. I’m not like you. I can’t just magically be good with numbers.”

“No one is ever magically good at anything,” I say. I tell him then how, when I was younger, I had wanted to be an architect. At that age I had loved the idea of building things, of seeing how various pieces came together, but my knowledge was largely cribbed together from what I had learned playing building sims. When I finally did try to test into the AP classes I would actually need, they wouldn’t even let me in. “I only got good at math because I had to learn it for things like STEM Club or AP Calculus,” I tell him. “I had to practice, just like you.”

“What about Aunt Nori?”

“That’s different,” I say. It always seemed to me growing up that Nori was better at everything, but in hindsight I think she only ever cared about her cameras, her photography. She was only perceived as gifted because she was given free rein to indulge her singular focus. I used to hate our parents for that, damning me with faint praise while giving Nori the freedom to explore her gifts. Meanwhile, the problem on Noah’s notebook lingers unsolved.

“Did you and Dad ever think about having more kids?”

“What now?” I ask. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Did you?”

“I don’t believe that’s any of your business,” I say. “Noah, where is all this coming from? Please talk to me.”

“Just forget it.” He rolls his eyes, goes back to staring into his tablet. His shoulders slump the way they do when he’s feeling defeated or ignored. My powers of professional empathy feel utterly useless here. “Show your work, how?” he asks of no one.

At the next soccer game, I bring it up with Troy. “You don’t think it’s a little strange?”

“Kids are curious,” he says. Noah’s team dashes past with the ball, and we cheer him on as he runs by. When it quiets down again Troy says, “This is still new for him. Hell, for everyone.”

“They haven’t even been introduced yet,” I say. “It’s a little early to have the ‘cool auntie’ thing happening.”

“He’s lonely. He wants someone to identify with.” He smiles in that way of his, whenever he’s planning to rib me for something. “You know, you’re a pretty tough act to follow, I dunno if you’ve picked up on that.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.” He focuses back on the game. “Have you peeked at his sketches though lately?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “I’ve seen them, and they’re lovely. He’s also working on them in class instead of focusing on the material at hand. Why do you think he’s barely passing half of his courses?”

“The point is that he’s passing,” says Troy. “He needs an outlet to express himself.”

“And I agree. Art classes. Summer workshops. By all means. But he still needs to make some sort of effort in the core subjects.”

“Tell me again that any of this has anything to do with Noah’s math homework.” Troy shoots me a knowing look, and I fume. His cavalier attitude can be infuriating, but he isn’t without his moments of insight. I shout out encouragement as Noah sends a shot spinning off downfield.

“It was an offhand remark,” I say. “Kids don’t parse subtext the way we do, but still.”

“I get it,” he says. “And what about you? How’re you holding up?”

“Just fine, but obviously you have other opinions.”

“I forfeited my right to have an opinion years ago. Look, I get that this is bringing a lot of stuff back up for you. It would be for me. But Noah doesn’t deserve to be caught in the fallout.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.”

“You’re not little Kimi anymore,” he says, “You’re a different person now. Stronger. You’ve got people in your life who care. People who want to help.”

“That’s certainly very kind of you to say.”

“I mean it,” he says. “I’m here. Whatever you need.” He still does this sometimes, still leaves small doors open in our conversations, and I refuse to enter through them. A sense of finality is essential to achieving closure. I turn my attention back to the game.

“I appreciate you listening,” I say.

During visits with my sister, the conversations tend to be relatively anodyne, at least at first. A question about a recent news article, for example, or a discussion about changes in fashion or popular culture. Her inquiries almost always pertain to the larger world, rather than to my own life since her stasis. Occasionally, however, there is some overlap.

On one such occasion, I visit during one of Nori’s bi-weekly physical therapy sessions. They have her on a treadmill, hooked up to monitors, running intervals. Stasis can be hard on the human body, and patients often come out lacking the strength or endurance that they possessed before. According to her doctors, these regimens will help boost her mobility and cardiovascular health. Nori and I talk in between bursts of sprinting, indicated by a chime and a sudden increase in speed from the treadmill. When 60 seconds have elapsed, the pace from the machine slackens again. Nori slows to a walk, still breathing heavily. She gestures to her neck, indicating the pattern tattooed behind my right ear and jawbone. “That your subvoc?”

I smile. “You’re familiar, I take it?”

“Only from what I read on the internet. The Star Trek stuff was always your thing, not mine.” I bristle a bit. I had forgotten how dismissive she could be, but I refuse to let her condescend. I explain the concept: that what started as a way to interact directly with the internet of things, became a way to enable private comms between people. “Legally gray,” I say, “but hard to limit the way people use it. Jailbreaking, they call it.”

Nori looks skeptical. “Doesn’t seem a little bit ‘1984’ to you?”

“On the contrary,” I say, “it’s the only secure communication channel most people have now.” Nori looks unimpressed. The treadmill beeps and speeds back up, and this time I raise my voice as her feet resume pounding out their familiar rhythm. “You know, not all change is bad. Sometimes new tech, new disciplines make our lives better.”

She gestures around us. “Tell me how any of this is better.”

“You’re here now. What about that? Or my subvoc, letting me talk to people without some program snooping in. Advertisers, law-enforcement agencies. What about that?”

“She says, getting her phone literally tattooed into her skin.”

“They’re not even remotely the same thing,” I say. “Christ. You sound exactly like Mom and Dad.”

“Are you lecturing me?” The treadmill beeps, and she slows her pace. “Where the hell do you get off?”

“I am trying to explain to you the way that things work now.”

“I think I get it, thank you.”

“No,” I say, “I don’t think you do. Privacy is a commodity. We live in a very different world now.”

“So enlighten me.”

I glare at her. When I was 22 years old, returning from a post-graduation trip to New Zealand, I found myself detained by customs agents upon my arrival into SeaTac. No doubt they saw the last name Fukada, first name Kimiko, printed on my passport, and saw an excuse to accuse me of traveling under false cover. It was nearly six hours before a law-student friend could get them to acknowledge that I was in fact an American citizen, and not some spy or sleeper-agent of the Japanese military junta. Meanwhile last week, I read that members of a survivalist militia out east were killed by an airstrike, launched upon their compound by an Air Force drone flying high above the deserts of Kansas. I have heard it said that such end-of-the-world types decry tech like the subvoc as the mark of the beast– perhaps they believed that old burner cellphones and ham radios would keep them more secure. “You read the news,” I say. “You can draw your own conclusions.”

The treadmill beeps a final time, and Nori comes to a stop. She shoots me a withering look.

On another occasion, Nori and I are sitting on a bench in the hospital’s visitor atrium. A geodesic roof stretches above our heads, gives shelter to a host of once-native flora: cedar, fern, redwood. Moss covers every trunk, while sprinklers rain down mist that pools into droplets, patters down through the branches around us. I close my eyes and breathe in deeply. Nori asks me out of nowhere, “How did Mom and Dad die?”

I take a moment before responding. I think then of the first time my mother sat me down to tell me about Nori’s cancer. I think of having to explain to Noah, at five years old, why his father and I could no longer live together. “They were quick at least,” I say. “Few years apart. Dad left work with a headache one evening, called Mom up from the bus and halfway into their talk he just started slurring.”

“Stroke?”

“I’m guessing so. Couple of bystanders tried to pull him off the bus, grab him an uber to a hospital, but by the time they got him there, he was already gone.”

“Jesus. And Mom?”

“That was a bit worse,” I say. “How familiar are you with Parkinson’s?”

“Not really.”

“Fair enough.” I explain then about the paranoia, the hallucinations that sometimes accompany the illness. “I didn’t realize at the time just how bad it actually gotten; we weren’t really talking much by that point. Anyway, one day not long after Noah was born, I get a call from the police. You remember the Schindlers next door?”

“Sure.”

“Of course. Well anyway, I get this message from SPD, who tells me that Mr. Schindler came out to find Mom digging up her tulips with her bare hands, talking to herself. He tried to ask if she was alright, and she just swore at him up and down, stumbled out into traffic.”

“Oh god. And that blind curve.”

I nod. “I should have pushed her more to look at assisted-living options, before she really started to go. Maybe she’d still be here if I had.”

“You can’t think like that,” she says. For a long time then we sit in silence.

“You seem to be taking things more in stride,” I say.

“Just trying to come to terms, as you put it. Though I do have another question, if that’s okay?”

“Go ahead.”

“When I was dying,” she says. “When they took me away, what did they do for me? The hospital I mean.”

Silence. I know what she’s hinting at, but I wish that I didn’t. “You mean a funeral.”

“I guess.”

I close my eyes. “Of a sort,” I say. “A vigil, they called it.” I remember how hasty and thrown-together the entire affair had felt, how the hospital had imposed strict limits on how many could be even invited. As a result, I only saw a few of Nori’s friends from grad school, along with several family acquaintances and colleagues of my parents. I recall the smell of disinfectant and incense that had hung over everything, the hard clonewood pews of the hospital prayer-space. I remember my mother sitting stone-faced on my left, my father on my right. I remember how lost and vaguely guilty he had looked, how he spent most of the time trying to meet my mother’s gaze and being ignored. Up at the front, a woman with short gray hair, clad in full vestments – a minister of some kind, intoning words of solace. On the table beside her sat a framed photograph of my sister, lit by candles. Not even a body to display, I remember thinking. I tried to imagine the girl I grew up with lying in some hospital storage unit somewhere, wrapped in plastic and pumped full of refrigerant. I would have nightmares around that idea for months–the thought of the lid closing above me, the transfusion freezing in my veins, the plastic film sealing off my mouth, my lungs. No longer even a person at that point, but an object. A unit of preserved tissue.

“Kimi?”

“Just give me a moment please.” To this day, I hardly remember any of what was said by those who took the podium. What I do remember is how at the end, instead of Amen, the minister had proclaimed Until we meet once more. It felt like a cruel thing to say, a promise that no one had any reason to expect would be kept. After what felt like an unbearable silence, people at last began to get up quietly and leave. I watched them go, heard their murmurs and sniffles. I remember saying to them No, remember saying You can’t leave, it isn’t over. I remember my father’s hand on my shoulder, remember him saying Kimi please. I remember shouting that he was letting them take her away, that they didn’t have the right, that it wasn’t fair. My mother finally started to cry, and my father whispered to me Kimi, not now, you’re making a scene. I hated him then for not crying the way we all were. I told him as much, to his face.

“Hey.” Nori places a hand on my shoulder. “Listen, it’s okay, I shouldn’t have asked. Just forget I said anything, I’m sorry.”

“I’m the one who’s sorry.” I start to cry, unable to stop myself.

“It’s okay,” she says again. “I’m here and we’re okay.” She pulls me into her arms, and for one very brief moment I’m back to being the younger sister again. The trees and ferns around us say nothing, and for a time we mourn what is lost, in silence, together.

On the day of her discharge, Nori calls me from one of the hospital courtesy phones. I can grab my own gear, she says. Just meet me with the car downstairs. We go to pick her up, and on the ride in, Noah can barely contain himself. He bounces in his seat, watches every passing pedestrian. “I don’t even know what she looks like,” he says.

“Like me but younger, I suppose.” It occurs to me that he’s never actually seen a photo of her. “Longer hair. More ink.”

“Ink?”

“Tattoos.” We pull up to the main entrance, and above us looms the hospital, all skywalks and gleaming surfaces. Out front are a throng of patients and their families, waiting for pickup. Some are on foot, some in wheelchairs, many laden with bags or heavy suitcases. Nori however stands off to the side, in jeans and a red hoodie. Her luggage is limited to an old black messenger bag and one plastic hospital footlocker. I smile and wave through the window, pop the car’s rear hatch. Nori tosses her things into the trunk and piles in.

“Get me the hell out of here,” she says.

The drive home is quieter than I expected. Noah stares at her, grinning, from the backseat. Nori meanwhile presses her face to the window, peers up at all the new construction overhead. She takes in the daytime traffic around us, says “The cars are all so ugly now.”

That night, I make us a fancy dinner–garlic-parmesan chicken with twice-baked potatoes. The ingredients nearly double our grocery bill for the week, but I’ve been wanting so badly to do something nice. After our last conversation in the atrium, I finally feel ready to try again with my sister. That she is even here with us tonight, at this table, is a chance most families never receive.

She eats slowly, never seems quite to know what to do with her silverware. Noah plies her with questions, and she tries to answer candidly, but only ends up sounding forced and awkward. At one point he asks, “You ever read any Marvel?”

She looks up. “I’m sorry?”

“Noah here is a big fan of the Hulk,” I say. “Amadeus Cho is one of his heroes.”

“You should check out Captain America,” he says. “The older ones, back when it was still Steve Rogers? He was frozen at one point, I think.”

“Maybe I should sometime.” Nori smiles. “How old are you, Noah?”

“Nine, you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“And if you hadn’t gotten sick,” he asks, “How old would you be?”

“Noah.” I set down my utensils. “Eat your dinner, please.”

“Forty-five.” Nori says this without looking up from her meal. “I’d be forty-five years old.” Noah meanwhile gives me a sideways glance, before going back to his food.

Later, Noah gets ready for bed, and Nori stakes out the futon in my office. I give a knock on the door after she’s gotten changed, find her with a splay of items across the bedding in front of her: a collection of store-bought toiletries, some old clothing, a few books. In an ancient leather case, her beloved Nikon camera, once a birthday gift from our father. She notices me in the doorway, straightens and feigns nonchalance.

“I just wanted to come give you your welcome-home present,” I say.

Her smile is pained. “Listen, I’m fine, I promise. All of this is perfect. Really.”

“Stop.” I produce from behind my back the box containing her gift–she takes it with some hesitation, opens it to find a brand-new computer, black and chrome. She pulls it out slowly and turns it over, runs a thumb along its edges.

“God that’s big for a tablet,” she says. “How do you turn it on?”

“It actually has a laptop mode. Here.” I press and hold one corner, and the holographic display flickers into being. Nori starts. The startup logo spins onscreen, and she looks at me.

“This really wasn’t necessary.”

“I just wanted you to have something to work from,” I say. “You deserve it.”

“Well thank you.” I watch as she begins to experiment with the new interface. “Hey, how do you connect to the internet on this?”

“Everything’s public now,” I say. “I pre-loaded with everything you’ll need. VPN, professional-grade imaging software. I even managed to pull most of your old portfolio.”

“How?”

“Call it inheritance,” I say. I explain then that after our mother died, executorship passed down to me. “For the last few years I’ve been the legal custodian for all our family data. Now that you’re back, I don’t have to be.”

“This is amazing.” Her words are genuine, but her gaze is clouded. I worry that I’ve somehow offended her.

“You don’t like it,” I say.

“That’s not it at all.” She seems so sad. “Listen, I’ve just had a long day. I’m probably going to brush my teeth and get ready for bed. Thank you though.”

That night, I have trouble sleeping as usual. I get up for a glass of water, come out to find Nori curled up in the reading nook by the window. She glances back at me, framed in silhouette by the lights of the city. A wave of déjà vu–for years after they took her, I used to dream of waking to find her in my bedroom, watching me from the shadows. Perhaps I’m still dreaming now. I ask her, “Am I intruding?”

She shrugs, turns her attention back to the skyline.

“I’ll put on tea. Chamomile, if that’s alright.” I pad barefoot into the kitchen, fill the pot with water and subvoc the burner on. I don’t even bother with the lights anymore. After so many years, I’ve grown accustomed to navigating in the darkness.

When I come back, Nori hasn’t moved at all. She takes her mug, and I crawl into the nook beside her. I take a sip. “When I was first looking at places,” I say, “after Troy and I separated, this spot right here was what sold me. I imagined Noah and I would curl up here and read books together. Now he’s too grown up for all that.”

“You’re his mom.” She looks out across the city, all neomodern high-rises and prefab housing blocks. Construction cranes and giant industrial printers dot the horizon. “There’s so much more of it now.”

“I think there was more of it back then than you remember.” I remember reading somewhere that in the last thirty years, some eighty percent of the American population had relocated to either the west or the upper east coast. Some did so seeking work; others, to escape droughts and deadly heat waves. Hardly anyone lives on the Gulf now, and all across the world countless other places are simply no longer habitable. So many places reduced to either silence or static. “Populations don’t just grow or shrink, they also migrate.”

“It doesn’t even look like Seattle,” she says. “Makes me think of like LA, or I dunno, Tokyo.”

“Mm.” I’ve been to Los Angeles; neither of us has ever been to Tokyo. For some moments, we drink our tea in silence. At last I say, “You’ve barely said a word since we came home. Talk to me.”

“What’s to talk about?” she says. “Everyone just carries on like nothing is any different. Like, to the point that it freaks me out.”

“Derealization, they call that.” In truth, I’ve been experiencing something similar–even now, I see her and find myself looking for the seams that will reveal her as some feat of visual-effects trickery. A flaw in the way that light is rendered, some facial expression that seems too flat. I keep expecting her to out herself as an illusion, and when she doesn’t some part of my mind panics, tries to reconcile what shouldn’t be. “The doctor says it’s just a side-effect. It’ll get easier the longer you’re out.”

“Meaning it’ll just start to feel normal. None of this is normal.”

