The Colored Lens

Speculative Fiction Magazine

Winter 2015 – Issue #14

Featuring works by David Kernot, Mark Rookyard, Gary Emmette Chandler, Dale Carothers, J.A. Becker, Alina Rios, Nathan Wunner, Adam King, C. L. Holland, Rhoads Brazos, and Jess Hyslop.

Edited by Dawn Lloyd and Daniel Scott

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

© Copyright 2015, All Rights Reserved

www.TheColoredLens.com

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Table of Contents

• The Poseidon Stones by David Kernot
• Incorporeal by Mark Rookyard
• An Indiscernible Amount of Things by Gary Emmette Chandler
• Eggs from the Cuckoo Clock Bird by Dale Carothers
• Aberrations by J.A. Becker
• The Keeper by Alina Rios
• The White Lady by Nathan Wunner
• Plain Girl by Adam King
• The Silver Spoon by C. L. Holland
• Born of Lies by Rhoads Brazos
• Spare a Prayer by Jess Hyslop

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The Poseidon Stones

By David Kernot

Mike Ironbark drove the shovel into the hard dry ground. He glanced at the year-old oak seedling in the pot nearby, and wondered how many years it would take for the tree to shade the farmhouse. “This is for you, Dad,” he said.

Dad had believed that everything is connected, and he died twelve months to the day. They had potted the acorn that night in his memory. Today they’d plant the seedling in the ground and celebrate his life again. Mike’s arms and shoulders ached from the compacted soil. He blamed the early onset of summer. He stood, straightened his tight back muscles and removed his worn wide-brimmed hat. He wiped the sweat off his brow and stared at the small rise of hills in the distance. They marked the edge of the farm and had already turned a deep shade of rusty-brown. In front of them, the heat shimmered above the expanse of wheat. How could it be so hot in the morning? “Curse this heat,” he said and looked around for his crowbar. He stared up at the cloudless, indigo-blue sky, proud of his successes on the land. This was Dad’s farm, his legacy.

He turned at the sound of the back screen door spring stretching. Anna, his wife, stood by the door of their farmhouse, a towel wrapped around her slender body and her long wet hair stuck to her. Mike couldn’t help but smile. She looked beautiful, and he was the luckiest man alive.

“Mike, there’s no water for Maisie Jane’s shower,” she said.

“Have you checked the tank?”

“Yes, it’s dry.”

Mike’s heart skipped a beat and he frowned. Out here, water was their livelihood. Without it everything would die, the crops, the animals… people. Showers were the least of his concern. But it was odd. The bore pump should have automatically filled the house tank overnight. The breaker had probably tripped; it had done that a few times of late. Salt or contaminants became lodged in the pipes that stretched deep underground, into Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.

“Have we got power in the house?”

She nodded.

“Okay, I’ll go check.”

“Daddy, Daddy.” The outside screen door opened wider. Their daughter, Maisie Jane, ran around Anna and made a beeline toward him. He smiled and squatted down. She threw herself into his arms, the spitting image of Anna, except she was tall and her eyes a deeper blue—something she’d inherited from him.

Maisie Jane still looked too pale and thin, but the doctors had said that her leukemia was in remission. He hoped so. “Sleep well, Mouse?” He ruffled her uncombed hair.

The six-year-old nodded. Maisie Jane looked around him, to the small hole in the ground, at his shovel, and the oak tree. “Grandpa’s tree,” she said.

His throat tightened, and he swallowed several times to work it away before speaking. They’d made many promises on Dad’s deathbed, but it had been at Maisie Jane’s insistence that they planted an acorn in his memory.

It didn’t seem a year ago that his father had leaned forward and put his paper-thin hand on Maisie Jane’s cheek. “Mouse,” he said. “You can tell your grandchildren it was Grandpa’s tree because he loved you so much.” She’d nodded. “And by the time the tree is well established, then you’ll have the Poseidon Stones I gave to your dad. Magic stones, like Poseidon, the god of water.”

Dad had chuckled and made one last joke before he passed shortly after, his hand on Maisie Jane’s arm.

Mike’s throat tightened again. Dad had always been bigger than life, and he hoped he’d be the same for Maisie Jane. His hands went to the chain around his neck, to where the three small emeralds were cocooned in silk and their separate hessian bags. Poseidon Stones. Even now they glowed hot as if they had lives of their own. They seemed to call him. Unfamiliar images formed at the edge of his vision, and—

“Don’t cry, Daddy.”

Mike pulled himself from his memories, forced the stone’s images aside; they could wait for another time. He wiped away the tears he’d been unaware of until Maisie Jane spoke and ruffled her hair again. He didn’t trust his voice not to be twisted with emotion and nodded.

“Maisie, come inside and let Daddy check the pump.”

Maisie Jane leaned closer. “Remember?”

He nodded again, and swallowed. “If I see any, I’ll let you know.”

“But don’t hurt them,” she said quickly and held up a tiny index finger in a determined way that reinforced the impression she was such an old soul. At times she seemed years older.

“I won’t.” He stood and watched the young girl run back inside. He smiled and shook his head. There was so much of his mum in her, it was uncanny. He regretted that Mum and Anna had never met, but Mum had passed years before from the cancer. Maisie’s obsession with dragonflies always amused him and especially Dad who had given Maisie Jane his wife’s anniversary gift of an intricate, gilded dragonfly. But Maisie Jane was right; they did tend to dart around near the small, bore pump shed in search of water. They might even be at the header tank, hovering over a broken pipe that fed the farmhouse.

---

Mike stood at the empty water tank and a sense of urgency gripped him. It clawed at his chest like a wildcat intent on ripping him apart. The stones at his throat seemed to lick him with fire and he swallowed hard. He pushed away an image of vivid, lush green pastures with their horses frolicking across the paddocks and stared at the harsh, dry hillside. Far to his left, a flock of his sheep gathered near a clump of trees, and he could hear the horses in the stables kick at their pens and whinny for food.

A dragonfly appeared. It moved straight up above him, flew backward, stopped and hovered a short distance away, almost as if it waited for Mike to do something. But he couldn’t. The dragonflies would die soon as the remaining water vanished.

He had a bad feeling. Water was everything, and he didn’t have the money to truck in supplies. Not this year. His two thousand acres of land were worthless if he didn’t have water to last the dry summer. He took a breath, slow and deliberate. Worrying too much, as always, never helped. He had water. Everything would be fine, and he strode down the hill to the pump shed, convinced the breaker had tripped again. Maisie Jane’s shower would follow. Anna could wash the soap from her hair.

Mike pulled open the pump-shed door and stepped inside, careful not to bang his head on the low roof. His stomach churned. If water was their life’s blood, then the pump was at its heart. He’d heard of farmers leaving their land once the water supplies ran dry. But out here, he had been blessed. The Great Artesian Basin was an ancient and enormous holding of water, buried under a third of the Australian continent. It had been here for an eternity, and it would remain so. He glanced about the small space, to the pump head in the middle of the floor, and the outlet pipes that fed the holding tank up on the hill a short distance away. Everything was as it should be.

He flicked on a light switch by the door, but nothing happened, and so he clambered over generations of accumulated rubbish strewn across the floor to the circuit breaker and smiled. It had tripped. It happened from time to time. He reset the breaker and dull light shone from an overhead globe above the pump. He breathed a sigh of relief, and the churning in his stomach lessened. The pump would kick in. He leaned over and pressed the reset on the pump housing and waited for it to automatically start and fill the header tank.

A pump light glowed, one that he’d never seen, and his heart skipped a beat. He stepped outside and cursed in the knowledge he wouldn’t be able to fix it. The water level had fallen below the pump inlet. But how? There was supposed to be enough water to last generations.

He sat in the dirt, unsure what to do next. He didn’t have the money to drill a new bore site. The farm was already in debt. How was he going to afford a new pump that could take water from a deeper well?

Perhaps he had overreacted. It might only need priming. Even as a glimmer of hope appeared at the idea, it died. Inside the shed again, he shut off the pump, and wrenched open the top of the pipe that descended deep into the precious artesian water. He grabbed a graduated test probe on a reel, switched it on, and inserted it down the pipe.

Mike checked the circuit to ensure the water light was functional. It was. He unwound it bit by bit, down past previous water level markers etched on the bore inlet years before. He stopped at the point where the next marker highlighted the end. Mike stared at the light that would flare once the probe hit water. He unraveled the cable a tiny amount at a time and watched and waited. A quarter of an inch… Half an inch… the light glowed. Mike sighed. Half an inch. It might as well have been ten miles for all it mattered.

He switched off the probe and stepped back outside, up the hill to the farmhouse. He had no money to extend the pump. And without it, the farm would die. He’d be unable to water the sheep, and the horses, and grow their food in the garden. He’d have to sell the farm. Put their organic lifestyle behind them. He’d have to move closer to the city, away from the support network of the church for Maisie Jane. Anna would lose her friends. He didn’t know what he was going to say to her.

---

Mike entered the cool, dimly lit farmhouse kitchen and he threw Anna a half smile.

“It’s that bad?” She frowned.