I take the rest of the week off to help Nori with getting reintegrated. The first few days are a blur of appointments: the Social Security office, the bank, the state Department of Licensing. At each location, the staff look at the date of birth on file, then at the young woman standing before them. No one can find her in any systems, because for two decades her data footprint has been completely nonexistent. Tasks like ordering new ID, or opening up a checking account, require at least a supervisor and a retinal scan. There are procedures in place for a case like Nori’s, though no one has ever actually had to look them up.

Credit lines. Insurance history. Debt. Nearly all evidence that my sister once existed has rolled off. All except the student loans. All except the threat of the hospital bill.

There are other hurdles as well. To drive now requires not only a field test, but a written exam–Nori doesn’t even make it past the written. “I don’t ever remember it being that complicated,” she says later.

“Thankfully there’s actual train service now.” Quite frankly, if asked to take the same exam myself, I’m no longer certain that I would pass it. Suffice to say that I’m thankful for the auto-pilot feature on my Hyundai. “We’ll study for next time, but for now you should be able to manage without.”

When not busy with administrative errands, we spend our time shopping for things Nori still needs, chief among them an updated wardrobe. We find ourselves at the old Macy’s on 3rd and Pine one afternoon. She busies herself in one of the fitting rooms, while I wait with our cart. She emerges after some time, tosses her pile of garments down on the bench. “No.”

“No?” I watch as she begins stuffing items back onto hangars. “You took at least ten different items in there. No to which ones?”

“All of it,” she says. “I get out and everyone dresses like a freak.”

“What? I don’t.”

“Yeah, but you’re…” She gestures, and I can hear the implication in her tone: old. I look down at my own ensemble: black Armani blazer, white V-neck, blue jeans with vintage Chuck Taylors. I specifically chose the look to be low-key and casual.

“I’m thirty-four.”

“Exactly. I should have expected this.”

“It’s the fashion now.”

“It’s hideous.” She holds up a pair of burgundy trousers, the material strangely iridescent. “These are supposed to be slacks.”

“The style is a bit young, I’ll admit.”

“Maybe we can just hit up a thrift store later,” she says. “They still have those, right?”

“Good luck finding anything more to your liking,” I say. “You can’t just wear the same five band tee-shirts from twenty years ago.”

“Watch me.” She piles the collection atop the counter and walks off; I rifle through for the items that I think most closely fit with her aesthetic, then toss them back into the cart.

“We still have to pay,” I call out after her.

Later, on the way back to the car, we swing by an electronics store and pick her up an inexpensive phone. We make our way downhill to where we parked, and as we walk she busies herself with the new features. “You’ll be able to take phone calls and access the internet,” I tell her, “but everything’s monitored now, so try not to say or post anything that you wouldn’t want seen.”

Nori rolls her eyes. “Wouldn’t want to risk getting in trouble with Big Brother.”

“Try your employer. Try your health insurer. Try a future lender.” I unlock the car and we climb in. “We really ought to think about getting you a subvoc.”

Nori looks at the markings on my neck, as if they were some sort of infection. “Absolutely not,” she says.

One afternoon a few days later, while Nori is busy with job applications, I come upon Noah curled up in the reading nook. He has his tablet with him, but instead of schoolwork he has his sketchpad open. He hunches over the paper-white screen, carefully drawing out a line. “What are you working on?” I ask.

“The comic.” He flips the stylus over, erases his line and then redraws it. I slide into the nook beside him. Noah has been working on his comic for months now–he speaks little of it, but it consumes nearly all of his free time, at the expense of both homework and chores. He begs me to take him to the library on our days off, spends hours perusing video tutorials, old graphic novels. Last month, when the book fair came through school, he came home with a pair of how-to drawing guides for kids. He knows the names of every illustrator from his childhood picture books. I peer in over his shoulder.

He does have a remarkable gift, I will admit. His lines are uneven, his shading too busy, his hand still unsure in the way of youth, but the books and hours of how-tos have been paying off. No talking heads inside of hand-drawn boxes here; Noah’s panels flow and overlap and dominate the page. I’m reminded of an old Calvin and Hobbes print my father used to keep in his office. I remember asking him once about it once when I was eleven, and he gave me some reply about the creativity and curiosity of children. On Noah’s current page, a boy in goggles and superhero gear encounters a sealed casket, wipes frost from its glass porthole. Sleeping inside lies a young woman. I ask him, “What’s the ‘A’ on his chest?”

He replies without looking up. “The Archivist.”

Later after dinner, Nori and Noah play videogames in the living room. They race over splitscreen, pilot futuristic hovercraft at speeds that threaten to leave me motion-sick. I linger on the balcony with my fingers to my neck, messaging with Troy. He informs me that he’s been thinking about Noah’s soccer league again. I thought maybe once the season was over, I might ask him and see if he wants to stick with it, or try something else.

Why? I ask. He’s doing really well.

He doesn’t enjoy it, he says. It’s something he does because I want him to, not because he wants to.

You’ve never been one to pressure him.

No, but kids pick up certain messages. A pause. From inside Noah shouts, “Who’re you talking to?”

“Your dad. Grown-up stuff.”

“Hey, Dad!” He speaks without taking his eyes off the screen. His hands are a blur on the controller, and Nori curses as she tries to match his dexterity. I go back to my conversation. Noah says hey.

Hey, kiddo. I can feel the smile in his words, in a way that text never connote. He’s been asking for a longboard for his birthday. Things are almost as big as he is.

He made some mention, I say. Tell me we’re not just encouraging him to just abandon a thing, whenever it gets hard.

It isn’t hard for him, says Troy. He just doesn’t care. If you told him right now that his practice was cancelled tomorrow, he’d go right back to his room with his sketchpad and his handheld. It’s okay for him to have different interests.

You guys bond over sports.

I bond over sports, he says. I don’t want to be that dad, pushing his interests onto his kid. You remember my old man–I did JROTC all through school just to make him happy. All it did was make me hate him.

So what are you proposing?

I dunno–maybe we try asking him. From the living room, Noah shouts and pumps his fist in the air. Nori shoves him playfully, and Noah shoves back. They have a real connection, one I admittedly envy. Who knows? Maybe we take him out to the skate park over by my place.

I’m already imagining the doctor’s bills, I say. I’m going to head back in for now. We can talk about this more soon.

Sounds good. See you. I go back inside, join Nori and Noah on the couch. They’re busy selecting their vehicles prior to the next race; I tousle Noah’s hair and kiss the top of his head. “Your dad says hey kiddo.”

That weekend, Noah goes to his father’s house. A week passes, during which time Nori searches for jobs and housing. The results are less than encouraging–housing in Seattle was already expensive, and the years have only seen the problem worsen. Now, more tenants vie for fewer openings. We discuss this one morning, while I check my emails and Nori looks at ads for roommates. “Too creepy,” she says of one. “Too old.”

“What about cohousing?” I ask. “I saw some nice listings over in West Seattle.”

“Ew.” She swipes continually left, as if dismissing a procession of suitors. “Let me pay half of my weekly income to rent a fancy bunk bed. In shifts.”

“Well, considering that right now your income consists entirely of my income, I’d say we’re thinking rather far ahead for all that.” She shoots me a dirty look over the top of her computer, goes back to swiping. From behind, her screen depicts a shimmering illusion of the lower half of her face. “Urban cricket farmer,” she says. “Rents from her parents. Ugh, hopelessly basic.”

“You are entirely too judgmental,” I say. “The fact is, whatever you find in this market is going to be small, it’s going to have shared services, and yes, you’re probably going to have to lower your expectations surrounding roommates.”

She looks around us. “You managed just fine.”

“The difference here is that I can afford it. Who knows though? Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

She doesn’t hear me. She appears to have paused on a candidate, cocks an appraising eyebrow. “Cute,” she says. “Seems normal enough.” Swipes right.

The job market turns out to be even bleaker. I assist Nori with rides to job fairs, call in a few connections for interviews–the Seattle Times, the PI, the Stranger. When those fall flat, we turn to design firms, marketing firms, PR, anywhere that might require a full-time photographer or editor. Perhaps it’s simply a glut of qualified applicants; perhaps the economy has simply changed. Over the week that follows, I watch as leads dry up and Nori’s morale falters.

One afternoon, we’re riding home from yet another interview. Nori stews, looking uncomfortable in one of my borrowed blazers. Out of nowhere she undoes her seatbelt, pulls off the blazer, crumples it up and throws it into the back seat. For several moments, the cabin chimes with the sound of the seatbelt alarm.

I ask, “Were you going to get that?”

She sighs and does as asked. “Such bullshit,” she says. “The entire thing is bullshit.”

“It was one interview.”

“Out of how many?” She looks out the window. “Maybe the articles were right, maybe I need to be looking overseas. China somewhere, or Dubai.”

“You really don’t want the kinds of jobs you can get in China or Dubai. Did they at least offer you any kind of feedback?”

“They didn’t have to. Right out the gate, one guy on the panel said he thought my portfolio work was ‘dated.’ I won contests for those shots.”

“Business types don’t always appreciate creative photography,” I say. “Just give it time. You’ve got degrees, you’ve got work published, you’ve got internships.”

“They wanted something more recent,” she says. She strains to get a better look as we pass Green Lake on our right. Here a break in the endless high-rises, a place where rows of lakefront houses still crowd against the water’s edge. Residential neighborhoods have increasingly become an affectation of the rich. “Any idea whatever happened to the old house?”

“I sold it after Mom died.” I brace, expecting her to be angry, but she just looks at her feet. Perhaps she expected this. “Would you like to go see it?”

Her reflection in the window frowns. “Can we?”

We lean on the hood of the car, parked just up the street from our old childhood home. The day is hot and bright and perfectly quiet, like a thousand summer afternoons from my youth. I have a memory of being Noah’s age, straddling my bicycle and staring down a world of possibilities. Nori says, “I hate what they’ve done with the color.”

I frown. “The pink is an interesting choice.”

“They cut down my tree.”

“Old oaks like that are hard to keep healthy.” It isn’t just her tree–all up and down the block now, yards are being planted with acacia, jacaranda, eucalyptus. Still other homeowners favor hybrid clones found nowhere in nature, engineered for drought and insect resistance. Xeriscaping is increasingly common, though a few holdouts still maintain green lawns, expensively irrigated. That kind of extravagance with water seems alien to me now.

“What did you get for the house?” she asks.

I shake my head. “The number would just make you angry.”

“So? Tell me.”

“Enough for the condo, and for Noah’s college fund besides.” The screen door to the house pushes open, and the current resident, a woman in her thirties, emerges with a tablet in hand, wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses. She takes up a spot on the porch swing they’ve installed, settles in and begins to thumb through invisible pages. She looks like the kind of person for whom work has only ever existed as an abstraction. She reminds me of the trees and the flowers here now–a transplant, beautiful and out-of-place. Nori looks on with an expression like longing.

“You didn’t have to sell it,” she says. “I wouldn’t have sold it.”

“You weren’t around to ask.” The house had actually been a sore point between Troy and I. At the time, Noah had just been born, and Troy thought it would be the perfect place to begin our family. He had never owned a house himself, couldn’t understand my eagerness to be rid of it. I couldn’t tell him how I dreaded the thought of living with so many old ghosts within those walls–perhaps I feared I might long to join them. Troy eventually gave up on the matter, but I know some part of him resented me for it. In hindsight, I think that may have marked the beginning of our end. Meanwhile a police gunship passes thumping overhead; its shadow crosses over yards and rooftops and then is gone again. The woman on our porch looks up, notices the gunship receding, then notices us.

“We should probably go,” I say.

The visit to the house affects Nori more than she is willing to acknowledge. I should have anticipated that it might be hard for her. Part of me longs to say something in my own defense, but what? I sold off our childhood home, because I didn’t want to deal with the grief that it encompassed.

That night over dinner, she asks me, somewhat unexpectedly, about my work. I’ll admit that I’m rather taken aback, but at the same time I’m touched by her sudden interest. I try to answer her questions to the best of my abilities.

“It’s not just social media,” I try to explain at one point. “That’s active data footprint. What I’m talking about is passive footprint, the data you generate just by existing. It’s location check-ins, purchase histories, photos you’re tagged in with other people. It’s about networks you accessed, places you lived, people you connected with. It’s like… tree-rings or fossil tracks; it reflects the shape and trajectory of one’s lived experience.”

She spoons up a bite of polenta. “So then, you get rid of people’s dirty laundry too? Scrub their search histories?”

“I am empowered in a limited way to manage the privacy of my client’s digital estates, per their final wishes.”

Nori seems unconvinced. “So, do Mom and Dad have an archive then?”

I take a sip of water. “Sorry, no. Not currently.”

“Why not?”

I smile. I am uncomfortable with this entire line of questioning. “I’ve worked at the idea some, over the years, but I’ve just never really completed anything.”

“So what would it take to complete?”

“Time,” I say. I’m not sure if I mean in labor-hours or grief expended. “You know, if you wanted to, we could always go out to my place of employment sometime. Visit their urns.”

“I don’t know that I’m ready for that,” she says.

The change in Nori’s mood deepens. Over the following days, she becomes quieter, helps out more with the housework. She responds to questions plainly, without any of her usual snark or pushback. I suppose that I should consider this an improvement, but it feels like a lie to me, a way for my sister to put up walls between herself and the world. I find myself missing her cynical affect. I find it a shame, because I do enjoy her as a person, whatever our differences in age or maturity. I want to know her better, and it saddens me to realize that I don’t.

I decide to take that Friday for just the two of us. I wake Nori early; we head into town for bagels, then cross the bridge over into West Seattle. We order coffees down at Alki Quay, take a stroll down along the waterfront.

The weather that morning is bright and breezy, the waters choppy. I’m told that there used to be a beach where we now stand, though the rising waves have long since claimed it. Now those same waves crash against the pier, while massive hotels block out the sun overhead. I’m reminded of the old paintings by the Spanish Surrealists, black shadows falling across hard bright earth. I mention it to Nori. “Refresh me on the word for that?”

“Chiaroscuro.” She gives her answer automatically, without looking up. The breeze tugs at her ponytail, her windbreaker, and I’m reminded of the weekend outings we used to take as a family. She is so much more beautiful than I remembered. She notices me staring at her, asks me “What?”

“Nothing.” The wind stings at my eyes, and I smile. “We should find somewhere to eat. Are you hungry?”

We take lunch outdoors at a nearby bistro, then back over the bridge into downtown. We wander Pike Place, the New Waterfront, the Amazon Gardens. Nori inquires about the Space Needle, but I say, “The view isn’t what it used to be. All the new development. I took Mom a few years back, you’d just be disappointed.”

“I guess.”

Later, we visit the Seattle Art Museum. The feature that month is an exhibition titled “Here and Now: Pacific Northwest Art in the 21st Century.” It presents itself as a kind of regional retrospective, spanning from turn-of-the-century Instagram photography, to the mixed-media and sculpture installations currently in vogue. All the artists are local to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, the Yukon Indigenous Administrative Region, and Alaska.

We wander with no particular objective, taking in the featured works. One room is devoted entirely to repurposed Civil-War era relics. Railgun emplacements, troop transports, all graffiti’d and reworked into new shapes by a blacksmith. At the center of the hall, posed upright as if climbing skyward, towers the gutted hulk of an old fighter jet. It is garlanded with cedar boughs, painted to resemble an osprey in the Coastal Salish style. All this, Nori informs me from the placard, is the work of a First Nations artist from Aberdeen, and is titled Reclamation. “This one here’s No. 9, apparently.”

“Mm,” I say. “Swords to ploughshares, I suppose.”

We head deeper into the museum, eventually going our separate ways. I end up drawn to a collection of sculptures, built from the 3D-printed bones of extinct animals. Each evokes a classical work in grotesque negative: The Creation of Adam, Judith and Holofernes, Saturn Devouring His Son. I find myself drawn to the Goya homage in particular, where the human victim is held aloft, half-eaten, by a monstrous assemblage of every great beast our species has ever slaughtered. Polar bear, giant ground sloth, mountain gorilla. The terror-stricken face of the original has been replaced by the gaping jaws of what the placard states is a Siberian tiger, and I find this fitting somehow. The sins of our past consuming our present, and thus our future.

From across the hall, I suddenly can hear Nori exclaiming, far too loudly, “What the fuck. What the fuck.” I look up at the source of the commotion. All around, other patrons are clearly perturbed. I cross the room quickly, seize Nori by the arm before she can embarrass us further.

“May I help you?” I hiss.

“Get off me.” She pulls away, goes back to the feature that has her so riled up: a black-and-white photography series, taking up an entire wall. The featured artist on the placard is a middle-aged woman, with impeccable cheekbones and upswept red hair going gray. Her work tends toward atmospheric shots, stark and heavily-filtered. I don’t recognize her name, though Nori certainly does. “That’s Bly Maddox,” she tells me. She explains then that they were in art school together. “We actually dated for a while. Before I got sick.”

“Oh, how lovely.” I turn back to the display, avoiding the gaze of the curator wandering in our direction. “What a small world.”

“Like hell.” She goes and points to the central work, a panorama depicting carbon-capture towers, anchored off the Olympic coast during a storm. “This was my piece. My fucking piece. I spent months on that shot, I can’t fucking believe her! Where the hell did she even find this?”

“You are making a scene,” I say. I understand that she has every right to be angry, but the attention we’re drawing has my anxiety in overdrive. Off to our right, the curator is approaching us with a concerned expression. Other patrons are staring at us, and at least one person has pulled out a cellphone. “There are better ways to seek redress for this sort of thing. Perhaps we can talk about them more quietly, maybe on the way home?”

“I’m sorry folks, is something the matter?”

I glance over at the curator. She seems eager to avoid a confrontation, to have this quietly brushed aside. “We were just leaving,” I say. “Nori?”

“Whatever.” She looks back at the Maddox exhibit again before we go. Shakes her head. Mouths the word bitch under her breath.

Nori fumes the whole way back to the car, and on the way home. I can feel her shaking next to me. Only as we park in my driveway does she finally speak up. “Listen, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “Perhaps we should file some sort of complaint with the museum. Maybe get an attorney?”

“What would be the point?” she asks. “I’m nobody. She’s somebody now. My word against hers. Like with everything else.”

“Not just your word,” I remind her. “We still have your portfolios. They’re on your computer. Maybe there’s still something there. Some kind of proof.”

“And do what then, sue her? Go through all of that all over again? Look, it’s over and she won. I don’t have the energy to fight about it.” Outside, great thunderclouds are building overhead. “Everyone’s moved on. Everyone has families, careers. You. Bly.”

“It isn’t that simple,” I say.

“You guys have at least done something. You’ve at least got something to show.”

“I think you’re forgetting all that you have to be grateful for here.”

“Like what?” she says. “Some new scars? Permanent nerve damage? My pictures are hanging in some art gallery under someone else’s name. What the hell do I have to be grateful for?”

I say nothing. On the windshield, droplets of rain begin to appear.

“Look, I’m sorry. Just forget it.” She goes for her door handle, then pauses. “What else has changed?”

That night, it thunderstorms, an unusual phenomenon for July, and the news covers it as a once-in-a-decade occurrence. The rain drums on the window during dinner, where we eat in silence. Nori disappears into the study afterward, closes the door behind her. I set to loading the dishwasher and tidying up.

After perhaps an hour, her door bursts open as I’m pouring myself a drink. She brushes past me in tears, snatches her jacket and bag off the hook. Goes for the door, then stops. “I’m going out.” She manages to keep her voice from shaking. “I need you to reload my card for me. Please.”

I watch her. The sound of the rain outside is like steel bearings on hardwood. I set aside the bottle of bourbon, open up my tablet sitting on the counter. “Of course,” I say. “You have my number? You remember how to get to the train stop?”

“I’ll map it. Thank you.” The sound of the rain gets louder as she opens the door, then goes quiet again. I watch her walk off into the night, head down and hood up. I take a sip of my drink and take my tablet into the living room.

The door to her room is open, the screenlight harsh against the lamplit walls. I can’t help but peer inside. There’s something intimate about a space only recently deserted–a sense of trespass, of absence. Like a sleeping face after the life has vacated it, like the data-wakes my clients leave in their passing. That sudden cessation one day of all activity. I have lived inside that sense of absence these last twenty years now. It is the only place I feel safe, the only place I can hear myself think. I slip inside, careful to disturb nothing.

Her computer screen is still up, left open on her social media. I am surprised to find myself looking at the official profile of the woman from the museum, this Bly Maddox. I search my memories and after some effort I finally recall her: a young woman in her twenties, with green eyes and a nose piercing, some partner that my sister brought around while I was still in high school. For all my effort, however, I can’t remember when we would have met, or at what point she stopped coming around. In any case, there is another woman in the picture beside her now. Their recent photos appear to show a beachfront wedding, the pair resplendent in simple dresses, exchanging vows barefoot in the sand.

It is true of course that we only ever know our family members, our parents and siblings, incompletely. It is especially true when we are children, though in the face of illness or family crisis it is also true as well. We speak so much of our loved ones’ perseverance, their courage, though we rarely ask what they battles they must be fighting internally. We rarely ask what it is they have lost. Slowly I sit down upon the futon. Raindrops patter against the window.

I wait up late for Nori’s return, checking messages on the couch. I try to imagine where she might be–out riding the trains perhaps, or out at a club? I seem to recall that she was a fan of dance music, but I have no idea what style or period. I pass out sometime after midnight, wake up late the next morning with the sun in my eyes. I peek into the study and find her safely asleep. When I emerge from the shower, she is awake, already starting the coffee. By the time I’ve gotten dressed she is sitting at the table. I pour myself a cup and join her. “Are you all right?”

She looks at me, shrugs.

“I think I finally figured out where I met your friend Bly,” I say. “Thanksgiving dinner, my freshman year of high school. Mom was talking like you guys thought she might be The One.”

Nori rolls her eyes.

“I couldn’t help but notice you stalking her profile page last night.”

She glares at me. “You went into my room. You looked on my computer.”

“Your door was open,” I say. “I didn’t touch anything. I was just trying to understand, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. You’ve been the one telling me that I can’t expect any privacy.” She falls silent, stares into her mug.

“What happened between you two?” I ask.

“What do you think?” She talks then about being diagnosed, how at the time her doctors were convinced she only had six to nine months. “We all were pretty sure I was gonna die. She couldn’t take it, so she bailed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Her loss, right?” Nori sniffles and wipes at her eyes. “It’s good though. She looks good. They both look really happy together.”

“I’m sorry anyway.” These things happened decades ago, but for her I imagine the hurt must be far more recent. “How do I not remember you two breaking up?”

She shrugs. “Bigger concerns, I guess.”

“A partner leaving after a terminal diagnosis seems like a pretty big concern. Did Mom and Dad know?”

“They did. I told Mom I was the one who broke it off. I didn’t want her to be mad at Bly. So stupid of me.”

“It’s not stupid to still love someone who hurts you,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What were we going to do? Pour our hearts out sitting on your bed? Talk about our feelings? What grade were you even in at the time?”

“Ninth. I would have listened.”

“You were like twelve. Were you even old enough be dating?”

“Fourteen,” I was. “And as a matter of fact, I was.” I think then back to long afternoons after school with my best male friend, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder against our lockers. I remember the away trips with the debate team, the long playlists we made for each other. I wanted so badly to share what I was feeling with someone. “I wanted to be close to you,” I say. “I still want that.”

“And what, you thought this was going to be some sort of second chance?” Her voice takes a mocking tone. “Look, I’m grateful that you’ve been here, I really am. But I never asked for this. I never wanted this. And here I am stuck now in some bullshit future with our parents gone, and you bossing me around, and my ex married to someone else, cashing in on my fucking work.”

I don’t say anything. I can feel my mouth move, but the words refuse to come.

“Look, just forget it.” She drains her coffee and pushes back from the table. “I’m gonna go grab a shower. After that I might take my computer, head into town. Maybe hit up the library.”

“It’s a Saturday,” I call after her. She ignores me and vanishes into the study. When she emerges again, she has her towel and hygiene bag. “What on earth for?”

She calls back from the bathroom. “What do you think?”

She is gone all the rest of that day. By the time I go to pick up Noah from his father’s, she still hasn’t returned. Only after Noah has gone to bed, and I’m sitting down to catch up on work, does she burst through the front door. She drops her bag on the floor in the hallway, in spite of the wall-mounted hook, and disappears into the study. When she comes out, she heads straight for the kitchen, raids the refrigerator. “This pasta spoken for?”

“It’s cacciatore. It has mushrooms in it.” This doesn’t seem to faze her. She reheats the leftovers in the microwave, stares at her feet as she waits for the timer. When her dinner comes up, she doesn’t bother with a bowl, just takes it with her in the container. I ask “How did your day go?”

She shrugs, already heading back to the study. “It went, I guess.”

This routine continues the next day, and the day after that. Only on Monday does she come home at a reasonable hour. I’m pulling dinner out of the oven, and so I don’t hear the door when she enters. I glance back just in time to see Noah tackle her in the hallway; she glances up at me and smiles painfully. I notice that she’s wearing the blazer I loaned her.

“Well this is a surprise,” I say. “Your timing is perfect. You can have a little break from leftovers.” I finish plating up everyone’s tilapia and couscous, look up and realize that I’ve left the TV on. Onscreen, the Pacific Garbage Fire is continuing into its second month. A wall of flame and smoke curtains the horizon, reduces the eastern sun to a pale red orb. Boats of all sizes deploy water cannons, to virtually no effect. Cut to a shot of the fire visible from orbit, a bright smoking crescent like lava flowing into the sea. It must stretch on for hundreds of miles. I swipe the TV off from where I sit and Nori says, unprompted, “I got a job.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.” I reach for my glass of Riesling. “That was quick. I told you something would work out. Where at?”

“Elliott Bay.”

I frown a moment. “The retail chain?”

She looks up and studies me a moment. I feel as though I’ve missed something. She rolls her eyes and goes back to her fish. “Yeah. The retail chain.”

“So what are you doing? Photography? Marketing? Graphic design?”

“Stocking,” she says. “I start Wednesday.”

“You mean like bookshelves?” Suddenly it all starts to make sense–the sudden hire, how soon they want her to start. No doubt they’re desperate for people. “You know what, it’s still a big milestone and you should be proud. This can be a stepping stone to something bigger.”

She shakes her head, spears up a bite of tilapia with her fork.

Nori quickly launches herself into 12 and 14-hour days. Soon we barely see her at all. She’s gone most morning before I’m even up, doesn’t return again until after I’m asleep. Sometimes she gets home and I start awake at the sound of the door–I can lie there and can listen to her raiding the fridge, bolting her food upright in the kitchen, brushing her teeth in the bathroom sink before bed. I’m reminded of how, after college, some friends and I shared a house for about a year. For roughly two months of that, one of my housemates had a cousin stay with us.

Most of us never even saw her, and those who had couldn’t accurately describe her. One night I remember getting up to go to the bathroom, only to discover her already in there. I remember lurking in the dark around the corner, dreading the prospect of an introduction and awkward small talk at that hour. I never got another chance to say hello, and I never learned why she left. There comes a point when we don’t have the energy for human interaction, when it simply becomes easier to live with the sound of each other’s presence in the other room. It begins to feel that way with Nori.

Noah quickly picks up that something is amiss. One afternoon he’s in the nook, working on his sketches. He asks me without looking up, “Why doesn’t Aunt Nori like us anymore?”

“She’s just working,” I say.

“Because she doesn’t want to be around us,” he says. “I didn’t mean to bug her so much.”

“You have never bugged anyone,” I say. I slide into the nook. “Look at me. What’s going on with Aunt Nori has nothing to with us. She’s just going through a lot right now. Do you remember when you were younger, and your dad and I got divorced?”

He winces, but nods. I suppose it’s my turn now to pick at old scars.

“That was a really rough time, wasn’t it? We almost had to pull you out of kindergarten.”

“You guys were yelling all the time. I didn’t want to come home either.”

“Neither did I.” In my work, I have learned how to cultivate a certain professional distance, a poise that helps me stay centered. I imagine it must be the same for doctors, or for social workers. That ability to exist at one remove from other people’s suffering is easy in the context of a working relationship, but I’ve never been able to do the same with my son. I blink to clear my vision. “That kind of hurt didn’t just go away, did it?”

“No.”

“Of course not. And the same is true here. Your Aunt Nori’s hurting, and it’s still fresh. But it’ll get better, I promise.”

“I guess.” I suspect most children learn to distrust the promises of adults from an early age. “You don’t ever seem like you’re hurting though.”

“I’ve been dealing with it for longer.” I smile and kiss the top of his head. “You should finish your drawing–maybe you could let me see it when you’re done?”

Nori comes home unexpectedly one evening. I’m sitting at the coffee table, busy working on my tablet. She keys in and blows past me into the study. When she emerges in a different outfit, I say, “You’re home early.”

“Saturdays I only work an eight-hour shift.”

“Eight hours would be four hours ago. Like two in the afternoon.”

“I know.” She slips into the bathroom. “I’m going back out. I just wanted to swing by and change first.” She leans over the sink with the door open, takes a moment to reapply her makeup. Something catches my eye, a series of dark geometric lines on her neck. They frame her right ear and jawbone like pathways, reach down to a contact point just above her clavicle. The borders are still fresh, still raw and angry, still shining with a thin coat of ointment.

“What is this?” I say. “When did you get this?”

“You’re going to make me fuck up my mascara.” She ignores my gaze in the mirror.

“I thought you hated the idea of a subvoc.”

“Mom and Dad hating the idea of getting their prints registered. They still did it.”

“That wasn’t exactly a matter of choice.”

“Lots of things aren’t a matter of choice.”

“I would have had to reload your card. With extra, even.”

“Overtime,” she says. “Nice thing about probationary employment.”

“And you weren’t planning on telling me?”

“I don’t have to inform you about every single aspect of my comings and goings,” she says. “I thought you’d be happy: layabout big sister gets up off your futon and finally gets her act together. This is me getting my damn act together.”

“Up off my futon, maybe. I’m not so certain about the rest.”

“Could we please just not?” She puts away her things and zips up the bag. “I honestly don’t know what you want from me.”

“For you to talk to me. For you to let me in.”

“This is really not the time to be doing the whole family-therapy routine.” she says. “I’m going out tonight. On my own money. Don’t worry, I won’t have to ask you to spot me again.”

“That isn’t even what this is about. I’m worried about you. I want to help.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help,” she says. “I’m doing fine. Better than I have since I got out.”

“You’re killing yourself with work. You’re barely sleeping. Those aren’t the coping habits of someone I’d say is ‘doing fine.’”

“At least I’m working.”

“And doing what?” I say. “I’ve scored you opportunities with at least a dozen good places. I’ve tried to find you jobs–good jobs within your field, jobs that use your degree. I would think you’d be grateful, and instead you’ve washed out of every single interview I’ve landed you.”

“Washed out? I got a good job, on my own, and I didn’t need your help. Better than some pity internship that wants to pay me half of basic income.”

“It’s menial labor,” I say.

“So? It’s all menial now.”

“It’s chain retail.”

“It didn’t use to be a chain!” she says. Her sudden outburst frightens me. “Good god, are you that dense? Do you remember nothing?”

For a moment I can only stammer, searching for words. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Elliot Bay,” she says. “Did Dad not ever take you there as a kid?” I wrack my memory. Our father never took me to any such place that I can recall, another reminder that he and Nori always had a different relationship than we did. A stronger relationship. “It was his favorite,” she says. “And they bought it out. God damn it, this town kills everything. They killed it and they took that part of him away from me.”

She’s near tears now. How could I not have known, I wonder? Did our father never choose to share that with me? Was I too selfish, too caught up in my sports and STEM club, my construction sims and my tabletop games? Was Nori just the daughter he cared about more? “I’m sorry,” I say.

“You don’t know anything,” she says. “About me. About this family. You don’t know anything.” She brushes past me and disappears into her study; the door clicks shut behind her.

After a little time has passed, she comes out to find me on the balcony. I can feel her in the doorway, ask her “What?”

“Now’s as good a time as any,” she says. “I found a place. I’ll be moving out probably Sunday. I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I say. “We can even take my car to haul things.”

“I don’t have that much.”

“I know. Listen, it was wrong of me to downplay your achievements. I’m sorry. You’ve worked really hard. You should be proud.”

“Please don’t,” she says. “Anyway, I should probably get going. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Wait.” I take her hand, clasp it in between mine. With my fingers I can feel the raised welt on her wrist where they’ve injected the probe for the subvoc. The probe opens the channel with touch, and the tattoo transmits the nerve impulses of the throat and larynx. Not so much recorded speech, as a mapping of speech. Once I feel the link, I touch my fingers to the button inked on my collarbone. I love you, I say.

She stares, struggles with the feel of another user’s words inside her head for the first time. After a moment she touches her own throat. I love you too. I’m sorry. Then without another word, she’s out the door and gone.

Noah goes back to his father’s for the week. I go back to working at the office again, rather than from home. With Nori gone, a silence settles back over the condo. It remains in the air even after I pick Noah up again on Saturday evening, hangs over our dinner and our weekly movie night. It begins to feel like she was never there at all.

She wanders into the kitchen on Sunday morning, already showered and dressed, as I’m loading up the dishwasher. She looks at me, then back at Noah doodling at the table. “You guys ready?”

“Just finishing up,” I say. “You need help getting your things packer?”

“Already loaded. It’s just a footlocker.”

“Furniture?”

“My roommate has furniture.” That tightening of the muscle in her jaw. “So, are we doing this?”

Her new place is out in University Park, a small unit located in a high-rise tenement block. Ugly Brutalist constructions, they crowd together like server arrays, dotted with lights. I remember the protests over zoning density that took place when they first went up. Noah peers overhead, jaw slack with wonder.

We pull into the visitors parking area. On either side of the entrance stand a pair of tall, carefully-landscaped junipers. The elevators don’t work, so we mount the stairs instead. Nori drags her footlocker, the wheels thumping over each step, while I carry a few bags of assorted groceries. Ramen, canned sliced tofu, eggs, assorted produce. She initially resisted my efforts at charity, but my fretting instinct isn’t so easily deterred. Bringing up the rear is Noah, hauling a set of bedding. Pillows, a quilt set, but no sheets–I couldn’t be sure what sort of bed she’d have at her new place, and Nori didn’t seem to know either. Such housewarming gifts as I have to offer.