He nodded, uncertain where to begin, unsure how to put how he felt into words that would make any sense at all. “The pump has reached its limit. I need to extend the inlet, and to do that I need to replace it with a bigger one, and we—”

Maisie Jane entered the room, and without a thought he squatted. She ran into his arms and hugged him. He closed his eyes. How? How could he sell the farm and move when everything they could want was here? He looked across the table to where a scattered array of church notices were, and he lingered on a recent one condemning the process of hydraulic fracturing to obtain natural gas from miles below the surface. Chris Owens had visited a month or so back and asked to lease the corner paddock. The church was against it. Against soiling the land. Against getting rich and using the money to spend on useless unneeded things. He chewed on his bottom lip and weighed up the wrath of the church elders against the promise he made to his Dad about keeping the farm. Either alternative had consequences.

“Mike?”

He stood and faced Anna. “There might be a way.”

Her eyes lit with expectation. She seemed taller. “What?”

“We can take up that offer from Chris Owens to put a hydraulic fracturing well here and extract natural gas.”

Her shoulders dropped, and she became silent. She shook her head.

He could tell she was recounting the church elders’ recent sermon about the risks of the deep wells. He had to agree. “I don’t see any alternatives,” he said softly and touched her shoulder.

She stepped closer to him. “Isn’t there another way?”

Mike couldn’t think of one.

“Your nest egg,” she said and looked at where the stones lay under his shirt.

“The stones?” His hand went to his neck, to where they rested beneath his shirt. They felt warm and licked him with fire, as if they sensed his dilemma. He’d alluded to Anna once that there was a cache of emeralds on the property, and joked it was their nest egg, their pot of gold that could get them out of trouble. But he’d made a promise to Dad when he was a boy to keep the knowledge safe, and not to do anything with them. They were magic. The stones at the end of the chain around his neck were a reminder of that day.

She nodded.

He had never considered the emerald mine as an option unless there was no choice. But the mine… Another promise… his soul was filled with them. He closed his eyes and tried not to remember, but the images from the past swamped him, from a time he was only ten…

How long had it been? The years fell away as he remembered that time, when he, Dad, and Lucky, their black-and-white border collie had gone out camping in the back paddock. It was just after Mum had passed from the cancer. Dad was still hurting bad; you could see it in his eyes. The pain of losing his best friend and the loneliness. But he’d pushed on because of Mike. Back then there was a small lake out by the corner paddock.

They’d set camp near the water’s edge in the small valley. A campfire crackled from the dry kindling. The air filled with spicy gum smoke, and burning ashes soared up into one of the darkest skies Mike could remember. They’d stared into the heavens and named one of the stars in the constellation of Scorpio after Mum. Dad had smiled and said it was nice and Mum would have liked that.

Lucky ran off when one of the logs in the fire exploded and a crescendo of sparks flew everywhere.

Dad called her, and when she didn’t return, he told Mike to stay put, so he could go and find her, but Mike had told him no. Mike knew what Lucky meant to him and Mum, and Mike went with him and searched for Lucky. It seemed like they’d searched forever, and it seemed like they’d stumbled around in the dark for hours. Apart from Mike, Lucky was the only other thing alive that reminded him of Mum.

It must have been about three in the morning, and they’d all but given up hope. Mike shivered hard from the cold, and he was tired. He’d fallen over a couple of times in the dark and cut his knee open. Dad was distraught. It didn’t help that he was slowing him down. Mike stared up at the star he’d named after Mum and asked for a miracle. He wanted Dad to find Lucky so he could stop tearing himself up inside. It was about the same time that a meteor flared across the sky to the south-west.

“Look,” said Mike and pointed in the direction. “It’s a sign.” He stumbled across the valley with no idea about what he’d find, determined that it had been Mum’s influence. He stopped at the hillside and looked around. Mike couldn’t see anything, but deep in the ground he heard a muffled bark.

“I found her. I’ve found Lucky,” cried Mike.

Dad ran to him, his eyes shone with hope, and he smiled and put his arm around Mike’s shoulder but couldn’t speak.

“Mum found her,” said Mike. “She sent a shooting star from heaven.”

Lucky had managed to squeeze through a fissure in the side of the hill and became trapped behind the stone. They dug away at the clods of grass and dirt with their bare hands, pulled away the small rocks until the opening was barely wide enough for Dad to squeeze through.

“Stay here,” he said. “If I’m not back in an hour, then run and tell Joe Pearce where I am.”

Mike nodded. Joe Pearce was their closest neighbor. Mike sat by the narrow cave entrance and stared up into the dark sky, to the star in Scorpio he’d named ‘Eternity’ after Mum. Soon enough, he heard Lucky barking at the entrance, and they exited the cave safe and sound. They all marched back to the campsite and clambered into the tent and slept.

The next day they went back to the cave and Dad took another look inside. He came out a while later carrying a kitten. They could never be sure if Lucky had gone in to chase it, or to rescue it, but Mike always remembered because that was the day they found the stones. Three emeralds. All had been together in the ground before he found them. Mike remembered his father rolling them around in his hands until he became light-headed. He had to sit down. He rubbed his head as if it hurt or he’d been overcome by something. He said, “There’s magic in these stones.”

Dad told him there were more down there. Lots of them. More than enough emeralds down there to make them wealthy a dozen times over, but that it would be their secret. Mike realized that Mum had been looking down from the heavens at them and she’d taken care of things in her own way. Dad made him promise not to tell. Mike did. Mum would have wanted that.

Mike shook the memories free and faced Anna. Over a course of twenty-five years the place had dried up and the dragonfly swarms had gone. Mike never saw them again, and like the water once in abundance, it too had vanished, leaving a dry dust bowl in its place. But the cave was still there with its hidden cache of emeralds. Mike had always wanted to go in and explore it but never had. He didn’t want to change any of the memories of that night when Mum had touched them all. He never wanted them to fade. From that day on it had always been a magical place.

He smiled at Anna with regret. “I can’t. I promised…” he said. “I’m going to see Chris Owens today and sign that contract. I might not be completely happy with drilling for gas on our land, but it’s for the best. Mike rubbed Anna’s arm and smiled. “You’ll see, everything will work out fine.”

---

Mike stepped inside the café, a small roadhouse on the edge of town, and he wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. The cool air from an overhead fan and the dim light was a welcome relief. In the far corner of the room, Chris Owens sat at a table reading. He looked up and waved. “Mike,” he said.

Mike nodded and walked over to him. Nervous cramps twisted his gut. He felt trapped as if there was no way out of his dilemma, but he assured himself this was the only way.

Chris Owens was a middle-aged man, balding with short-cropped hair. He wore a business suit, but his tie was pulled loose away from the top of his shirt, and it made him look less formal, approachable. He smiled and shook Mike’s hand. The grip was firm, confident.

“Mr. Owens,” said Mike. “Good to meet you.”

“You too. Call me Chris,” he said and smiled at Mike. “I hope you don’t mind meeting here, it’s a less formal, and we’re not about pressuring anyone.”

Mike nodded and sat down across from Chris. The tension in his stomach lessened.

A waitress stepped over and wiped her apron. She pulled out her pad and pencil.

Mike didn’t know her. He didn’t come into town often, and it had grown in recent years.

“Coffee?” asked Chris.

“A glass of water,” said Mike and smiled at the obvious joke. Here for the town folk water was not such a precious commodity.

“Two waters, please,” said Chris, and waited for the waitress to leave.

Mike sat and didn’t speak. A part of him felt uncomfortable, dirty, with his decision to come and discuss drilling on part of the farm. The other part said he had to be a realist if he was going to survive. His stomach churned again with uncertainty, and he sat with his hands under the table, clenching and unclenching them.

The waitress returned with two large glasses of water filled with ice. Chris pushed an empty coffee mug aside and frowned. “Is it that bad?”

Mike told Chris the story about the pump and the water level. He had nothing to lose being honest.

Chris Owens opened up a survey map of the land surrounding the farm. He tapped his finger on the area out by the corner block. “This is where we’d like to drill. It’s close to the road, so we won’t bother you for access. It’s far enough away that the noise will be minimal. You won’t even know we are there.”

“Is it safe?”

“You’ve got a young girl.” He looked down at his notes. “Maisie Jane?”

Mike nodded.

“We’ll fence it off. It will be safe. Nobody will be able to get near—”

“It’s not what I meant. Is it safe? The drilling? It’s not going to destroy the land?”

Chris Owens laughed, and he pushed his chair back from the table. “We get that a lot. Trust me. Hydraulic fracturing, or hydro-fracturing, is completely safe. It’s one of the cleanest and safest methods to extract natural gas. It’s great on the environment. All clean energy.”

“What about leakage? I’ve heard there have been problems.”

“The early wells were poorly designed. Nowadays we encase them in steel and cement to ensure there is absolutely no risk of contaminating any groundwater.” He slid a brochure across the table. “Take this. It shows our unique design.”

Mike took the brochure and leafed through the pages, filled with testimonials from other people who had signed up. There were pages of design drawings showing how the shaft would be drilled and fitted out.

“I won’t lie, Mike. There are always risks, but we strive to minimize them. I’ve conducted a geological survey of your land, and I can see that there won’t be any problems. So, what do you think?”

“Sounds good.”

“I’ve drawn up a contract.” He slid a thick wad of typed paper across the table. Chris tapped a spot on the front page. “Take a look. I think you’ll find that we’ve been more than generous.”

Mike leaned closer and glanced at the figure. It was much more than he’d expected. More than he’d average over five years farming. He’d be able to buy a new pump. It’d see him right.