“Roommate’s supposed to be working,” Nori says. “Won’t be back until later this evening.” She opens the door into a small, crowded space, with flimsy-looking walls and sliding doors. Dirty laundry is draped over the sofa, over the coat-hooks, the chairs. There are unwashed dishes on the living-room table, which also seems to double as the dining-room table. There are no chairs. Posters advertising various live concerts adorn the walls. Cutouts from various glossy fashion mags are strewn over every surface, some pasted into collages. There seems to be a recurring focus on hair, femme hair specifically, in various punk or androgynous styles.

“This roommate, what’s she like?”

“Seems alright,” she says. “Works as a stylist.”

“Mm.” It explains things. I glance out the window–one thing this place affords, if nothing else, is a breathtaking view of the city looking south. Morning sunlight silhouettes the skyline in gold. I ask, “Do you need any help with anything?”

“I’ve got it.” She rolls her foot-locker into a corner, instructs Noah to drop her bedding on the sofa. “So.”

“So.” I take her in. A sense again that I’ve damaged us somehow, in some way that can’t be fixed. Not all things become clearer with hindsight. “You’ll subvoc me if you need anything?”

“I should be alright.” For a moment, I think she might become emotional, but the moment passes. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

“It’s nothing,” I say. “Noah, you ready?” He glances back at us, shrugs and heads for the door. Stops to hug Nori as she passes. She smiles. It is the same smile that she gave me, after her diagnosis. It’ll be fine, I remember her saying. I’ve got good doctors, a good treatment plan. Everything’s gonna be just fine, I promise. At what point do we start lying to children and calling it love? Nori and I exchange a look then. “Come on,” I say to Noah.

“Okay.” He heads out the door, and I stand there a moment longer. I know this isn’t goodbye, and yet in some fundamental way it is. “See you around,” I say.

“Yeah. See you.” Rather than prolong the moment, I head for the door.

On the ride home, Noah says, “She isn’t going to come visit us at all, is she?”

I glance back at him in the mirror “I honestly don’t know.” He shrugs, goes back to looking out the window.

Later that afternoon, while we work on our respective projects at the kitchen table, a knock comes at the door. It’s one of Noah’s friends, asking if he can come ride bikes. Noah is up and out the door the instant I call for him. When I return to the table, I notice he’s left his tablet open. On it, the latest panel from his comic: in it, the sleeping woman from before now wanders through an underground ruin, dwarfed by runic symbols. She arrives at a pedestal, pushes a button to reveal a casket like the one she first emerged from. Without a word she climbs inside, seals the lid over herself, closes her eyes as frost obscures the porthole. For a long time, I just stare over that particular image. I rub the bridge of my nose, then turn and attempt to return to my work.

That night, Noah and I visit the Ballard Night Market. The air is alive with music and laughter, with the smell of fried food, dishes from various cultures. We wander among the street trucks, grab pad thai for myself, barbeque-tofu mac and cheese for Noah. We sit on a bench and tuck into our food, listen to the buskers plying their trade, then toss our plates into the nearest incinerator when we’ve finished. Up ahead through the crowds, a familiar face: it’s Troy, out with a woman I don’t recognize, presumably his latest girlfriend. She leans into his shoulder as they walk, and here in the wild I can see how happy they are together. He spies me through the throngs and waves, and though I wave back I resolve not to disturb them. Noah, however, has other ideas. “Dad!” he shouts. “Come on.” He tugs at my sleeve, then slips through the sea of bodies like an eel. I try to keep up but am quickly caught up in the throng. I watch him run up ahead, see him tackle Troy in a full-body hug. Together they all beckon me to join them, but something stays my feet. Something always stays my feet.

This Crated Sense of Anxiety

By Andy K. Tytler

‘This Crated Sense of Anxiety’: 50 Years After Undipetra, Four Survivors Reflect on the Riot that Started a Revolution

by Andy K. Tytler, Features Desk
19 Esinat 7.00 RST

When veteran volitite miners Irro Tonhamgra and Ephrea Burold heard the shouting in the corridor, they assumed it was just the latest in the near-daily scuffles of that endlessly rainy winter. But then came the order from on high: lock it down.

‘We started the lockdown procedures, just going through the motions, you know, following orders,’ Tonhamgra says. ‘Didn’t realise anything was squint.’

We are sitting in Tonhamgra’s frontroom, a small but cosy space with a large picture window letting in the afternoon sun, and providing a view of the quiet street on the northeast side of Ofsoli, where Tonhamgra has lived since first starting as a packer at Undipetra Stand. Now Ofsoli is known for its trendy shops, quaint and affordable single-family detached homes, and excellent view of the stand, but back then it was just a place for the workers to live.

Burold sits on the sofa beside me, working his way through his third cherry biscuit. He lives a block away, also at the same address he was assigned when he first got the job in the laundry room on Rig 12. Each day they alternate hosting each other for lunch, then take a walk along the shore to watch the sun set over Undipetra. Both assert the daily walks and homemade meals are the secret to their longevity. He will be ninety-five this year, Tonhamgra ninety-six. Although Burold adds wryly that it might be all the cherry biscuits.

‘It wasn’t the first time we’d gone into lockdown, not by a long shot,’ Tonhamgra continues. ‘Not even the first time that winter. Everyone was on edge, what with all that sour-rain. It was the fifth week of it, and five weeks inside doesn’t suit anyone, let alone the Aviai.’

‘The whole place thrummed with it,’ Burold tells me. ‘Tempers flaring at the smallest thing, little scuffles and things breaking out a dozen times a day, accidents, sinks, mini-collapses through the roof.’

Tonhamgra nods. ‘The walls felt like they were closing in on us. There was nowhere for a moment alone, and all the time the rain, no sun, and the knowledge that you’re trapped. The whole rig was wrapped round by this crated sense of anxiety.’

She sighs and falls silent. Burold leans back wearing a pensive expression, his brow furrowed. Surrounding them on the walls of Tonhamgra’s front-room are old revolutionary posters and framed newspaper articles, including that now-iconic image of Tonhamgra at the march on the capital two months after the riot, hands up, arms trying to shield her face from the Civic Guard’s acid spray. The scarring on her left cheek, neck, and hands is gone now, long since replaced by skin grafts. Not so on her arms. She tells me when she catches me staring that she chose not to remove it. After all, she points out with a tone hovering between humour and reproach, she earned those scars, and she has nothing to hide.

After a lengthening period of silence, I prompt Tonhamgra to continue, but it’s Burold who picks up the story.

‘I was just about to put in my key so Irro could start the lockdown when we heard the cry for help, to wait, to keep the door open,’ Burold says. He’s still leaning back, his hands clasped together, and speaking without looking at me. The cherry biscuits are forgotten now. ‘We just sort of looked at each other, like “What now?” We both knew the official procedure is hermetic seals on all doors, no exceptions, but we’d also never been in a lockdown where there’s someone in the corridor begging not to leave them to die.’

Enter Tweil*, the Avia on the other side of the door.

Like most Riloans, my first visit to Undipetra Stand was for a school field trip, and I have to admit that I knew I was meant to be humbly grateful and dutifully impressed by the sacrifices of those who fought and gave their lives there, but as a thirteen-year-old first and foremost concerned with finding out how many of my friends and I had got into the same preparatory, I couldn’t muster the zeal. Mostly, I was disappointed we didn’t go any further out than Rig 2, where the visitor’s centre and main bulk of the museum are, and I wanted to see the Cataracts. I grew up on the north side of the island, in away from the coast, where we don’t even get the occasional floating pebble. So to pack onto a coach, and then a ship, and get all the way out to the most expansive stand in the archipelago–and therefore the world–but not see the largest waterrise by both height and volume while there? It was the closest thing to a travesty my thirteen-year-old mind could imagine.

Today, though, I’m seated on the top floor of the restaurant Rig 33 has become, with a perfect view of the rise, though all that rush of water is silent through the thick glass of the observatory deck. Across from me is Tweil, his ears twitching with excitement when I tell him I’ve never seen the rise from up here, looking young to my Riloan eye although I know he’s just celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. He clicks his tongue when I ask how the party went.

‘Now that I’m officially a middle-aged Avia?’ He rolls his eyes. ‘It just means everyone keeps asking me when I plan on starting a family.’

He waves away further talk of families and getting older and goes back to talking about the restaurant he’s chosen for the interview. He tells me with great confidence that it is the best view short of the rock shore on the far side of the rise, where the thick layer of ocean hovers implacably for about fifty more kilometres before tripping down a number of elevations to reach the far side of the stand, and assures me I can have one of his personal passes if I ever want to see it.

I don’t think he’s putting on a show of Aviain politeness. He was delighted by my request to interview him about that first day of the riot–as well as the days which followed–and helped connect me with other Aviai who were there that day but who, for obvious reasons, were reluctant to tell their stories before now. But with the twentieth anniversary of all the stands officially handed back to the Aviai just around the corner, there is a sense of security and stability, and perhaps yet more hopefully, prosperity, coming to the Aviai in the years ahead.

‘Everyone’s happy, everyone I talk to,’ Tweil tells me over a modest lunch of pickled sea star and crimsonberry bake. ‘The stands are finally ours again, and ok, so we had to keep fighting for twenty years after you lot won your war, but it was worth it. We’re nearly done repairing all the damage from the overharvesting of the volitite, and this next generation, they won’t ever live in fear of having their wings pinioned.’

Tweil extends his left wing to illustrate his point, where a careful eye will catch the line between the severed joint and his prosthetic. He’s just one of the over two million Aviai who were punished by the Temiten in this way, but as most Aviai will tell you, the far deeper wound was the Temitens’ policy of writing down Aviain personal names. (As most readers will already know, there’s a deeply held belief among the Aviai that writing down a personal name gives evil spirits, underworld gods, and other demonic presences the power to use it against them.) Even though all Republic of Riloa records have been expunged of Aviain personal names and replaced with the cypher equivalent according to Aviain practice, to the Aviai the damage has already been done. The names were written down, and there is no way to hide that knowledge away again. Never mind that the Temiten government has acknowledged it retains copies of most occupation-era records in its capital, including those with Aviain personal names, and yet refuses to destroy or otherwise expunge them.

Still with his wing extended, and after popping another piece of pickled sea star in his mouth, Tweil draws his longest right foreclaw along the feathers of his prosthetic. Then he refolds the jet-black wing.

‘Usually it doesn’t bother me, but every once in a while it gets to me, not feeling the way the air moves over the feathers out at the tip.’ He chuckles, but in a way I can tell he’s trying to make light of something he can’t change. ‘Sometimes I imagine I can feel it, and that almost throws me for a loop more than not feeling it. Does give me a daily reminder to be grateful, though. Those years not being able to fly were difficult, and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone, no matter what they did.’

I steer our conversation to that moment in the corridor, and after a few false starts Tweil begins to tell me.

‘Itleili had been grumbling for a long time,’ Tweil says of the Avia usually credited with starting the riot. ‘For years, and even in the weeks leading up she wasn’t grumbling any more than normal. But honestly if it hadn’t been Itleili it would have been someone else. But Itleili, when that Temiten foreliner ordered Oulitchi out to the vent knowing it was overharvested, that it was going to collapse and drop half a layer when it did, Itleili decided she was done.’

What follows depends on who you ask. The Temiten foreliner in question, Neran Danith, insisted from the first report to the day she died that Oulitchi volunteered, and certainly there was a policy at the time awarding additional hazard pay to the type of solitary harvests of failing vents Oulitchi attempted–and it was not the first such harvest Oulitchi had successfully completed. Tweil, along with two other survivors who were in the room that day, have always testified that Oulitchi was picked by Danith because he had reported her for ignoring safety regulations on the rig. There is no record of Oulitchi’s having made such a complaint, but given the Temitens’ hasty purging of records before their withdrawal from Undipetra, it’s impossible to know for sure.

What is certain, however, is that Oulitchi made the flight down to the vent to begin the harvesting of the still-soft volitite, and about 230,000,000 cubic metres of water fell from a height of fifteen metres above non-stand sea level when the vent collapsed, shutting off the flow to seventeen other vents and disrupting the delicate balance between the molecules of volitite suspended in the water and the flows beneath the stand floor.

The other alternating layers of ocean, air, and rock sank accordingly, condensing several in the process, and the resultant force rolled out through the stand.

In the distance through Irro Tonhamgra’s frontroom window I can see the golden light of late afternoon filtering through staggered layers of water, some kilometres wide and long, others less than a handspan, can see the light and shadow playing on water, rock, peeking through a thin slice of air here or a tremendous gap there, a dreamlike layer-cake of ever-shifting beauty. Off to the southwest, I can see the grey-blue line I know are the Cataracts, more than 20,000 cubic metres of water a second rising 804 metres to spill out onto what the Aviai call the Clouds’ Pool.

I ask Tonhamgra and Burold if they knew a layer collapse was the cause of the lockdown. Burold gives a vehement shake of his head.

‘Hadn’t the faintest. It was because of Tweil.’

‘He’s shouting and pounding on the door,’ Tonhamgra picks up the story, because Burold chokes up and can’t continue. ‘That a Temiten tech has been killed, that they’re still fighting, that the order went out for full suppression.’

‘Full suppression’ was the term the Temitens used for gassing a riot. There were eleven ‘full suppression’ incidents during the occupation, three times at Undipetra. Inevitably, given that none of the witnesses survive, it’s difficult to determine from the Temiten case reports the true causes of any of those eleven gassings.

Tonhamgra clears her throat. ‘So there it was. Let him in and then start lockdown–and have our arses handed to us when our foreliner found out–or follow procedures knowing that deck is about to be gassed.’ Her shrug is less nonchalant and more resigned. ‘We both knew we couldn’t do it. So we opened the door.’

Xophil Lingranam is wearing a Riloan flag pin when she opens the door. There is more grey than dark brown in the tight coils of her hair, worn long and loose in the revolutionary style. She thanks me for writing a story on the Undipetra Riot, laments that this newest generation doesn’t understand how hard she and others like her fought to ensure our independence.

I gently suggest that this should be a mark of success, and she waves me off with a laugh.

‘You’re too young to understand.’ Then she grins. ‘But you’re right: here’s hoping you never have to.’

Lingranam has the personality equivalent of a high-summer day. She commands the room, and brightens it in a way that can burn if you’re not careful. But her carefree conversation is like a soft morning breeze, belying the razor-sharp intellect behind her casual words.

‘It was too much rain, for too long,’ Lingranam says. ‘Every single last one of us, and the shield techs on all the other rigs–because of course we had ways of talking, even if we weren’t supposed to–we all agreed: too much. Already Rig 5’s integrity was so low stress cracking had started to creep across the shield, a bunch of rigs had pitting, flaking, spalling–we weren’t the only ones who noticed. We were just the ones who realised how bad it was, and how badly the rain needed to let up so we could replace the shielding.’

She was only in her second month on the job as a shield tech, those workers responsible for monitoring the integrity of the structure protecting them from the acidic corrosion of winter’s rains–not to mention the always-present danger of a layer collapse. I ask her what it was like, being trapped for five weeks on a job she’d just started. But she shrugs this off.

‘What’s it like for any of us in the winter? The sky gives us acid, and we deal with it. That winter was just uncharacteristically bad.’

She’s right. Never before or since has the archipelago experienced five weeks’ straight of sour-rain. Nor five weeks’ straight of sweet-rain, for that matter.

‘You just have to breathe it out again, the antsy feeling, the part of your brain clawing at you because you can’t leave.’ She scoffs. ‘But they made it worse, confining us to our decks after the second week. If they’d had any brains, they would have given us more rig access, not less. If they’d done that, the Temitens might still have control of Riloa.’

Among all the survivors I’ve spoken to there is a shared sense of surreality, even after 50 years, that they managed to take control of so many rigs that first day. By the third day after the collapse the Temitens were concentrated in just four rigs hugging the shoreline, and nobody could believe that in such a brief time they had achieved almost total control of the largest stand in the archipelago. All of a sudden, Lingranam tells me, driving the Temitens out of the islands seemed not only possible, but attainable.

‘There was always that tinder in everyone’s mind, the thoughts collecting like puffs of seed-wool,’ Lingranam explains. ‘You couldn’t help but think it, especially if you were having a bad day: “If the Temitens were gone…” But they didn’t truly catch fire until we’d taken back the stand. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t, “if the Temitens were gone,” it was “when the Temitens are gone”. It gave us momentum.’

Lingranam was one of three shield techs on Rig 12, Deck 3, the same one as Tweil. She knew Tweil, just like she knew everyone on the deck, had gotten to know all of them out of necessity and lack of anyone else to talk to.

‘Danith looks over the Aviai, points right at Oulitchi, and I can even remember the smirk on her snaky little face,’ Lingranam.

Like most of the survivors I’ve met who knew Danith, Lingranam has nothing good to say about her.

‘”You, Oulitchi, you love hazard dives,” Danith said to him, and one of the Temiten techs had the nerve to chuckle behind her, “Vent 12-5 has the highest quality today. Go and bring it up for us, will you?”‘

Lingranam clenches her fist, and I realise she’s still angry at Danith, even after all these years.

‘Itleili tried to intervene, but Oulitchi motions for her to stop,’ Lingranam tells me. ‘He looks Danith right in the eye and says he’ll do it, so of course the other shield techs and I have to open the access so he can fly down there, and the enviros have to give the all-clear on the gas level, and it’s dead silent in there for a minute so all you hear is the pop and spit of each drop of acid hitting the water outside blending together into a distant but persistent hiss, and the enviros say it’s safe for Aviai but we have to use the chamber locks because it’s too high for the rest of us.’

Lingranam lets out a long, low whistle, and she shivers.

‘To this day, I think of that moment and I can’t help but feel claustrophobic. Because there are the shield numbers, and it just hits me: if the layer collapses, the shields won’t hold. All that ocean falling down on us is going to overwhelm the rig.’

‘I was the only one who ran up the corridor to the next deck,’ Tweil tells me with a sheepish wince. ‘It’s only because that door was closest. But that’s why I heard what came through Danith’s radio when she and two other Temiten fled into the riot room. And I panicked.’

He flutters both wings, considers the last piece of sea star, decides against it.

‘Utlullu stayed behind, to try to help Itleili. She was still alive, barely. I can remember hearing a woman’s voice, who I know now, of course, had to have been Xophil shouting that the shield had broken on the roof and buckled on the top four decks on the south side of the rig, but honestly I wasn’t even thinking about drowning.’ Tweil considers a moment. ‘At least, not right then. I’d heard the response on the radio: full suppression. And I just raced out of there as fast as I could go.’

I ask Tweil what was going through his head when the door opened onto Deck 4, and he blows out a long, loud breath.

‘Just relief, honestly. Grateful I wasn’t going to get gassed, because I thought the whole thing was confined to that fight on Deck 3, that once the layers had settled everything would go back to normal.’

But it was in the room with Tonhamgra and Burold that Tweil learned the collapse was much more serious than he realised. Already the top four decks were filled with water, and as each part of the rig failed, it led to yet more structural collapse.

Meanwhile, Danith didn’t carry out the order for full suppression for fifteen long minutes, and because she’s the only one in the riot room who survived, we’ll most likely never know the reason why. She claimed in the first report that she did initiate full suppression, but that the rig failure prevented its being carried out. But when in the course of the Temitens’ inquiry it came out that she hadn’t initiated the procedure until fifteen minutes after the logs show it went through the radio, she claimed that the other Temitens had tried to prevent her from carrying out the order, not wanting to die themselves. And in a third version, in an interview she gave shortly before her death, she claimed that the other Temitens had wanted to carry out the order, and that she had fought with them to prevent it. Her explanation as to the discrepancy was that she was afraid of being punished by the enquiry supervisors for telling the truth. In that, at least, I have to admit I believe her. I’m just not sure which truth she was afraid to tell.

The failure of the rig did prevent the full gassing of Deck 3, and in an ironic twist of fate, the part of the deck which remained largely clear of gas was where the original fight had taken place. The Avia Utlullu who tried to help Itleili was unable to save her life, but by staying he saved his own. And Lingranam survived because she stayed in the room to report the catastrophic failure to stand headquarters.

‘All that relief just turned to panic again, just like that,’ Tweil says, clicking his two foreclaws together in a quick snap. ‘Just, “We’re going to drown, we’re going to drown, we’re going to drown,” just like that, over and over. But then Burold shakes his head and points up. Because Deck 5 is where the laundry room is, and he says he used to work there, years ago back when he first started, and that’s where there’ll be a whole room of spare wetsuits, the tanks, everything.’

I ask him if he was scared of the prospect of swimming up through all that water. He nods.

‘Terrified. I can water-dive as well as the next Avia, and I could swim well enough–better back then, because I hadn’t been pinioned yet–but we only ever make short, quick water dives. You end up back at the surface more because you bob up from the air trapped under your feathers than because you’re swimming for it, and I’d only worked with a tank once or twice, when gas levels were too high even for us. So the idea of making my way up through twenty metres of still-settling ocean?’ He nods again. ‘Terrified.’

‘Not a soul was there in the spare suits room,’ Burold says. ‘And none of the three of us understood why, although we could hear all the commotion. At the time I thought it must be the general emergency of the upper decks’ shield failures, not because the riot had started in earnest.’

Decks 5, 6, 7, and 8 were in full battle mode by then, Aviai and Riloans fighting Temitens for the limited number of saferooms and escape capsules still available while the rig filled with water. But even the people on Rig 12 had no idea that all across the stand, rigs had buckled under the force of the wave racing out from the collapsed layer, and similar riots had started in a mad dash for resources.

‘Tweil was telling us everything that had happened while we’re getting the suits on, and I’d be lying if I said I thought we were going to survive,’ Burold admits. ‘All the time in the back of my mind, I’m thinking that we don’t know what layer’s above the water now. Could be we get through all that ocean to find a layer of solid rock. And even if we’re lucky and we get an air layer, there’s still the matter of those tanks not giving us enough air to get anywhere of import. Certainly not out of the gas, and Tonhamgra and I wouldn’t be able to stay above the surface if the gas levels are too high, and if we’re really unlucky there’s nothing above that water but sour-rain peppering the surface.’

I ask Tonhamgra if she had equally pessimistic thoughts as they were preparing to head out into the water, but she shakes her head.

‘I didn’t think we’d get that far. I was sure someone would stop us, and if we did get to an access, I thought for sure we’d never make it to the top of the layer.’ She lets out a rueful laugh. ‘So no, I didn’t even think about the fact that we might get up there to find solid rock.’

No one stopped them, because any supervisor who might have was too busy either overseeing the lockdown of the rig or overseeing the evacuation. Reading through the transcripts of all the various messages going back and forth, it’s clear that some of the rig staff believed the Deck 9 ceiling would hold, along with the lower decks’ outer shielding, and so focused on restoring order and getting everyone locked up in their dorms. Others had figured out the entire rig was going to fail and focused on getting out as many people as possible. The Deck 7 supervisor, Hylis Yerot, especially believed that no other decks would flood right up until the moment the water swept through his own. It’s not a coincidence that no one on Deck 7 survived.

But down on Deck 5, at the access point in the laundry room, Tweil, Tonhamgra, and Burold were checking the conditions of the water as far as they were able to. All of the churn, and the guttering power outages in the rig, were making it difficult. The unit kept shutting down and taking several minutes to restart, retest the water, and give them the results–and the go-ahead they needed to open the access.

‘At that point I didn’t even care if it came back saying it was pure acid out there,’ Burold says. ‘I had already sort of admitted to myself we were going to die, and I wanted to die trying not to die, if you understand me.’

I do understand him, and I encourage him to continue.

‘Well, the bloody thing finally decides to do its job, and tells us the exterior is a Level Three Hazard: Deep, Turbulent Water, but opens up the access and lets us into the transition chamber. Then the damn thing cuts out again.’

Leaving the three of them in the dark, in an approximately three-metre-by-three-metre space, wondering if they’ll be able to get back into the rig or out into the water–or if they’ll be trapped there to die instead.

‘Do you know,’ Tweil asks me, shuddering from head to tail feathers, ‘that ever since that swim I haven’t been able to tolerate anything on my face? Not masks, not scarves, nothing. It puts me right back in that moment, and I get this nauseating wave of claustrophobia. I have to get fresh air or I’ll get woozy.’

He decides to have the last bit of sea star after all, and leans over to peer at the dessert menu.

‘It’s the exact opposite every time I see blue sky. Because when the power came back on and we were able to open up the outside lock and get out there into that water, and then up and up and up and seeing the undulating fabric of silver so we knew there was air above but not knowing what kind we were going to find and then we find, of all things, a great big bright expanse of blue sky? Every time I see a sky like that, like the wide-open ones we get in the spring and summer, I’m taken back to that moment.’

In all the chaos, the rain had stopped, and all the other layers of rock and water over Rig 12 had bowed out with the initial collapse and slid off into the various vent-zones surrounding. It ensured the survival of dozens of people from the rig at the same time it meant those in Rig 13 had no way to get out. The avalanche of ocean and rock which slid from vent-zone 12-5 into 13-1 made certain no one would survive.

‘Even after I was convicted for instigating a riot and sentenced to pinioning,’ Tweil continues after choosing two desserts because he can’t decide which one he wants, ‘even in the worst parts of the war when there wasn’t enough food and it looked like we were going to lose–again–and I wanted to give up instead of see us fail, all I had to do was catch a glimpse of blue sky–‘

He stops a moment and looks out the window, because the early morning showers have given way to the precise sort of sky he’s describing. The sunlight shimmers along the pure black of his feathers, bringing out the deep blues and dark purples hidden in their depths. He turns back to me, smiling.

‘I would tell myself I could live through the worry, and the fear, and the fighting and the hunger and all the whole mess of it, because at least I wasn’t a dozen metres underwater kicking for the surface not knowing if there was any surface to kick for.’

Tonhamgra and Burold agree, as does Lingranam, and nearly every other Undipetra survivor I’ve spoken to: the memory of that sky sustained them through a myriad of future gruelling times. Whether they swam out or managed to get themselves into an escape capsule or, in the case of those on Rig 38, free-climbed up a tilted rock layer and shimmied along on their stomachs in the five-foot gap of air between themselves and the next rock layer above for half a kilometre before finally making it out, everyone talks about the blue sky. It was seeing that limitless blue sky after five weeks of sour-rain, and two hundred years of occupation, that made it seem like independence was possible.

On Xophil Lingranam’s doorstep before I leave, I ask if she has any advice for my generation of Riloans. She smiles in a way I can tell she’s been asked this question before, but still doesn’t mind answering it.

‘Don’t ever stop demanding a better life for yourselves,’ she tells me. ‘There’ll always be someone trying to convince you that you don’t deserve whatever they’ve got. Don’t believe them.’

A 50th-Anniversary memorial service will be held at the visitor’s centre of the Undipetra National Museum this upcoming Ner, 26 Esinat, commencing at 11.00. Admission is free, children welcome.

*All Aviai are identified by their family names, in adherence to Aviain custom and Riloan federal law.

With All the Soul of my Chemical Reactions

By Nathan TeBokkel

[1]

“I saw myself, running beside a cornfield, just after sunset.”

“Say that again, Mr. Flax?”

“I saw myself, running beside a cornfield. After sunset.”

“Yourself.”

“Yeah. But I was on my bike.”

“What did you—” the cop, who’s been asking questions through his boot-brush mustache groomed, or not, to hide the crooked buckteeth his slick cop benefits should’ve fixed by now, looks at his partner and flares his nostrils. “What did you do?”

“I foot-braked hard, swerved onto the gravel, called out.”

“And?” says Bootbrush. The other cop has been drawing what Pete can only guess are dicks in his notebook, bored as hell, saying nothing so they can get out of this shack, trying instead to make Bootbrush laugh. Pete watches him tilt the notebook over his paunch, ever so slightly toward Bootbrush, who strives valiantly not to look.

“He didn’t stop. I got back on my bike and came here, called you.”

Bootbrush, who had introduced himself as some dipshit cop name like Officer Sanderson or Anderson, makes a show of clearing his throat. Pete wonders if he ever chokes on one of his pubey mustache hairs. He raises his notebook, pretends to read from it. “So let’s get this straight. You were biking after sunset. You saw someone running in the ditch between the road and the cornfield. That person looked exactly like you in every respect. You stopped and called out. He didn’t stop.”

“Yep.”

“After sunset?”

“Yep.” Pete lolls his head back and sighs like an airbrake, but Bootbrush trucks on.

“What was the other guy wearing?”

“Jeans, white t-shirt, Kaepernicks—no, I don’t know, but nice shoes, real nice.”

“You sure you got a good look at his face?”

“Yep.”

“And he was running?”

“Yep.”

“After sunset?”

Pete opens his mouth to blurt some smartass joke about the definition of insanity—

“Mr. Flax, I think what Officer Blanderson”—Blanderson, dammit, thinks Pete, should’ve known—“is getting at is that it’s hard enough recognising someone in the day, let alone at night. And this guy was running.” The Dick Artist pauses, tilts his head to look curious, uncreases three neck-rolls in the process. “Have you ever consumed illegal substances?”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

The Dick Artist rolls his eyes theatrically. This guy gets all his preteen-girl emotes from Andy, Mandy, Brandy, & Brad. “Just doing our jobs, Mr. Flax.”

Bootbrush—Blanderson—looks knowingly down at Pete’s pants, black tights with neon green pot leaves all over them, draws his lips into a messy line, nods I-told-you-so-y.

“Okay, first of all, no. Second of all,” Pete looks squarely at Blanderson, “your idiot government is still grandfathering out all the pot plants.” The second Harper government—led by the monomaniacal Harper, now using a wheelchair and a vat of stem-cell cream after a salvo of strokes, propelled by some unquenchable thirst for his since-won title of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister (23 years, 7 months)—had re-criminalised marijuana, after it had been legalised for nearly a full dozen years, in the first of Trudeau’s three lazy terms, and was now struggling to make good on that. “So this,” he pinches his tights and snaps them back to his leg, “wouldn’t be illegal if it was pot, which it isn’t. It’s fucking pants.”

A mischievous, no, a dangerous light glints in the Dick Artist’s beady eyes. “Don’t you fucking swear at us, Peterson. We’re here because you called us here, and you’re clearly fucking around. If we wanted to, we’d haul you in for one of the hundred other laws you’re breaking.”

Pete fumes, but sits rigidly still. Blanderson looks a little uneasy, keeps checking his oversized reinforced-poly watch.

“Whoever you saw, it wasn’t you. It’s not a clone. We don’t live in the fucking Black Mirror.” The Dick Artist, groundlessly proud of his thirty-year-old pop-culture reference, gathers his baggy legs under him and teeters off the low couch. “Don’t call us again, unless it’s serious,” he wheezes, clutching at the thin rail beside the door to catch his breath. “And stay away from the elections signs.” He turns to go, and Blanderson hops up and follows him out.

[2]

It’s true, Pete has vandalised elections signs, but it was a spectacle and for the betterment of society. He and his friends cribbed 106 roman candles from a roadside vendor by attrition over two weeks (justified because the vendor charged a 500% mark-up on the convenience store he bought out annually for Canada Day), salted out the kaolin inside burnt lightbulbs, unscrewed their filaments and replaced them with the roman candles, and then gorilla-taped pairs of them to the signs at three in the morning. The lightbulbs-cum-magnifying-glasses caught the first slants of the sun, lit the fuses on the roman candles, and torched the signs. Everyone in the country blocks near his rural “park” awoke to showers of sparks, glass, and the firecracker-smeared leer of Hope Silver, candidate for the New Right Party of Canada, the NRPC, the Nerps, rebranded old Conservatives merged with the booming Libertarians. Silver had cut her teeth as a self-anointed journalist filming clandestine clips of anti-“immigrant” rallies, clips later revealed to be less clandestine than set up, Silver being one of the rally organisers herself, reciter of the fourteen words, destined for a career in comorbid doubt manufacture and plausible deniability.

Hope is popular among the propertied Nimbies around the parks—clutches of shacks around run-down farmhouses built in response to Harper’s plutophilic land-tax reforms. Hope is popular in the parks, too, despite her anti-poor stances, because the squatters think of themselves not as exploited but as, who said it, Steinbeck, temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They always vote for Nerps, and the only thing they hate more than non-Nerps is other squatters, especially ones who don’t look like them.

It was a funny world where the police shook a candle-charred image in front of Pete’s face, lamenting the besmirched, once-sexy Silver, but didn’t think to mention his using explosives with glass shrapnel. It was pretty much the same with Blanderson and the Dick Artist: the only reason they could think cloning wasn’t a serious possibility was if they didn’t follow the news at all. Everyone was doing it, ever since China fessed up to cloning monkeys in 2018, and the rest of the world clued that they had probably already cloned a human or fifty. Amgen, Novo Gilead, Celgene, Biogen, Baraddur, Regeneron Pharma, Plethora Genetics—underground reports, infiltrations, the occasional exposé unearthed what read like a parody of Crisis Age sci-fi. It was everywhere. Amateurs could probably even do it now, with modified media and a terrarium, high-throughput CRISPR arrays, and a little bit of luck.

Pete sits on his lop-sided concrete steps long after the cops have driven off, their tires scattering gravel into the thin yellow grass and trim helices of dogshit that surround the main drive. He thinks about Hope, her slogan “Hope for a Secure Future,” about its mockery of the beautiful idea of hope itself, of the future itself, about the government’s Virtual Wall program, dismissal of climate science, up-regulation of cloning methods patents, about their dissolution of the genetic engineering oversight commissions, about the death of Percy Schmeiser after his imprisonment, at age ninety-seven, for protesting Bioreactor’s livestock cloning. Pete is a small, loose cog clattering down the well-oiled innards of a vast and needlessly complex machine; at least, on his way down, he might make a little more noise, might jostle a part or two a little more loose.

The door slams behind him, screen peeling farther off its frame, as he gets his GoPro and his phone. He texts Mack from two doors down, Deadfish Dan, so named for his indiscriminate love of all the BeanBoozled flavours (they came in peach, cherry, toothpaste, and dead fish, among others), from three, and Kevin from one lane back.