“Well?”

Mike looked up. “It’s very generous.”

Chris smiled. “Take it home. Talk it over with…” he glanced down at his notes. “Talk to Anna about it, and see what she says.” He stood and held out his hand. “I’d just ask that you keep this between us.”

“Of course.” Mike shook the man’s hand.

“And it’s a minor point, but this is the best offer we can give you. It’s only valid for five days. I’m sure you understand. After that, I’m afraid we tend to reassess the situation downwards.”

“So how long before the drilling would start?”

“Well… we could have a team in place within a month of signing.”

“And the money?”

“As soon as you sign the contract, Mike. I’ll leave you to think it through, but from what I heard, it’s going to be a hot summer.”

Mike nodded. It was going to be a long dry summer. He felt it in his bones.

“You all right if I visit in a couple of days, Mike?”

“Sure.”

“Excellent. If you’ve got any questions, perhaps we can go over them then?”

“That would be good.”

“Nice to meet you, Mike.”

Mike shook his hand again. He sat for a few minutes and waited for Chris to leave the café. He leafed through the contract, but nothing seemed out of place with the offer. Things were looking up after all.

---

Mike stepped out from the café into the heat. He ambled down the street to his car.

“Michael!”

Mike stopped. He turned and faced the man.

Pastor Matthew strode across the street, hand thrust forward in greeting.

Mike shook the church elder’s hand. “How are you doing, pastor?”

“Always good, Michael, always good.” He looked over at the café Mike had just left and frowned. “What have you been up to? I heard you had a meeting with Chris Owens.”

Mike opened his mouth, speechless. It wasn’t any of the pastor’s business.

“Anna called,” said the pastor. “She said you might be acting rash.”

Anna? Mike chewed at the corner of his lip. Why would she have done that? “I was discussing cash options to buy a bigger pump.”

The church elder’s forehead twisted with genuine concern. “Problems with your water supply?”

Mike nodded.

“Funny, a few of the congregation have said water levels have been dropping. We did some tests, and found the water quality has degraded, too.” He looked down at the contract in Mike’s hand. “Is that what I think it is?”

Mike shrugged.

“Did they tell you about the risks?”

“They mentioned they have a new design,” said Mike.

“Did they say they pump disinfectants, acid, detergent and salt down these wells? And sand and ceramic particles?”

Mike cleared his throat. “No.”

“Did they say that the wastewater is stored on your land and contaminated with radioactive material, heavy metals, and other toxins?”

Mike shook his head.

“They will throw benzene and toluene and who knows what into the air and poison your farm, and they won’t care. Who knows what the risks of long-term exposure will be. Birth defects. Blood disorders. Cancer. Of all people I don’t need to tell you about that.”

Mike didn’t need reminding about what Mum and Maisie Jane had gone through. His throat tightened. “You seem pretty much against the idea, pastor.”

“Fracking is a problem.” The pastor pointed to the café where Mike had spoken to Chris Owens. “They are poisoning the land, tainting our water. The Great Artesian Basin supplies water to half of Australia. Here!” He pointed to his feet. “Right below us. It’s not right, Michael. It’s not the church’s way. God wouldn’t approve of this.”

Mike squeezed his hands together. “None of those things have been proven. Anyway, what choice do I have, pastor? I can sell up, move to the coast. Leave everything behind.” He squeezed his eyes shut. Fail. Mike took a deep breath, opened his eyes and sought for understanding within the pastor. “Without water the farm is worthless. Without a pump there is no water. Can the church loan me money for a new pump, pastor?”

Mike heard blood pounding in his ears while Pastor Matthew stood silent. Mike watched the pastor’s forehead twist as he wrestled some inner turmoil.

The pastor spoke in hushed tones, and his voice caught every so often. “A little for food, perhaps…” He shook his head slowly. “Charity has boundaries, I’m afraid… and if I recall, Michael, you have an outstanding debt with the church elders?”

Mike closed his eyes and nodded. The church and the community had pulled together to provide the money to pay for Maisie Jane’s leukemia treatment two years ago. But Mike had been unable to repay the debt. “You don’t understand, pastor. I have no choice. I need it for my family to survive.”

The elder smiled. “I understand, son.” He stepped closer. “You always have choices, Michael. I would suggest that you just ask Him.”

Mike stepped back a step. “But it’s not that simple, pastor.”

The pastor smiled. “You’ll find a way. I have faith in you. God works in the strangest of ways. I know the answer will arrive for you in time.”

Mike nodded. He didn’t believe a word of it. All the pastor had done was to paint him into a dark corner.

“Sleep on it,” said the pastor. “Do that at least. I’m sure your father would have wanted you to.”

Mike nodded. Perhaps there was another way. He stared at the contract in his hand without any idea what to do.

When he looked up, the pastor had gone, and the stones, millstones, burned with a fire hotter than the afternoon sun. It was as if they called to him, almost beckoned him to do something. But what?

---

Mike stood at the base of the water tank and rapped his knuckles on the side of the corrugated tin. He did it on every rung until he had reached the lowest; the one below the outlet, and it was only then that the hollow tone changed to indicate water. Maybe he’d be able to use a hand pump to scavenge the remains. But that didn’t help him. It only confirmed what he knew.

He sat on the floor with his back resting against the empty tank and stared at the distant hills. Two days had passed since his meeting with Chris Owens, and with it the final drops of their main water supply. He didn’t know what he was going to do. His flock of sheep stood idle in the midday sun around the water trough. Empty. The horses frolicked in another paddock unaware he couldn’t top up their water. It couldn’t get worse.

He tried to massage the tension away at the side of his head, but it made little difference. Chris Owens was visiting at four in the afternoon, and Mike would sign the contract, but he couldn’t wait. He couldn’t sit idle. He’d go now and get it over with before his head exploded. Pastor Matthews and the church would turn their back on Mike’s family. He knew they would, but Mike would rather keep his farm, and continue living the life expected of him. A lifestyle he loved. He’d take care of the family in his own way, and if that meant they would frack his land, then so be it.

He heard Maisie Jane and Anna laughing inside the old family farmhouse. It filled him with joy. Maisie Jane had been immune to what was going on around her thanks to Anna. He couldn’t sell. It was all Maisie Jane talked about while she recovered from her illness. He wouldn’t make them move.

They would find a way to survive on an old corroded tank by the side of the house, one that took water from the farmhouse roof. It was a small tank. The water quality wasn’t the best, and he’d need some of it for the sheep and the horses. There’d be no showers, but it would have to be enough for cooking and drinking, and the toilet. What was the old bush motto: if it’s brown wash it down, if it’s yellow let it mellow. He grinned in spite of his somber mood. They’d survive. They had to! It wouldn’t last more than a few days at best, but he’d find the best outcome he could.

He stood. He’d be with Chris Owens within the hour and sign the contract. He marched down the hill to the farmhouse and crept inside and grabbed the car keys, intent on letting Anna and Maisie Jane play in the next room. He didn’t want to break their mood.

---

On the way into town he took the longer route, the one that went past the bottom paddock where the hydraulic fracturing well was going to be sited. He pulled the car up on the verge and stopped. From the side of the road, the area looked picturesque. A small valley with gentle hills to the left. The quiet solitude embraced him. He stepped outside, and the morning sun warmed him. Sound pollution would probably not be an issue: it was a reasonable way from the house. They’d probably still hear something, but it wouldn’t be too bad. It’d depend on the way the wind blew at times.

Mike clambered over the fence, and it was as if it triggered the stones in the canvas bags against his chest. It always happened as soon as he walked the land near to the cave that the three emeralds had come from. Fire smoldered at his neck. He ignored it as best as he could, unsure why the stones always became agitated around this place. It was as if they had a life of their own and they yearned to be put back in the ground where they had come from. Mike would never do that. But he twisted his neck uncomfortably against them. There was a power within the stones that he couldn’t ignore. Dad had joked several times and said they were magic, and he’d said never rub them together unless he wanted to start a fire. Everything is connected, he’d said. Even the Poseidon Stones.

Mike had ignored the warning once and dared clamber into the cave. The dark narrow cavern hummed. All the hairs on Mike’s body stood erect. It was a magic place. Mike clambered out of the cave as fast as he could. Dad laughed when he found out, and had told him of a time he’d taken the stones out and rubbed them together. “You’ve never known power until you do,” he said. For years after, he laughed and said, “Don’t ever connect them. Keep them apart, like insolent children.”

Mike pulled them out, away from his skin and breathed a sigh of relief. He had to admit that they were magic. In their own way, they were alive. He’d never taken them out of their silk cocoons, never removed them from the hessian bags. Who knew what they would do. Fire? Magic? Either way, he’d promised to take care of them and the land here.

The once-wet depression was bone dry. The dragonflies that once hovered over the water pools were gone. Mike vowed once again that he’d never go. In the distance, off to his left the low rolling hills were already burned gray from the early start to summer. Nothing lived at this spot. The drilling company was welcome to it. He put the fiery stones around his neck back under his clothes and took comfort in their closeness. The other stones in the cave would remain intact, far enough from the clutches of the miners and their drilling for gas. It sat outside the drilling area, and that was all that mattered.

---

Everything was quiet in town, as if it slept in the midday sun. Mike strode into the mining office this time and asked for Chris Owens.

The man looked a little startled when Mike held out his hand and announced that he was here to sign the contract, and he didn’t want to put Chris out with the drive.

“Come this way,” he said and ushered Mike into a room. Moments later, a tall woman that he couldn’t quite recognize, although he was certain he had met her family years before, brought in the contract.

Mike signed it without any hesitation and sat down in the comfy black leather armchair.

“Did you have enough time to read it?” asked Chris Owens. His face showed surprise.

“Yes,” said Mike. “Everything was fine.”

“Any questions?”

“No,” said Mike. He waited until Chris Owens signed it. “That’s it?” Mike asked.

“That’s it.” Chris held out his hand and Mike shook it.

“There was one thing,” said Mike.

Chris Owens smiled. “Name it.”

“I wondered about getting a down payment. So I can buy in some water. Get that new pump,” said Mike.

“Soon,” said Chris Owens. “It’s normally about a week.”

Mike’s mouth fell open. He leaned forward. “A week? I thought it’d be quicker.”

Chris Owens smiled again. “There’s a three day cooling off period. You know, in case we find anything different from what we had initially expected.”

Mike frowned. “Different?”

“Don’t worry, it’s a formality. I’ll organize the team to come out.” He looked at his wristwatch and nodded. “There might be time to get them out later this afternoon. Tomorrow at the latest. It’ll speed up the process so you can get paid.”

Mike hesitated. “Team?”

“They’ll double check the earlier survey. Fence off the site. Get the dozers in.”

“Dozers?” Mike wasn’t clear on any of this.

“To level the site.”

Mike’s stomach knotted. He wasn’t comfortable with what he was hearing. “Why does the site need to be flattened?”

Chris Owens shrugged. “It’s what they do.” He looked at the wristwatch again. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another meeting. I can get one of the site guys to take out your copy of the contract if you like? Saves you waiting around.”

Mike nodded.

“I should be able to get him out today.” He held out his hand again and smiled. “You’ve made the right choice, Mike. We’re all going to get rich mining gas. You’ll see. You’ll have the best farm in the district.”

Mike left the office. He should have felt relieved now that he’d signed the contract, but he didn’t. Instead, an uncomfortable knot twisted in his stomach. Somehow, he had to find a way to make their supply last over the next week.

---

Mike sat in their kitchen across the table from Anna.

She stared at him. “So it’s done?”

Mike nodded. She didn’t look comfortable when he had told her. “I’ve organized a water truck delivery for the end of the week. We’re rationing until then.”

Anna didn’t speak. Concern swam across her face and twisted the corners of her mouth.

He frowned. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right. I just thought you’d find another way somehow.”

“What should I do?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s your farm. You know I’d never get in the way. If it were me I’d see if the church elders would give me a loan.”

Mike nodded. “They told me our credit had expired.”

“Still, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

“I’ll think about it.” Mike chewed his lip. The elders were quite clear there would be no more credit last time Mike had asked, although Anna wouldn’t know that.

Mike frowned. “I did what I thought was right for all of us.”

“But bulldozers leveling the paddock… Is that what you want?”

Mike stood and raised his voice. “I had no choice. We’re out of water. The animals are out of water…” He took a deep breath. His throat tightened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. I’m going outside to get some fresh air.” He walked around the table and ran his hand gently along the side of her face. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he said, his voice raspy with frustration.

Mike pushed open the door and strode outside. What had he done? Why wasn’t Anna happy? Couldn’t she see that he’d done it for them? What did she want him to say? That he wasn’t happy they were going to bulldoze the site? If only he had asked before signing.

A dragonfly darted back into the shade by the water tank. It positioned itself in a pocket of shade. To Mike, it looked as though the beautiful insect had minimized its body to the sun, and it used its four huge wings as reflectors. Mike couldn’t blame it. The heat was draining.

He remembered that the cave where the emeralds were located was next to the edge of the site boundary. What if they damaged that area by bulldozing it? What if they uncovered it? Goddammit! What had he done?

In the distance the sound of a hammer striking metal made him stop in his tracks. He looked at the time and realized that Chris Owens’ team had wasted no time in getting here. He heard an engine start up. A bulldozer. What had he done? Fear kicked in and he ran toward the bottom paddock as fast as he could. The stones around his neck came alive like wildfire.

---

Mike looked around, amazed at what he could see. The corner paddock looked like a construction site. A perimeter fence was going up, and men were banging in posts. A bulldozer was leveling the land nearest to the roadway. Ripping up the vegetation into a mound.

“Stop!” He ran toward the bulldozer and waved his hands in the air.

The driver of the dozer stopped and turned off the engine. He stepped down off the heavy machine. “This is a drilling site. You’re trespassing.”

“It’s my farm,” said Mike. His chest warmed where the stones were, and he moved them.

“I don’t care. I was told you signed a contract. You agreed to all of this.”

“I did,” said Mike.

“Well, then you need to get off the site. I’ve got to level it before the end of the day. The drilling head is being installed tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Dave!” The dozer driver waved a man in a suit over.

The man strode over and offered his hand to shake. “Mike?”

Mike nodded.

“I’m Dave Myers. I was heading down to deliver your signed contract. What seems to be the problem?”

“I just need a moment.” He turned away from the man and stared at the line of pristine hills. A dragonfly whipped past. He’d seen them do that a lot recently. They darted about, intent on their solitary missions.

Mike looked around, back where he’d spotted the dragonfly. It hovered in more of a dance than anything else. This was where they had camped all those years ago. Back when there had been water and the dragonflies swarmed the place in abundance. The cave entrance, hidden by a large rock beckoned. Lucky had been lost there … and where they’d found the emeralds… If he did this he’d never be able to take Maisie Jane camping here. He’d never be able to sit her down at a campfire and pass on the story of that night.

It wasn’t right, but he had no choice. He was as trapped as Lucky had been that night in the cave.

The dragonfly returned with another, and they hovered nearby. Mike watched the prehistoric-looking insects with interest. Dad had always called them the jewels of the sky. In the sunlight they dazzled. Their large green eyes looked like big emeralds. Mike touched his neck chain. They looked like the stones.

One hovered, and the other zigzagged left and right. It stopped and then flew backward. It seemed so random. The first one swooped over Mike’s head, made a hairpin turn, and they both flew off toward the area where the lake had once stood. Before, when there was water.

Almost in response to his thought, the stones flared.

Mike smiled. It was like a watershed. The tension fell from him. Why hadn’t he listened? Why hadn’t Mike taken more notice about the world around him? He pulled the stones out from under his shirt and removed each of them from their small hessian bags. Even through the silk cocoons, they burned in his hand.

It all made sense now. He turned back to the man who had stood patiently. There was another way. He smiled at the man. “Dave, was it?”

The man nodded.

“You’ve got the contract?”

“Yes, here.” He pointed to a spot on the paper. “All signed. Endorsed by the local company director.”

“Can I see that?” Mike held out his hand for the contract.

“As you will see, the area is ours now, Mr. Ironbark. I would like to respectfully ask you to move away from the site until we can put up a perimeter fence.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Mike.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m not leaving.”

“For your own safety, you must leave this area. It’s an industrial requirement. You can watch the works from the other side once the perimeter fence is up.”

“No, I didn’t make myself clear. This…” Mike waved his hands in the air, “…this isn’t going to happen. You have a three-day cooling off period before you can start.”

“Yes, but we’ve elected to start early. We’re happy with the site location.”

“I’m not. I have the same three days to change my mind.”

“I’m not sure. I’d have to check—”

“I’m sure,” said Mike. He tore the contract in half and in half again and threw it onto the ground. “I have elected not to go ahead with the fracking on my land. You are now trespassing, and I would respectfully ask you and your company to leave. Immediately!”

The man stared back at Mike for the longest moment, and finally he smiled. “Okay. I can see you’re not going to change your mind any time soon.”

“No, I’m not. Tell Chris Owens thank you, but I don’t need a new pump. Tell him I have all the water I need.”

---

Mike strode from the drilling and construction team. They’d leave soon enough. They had no choice. He made his way near to the cave and positioned himself on the high ground, where he had camped all those years ago. Who’d have thought it would have been the dragonflies that would solve the riddle for him. He grinned. Dragonflies were an ancient insect, and had taken to the air long before any of the dinosaurs walked the Earth. Dragonflies couldn’t live without water. They always appeared around ponds and lakes. He’d always seen them around the animals’ troughs, skimming the water’s surface.

And there they were. Not one or two, but hundreds of them. They hovered in the dry paddock where the lake once was. Like a sea of emeralds. Mike stared at the three silk parcels in his hand. Never let the stones connect, he’d been told. But everything is connected, and all this time the power of the Poseidon Stones had been hidden in plain sight. Poseidon was the god of water, and the dragonflies, with their big emerald green eyes had hinted to where there was water. Why else would there be so many dragonflies in abundance? It was as if they hovered and waited for him.

He pulled one out of the stones from its silk cocoon and let it fall onto his hand. He winced. It was as if someone had slid a rough piece of wood along the side of his head. The warm stone seemed to come alive. It pulsed inside his head.

He pulled out the second stone and placed it alongside the first. Pain shot through his head and it grew to a deep throb within him. His hand shook. He wanted to let go of the stones. They burned like nothing he’d experienced. Quickly he let the third stone fall onto his open palm before he lost all courage.