[3]

Pete leads Mack, Deadfish, and Kevin down the pothole-cratered 13th Line, which had been empty of car traffic since the county had stopped resurfacing and gas passed $3.75 a liter. He’d seen himself north of the intersection with Road 96; there were some half-dozen other parks in the area, so the other Pete could’ve come from any one of them. They’d have to wait and see.

“What’re we doing here again?” Deadfish, fist-fulling his unpredictable beans into his lax jaw, is red-eyed high on his home-grown buds.

“Pete says he saw his clone running beside this field,” Mack says. Mack, formerly a grower himself—they all were—had taken some time to wean himself off Busch and weed. He’s been clean for a full month now, and is melodramatically bitter whenever he’s reminded of it. “You’re not thinking straight, for some reason.”

Deadfish raises a solemn finger. “‘When you high is dry, you plenty mouth.’”

“I just want to get some pictures,” Pete says. “Videos would be even better. Everyone have a camera?”

Mack and Kevin nod, hold up their phones. Deadfish furrows his brow, lost in thought.

“Dan, take my GoPro. I’ll use my phone.”

Deadfish cradles the little cube in both hands.

“I saw me—him—running in this ditch. I don’t know if he’ll be back, but we should spread out, cover the ditch and the near field. Then, if we don’t see anyone, we should check the two nearest parks. Sound good?”

All three nod and begin to spread out, Mack and Pete walking south, Dan and Kevin north. Pete snaps an ear off an unyielding stalk, woody, probably quint-stacked GMO corn, husks it, begins to eat. The borer-, rootworm-, and crow-resistant kernels are hard to bite, rubbery seed coats repelling his teeth, but when he pierces them, they are extraordinarily sweet for cow corn and mouth-dryingly starchy. Mack gives him a sidelong glance every time his mouth makes a noticeably slurpy noise.

“Eat one, man,” says Pete, hunger rekindled, as he reaches for his second cob.

Mack sighs, grins reluctantly, breaks his own off. He husks his cob but stops his arm midway to his mouth.

“Was that Deadfish?” Mack’s eyes widen. “There, again, hear that? Like a scream.”

Pete stops chewing and spits out the kernels he had in his mouth. Sure enough, there’s a distant, eerie wail, like a sad dog whose tail is being stepped on has almost given up trying to get free. Or like a fried Deadfish has stubbed his toe. “I bet it is.”

Mack runs through the corn, and Pete follows, monster-leaves slapping and slashing at their faces, pollen puffing off the tassels. Luckily, it isn’t late enough that dew has formed on the leaves, or the pollen would be stuck to their skin, itchily plugging their pores.

As the wail gets louder, Pete hears a rustling in the corn ahead. “Mack,” he hisses. “Mack!”

But Mack is a few rows too far, and before Pete can reach him, another Pete does. Two other Petes. Mack freezes like a rabbit in the porch-light, imagining that stillness is the same as hiding, planning his escape to coincide with the very moment they take their eyes off him. They’re wearing identical white shirts, jeans, Kaepernicks; they have the same unkempt straw-blond hair, the same brown-flecked blue eyes, the right lid a bit heavier than the left, the same slightly rightward crook to their noses, the same long-lobed ears, pouty lips, corn-silk half-beards, receding chins, broad shoulders, thin wrists. They blink in unison, almost; Mack ducks past them and whips out his phone, filming them as one walks toward Pete and one walks toward Mack.

“Who the fuck are you?” says Mack, Deadfish’s wail in the background, red camera light blinking in the fore.

Pete’s filming, too, as both other Petes turn to Mack’s question.

“Who the fuck are you?” they echo, and, turning to Pete, “And you. You look just like us.”

“No, no” says Pete, and Mack repeats him like a bouncing ball. “No, no—you look just like me.”

The other Petes laugh. “Where are you from?”

“Down the road.”

The other Petes look at each other. “We’re from up the road.” They look like they’re about to say more, but another Pete crashes through the corn, nearly bowling over the first two. All three Petes look at each other, blink, then run past Pete himself, all stiff legs and arms, shoulders knocking into him.

“Wait!” Pete turns and films them run, but their backs are blocked by corn leaves.

“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.” Mack’s eyes are wide, he’s hyperventilating, and his hands flounder down to rest on his knees.

Pete slaps him on the back, managing his own shaky queasiness by helping his friend. “It’s okay, Mack. I got some great shots. No way the police will laugh it off.”

As Mack’s breathing slows, Kevin leads a weeping Dan to them. “Did you guys see the Pete clone?”

Mack nods, but can’t answer. Pete does: “Yeah, we saw three.”

“Holy shit,” says Kevin. “We filmed one, but he didn’t say anything, just kind of stared at us. Did they say anything to you?”

“Yeah, they said I looked like them.”

Deadfish snorts wetly through his sobs. Kevin, incredulous, shakes his head. “This is fucking weird.”

The four walk back to their park, no sign of the other Petes on the way, and part one by one until Pete’s home alone. His dad is gone, as usual, hopefully working, probably scheming emptily or stealing something he’ll soon find out was less worthwhile than his initial appraisal had suggested, like this couch, their third in as many months. Pete sits down on it, calls the police station.

“Oxford County Police, Officer McMurphy speaking.” It’s the Dick Artist.

Pete slumps internally. “Hi, this is Peterson Flax. I have another … disturbance to report.”

“Self-reporting, Mr. Flax?” The Dick Artist belches a laugh.

Pete ignores him. “My friends and I saw three clones in the same cornfield, north of 13 and 96.”

“‘My friends and I’—good grammar, Mr. Flax. I’m sorry, but we’ve already been to your place of residence today.”

“Look, this is serious. We have good footage, too.”

“I’m sorry, but we can’t spare the officers.”

“Is that why you’re answering the phone?” Pete regrets it as soon as he says it.

The Dick Artist’s voice blooms like a sundew. “On the other hand, we just might be able to send some officers your way. Hold, please.”

“No, no, fine, don’t.”

“Have a lovely evening, Mr. Flax.”

“Fuck you,” Pete breathes, not quietly enough, and hangs up to the sound of the Dick Artist retchily clearing his throat.

Furious, Pete takes a short video of himself explaining who he is and what he’s seen, then thumbs through the clips from his phone. His friends have all uploaded their shots to their cloud, via the patchy internet their park collaborated to siphon from the nearby fibre-optic highway. Kevin’s videos are decent, and Mack’s show two other Petes plus Pete filming, which is good for authenticity. Even Deadfish’s shots aren’t bad, though most of them are crooked pictures of corn. He splices them together using an arduously torrented video-editing program, cleans up the sound, and, many hiccups and reboots later, posts the finished product to YouTube with the title “Three Clones Spotted Near London.”

[4]

By the next day, 7,826 people have watched his video. LaMichael Rose from Brampton comments that he saw two clones of himself in a mall, buying cinnamon buns, his favourite snack. Lili Thibodeau from Montréal, Québec, comments that she saw a clone of herself board a subway, then a clone of herself, maybe the same one, texting on a park bench. A user named PrivateI manages to comment, through a welter of exclamation marks, that they’d been fixing their hair in the mirrored glass of the Bay Park Centre when their reflection started to pick its nose, and two other passersby saw it, too. A user named Clonespiracy69 observes that clones are everywhere and that probably all of them are clones, too. The rest of the comments are more anonymous notes of agreement and concern.

As Pete scrolls through them, clicking links to articles about genetic engineering, a brisk knock rattles his front door. His dad still isn’t home, so, tweaked it might be the Three Petes—or, worse or not, he doesn’t know, the Dick Artist—he peeks through his bedroom blinds. It’s a woman, tall and thin, tailored navy blouse and military bun.

“Hi,” says Pete, opening the door. “Peterson Flax.”

“Hi Pete,” says the woman, extending a vanilla-scented, cream-softened hand. Her cuticles, Pete notes, are exquisite. “Kelly Stiegler, Canadian View.”

“Oh,” says Pete. The Canadian View is a living fossil, the last remaining establishment print news publisher in Canada, formed through the Harper-pressured merger of Postmedia, Torstar, the Globe and Mail, and the gutted CBC. Somehow, it survives, improbably staking its reputation on investigative, long-form journalism, hard-hitting interviews, and actual paper. “How can I help you?”

Kelly has piercing, pale green eyes, with a sparkle of trouble, or so Pete imagines. “I’m just here to ask you a few questions about the video you posted yesterday. Mind if I come in?”

“Oh,” says Pete again, stupidly, fumbling for words. Not often he’s caught without something to say. “Sure, come in.”

He steps aside, holds the door open, and catches his right hand unconsciously neating the rumples of his greasy tank-top.

“Do you have any questions?” she asks as she brushes past him, slips into the welcoming tape-patched folds of the couch. He sits in the vinyl-strap patio chair across from her.

“Not yet,” says Pete, regaining some of the paint-thinning bravado he likes to think he’s known for. He hasn’t met anyone with Kelly’s poise in a while, not since he dropped out of high school a few years ago; it knocked him off his spot, for a second. She reminds him of the debate team—that girl Ronnie, fearless and razor-tongued.

“Good. Pete, your video intrigued me. I’ve been working on a story about clones for six months now—”

“Six months?”

Kelly smiles, hapless, toothless. “Yes. You’re not alone, as I’m sure you know. Can you describe your encounters with the clones?”

“Not that much to say. I was biking to get some milk from the dairy a couple lines up, and I saw this guy running in the ditch beside the cornfield at the corner of the 13th Line and Road 96. I slowed down, because it’s weird for anyone to be running in the ditch, and then I saw that he was me. I called out, but he just kept running. Weird running too, stiff legs, locked elbows. I guess I’d never mentioned that before.”

“What did you do when he didn’t stop?”

“I called out again, but I was spooked, honest. I came back here and had to unwind a bit, then I called the police.”

“How did they handle the situation?”

“They dispatched two officers here, Officer Blanderson and Officer The Di—Officer McMurphy. They asked me a few questions, but … ”

“But?”

“Didn’t do a whole lot.”

“What did they say?”

“They heard my story, asked me the same questions over and over, didn’t believe that I could see his clothes, let alone his face. Then they gave me shit for swearing, for wearing pants with pot leaves on them, and for some stuff I—they thought I did a little while ago.”

“What stuff?”

“Some vandalism.”

“Of what?”

“Hope Silver’s election signs.” Pete looks between his feet, toes touching, catches himself, looks up defiantly. He thinks he can see a grin tickling the corner of Kelly’s professionally set lips.

“Do these cops watch the news?”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Pete snorts.

“Pete, do you biohack?”

This one catches him off guard. He thought they’d been establishing some kind of camaraderie. Guess not. “What? Biohack? No.”

Kelly narrows her eyes ever so slightly. “Do you know anyone who does?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Who do you know?”

“My friend Mack.”

“What does Mack do?”

“Nothing now.” Pete’s starting to bristle. “He tried to make a glowing strain of weed, almost a year ago, back when he was still blazing.”

“Did he succeed?”

“No. Cost too much money.” Pete grimaces. If this lady knows her shit, she should know she’s starting to toe the line of what’s cool for squatters to talk about. Money’s only a safe topic between zero and twenty dollars, or, of course, above a thousand dollars, a sum lodged safely in the pigeonholes of post-neoliberal fantasy. “And he was terrified of clones.”

“But he never made a clone?”

Pete blows air out through his lips. “No. The money, like I said. And Mack just has this clone-phobia.”

“I saw that in the video.”

“Yep.”

“Do you know anyone else who biohacks?”

“No. Nobody has the cash. Why are you asking me all this?”

“Sorry, Pete, but I have to be sure.”

“What for?”

“There are rumours going around that the clones are being made by backyard geneticists, garage biohackers. You know the story, I’m sure; you’re a smart guy. Anarchists, socialists, anti-government types. One variant suggested it was the last CAW union, but then the union was dissolved, and the clones kept showing up.”

“That’s fucking stupid.”

Kelly shrugs. “We can’t rule anything out, at this point. Who knows, maybe there’s a bleeding heart libertarian out there, intent on changing the world through Reason and Productive Achievement.” She shifts in her seat, uncrosses and recrosses her legs, and winks, Pete thinks, at him.

“I guess.”

“Can you tell me about the video, then?”

Pete shows her all the clips, explains last night, shows her the comments on his video. They get talking about the conversation he had with his clones.

“They didn’t say anything else to you?”

“No.”

“Only ‘You look like us’?”

Pete grunts. “Yep. Do they ever say much to people?”

Kelly pauses, looks at the brown water ring on the ceiling. “Not usually. Clones don’t have much to say. I’ve interviewed some of them. Bad memories, or maybe not that many memories. Weird syntax. But sometimes, they have long conversations with their originals. Once or twice, they’ve met up regularly, had what you might call a friendship. And once… ”

“Once what?”

“An affair.”

“Whew,” breathes Pete. “That’s fucked.”

“I’m sure there are more stories of all kinds. That’s why I’m here.”

“I didn’t fuck my clones.” Maybe he comes on a little too strong, there.

Kelly bites her lip. “No, I know, Pete.”

“How many other clones are out there?”

“I shouldn’t say much about it, but more than five hundred. And that’s in Canada alone.”

Pete whistles. “And backyard biohackers is still the big smart theory?”

“Well, I’ve interviewed other leads, too.”

“Who?”

“A lot of people. Government, but their scientists aren’t working on a lot these days. Military, same deal.”

“What about that creepy fuck at Plethora Genetics? I saw him on YouTube last week talking about their new cloning techniques.”

“Eugene Pearson, CTO. I’ve talked to him, gone through their records, at least the ones they showed me. Clean.”

“Creepy though.” Pete tucks his elbows to his sides, sticks out his forearms, lets his hands dangle in an imitation of Pearson. “Spidery, daddy-long-legs kind of guy. Probably a GMO.”

Kelly’s mouth twitches again. “We talked to Megan Cass, too, CEO of MetaSelection. Same story.”

“Well, Kelly, I hate to say it, but somebody is spoon-feeding you shit.”

“I have a lot of leads to work through.”

“I guess.”

“Have you been outside your community recently?”

“No, just to the dairy, some walks in the fields.”

“No school, hospital visits?”

“No.”

“Have you discarded any garbage lately?”

“What? Yeah, obviously, all the time.”

“What garbage?”

“Uh, everything.”

“What kinds of things?”

“I don’t know, the usual. Light bulbs, food packaging, candy wrappers, paper towels, tissues, bandages—why are you typing all this up?”

Kelly’s fingers rap furiously across her keyboard. “Ever litter, like on the ground?”

“I know what littering is. But yeah, I guess, a few times.”

“What?”

“Same stuff, really. Firecrackers, cigarette butts.”

“Ever spit?”

“Spit? Yes, Miss Stiegler. I also cough, sneeze, pick my nose, fart, piss, and shit. Sometimes, my shit splashes the toilet water into my asshole, and I get scared of tapeworms and use some extra toilet paper. All down the drain, though, not littered on the ground.” Kelly’s hard look interrupts him, and as he calms down, he clues. “Oh, fuck.”

“That’s the theory.”

“They’re, whoever ‘they’ are, they’re picking my DNA off my garbage, my waste.” Or that’s what Kelly thinks, or, at least, that’s what she’s telling him she thinks. He wants to ask why, why me, but as soon as he thinks about wanting to ask, he knows the answer, and he knows it’d be better not to ask. DNA is hard to find complete, hard to isolate, and once you found some good, intact stuff, you’d want to replicate your findings. Even Mack had done that. And besides, why anyone other than him—young, poor, powerless. They must’ve figured that the most he’d do would be to make a YouTube video, if that.

“Nobody has found out where they get it. But your DNA is everywhere. It can’t be that hard. That’s why there seems to be no system, either; if you pick up a Kleenex, you don’t know whose it is. But if there’s at least one nasal cell, you can make a clone. And you don’t know who the clone would be.”

“So there could be a hundred more Petes running around, anywhere in the world.”

[5]

Pete talks with Kelly for half an hour. They revisit his experience with his clones in minute detail, then he takes her to the cornfield. The clones aren’t there, so they go to the nearby park, a ring of houses huddled around a dilapidated red-brick farmhouse with some broken and some plywood-covered windows. Pete follows Kelly as she knocks on every door. Most people don’t even bother to look out their windows, don’t answer. Some stare angrily through whatever they’re using as curtains—garbage bags, taped-together Canadian Views, ragged bedsheets, tablecloths, sometimes even a mismatched curtain or two. Only a small minority open the door, and only a small minority of those are willing to talk at all.

One old lady, wrapped in a feather boa, points a cracked nail far too close to Pete’s cornea: “You.”

Pete stops his Adam’s apple halfway to a gulp. “Hi,” he manages.

“I seen you walking in and out of that farmhouse all day, a hunnerd times a day.” She cranes her neck forward, squints hard, and nods slowly. “Yeah, it was you.”

Pete starts to shake his head, but Kelly interrupts him. “Are you sure, Mrs.—”

“’Course I’m sure. Already called the cops on him twice, ’cause there shouldn’ be noone in that house now, or at least if someone’s gonna be there it should be a park resident, not some stranger—”

“When did you start seeing Pete here, Mrs.—” Kelly leaves the name hanging for the woman to fill with an introduction, but, Pete thinks, nobody in a park is going to volunteer their name to someone in as clean an outfit as Stiegler.