It was as if someone had smacked him on the side of the head with a brick. His heart skipped a beat. His hand felt as if it was on fire. He closed his eyes and bit his lip until he tasted blood and fought not to let go of the stones. He took a breath and braced himself, then closed his hand around the stones so that they joined. So they connected.

He thrust his hand out. The pain in his head grew and he doubled over. The ground shook around him and the fire seemed to burst from his hand, or the stones. A bright flash illuminated through his closed eyelids. He winced and shut them tighter. Still the pain continued to grow until he couldn’t tolerate it. He opened his hand and let go of the stones.

They fell, and the pain vanished. He opened his eyes, convinced his palm would be burned, but it was unscathed. He bent and retrieved the stones, one at a time, and he placed them back in their silk cocoons and returned the magic Poseidon Stones to the small hessian bags on the chain.

He glanced over at the spot where the lake had once been and smiled at the massive swarm of dragonflies. In that small moment, the swarm had multiplied and there had to be a thousand or more there now. They hovered over the old lake and darted in chaotic style just above the ground, to where water bubbled up from a rent in the Earth.

---

Mike and Anna stood in the bottom paddock, at the edge of a lake that hadn’t been there three days before. In that time he had unshackled the water pump and moved it beside the edge of the lake. It hadn’t been difficult to rig up the inlet to take the fresh spring water, and now the farm tank was full.

Mike watched Maisie Jane run in and out of the water and splash in it. A car pulled up by the road and a man stepped out. Anna waved, and Mike recognized Pastor Matthew.

He strode down and joined them. “I heard that you’d experienced a miracle,” said the pastor. “I had to come by and see for myself.” Pastor Matthew laughed.

“I told you you’d find a way. Your dad would be proud of you, son.”

“I’m proud of him too, pastor. Imagine there being water just below the surface all this time.” Anna grinned at Mike.

Mike grabbed Anna’s hand and squeezed it. There was more than enough water for the animals and the family, and Mike would be able to lavish the oak seedling they had planted. It would flourish.

Anna squeezed his hand back. “Would you like to come in for some afternoon tea, pastor?” She grinned again. “A glass of cold water perhaps?”

Pastor Matthew chuckled. “I’d like that.”

“I’ll grab Maisie Jane,” said Mike. He stood and watched his daughter stalk something near the water’s edge. He saw several dragonflies and smiled. One darted backward and hovered above her head. Its emerald colored eyes glistened like the stones. They made him feel more alive. More connected to the world than Mike ever thought possible. They pulsed with a beat deep inside him. One day they’d be Maisie Jane’s, along with the farm.

---

Incorporeal

By Mark Rookyard

I was there in the room when the policeman told my wife I was dead.

“A terrible accident,” he said. “An explosion. There couldn’t have been much warning, the particle collider…” he trailed away. “He wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

I wanted to shout, to scream. Instead I held my hands before me and saw nothing but the crimson carpet. I wept and wondered that even my tears were invisible.

I was there when Hannah told Lisa that her daddy wouldn’t be coming home. They held each other until they both fell asleep, their eyes red and their faces pale.

“I’m here, Hannah,” I could have said. “I’m here with you.” But instead I held my silence, ashamed and afraid of my condition.

I attended my own funeral and wept as the empty coffin was carried away.

“Such a terrible thing,” Uncle Joseph had consoled Hannah. “So terrible.”

But, as is the wont of terrible things, time passed and they became less terrible. Hannah began to smile more and Lisa didn’t cry herself to sleep so often. The trees in the garden turned a burnished orange and then powdered white and then a flushing green and occasional laughter could be heard through the house and it made my heart cold to hear it.

I should have felt joy in their happiness, but a man can turn melancholy, drifting quiet and alone in his own house, unnoticed and unseen.

Was I a ghost? Was I truly dead? Was this some kind of hell I had brought upon myself?

But I couldn’t be dead, could I? Did the dead eat? Did they drink? I had to do both, and then hide in the basement, shivering against the cold until I had digested the food.

“Lisa, you’re sleeping at your Nan’s tonight.” Hannah stood in front of the mirror putting on her earrings. She was wearing makeup and a red dress. The trees in the garden were heavy with snow.

I roused myself in the corner. What day was it? Every day merged into one when there was nothing to do but wander disconsolately around the house.

“Lisa?” Hannah shouted. “You going to get ready?” Hannah sighed and checked herself in the mirror, turning sideways to look at her figure.

---

His name was Steven and he smiled a lot.

Lisa would look at him with serious eyes and Steven would smile and tell jokes and help around the house.

Nobody smiled that much. Had I ever smiled that much? When they were out, I would go through the photographs and see myself smiling. I stood in front of mirrors and saw nothing.

“When’s Steven coming?” Lisa called out. “He should be here by now.”

I started in my corner. Had I fallen asleep? My head hurt. Lisa sounded excited.

“He’ll be here in a minute.” Hannah smiled as she washed the pots.

I clasped a hand to my head. Lisa liked this guy. She was only six. Or was she seven now? The birds chattered on budding trees and sunlight streamed through the kitchen window. The brightness hurt my eyes and my head.

My family. I had to protect my family.

Lisa was asleep when they returned and Steven carried her from the car and into the house. The sight made me weep and clench my fists.

I sneaked into the car and it seemed a long time before he came from the house.

He was evil, this man. An intruder. I wanted to kill him as he drove. No, first I wanted proof of his evil intentions. I wanted to know what it was I was saving my family from.

I lay on the back seat and watched the ghastly glow of the streetlights smear the darkness of the night.

Steven’s lair was a fashionable apartment overlooking a fashionable canal. I imagined pornography parading on walls and handcuffs hanging from bedposts. Instead I got an apartment that was neat and fashionably sparse.

He checked his messages when he got in. Five calls to his mother. He would ignore them and chat to women on dating sites. But instead he called his mum on his mobile.

He sat in a reclining chair, loosening his tie. “I do have a mobile, Mum.” He took off his shoes and placed them next to his chair. “Well, if you used the one I bought you.”

I looked at a bookshelf. He liked history and sports biographies.

“I’ve been out. Yeah, with a woman.”

The kitchen was tidy. The fridge had lots of meals for one.

“I’ve had women before, just never wanted to tell you about them. This one’s different.”

I could tell he was smiling as he spoke.

“No, just different. A widow. Poor guy died in an accident.”

I looked in the bedroom. Flowers on the table.

“One. She’s sweet. Misses her dad, course she does.” He laughed. “She’s great. Hannah. No, I don’t want to rush it, but I think we could make a go of it. Listen, are you going to be in on Sunday? I’d like you to meet her.”

My head hurt and my heart hurt. I slipped out through the door, closing it quietly behind me.

It was a long way home under dark skies and glaring streetlights.

I slipped into the bed as quietly as I could. Hannah rested her head on my shoulder, snuggling in and breathing deep. “Dan,” she whispered, half smiling. “Dan.” She draped an arm across my chest.

I smelled her hair and held her close.

When the first breath of sunlight touched the window, I went to see Lisa. She was fast asleep clutching a toy bear. I stroked her hair. “I love you,” I whispered. She clutched the bear tighter and smiled.

My hand shook as I opened the door. The morning sun was shining, and as I took one last look back at the house, I saw my footprints were already fading in the dew-wet grass.

---

An Indiscernible Amount of Things

By Gary Emmette Chandler

Outside there is only death. Wren had learned these words almost twenty years ago, as part of a nursery rhyme. Hunkered down in the passenger seat of the crawler, waiting to set out on his first assignment, it was all he could think. He felt small within the bulky white suit, each breath coming heavy through the mask’s filter. Reentry would mean a quarantine lasting more than a week. So far, that at least had worked; there was no record of contamination within Hub.

When the last set of doors slid open and the crawler passed through, Wren only stared without a word. He blinked at the sun until his eyes stung and began to water. Wren turned, then, to gape at the clouds. They billowed upward, dwarfing those in the museum exhibits, putting to shame the clouds in his head. Below, level with the crawler, there was just a vast, green expanse of thickets that rose and stretched about Hub. It was beautiful. Wren had to keep reminding himself that it was fatal, too.

The landscape moved along in silence for almost two hours, without a word between Wren and the driver. They passed abandoned cars and structures punctured by vines, as they navigated around dormant warheads, deep craters, and crippled, grinning signs. In the distance, a dark building loomed over the ruins, still intact, like the last bottle in a sea of glass. With each moment it seemed to grow, until the crawler pulled off the fractured highway and rumbled to a stop at the structure’s entrance.

The forward canopy snapped open and the two men climbed out, letting themselves down over the tall wheels. Wren held back as the driver approached the doors and keyed in the entry code, sending a signal to Hub. It was the only communication left outside their dome–just that request lighting up on a display panel somewhere back home.

As they waited for the Hub technicians to verify entry, Wren felt the terror all around him, creeping through the pale film of his suit. It was like knocking on a door two hundred miles away. What if the filtration on their masks broke down while they waited, as it had for the old man? Wren glanced at the driver. He stared placidly ahead, carrying only a latched tablet. Glass and fabric–that was all that protected them from the air outside. How could he be so calm?

Wren almost dropped his case when the steel doors unfastened themselves, peeling back to allow entry to the decontamination chamber. They stepped inside, and the driver tapped the lock, sealing the entrance behind them. Wren could see nothing through the mist as it pooled around their bodies, wiping them clean.

Once the second set of doors pulled back, and they entered the lobby, Wren stood silent, surveying the building’s floor. Piles of random objects clogged the hallway, nearly meeting his waist where he stood.

“Your contract,” the driver said, his voice distorted through the mask. He unlatched the imprint tablet and handed it over.

“Take off your gloves. Press here, and here, to verify that you’ve arrived and been let in,” the driver continued, gesturing as he spoke.

Wren managed only a nod in response, pushing his thumb against the lines that displayed his name and the words “Delivered.” The driver grunted and turned, pressing the lock once again. Wren watched the doors as they swallowed the man. He waited, and listened as the crawler sputtered to life outside the building and trundled away. After a moment, he turned and fell to his knees. For the first time in his life, Wren was completely alone.

---

The tower had been built during the war. Each building employed a series of ventilation systems, backed by separate fail safes. When the city died, and power failed, the structure fell back on solar energy to keep the air inside clean. Wren had to repeat this to himself several times before he could take off his mask. “You are safe here, Wren,” he said to himself as he fidgeted with the seal. Even so, as he set the white mask on the ground, he expected his lungs to fill and burst, to leave him drowning on the floor. When nothing happened, he took a deep breath and began to look around.

The tower extended twenty floors upward. In the final month before his departure, Wren had studied the blueprints at the Academy each night. Each floor measured about five thousand square feet, and had been packed with items brought in by the scavenger crews. Outside, the walls were covered by black solar panels, and each window had been reinforced with several layers of bulletproof glass.

Wren sat in the hallway, staring at the closest stack of things. They lay in pieces, in fragments spaced apart, as though the objects had forged the path themselves. The scavengers had been careless. And yet, how could he fault them? They had spent most of their time outside the building, where the threat of pierced clothing meant contamination, and a slow, wasting path to death. Tidiness was not their concern; it was his.

He sighed and stood, bringing his case to the empty room by the entryway. For the long year to come, Wren had been issued seven days of clothing to be cleaned by hand. Each garment was identical to the last: pale blue, with long sleeves and four stripes printed on the breast. He had also been given a stiff mat and a thin set of sheets, which he unrolled and laid out on the floor as his bed.

Wren took the hallway to the left, searching for the store room. The first transport was due in three months, but he had been assured a six month supply cache was already in place. It didn’t take him long to find it. The room was filled with jugs of water, cases of broth, and twenty crates of High Nutrition Sustenance. HNS was dry, bitter, and difficult to chew, but there was no threat of contamination, and it lasted almost indefinitely.

They had left a separate supply of water for bathing, along with a few jugs of soap, and several hundred small packets of disinfectant. In the room next door, he found a small bathroom with two dubious looking toilets set against the wall. He lifted the lid of one and looked in. There was no bowl, just a long, black drop below. Wren straightened up and walked back to the store room, opening a packet of HNS. He chewed slowly, trying to keep the bar from touching his tongue.

After he ate, Wren set out for the stairwell. With the tower’s remaining energy spent on the entrance and vents, the elevators were useless. Wren had to brace the door with his shoulder and press with all his weight to get in. The hinges groaned with age, echoing into the black distance above. There were no windows in the stairway, just old lights left along the wall like dead eyes. He gripped the handrail and climbed the first set in the dark.

The second floor was laid out the same as the first: clothing and bits of broken machinery covered the floor, shoved aside into rooms empty of anything except more piles. Near his feet a stuffed doll with red, curling braids lay ripped at the shoulder. He waded across the room, stooping down to examine a scarf, and then a small stone carving–pale, transparent, a short man with a plump belly. Wren placed each item he examined back among the heaps, tapping his hip idly, memorizing approximate positions and compositions, making minor calculations and estimates in his head.

As he stepped among these artifacts of the past–upturned tables and chairs, broken vases and cracked, ceramic bowls–a thrill swept through him, overpowering the fear he’d felt before. Wren had spent his life from the age of ten studying items he had only seen in photos, or behind glass. Wandering among the piles, he was mesmerized by it all, picking up an old watch or rusted necklace to feel the weight of it in his palm, pressed between his fingers. None of these things would ever be his, and yet–for this year–each one of them was.

Wren climbed six more floors before the dark began to grow. In Hub, there was always light. Another thing to get used to, he thought: living by the sun. Careful not to fall, he made his way down the stairs slowly, gripping the rail.

Each floor would have to be organized on its own, and Wren calculated almost forty thousand items altogether. To meet the deadline he would have to sort at least two floors each month. Wren paused as he stepped back into the main hall, surveying the room, and began to laugh. The sound startled him, crawling along the steel walls and spreading about his feet. He gripped his arms and stared out the tall windows of the first floor. Beyond the crumpled buildings and fractured highways, there seemed to be nothing but a dark, vast silence stretching out before him.

---

When the first quarterly transport was due, three months later, it was either a day late, or Wren had marked the calendar wrong. He waited in agony, avoiding his work–restless, prowling the floors, and peering through the great windows at the verdant landscape below. Clouds bellowed and broke, until they were swallowed by the darkness. He returned to his room in a sour mood. Had they forgotten him?

As a student, Wren had isolated himself with his studies, but now he longed for Hub–yearned to see another face. He wanted to hear speech, to know there was someone else alive in the world beside him. Wren turned over on the hard mat, begging for sleep to take him.

His dreams the next morning were broken by a low, puffing thunder. Wren blinked, then tore off his sheets and scampered to the entrance of the building. His heart skipped and hammered as he watched the crawler idle out front. He pressed his face to the glass, waiting for someone to emerge. After a moment, the driver dismounted, and opened the hollow at the back of the crawler.

Wren backed away, giddy, waiting for the man to approach and enter the codes. As the second set of doors pulled back, groaning, Wren rushed forward, then stopped and backed off a little, unsure of himself–shy. The driver peered at Wren through the white impasse of the mask.

“Your supplies…” the man said, trailing off, gesturing toward the crates he had wheeled in on a large dolly.

Wren blinked, and then nodded.

“Can you help me with them?” Wren asked.

The driver grunted in assent, and they shuffled over to the load. It was just as Wren should have expected: flats of water and soup, boxes of HNS. Hiding his disappointment, he reached up and grabbed a crate, then fell into step alongside the man, directing him to the store room as they went.

“How is it?” he blurted, once the boxes were on the floor. “Back at Hub. How is everything?”

The driver glanced over at him before raising his shoulders in indifference.

A look of pain crossed Wren’s face, and he turned to eye the soiled, battered shoes he wore.

“I just mean,” Wren continued, in a murmur, “if there’s any news I’d like to hear it.”

The driver sighed and took off his mask, setting it on the floor. Wren’s heart surged; three months of solitude made the man’s face a strange, beautiful sight. There was a kind look about him. Wren tried to smooth the mass of hair that fell in front of his own eyes, and glanced away.

“It must be hard,” the driver said, itching his neck where he’d removed the mask. “All alone out here, for as long as you are. The scavengers go out in groups, and only for a month at a time before they rotate. Do you ever wonder why that is?”

Wren grinned, surprised by the cadence of the driver’s voice. The labor caste wasn’t taught to speak like that.

“It’s always been like this,” Wren said. “And there aren’t many of us, just five at a time–one for each building. I replaced Sorter Kunin, when he–”

The driver interrupted Wren.

“Or maybe they just don’t trust you. A few of you alone for a year, with all of their things.”

Wren stood there for a moment, stunned as the driver walked back to the dolly. He dashed back, catching up as the man hefted another crate.

“I don’t understand,” Wren said. “What would we do but sort it?”

The driver gave him a strange look and chuckled. “What indeed.”

They carried the last of the crates in silence. Wren wanted to ask something else–anything–to begin another conversation, but he felt mute, unable to manage a single word. He found himself repeating his own words in his head, forgetting the man that still walked beside him. It was only as the driver stood at the doors, fidgeting with his mask, that Wren remembered his presence.

“I have to close you in, now,” the man said.

He paused, looking at Wren.

“You asked how things were,” he said, with half a smile. “They’re the same–bad for most of us.”

The driver hesitated, and then shrugged.

“But perhaps that will change,” he said.

Wren only nodded at first, then shook his head.

“Your name. I’ve forgotten to ask, again.”

The driver laughed, and Wren began to think his first impression of the man had been all wrong.

“Kai,” the driver said.

“I’m Wren.”

“I know your name,” Kai said, shaking his head and grinning as he secured his mask. “I’ll see you in three months.”

Wren stepped back as Kai entered the decontamination chamber, then watched, squinting through the windows as the crawler pulled away.

---

Wren had been born into the academic caste. When he was five, contact with his parents had been cut off and he had entered the Academy. At the age of ten, he had been chosen as Kunin’s successor. When Kunin wasn’t off for a year sorting, Wren spent his time with the old man learning the trade. It was an honor, but it had cost him contact with his peers. When the others gathered for sport in the atrium, or migrated to the commons to mingle, often trailing off to copulate, Wren would be the last one in the library, nose deep in a text. At the time, he had consoled himself with the notion that what he was doing meant something, and was greater than himself.

He couldn’t understand what the driver, Kai, had meant. There were regulations in place for his work, but they were no more strict than anything else in Hub. Everything has a reason: survival. That was the answer to every question in Hub.