“—and the cops came, same two buggers both times—”

Pete’s ears get hot; he tries not to move. The same two cops—Blanderson and the Dick Artist, must be.

“—they even saw him.” She points at Pete again, who clenches his fists, digs his nails into his palms to keep from saying anything. “And they didn’ do nothing.”

“When did you first see Pete?”

“Oh, on about two weeks now.”

“You first saw him two weeks ago?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Was the house empty before then?”

“Been empty ever since the Marshalls unplugged their old man and took his money to—”

“How long was it empty?”

“—to some island, Cayman, yeah. Somewhere they don’ have to pay no tax—”

“Do you know how long they’d been gone before—”

“—because y’know with this upside-down tax thing we’re all Nits.”

Pete clears his throat, thinks the better of it. This acronym, No Income Tax Sponge, still rankles him and his neighbours, even though Finance Minister Black was caught saying it ages ago, because while it was true they had little income, they weren’t sponges. They got no infrastructure support or anything else taxes were supposed to do.

“And that was maybe three weeks ago, empty since.”

“So it was empty for three weeks, and you’ve been seeing Pete for two weeks?”

The woman cranes her neck again, nods slowly. Pete could swear that by the way she hoists a decrepit eyebrow she thinks Kelly’s slow.

Kelly opens her mouth to ask a follow-up question, but reconsiders, thanks her, and stalks off to the farmhouse. Pete, nervous enough to piss his pants but reminding himself that someone might make a new him out of the soaked dirt, trails behind.

Nobody answers, but the handle gives to the gentlest pressure from Kelly’s steady hand. Pete’s trembling, no, quaking. Kelly pulls the door open, and three Petes tumble out. They blink dumbly in the sudden sunlight, look around at each other, then sprint inflexibly through the park. Kelly edges her way inside, Pete, barely breathing, behind. Inside the farmhouse, dustily lit by chinks of light through the broken shutters and open door, there’s some old wooden shelves, a moth-eaten armchair, and, standing stock-still, arms at their sides, calmly looking in whatever direction they happen to be facing, fourteen Petes. It is a mannequin tableau, except that when Kelly and Pete enter, most of them move their eyes.

Pete has had enough, then, and lurches out, trying his damnedest not to cry. He has to sit down, though, catch his breath, think things through. The grass, he finds, is less brittle than he expected, almost forgiving, or at least not resistant. He notices, then, he feels deep in his marrow, then, that the world is whirling like a drunk and knuckling through the galaxy at a million miles an hour, and his ears pick up its horrible, long, polyvocal Doppler effect—wind blowing, people snoring, cicadas thrumming, blackbirds chortling, mice tittering, a distant engine backfiring, Kelly asking question after question, Petes blinking and stuttering, the sounds all stretching, stretching.

[6]

It has been two months since the journalist arrived. No story has appeared in the Canadian View, and Pete would know, because he has every daily copy stacked beside his front door. His dad hasn’t appeared, either. Last Pete heard, he met some girl “practically your age, Petey” in a bar, possibly a strip club, in London. He liked to shack up with these girls for a few months before coming home. But Pete can’t help wondering if his dad was whatever-it-was’s source of Pete DNA, if maybe, in need of a little walking-around money, he’d sold them some of his son’s genetic matter. Pete also hasn’t seen Mack or Kevin or Deadfish, hasn’t answered their texts or opened the door to them, and eventually they gave up.

And maybe that’s for the better. For it has also been two months since Pete has fired up the pump to wash a plate or a fork or his body, borrowed some bleach to wipe the windows, wheelbarrowed the garbage to the park’s secluded burn pit, hung his laundry to air out, or flushed the toilet. It’s stained black and half-buried in used and occasionally re-used toilet paper.

The flies are the worst of it. Their shit pollocks the windows so thoroughly that Pete can only tell if the sun is out or not, and it covers the countertops, too, so he doesn’t want to eat much, just crackers from boxes left in a heap where there used to be a garbage can, washed down with apple juice, empty tins in a sticky pyramid. Some days, there are more flies in the air, buzzing incessantly, landing, dodging his swat, then landing in the same spot again, over and over, pinging against the lightbulbs browned with fly shit, hammering against the windows. Other days, there are more flies dead on the ground, drying into hollow husks in the window sills, limning the dirty dishes in leggy black, bristly blue-green bellies exposed to the humid air, dulling as maggots wriggle in and out.

But at least there would be no Pete cloned from an apple juice tin in Flint, Michigan, the last place Pete had heard Ontario sent its trash. There would be no more Petes at all, in fact. Nothing leaves the house anymore.

A Skulk of Ghosts

By Avra Margariti

They gather at his backyard every night. They sniff the pine-infused air, dark noses glistening with moisture, and orange-furred ears pasted to their skulls. Ivan watches through the patched screen door, the fine net stitching shallow indentations across his forehead.

The foxes are four in total: a vixen and her cubs. They prowl the swath of scraggly grass that connects his property to the outskirts of the forest. The cubs don’t seem interested in him. They chase, tackle, and nip each other, orange-black-white balls of yarn, tumbling. The vixen’s movements are slower, more deliberate. She doesn’t go near his cabin, only watches him as he stares back through the mesh screen, in his robe and slippers and skin coming apart at the seams.

Plum dusk gives way to muddy night, and the cubs yap and run back into the underbrush. The vixen lingers awhile.

She looks familiar. Painfully human. And he can’t tear his eyes away from her.

Theirs is a small village. On the rare occasion Ivan cycles to the shops for supplies, he hears people talk even when he doesn’t want to listen. The story goes like this: murderer; imbecile; hermit.

The rest he’s pieced together with the doctors’ help, but mostly on his own. He has all these photographs in an old biscuit tin. Baby photos and school photos and church choir photos. Then there’s Vera in a white sundress. Vera in a pearly wedding gown. Vera under a white morgue sheet. This last photo, shown to him while he was still in the hospital, isn’t actually in his possession—not outside his nightmares, at least.

What he knows but doesn’t remember: He was driving to the city on ice-slick mountain roads with his wife and kids when something darted in front of his car. Despite trying to swerve, he hit the creature and lost control of the vehicle. Fur and guts stuck to the grill of his car, which is how they could tell afterward that it was a red fox.

What he knows for certain, without rhyme or reason: The foxes in his backyard are Vera and the kids.

Now, he may have huge chunks of memories missing and little metal screws embedded in his skull, he may not remember how to tie his shoelaces so he only wears holey house slippers, but he hasn’t lost it—not yet and not completely. It’s not that his wife is a vixen, the three cubs their triplets. But maybe his family’s souls are trapped inside the foxes’ bodies. Maybe this is Vera’s reincarnation, there to torture him the way the Furies would torture murderers and breakers of oaths (to have and to hold and most emphatically to not kill in the mountains until death do us part).

At night, he hears them scratching and screaming by the vegetable patch outside his window. He lies awake in bed and counts the knots in the wood-paneled ceiling. Over and over again, he whispers, “I’m sorry I don’t remember you. I’m sorry I can’t feel sorry for what I did.”

His only neighbor for miles is a woman named Cynthia. She’s a good ten years older than his wife. Older than Vera will ever be. She lives alone in a cabin almost identical to his and comes over sometimes to check on him. He doesn’t always know how he feels about that.

Cynthia lets herself in, wrapped in a navy anorak over her floral house dress. A beef casserole emits pale steam between her gloved hands. She sets it before him on the kitchen table.

“Don’t flatter yourself, I didn’t make it for you. The fact that I’m all by my lonesome slips my mind when I cook.” Though meant as a joke, it sounds a little desperate, her voice like rough wool.

It’s the texture of that laugh that makes him say, “Do the foxes visit your yard too?” Do they keep you up at night?

She looks up from the drawer, where she’s rummaging around for some clean cutlery. “Foxes? What foxes?”

“Never mind,” he says and pulls out a stool for her.

“Ivan, I worry about you,” Cynthia says with a hand on his forearm. He’s rolled up the sleeves of his plaid shirt, and her fingers tickle his arm hair.

Sometimes Cynthia makes these soft eyes at him. He pretends he’s dumb like everyone in their village thinks he is, that he can’t understand what those looks and light touches mean. God knows how lonely and touch-starved he is, but he can’t be with her like that. He has no way of knowing if he feels close to Cynthia only because she’s similar to Vera, or because she’s nothing like his late wife. Even worse, he’s scared he’ll superimpose on Cynthia the image of Vera he has assembled in his head, and that wouldn’t be fair to either woman, dead or alive.

That evening, after Cynthia has hiked back to her cabin, he scrapes the leftover casserole onto a paper plate and crosses the overgrown backyard.

He only intends to leave the offering on the other side of the broken fence and return to his house. When the vixen’s snout peeks out from between some wild berry shrubs, however, his joints freeze like a car engine that won’t start in the cold. He finds himself kneeling on the forest bed of twigs and crispy leaves. His breaths are feathery billows of mist.

“Hello, old girl,” he says. In the near-silence of the woods, his voice sounds like a gunshot.

Vera’s eyes lock on his as she steps nearer. They’re as black and glinting as coals, her fur a gradient, flame-like orange, the same fiery shade her hair used to be when she was alive. The cubs follow their mother’s lead, warily pawing the air in his direction. Ivan brings to mind the biscuit tin full of the triplets’ photographs. One cub is darker than the rest, like his son Jackie, who had the tannest skin of all the children. Another cub is missing her left ear, similar to Zoe and her birth deformity. And then there’s the smallest of the three, the spots on her forehead reminiscent of the barrettes Theodora used to wear on her auburn locks during Sunday school.

He opens his palms and extends them toward all four foxes. Fine tremors run through his muscles as Vera’s snout nuzzles his hand, but he doesn’t retract it. Her nose is a cold shock, her fur coarser than it appears. The cubs also creep closer, their body heat a nimbus that melts the frost from his skin. He shifts to grab a fistful of beef—to handfeed and placate his fox family—but he must have moved too fast, or too sudden. Vera’s fur bristles and her belly sticks low to the ground, the cubs picking up on her agitation. She swipes her claw across his palm before scrambling away, back into the copse of shrubs and ferns with her cubs in tow.

Was Vera this hot and cold when she was alive? He might not be the owner of his memories, but he thinks so. He stands, and his chest rattles with the broken pieces of his heart.

Was Vera a good person?

Is he?

On his way back to the cabin, he briefly considers going into the city for a rabies serum, but no. He doesn’t drive anymore, and there’s nobody who would take him. Besides, the thought of hospitals and doctors sickens him. He doesn’t want to spend his life on a cold slab or his brain to be poked and probed. So he puts some rubbing alcohol and a clean piece of gauze on the bleeding scratch and crawls into bed.

He thought going outside would appease his own private ghosts. But later that night, the howling rises to an unprecedented crescendo. He clutches his wounded hand to his chest and listens to the vixen and her cubs until the entire world is a scream.

The howling doesn’t abate. He goes about his daily routine, tends to his tiny garden, pickles his veggies, and gets his monthly disability check in the mail.

During quiet afternoons spent in Cynthia’s cabin, as they do the crossword by the wood stove or watch game shows on her rabbit-eared TV, he wants to ask, “Can’t you hear them? Can’t you hear the howling?”

He doesn’t know how to make it stop.

Back home, he peers out into the darkness through the torn screen door. The cabin is cold as a mausoleum. He squashes the shells of his ears against his skull to drown out the chilling noise. When he closes his eyes, burnt orange flares across his lids.

Ivan treads past his vegetable patch, then through the backyard, now overrun by weeds and covered in thin sheets of ice. His gait is clumsy but his steps hint at no second thoughts. Finally, he reaches the ripped chicken-wire fence bordering the forest. He’s forgotten his slippers. Prickly burs and jagged stones slice the soles of his feet.

They’re waiting for him on the fringe of the forest. Vera. Jackie. Zoe. Theodora. Their eyes follow him as he lies down on the wet, cold grass and spreads his limbs out like a child making a snow angel.

The foxes trot toward him—in the forefront, the wife he may have loved or hated, followed by their children that he can’t remember whether he cared for or neglected. Under his threadbare robe, he’s naked and afraid. He feels their rough tongues on his body, the brush of their bushy tails, their teeth and nails breaking the soft skin of his belly and thighs.

Cold seeps through his pores, down into his bones and the metal screws that hold him together. As the foxes pant and wail above him, he fixes his eyes on the dark sky. Ivan gives himself to them. After all, this is their birthright—their deathright, too.

“So, that was a stupid thing to do,” are the first words Cynthia speaks when he comes to. Soft tufts of brown hair the color of a sparrow’s feathers have escaped from her braid, and there’s a feverish glint in her eyes.

“Yeah.” He’s in Cynthia’s bed, covered in a comforter, white as a flag of truce. His joints are stiff; his wounds have been dressed in gauze and some strong-smelling ointment, and his head feels even woollier than usual.

“I called a doctor. Sorry, I know you hate them, but we couldn’t have you going rabid, could we?”

“I’m sorry, too,” he whispers through a sandpaper throat. For worrying her. For not thinking it through. He wanted so bad to feel regret for the things he doesn’t remember doing, that he was willing to make himself sorry by any means necessary.

The world is mercifully quiet. The only sound to be heard is the kettle boiling in the kitchen and the pitter-patter of rain.

“Why did you do it?” she asks. “Did you want to die or… ?” She feigns casualness, but her sadness spills through the cracks in her voice.

“Or.” He brings a hand to her face and caresses the sleepless midnight shadows underneath her eyes.

“Maybe you could tell me about it someday,” Cynthia says, placing her hand over his.

“Maybe,” he agrees.

Cynthia leaves his bedside to prepare tea. He looks down at his scratched hands, the blood caked in the cracks of his palms. It’s been eighteen months, and he’s tired of being a blank canvas. He wants to make memories that don’t come from biscuit tins full of old photographs or from the howling of red foxes. He wants to look at himself in the mirror and not see the villagers’ words for him written across his forehead.

Cynthia returns, holding two mismatched mugs of fragrant green tea. She smiles at him with her soft eyes and hands him one of the hot drinks.

Ivan accepts her offering.

Maybe someday, perhaps soon, he wants to populate his head with something other than ghosts.

Finding Papa

By Ana Gardner

“It’s a secret magazine.”

Iro’s eyes widened for emphasis, and he looked left and right in the weedy backyard like he wanted to make sure no one could hear the three of them.

“There’s symbols on the last page, and if you read them out loud at midnight—but you gotta be alone, and it’s gotta be exactly midnight, not like, ten-thirty.” He scowled at Sandy, like she was some kid who didn’t know what midnight meant. “Then if you read them right, the aliens come!” Iro threw his hands up, “And they give you secret powers!”

Sandy covered her mouth with her hands. Her loose tooth moved; any day now it’d fall out, and Momma would panic again, even though everyone said losing baby teeth was normal.

“But you gotta really believe in them,” said Cait, her conspiratorial hush barely louder than the rustling shrubbery. “Or else when they come, they put you in the hospital.”

Iro nodded. “This kid Joey from school read the symbols five times. He’s been in the hospital three times…”

Sandy was rapt: “And the other two?”

“Who knows?”

“Whoa.”

She loved staying at her cousins’ house. Iro and Cait were already ten, and they knew all the cool stuff.

They remembered Sandy’s Papa, too, better than she did. She’d been just three when he vanished, and all she remembered was standing by his knee watching the night sky. Iro and Cait had known him better, and they told Sandy about him.

They said Papa loved stories about aliens and stars, so Sandy loved those stories, too.

“You think Papa read the special symbols? Maybe the aliens put him in the hospital!”

Momma said Papa was in the hospital ‘cause he didn’t know when to stop, but Sandy never knew what he was supposed to stop. Maybe he’d read the secret magazine too many times.

“You think that’s why Papa had to go away?”

Iro scratched his chin, sharing an uncertain look with Cait. “Eh…”

“You’re not really supposed to tell anyone when you read it,” said Cait. “It’s a secret.”

“Hush-hush,” Iro agreed, and their twin mops of brown hair bobbed in unison against Aunt Delly’s myrtle bush. Sandy relished in the excitement of their wonderful shared secret.

“I want to read the magazine!” She jumped to her feet. “Where do we buy it?”

But the twins looked mournful.

“We can’t buy the magazine,” said Cait, with a big sigh.

“They only sell it up in the city,” Iro put in. “And only if you got lots of money.”

“And you gotta know a secret code, or the seller won’t give it to you.”

Sandy wilted. “We can’t get the magazine?” What was the point of knowing about it if she couldn’t read the alien symbols and get powers?

“But we know where there’s a copy,” said Iro, and he lowered his voice as Cait looked cautiously around the yard again.

“Mikos keeps it under his mattress.”

Standing at the far end of the hall from Mikos’s room, Sandy felt like her dog Millie, when Momma opened the door to let her out at night and it was raining. Millie’s spotted ears flopped nervously and she tucked her tails between her legs. Going outside was Millie’s favorite thing, but rain was scary.

Mikos was scary, too.

He was Sandy’s oldest cousin. He went to high school and never played with her and the twins. Aunt Delly said they weren’t allowed in his room, and the door was always closed.