Hub, as they learned as children, had been built as an experiment. It was a government project, an extension of the Mars Initiative, a trial for a giant dome on the red planet–self-sustaining, and sealed off from the environment, with an initial population of one thousand. When war came, and the germ spread across the country, Hub was the only population center left unaffected. The castes, the Academy, the enforcement sector–all of these were established at the same time. For each safe building beyond the dome, one sorter was designated, and replaced only at death. It was the sorter’s job to save the most important artifacts of humanity. When the items were retrieved, they were distributed between the upper castes. As each day passed in silence, and the nights stretched before him, Wren would remind himself of the honor of his task, like a lullaby, as he tried to fall asleep.

Even so, it seemed the floors rose endlessly above him, heavy with their things. Each day followed the same pattern: Wren sorted, and he ate–he defecated, and he slept. As the months swept by, he dreamed of the piles. They lay out in front of him in waves, writhing, no longer items, but people–naked and charred, reaching out at him, tearing at his face and trying to draw him in.

Sometimes, he dreamed of the old man. As Kunin spoke to Wren, he would begin to dissolve, crumbling at the mouth, becoming the things–the piles–his voice echoing in his head, “Never forget who we are, Wren.”

After the worst of the dreams, Wren would wake in a sweat, shivering. Unable to fall back asleep, he would get up and pace the floor by the windows, staring out into the darkness for hours on end.

---

When the second transport came, Wren worked quietly beside Kai, saying little as they carried the supplies. Once they finished, and the man was turning to go, Wren managed to say what had been weighing on him for months, in the silence.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me, the last time you came,” Wren said, chewing on his lip as he spoke. “I don’t understand what you meant about the Academy not trusting me. About change.”

Kai laughed gently and knelt down, sifting through a pile of items sorted into the most valuable tier. Wren flinched as he touched them.

“Do you mean that?” he asked, looking up at Wren with a blank expression. “You might not like what I have to say.”

Wren nodded. He didn’t care what Kai said, really; he longed to hear the sound of another voice, to keep the man in his presence a while longer.

The driver gave a heavy sigh, and seemed to be considering something before he spoke.

“It starts with our history,” Kai said at last, meeting Wren’s eyes. “It’s what they don’t tell us that matters–not the war, or the germ–it’s what happens after all of that.”

Kai stood up and started walking among the piles as he spoke.

“All we have are approximations now. How long ago did this happen? Eighty years? One hundred? They don’t tell us. It’s passed down in whispers: How they formed the caste system in the name of survival, arguing that panic might cause a breach, and contaminate Hub. That we needed order; a structure to maintain the survival of our species. So our parents put their heads down. They worked. You and I? We were born into the life we were born into.

“But what good are all of these things here,” Kai asked, glancing back at Wren. “We have everything we need in Hub to survive without ever leaving the dome. How does any of this enable the survival of our species? We don’t use it. They put some of it in the public museums, true, but most of it goes on their walls. Tell me, Wren–what’s the point?”

“To preserve our culture,” Wren said, after a moment. “To know who we were.”

The other man gave a short laugh and scratched his forehead, looking away.

“How could you know all of this?” Wren asked. “There was nothing that I read–nothing like that at the Academy.”

Kai bit his lip.

“Your predecessor was a good man,” he said. “It was wrong what they did to him.”

Wren froze.

“What do you mean?” he asked, very quietly.

“Wren, how many books have you come across while you were sorting?”

The other man had taken off his gloves, and traced the lines on his hand as he spoke.

“Hundreds,” Wren said, shaking his head. “I’ve made stacks on each floor. Books aren’t sorted into the tiers.”

Kai nodded, and began to pace.

“Auditors take note of the books, and go through each before they’re accepted into the libraries. Anything dangerous is incinerated.”

“Dangerous?” Wren asked.

Kai shrugged.

“Theory, history. Certain works of fiction. The sort of work that made Kunin see how wrong everything is in Hub. Twelve years ago, he began to smuggle in books like that. I’m not sure how he got it past the quarantine, but he did. When he wasn’t on assignment, he began reaching out to sympathetic individuals, members of the other castes, distributing and copying the books. Last year he was caught.”

Wren shook his head, regretting having ever asked the man anything. He was nervous, confused.

“They took the other four sorters off assignment and brought them out here, to this building–his building. They made the others watch as they stripped Kunin naked and pushed him out into the open.”

“I don’t believe you,” Wren said, as something stirred in the pit of his chest. “He was–they told me that his clothing was pierced in transit, that it was an accident.”

Kai looked up and smiled, then turned away.

“I drove them,” he said after a minute.

There was a long silence, broken at last when Wren asked, “Why are you telling me all of this? I could turn you in.”

Kai laughed in a tired sort of way, and looked back to Wren.

“You could, when you return in six months,” he said. “The other sorters would, I know that. Even before what happened with Kunin, they would have.

“But you,” Kai went on, watching Wren with half a smile. “We don’t know about you.”

Wren shook his head. It was too much.

“What are you planning to do?” he asked.

“To continue where Kunin left off. Wren–you must realize that none of us know what else is out there. We are led to believe that the entire world is dead and poisoned beyond our walls. But how can that be true? The world is vast, and within Hub we are slaves to the caste.”

Kai’s voice seemed to burn as he spoke.

“If we were to overthrow that, to overturn the caste system, we could build more crawlers–we could go farther than just these towers. There must be others alive out there, beyond Hub. And we could go on equal footing. But first, we need books. We need to keep the words alive, to reach others.”

He stepped forward and gripped Wren’s shoulder.

“Wren, we could be free of all these useless things.”

At that, Wren swallowed and turned away.

“I can’t,” he said.

Kai smiled once more.

“Think about it,” he said, and began fitting on his gloves as he walked to the exit.

Wren opened his mouth, but said nothing. He watched as Kai put on his mask and punched the lock, stepping through the doors.

“What else is there for me to do,” Wren murmured at last, once the other man had gone. It felt like the world and everything he knew was slipping away, piece by piece.

---

The moment Kai left, Wren found his head swimming with questions. How did Kai organize with the others without being caught? How many of them were there? Was there truly hope of another place beyond Hub that wasn’t contaminated? Wren only grew more impatient with the questions as each day passed.

Soon, he began sorting through the stacks of books with a new purpose. He sought out history books and works of theory with new interest, no longer sorting them into the piles. His studies at Hub had only showed him small details, never the whole picture, and it had left the past of their species obscured.

Wren discovered anarchism and democracy, socialism and slavery. He read about the holocaust and the crusades, the Cold War and the Great War. He discovered an endless amount of religions, and with each, the wars waged in their name.

The more Wren read, the more divided his thoughts became. There was no war within Hub, no religion, and yet there was a class system every bit as rigid and precise as those abolished centuries before their time. Which was better? They were safe within Hub, so long as they played the role they were born into. Did it matter if the privileged had their pick of all these things? Wren couldn’t decide.

Most of all, he yearned for human contact. Often he spoke as though Kai was there, making arguments about the caste system and staging debates. Wren understood it was mad, but it didn’t matter; there was no one to hear, and his own voice echoing about was all the reason he needed.

By the time the third transport came, three months later, Wren had come to think of Kai as a friend. At last he could ask his questions, and have a real answer. Wren waited at the doors, unable to contain a grin. As they unfastened, and a figure appeared in the receding mist, Wren rushed forward, embracing the man.

There was a shuffle, then, and the man backed away, waving his arms. Wren’s heart seemed to stop; as he peered at the face behind the mask, he saw another man–one he didn’t recognize.

The man wouldn’t say what had happened to Kai.

Wren sat on the floor by the entrance until the man finished with the crates and left. As it pulled away, the sound of the crawler seemed so much smaller, and softer, than it had in his memory.

---

Wren climbed and sorted three more floors in the next month. Even then, he was behind. He had made new calculations, and at his pace, he would only be to the eighteenth floor when the auditor came. Still, all he could do was move through one item at a time. He clung to this as he worked, as though it was all that was left to keep him from sinking into darkness.

He rose each morning to leave a black mark on the calendar before climbing the stairs to the floor he had left off on. As Wren sorted through the piles, doubt began to take hold. He was unsure of himself. Everything he had been doing made so little sense. Who was he sorting for? And to what end? Wren lifted a necklace from one of the piles and watched as it glimmered and burned in the light.

What would these things do for the people that received them? Everything he sorted would hang from necks, on walls, like Kai had said–like trophies, like severed heads. Wren cried out and flung the necklace against the wall, watching as the gems shattered and flew from their chain, cascading about the room. After a moment he fell to his knees, scrabbling to preserve what he had broken, to collect all the pieces, feeling as though he had taken a life.

Wren began to doubt each decision he made. Why was one thing worth more than the other? He knew the method, of course–historical value, level of preservation, the materials used–but he was losing the point, and his judgment was failing. He would try to read, but wouldn’t be able to focus. Instead, at night, he would walk to the great glass windows and stare out into the void that lay beyond. Wren would watch the empty distant black, just letting his mind go for a moment. There, the days swung round, repeating themselves like a strip of film.

---

August 13th was Wren’s birthday. He marked it off the calendar, smiling a little. There was a jar of pitted, preserved cherries he had found among the piles. He had read about them in his time at the Academy, pouring over the images longer than he should have, memorizing their shape and texture, imagining their taste. They were extinct, and if somehow they were still preserved, they would fall into the highest tier. Wren took a breath and unscrewed the lid. He had lived through the motions a dozen times in his sleep. After a moment he dipped his fingers into the jar and stuffed one into his mouth.