“You’re sure Mikos has the magazine?” Sandy glanced warily around the corner, to his black oak door with a big ‘Stay Out’ sign. “Does that mean he has…powers?”

She could picture tall, lanky Mikos lengthening into a horned monster, making her vanish like Papa had…

“Nah.” Iro waved a hand, “I bet he’s never read it. Mikos hates to read.”

“Yeah.” Cait sighed, tragically, “The magazine’s just sitting there… useless…”

“He should give it to us, then!”

“But he won’t,” said Iro, “’cause he’s a big mean dolt. And if he knew we wanted it he’d just hide it and we’d never find it again.”

“We’re not allowed in his room,” Cait smiled, “but Mom and Dad can’t punish you…”

Sandy shifted on her tiptoes, looking down the hall to Mikos’s closed door again.

“Are you sure the aliens give you powers?”

“Totally,” said Cait. “You could fly, or be invisible.”

“Or always know the answers on a math test,” said Iro. “Or have endless pizza.”

“Can they make you find missing people? Or—or fix things that are broken?” Momma said they’d go look for Papa, when she fixed her car. But Momma’s car had been broken forever. They drove Papa’s old car to school or around town, while Momma’s sat in the cornfield behind the house, and Momma was always looking for parts to fix it.

“They can give you anything you want,” said Cait. “Long as you get the magazine…”

Sandy looked back to the black ‘Stay Out’ door. Her heart beat real fast.

“’course, if you’re too chicken to get it, we can always ask Joey…”

“I’m not chicken!” Sandy glared at Iro. “I’ll get it. I’m not scared of anything.”

The twins grinned, and they shooed her down the hall.

“Remember, it’s got a blue cover–”

“She can’t see blue, dimwit! The cover’s all glossy–”

“I can too see blue!” Sandy hissed over her shoulder. It was Momma who didn’t see blue. She thought it was the same as green. “I know all the colors, I’m not a baby!”

“It’s under the mattress,” Iro reminded her. “Oh and if there’s other magazines in there, get all of them. Go on, hurry up before he comes back! We’ll stand watch.”

Sandy turned the doorknob and, hands clenched tight for luck, opened the door.

Mikos’ room smelled weird, like laundry that Momma hadn’t put in the drier in time. Dust floated in the air, and angry band boys in posters on the wall looked at her like they knew Sandy was doing something not allowed.

A dusty telescope sat by the window. Papa used to have a big telescope. Momma said you’re supposed to look at the stars with it, but that Papa looked at stuff he wasn’t supposed to.

Sometimes Sandy asked Momma to show her where Papa was, in the night sky, and Momma pointed to faraway stars and Sandy pretended she could see him.

She peered through the Mikos’ telescope, but she couldn’t see anything at all.

“Did you find it?” Iro whispered from the end of the hall.

“No.” She walked back to the open door, but the twins waved her back in, arms flailing:

“Don’t come out, go get the magazine!” “Hurry up!” “Go!” “Under the mattress!”

Sandy turned back.

Mikos had a big grown-up bed, with a striped blanket covered in papers and socks and books and electronics cables. The mattress was too heavy to lift, but Sandy’s hand fit under it easy. She pictured something under the bed grabbing her, and she yanked her hand back.

The angry boys in the wall posters looked like they were scolding her.

Sandy stuck her hand under the mattress again, until her fingers felt something like paper, and she pulled out a crumpled glossy-paged magazine. It had big letters on the front, and a nice lady in a sun hat. The lady looked like Momma.

What would Momma be on the cover of the secret alien magazine?

Sandy flipped to the end, but there were no secret symbols. Then she remembered: you had to read the whole thing first! She flipped back to the cover. The lady looked like Momma, but she wasn’t. Her eyes were all wrong. They were blue like the sky, and Momma’s eyes were more green than blue…

“What the hell!”

Sandy jumped. Mikos stood in the doorway, angry, scowling:

“You’re not supposed to be here!” He took a step toward her: “This is my room! Get out! Give that back! Hey—” He grabbed the edge of her shirt as she dashed past him. “Stop!”

Sandy wailed a high-pitched scream. Mikos let go, and she stumbled and landed hard on her knees on the hard floor outside his room. The magazine dropped from her hand and slid along the polished wood, and Sandy roared her pain and fear in loud, tearful wails.

“Honestly!” Aunt Delly pressed the wet kitchen towel to Sandy’s bloody knee, causing her to screech again. “Mikos, why weren’t you more careful with her?”

“I didn’t do anything! They’re the ones who were snooping through my stuff!”

“We weren’t even near your room!” shouted the twins.

“Quiet!” Uncle George banged a palm to the kitchen table.

“I don’t see why I’m grounded when they invaded my privacy,” spat Mykos.

Sandy scowled: “’cause you wouldn’t share the secret magazine!”

“Why don’t you just ask your mom for a copy!”

“Mikos!” Aunt Delly shot him a scandalized look. When she glanced again at the magazine cover, her face was red. “I can’t believe you. Where did you ever get this?”

“I found it, okay?”

“That’s not true!” Cait glowered, arms crossed in the corner. “We know where he got it!”

“Shut up, wormface!”

“Don’t call me that!”

“He got it from Uncle Bobby’s garage,” said Iro. “When we went to clean it out last spring. There was a big old box, and Cait and I saw him take stuff out of it and hide it.”

“This was Papa’s secret magazine? So it’s mine!” Sandy hopped down from the stool, but Aunt Delly yanked the magazine away before she could grab it. “Give it back! It’s mine!”

“Sit down!” shrieked Aunt Delly. Then she rounded on Mikos, “You took this from the garage?”

“No I didn’t! They’re lying!”

“Mikos–”

“Who cares? It’s not like he’s gonna come back and ask for it! He’s dead!”

His words rolled through the small kitchen, bouncing off the walls like brown ugly bats.

Aunt Delly put a hand over her mouth.

Uncle George stood up, “Damn it, boy,” and Sandy gaped at them, the world taking on a brown tinge.

“Papa’s not dead. He’s not!” She jumped to her feet, fists clenched. “He’s with Momma’s family in the sky, but we’ll go look for him one day when she fixes her car!”

Mikos rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

“We are! Momma said…!” Sandy looked to Iro and Cait, who gave her identical helpless looks. “We’ll go look—Papa’s not dead!”

Uncle George stood up, reached for her—“Now, Sandy…”

“My Papa’s coming back!” Sandy grabbed the magazine from Aunt Delly before anyone could stop her, and she ran out the back door, dashing out into the street.

Aunt Delly and Uncle George shouted for her in the backyard, and Iro and Cait ran up and down the sidewalk calling her name. But Sandy, tucked away in the little park behind Aunt Delly’s house, up among the leafy branches of an old oak tree, didn’t answer.

They were wrong about Papa. He was up in the sky with Momma’s family, and Sandy and Momma were going to fix Momma’s car and go find him. They just needed the right parts. Momma was always traveling to look for them; that was why Sandy stayed over at Iro and Cait’s house so often.

“Sandy? Where are you, girl? Come out.”

Aunt Delly and Uncle George walked into the park, looking behind bushes and around the swings. Sandy pulled herself close to the oak trunk so the branches would hide her. But grown-ups never looked up, anyway. They passed right under her and didn’t notice. Sandy could see the top of Uncle George’s head, with a round, shiny patch of missing hair.

“Did you know Celeste did that?” Aunt Delly’s voice was hushed, annoyed. “Honestly George, this brother of yours. The drinking, the delusions—and I told you when he married this strange woman out of the blue that there’s something–”

“Sandy-y-y-y!” Iro’s voice boomed over Aunt Delly’s, drowning out her words. Sandy leaned down so she could hear better. It wasn’t nice to eavesdrop, Momma said—but Aunt Delly and Uncle George were talking about Momma and Papa, so it was alright, then…

“…don’t think she still does those magazine shoots, right? You think that’s why she’s away so often? I mean, I knew it had to be something fishy, the way Celeste never talks about her life before Bobby, and she doesn’t have a real job…”

“I don’t know what she does, Delly, alright? But she’s gonna be back any minute and we better have a kid to give her.”

“I told you there was something wrong with her…”

Their voices faded as they reached the far end of the park and disappeared around the corner. Sandy shifted on her branch and pulled her knees up to her chest, still clutching the magazine.

If she could only read the secret symbols and contact the aliens, Momma wouldn’t have to worry about fixing her car, and they could find Papa. Sandy missed him, but Momma missed him more. She was always looking up to the sky, with her worried look, then back at Sandy, and her eyes got droopy and sad.

Sandy opened the magazine, but the last page held only small writing and an ad for juice bottles called “BACARDI”. She flipped back, through dozens of pictures of shiny ladies with yellow hair. Many showed the lady who looked like Momma but wasn’t. Her face was too round, her eyes the wrong color. Sandy touched the crumpled pages. Was that the secret of the magazine? Perhaps the mystery of those pictures would help summon the aliens and find Papa.

But if secret symbols hid in those pages, Sandy couldn’t find them. In the end she heard Papa’s car pull up to the curb. It always made the same noise, when it stopped—a little rat-tat-tat-tat and a cough from the tailpipe—and it smelled like gas and like Momma.

Sandy slid down from the tree and wandered back toward the house; out front, Aunt Delly was talking in her whining voice:

“–just ran off, we couldn’t catch her, I’m sure she’s nearby but…”

Momma’s head turned as Sandy made her way around the house. Momma always knew where Sandy was, if she was near enough. She said she could smell her.

Momma smiled, and Sandy picked up the pace.

“Oh, thank god!” shrieked Aunt Delly, “Where have you been! Didn’t you hear us calling? Listen, Celeste, you need to teach this child…”

Sandy ran up to Momma and hugged her legs. “I wanted powers from the aliens so we could fix your car and go look for Papa! But Mikos says Papa’s dead!”

Momma tilted her head. Uncle George hurried over from the other side of the house. “Sorry, Cel…bit of trouble this afternoon.”

“Momma, Papa’s not dead, right?”

Momma’s eyes changed colors. They always turned a sort of brown when she was mad. Then she noticed the magazine in Sandy’s hand. “What’s that?”

“It’s Papa’s! Iro said we can read the secret symbols and call the aliens at midnight…!”

Aunt Delly groaned. Momma’s eyebrows rose.

“Oh?” She picked up the magazine, flipped through it. “No, I don’t think that’s going to work. Why are your knees bleeding?”

“I fell when Mikos caught me. And you gotta read the whole thing, and it only works at midnight. Momma, is Papa coming back?”

Uncle George put a hand on Momma’s shoulder. “Listen, Cel, maybe it’s time the kid knew the truth. She’s six now, she’ll understand. And we’re here for you…”

“Why did you have Robert’s things?”

“That was an oversight,” Aunt Delly snapped. “But Sandy went into Mikos’s room without permission—”

“Iro and Cait told me to!”

“—and then ran off, honestly Celeste, this is a dangerous way to raise—”

“We’re sorry!” wailed the twins, “We just wanted to look at Mikos’s magazines.”

“Cel,” said Uncle George.

“Papa’s coming! Right? Right, Momma?”

Momma looked from Sandy, to Aunt Delly and Uncle George, to Iro and Cait hovering behind the rose bush on the lawn. She looked like Millie when confronted with a thunderstorm.

“Your Papa’s gone for now,” she told Sandy.

“But we can go look for him, right Momma? Up in the sky? When you fix your car?”

Momma cleared her throat. “Time to go home, now.” She took Sandy’s hand and walked her to the car, then turned to Aunt Delly and Uncle George. “Thank you for watching her.”

“Listen, Cel,” said Uncle George, “about your job…I mean if you’re strapped for cash, we could lend you some, or—Delly’s salon’s probably got some job…”

“Thank you,” said Momma, and, closing the door on Sandy’s side with a bang, she walked around to the driver’s seat. They pulled away from the house with rat-tat-tat-tat noises, while Uncle George was still waving his hands behind shouting, “Let’s talk…!”

Sandy toyed with the little bear clip on her seatbelt. “Are you mad?”

Momma’s eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. They were still a little brown.

“No. But let’s not tell people about the flying car anymore. We talked about this, right?”

“I forgot.”

Momma smiled and looked back to the road. But Sandy wasn’t done thinking.

“If Papa’s gone to the sky, does that mean he’s dead?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Is he an alien?”

Momma’s eyebrows made a funny shape.

“No. Your Papa’s not an alien. You know he was born just down the road.”

Sandy did know. Papa was born the next town over, like Uncle George. But it would’ve been nice if he were an alien. Then Sandy would read the magazine and Papa could come. And they’d go to the sky and see all the stars she couldn’t see through Mikos’ telescope.

Sandy sighed.

“Momma? Why does the lady in the magazine look like you?”

Momma glanced back again. Her face changed, from her outside face to her home face. Only Sandy and Millie saw Momma’s home face, and they weren’t supposed to talk about it to other people.

“Your Papa had those magazines lying around, when we met. He thought those ladies were…pretty.”

“You’re prettier than all of them.”

Momma grinned. Her face changed back to the cover lady’s face.

“Your eyes are the wrong color,” Sandy told her, and Momma laughed.

“Your Papa said so, too. I can’t get the shade right.”

It was ‘cause Momma couldn’t see blue, and the cover lady’s eyes were blue.

Sandy looked out the window of Papa’s car, watching the trees go by on the side of the road. “Did Papa ever see your home face?”

She liked Momma’s home face; it was a funny color that she never learned in school, the color of the air when they listened to a specific station on the car radio. It had more angles and big eyes and lots of moving muscles. Momma said the muscles helped when she had to change to her outside face.

“He did. That’s what I looked like when we met.” Momma smiled, “He wasn’t scared of it, like most people would be.”

“’cause people don’t like things that are different?” She and Momma had talked about this, too. “And that’s why we don’t tell them about your car, or show them your home face?”

Momma winked. “That’s right.”

“When do I get a home face?”

Sandy had only a couple of Momma’s face muscles. Momma said most developed later, but she thought Sandy’s might not develop at all, ‘cause they were meant for blending in, and Sandy blended in just fine with her face just the way it was.

Sandy found that very unfair. She wanted a home face and an outside face, too.

“We’ll see,” said Momma, which was grown-ups always said when they didn’t want to give straight answers. Sandy went back to tapping her seat belt bear.

“Are you sure Papa’s okay?”

“I hope so.”

“Why did your family take him?”

“He asked too many questions,” said Momma, and Sandy didn’t know if she was kidding, so she stuck her tongue out until Momma laughed. “After we met, your Papa was curious. He wanted to meet my family, so he tried until he found a way to contact them. They didn’t like it.”

“Why?”

Momma hummed. “They don’t like different, either. Your Papa was different, and they were afraid of him. They didn’t…understand the situation.”

“Why?” Sandy began to wiggle her loose tooth, but then she remembered how Momma panicked when teeth fell out, and she stopped. “Was it because of me? ‘cause I’m different like Papa?” She frowned, “Are they afraid of me, too? Are they gonna put me in the hospital?”

“No.” Momma sighed, “They don’t know about you. We were—hiding, when they came. In my car. But your Papa didn’t listen to me and thought he could talk to them.”

Sandy chewed on her lower lip, until Momma’s eyes met hers in the rearview mirror.

“You don’t have to be afraid. No one will hurt you, or take you anywhere you don’t want to go.” Momma smiled, “And if anyone tries, I’ll eat them.” And she returned her home face briefly, to flash a long row of sharp crowded teeth.

Sandy giggled.

Momma pulled off Route 31 onto the little country road that led through the corn fields to their house. Papa had picked this house, miles from the nearest town, ‘cause he liked to look at the stars and the town lights got in the way. It meant Sandy lived too far from school for a bus to pick her up, and in rain season the driveway flooded, but Sandy didn’t mind. If Papa had bought a different house, he wouldn’t have seen Momma’s car break down in the corn field, and they’d never have met.

She rolled the window down to smell the familiar dirt and dusty corn cobs.

“Momma, did you find more pieces today to fix your car?”

Momma’s eyes met hers in the mirror again. “I did. Almost got everything we need.”

“And then we can go look for Papa? Your family won’t mind, right?”

Momma smiled. “We’ll see.”

Sandy wrinkled her nose at her.

Momma parked Papa’s car by the little corn field so they could walk the rest of the way like Sandy liked to do, and they wandered among the tall corn stalks and past the area where they were all flattened in a perfect circle, until they reached the little house, and Millie ran out to greet them, thumping her twin tails, and she began to lick Sandy’s scraped knees.

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

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The Colored Lens #32 – Summer 2019

Table of Contents

Cephi

Death and Two Women

Lavender Footsteps

Lifesong

Party’s End

Peaches

The Barber and the Black Canary

The Water Dragon

Traveling by Starlight: A Journey of Two Ways

Walking the Line

Zombies Can’t Take the Train

Vigil

The Hungry Ghosts

The Colored Lens #31 – Spring 2019

Table of Contents

A Hunt for Gods

The Memetic Vaccine

The Hungry Ghosts

Always on My Mind

Guinea Pig

The Spirit Cave

Vigil

This Crated Sense of Anxiety

With All the Soul of my Chemical Reactions

A Skulk of Ghosts

Finding Papa