His eyes softened, then shut tightly, and he spat the cherry onto the ground, gagging. Rot filled his mouth, and he sat down, his cheeks burning as he sobbed, rocking, cradling the jar.

---

Wren was nearly half way through the sixteenth floor when another vehicle came. He was just picking up a silver hand mirror, the glass shattered, when he heard the ragged churn of an engine in the distance. The mirror slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. It didn’t make sense–the final transport had already come, and there was still a month left unmarked on the calendar. He dashed to the windows, frantically trying to place the vehicle that approached. Wren fled down the stairs, counting the floors as he vaulted a few steps at a time. Near the third floor he fell, wrenching his ankle and cursing, staggering up and limping the rest of the way.

In his room, Wren stood gaping at the calendar, staring at the empty page. It came over him slowly, the memory creeping up and settling around his throat like a noose: there were days, scattered throughout the long year, where he hadn’t marked the calendar. It would be the auditor’s vehicle, below.

As the doors of the building shuddered, creaking to life for the first time in several months, Wren’s knees gave out where he stood. He listened as the footsteps echoed through the building. Just one set, like cannon fire. Wren wondered if that was how his steps went as they paced around the building, unaware of themselves.

“Wren,” a voice called out. “Hello?”

The voice sounded his name once more, sharply. At that, the terror holding Wren in place broke, and he rose, sprinting from his room to the entrance, trying to ignore the pain in his ankle as he ran.

Turning the corner, he stumbled to a halt in front of a man he had never met, who eyed him with a look of distaste. He still wore the white suit, though he had taken off his mask.

Wren smiled a little and extended a sweaty palm. The man did not take it.

Instead, he turned away from Wren and began to stroll about the first floor, thumbing a noter as he walked.

“You’ve been on this job a year,” the man said, scrolling through a document. It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” Wren responded, distracted by the pain in his ankle, and the blood that pounded through his head.

The man looked older than Wren. His hair was dark, worn slicked back over his head. Some sort of jelly, Wren thought–something found by another sorter. Auditors were part of the governing caste, and Wren realized how he must look to the man. He had seen himself through the shards of the hand mirror, but had made no note of it; Wren’s hair fell to his shoulders, tangled and clotted, his clothing torn and soiled. He hadn’t noticed the smell before, either.

Wren began to smooth his hair nervously, pulling it back over his head and draping it behind his ears, imitating the man. He opened his mouth to speak, but all the questions–everything he wanted to say–seemed to jam together and catch in his throat. Only a hoarse whisper escaped.

He closed his mouth and turned away, shuffling over and pretending to examine one of the tiles. It felt like the dreams he’d had where he sat alone, surrounded by books, only to discover he had forgotten how to read.

There was a sigh behind Wren as the auditor muttered something Wren couldn’t make out.

“You need to take me though the floors,” the man said very slowly, repeating himself. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Wren said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I haven’t had anyone to talk to in a very long time.”

Wren took a deep breath, and began.

They were halfway through the first floor when the auditor stopped him.

“How have you marked the sections?” he asked.

Wren halted and blinked at the man.

“When they come to take it, they need to know what to take, how to arrange it. You haven’t done that yet?”

“But I can show them,” Wren said, in a panic.

The auditor sighed and shook his head, making several notes.

“You’re supposed to have that ready. You remember that, right?”

Wren didn’t know what to say. Again, he was conscious of gaping at the man. Of course he knew that. But he hadn’t thought of it for months–it hadn’t been necessary. He would have done it at the end, after everything was sorted.

He swallowed, then, remembering that several floors were still untouched. Wren looked at the man, and began to stammer.

The auditor cut him off.

“You’ll have to do it before the collectors arrive,” he said, with a sigh.

Everything the auditor said seemed to come with a sigh. The man looked perpetually tired, and there were deep lines etched beneath his eyes that Wren hadn’t noticed before.

“This time, just make sure it’s ready,” the auditor continued, looking down at his noter. “Once they’re here, everything goes to make room for the next load.”

Wren nodded, and steadied himself against the wall.

They moved through the rest of the floors as Wren explained how each stack had been organized, or pointed out a treasure of note, showing the auditor why a painting had been set aside in the lower tiers due to a gash in one corner, or why a dark bottle had been left to the highest tier: whiskey, dating back to the 20th century. The auditor rarely spoke or responded to Wren’s comments, but his hands always moved across the noter.

When they reached the last floor sorted, the silence enveloped them. He had shown the auditor the final piles, lingering where he had left off, clinging on to each item as though it was the last foothold at the end of a long climb.

The auditor sighed once more as he looked about the room.

“The piles over there,” he said, gesturing, “why do they look like that. They haven’t been sorted?”

Wren eyed his feet. His toes protruded from the worn shoes, and his nails curled back into the flesh.

“There are three more floors above,” the auditor said. “How many are unsorted? All of them?”

Wren nodded. The man sighed, and noted something. That was his role–to sigh and note–just as Wren’s was to sort.

“You should show me.”

Wren felt dizzy, but nodded, and motioned ahead.

They walked slowly, climbing the stairs and standing a long while at the entrance to each floor. Wren watched as the auditor took his notes. He knew, then, that he had no control over what happened next. He had made his case–had put everything he could into his work, under the circumstances. It was up to the auditor, now.

On the final floor, Wren followed the man to one of the large windows. He watched as the auditor gazed out at the wounded landscape below. Buildings lay spread out across city, submerged in the overgrowth. Wren cast a miserable look at the sky where the clouds grew dark and gathered in the distance.

The auditor spoke without taking his eyes from the terrain below.

“If it was up to me, I would never come out here again,” the auditor said. “You can’t go a minute without a reminder of everything we’ve lost and will never have again.”

He turned, locking eyes with Wren. It made Wren shiver.

“It’s your first assignment, and we had to start you before you were ready. I’m giving you an extension–three months to tag and sort all that remains. Spending any more time out here, alone, is punishment enough. The Academy won’t have any questions until the review. They’ve got enough to worry about right now.”

“Thank you,” Wren stuttered, after a moment.

The auditor waved a dismissal.

“Just make sure everything is done this time. You won’t have a second chance.”

He paused, briefly eyeing Wren.

“Clean yourself up, too. You were left with supplies for hygiene. Use them.”

They descended slowly, in silence. Wren’s head pulsed and pounded, and his ankle cried out with each step.

It was only when they reached the first floor that Wren found his voice.

“Back home, at Hub,” he said. “What is it like?”

The man stopped, and turned to look at Wren. After a minute, he spoke.

“There was a terrorist cell causing problems earlier in the year–riling up the lower castes, poisoning the crops. But they were caught, and executed.”

The auditor paused for a long while, looking straight at Wren.

“One of the men was your driver. Did he ever speak to you?”

Wren quickly shook his head. The auditor sighed.

“No. Of course not. Just keep your mind on what you have left to do,” he said, nodding at the unsorted piles.

The auditor discussed several logistics before he left, telling Wren he would arrange for another supply crawler to come through in a month. Wren watched as the man secured his mask, and entered the door codes, stepping back out into the antechamber. He was aware, then, of how dry his throat felt as the great doors moaned shut, sealing him alone, again, with an indiscernible amount of things.

---

Wren worked tirelessly in the time he had left. He marked the days off without error, flipping the calendar on its back to chart the time he had left. As he sorted, Wren couldn’t help but feel anger at the things as they passed through his hands. Everything felt different. He wanted only to have everything into their stacks, labeled and ready to be carted away.

There was nearly a week left on the calendar once Wren finished tagging all the piles. At the end of the last day, he sat down next to the final stack, holding a golden watch and staring at the broken hands. He didn’t know what to do, how to behave without the task that had become everything to him. Wren picked up one of the books and looked over a passage, trying to memorize it. Was that how Kunin had done it–how he had smuggled the books home? His head began to throb as he tried to do the same, reading one passage over, aloud.

“If all we are is our things, then perhaps that is it for us. Perhaps it should be.”

Wren sighed and stood.

He went through the stacks again to make sure everything was in place. Wren stood by the windows on each floor as he worked his way back up, watching for the inevitable plume of exhaust to come puffing toward the building.

He waited.

Wren tried to imagine what it would be like to return to Hub, to once again be surrounded by people. He laughed bitterly when he remembered that he had spent his time in isolation by choice before, studying, reading, and preparing for the task that would one day–always on the horizon–be his. He wasn’t sure he could go on, could embark on another year of the task knowing now what the solitude was like. But then, what other choice was there?

Wren thought of Kai, and pushed the memory away.

He sat down by the windows on the top floor and looked out at the forest below. It clambered upward like the air wasn’t poison, wrapping about the dead city, sprouting veins through its shell.

Wren stood and turned away, gazing at the tidy piles that lay gathered on the floor. It was all there, all sorted at last. They waited with him in the silence, those things–fragments of a history lost–pulled back from the depths and forced to linger, like memories, or ghosts.

---

Eggs from the Cuckoo Clock Bird

By Dale Carothers

Before I quit my job at Quality Vending earlier that morning, I was the master. I could sell snack machines to anyone. My waistline and my love for refined sugar were my arsenal. My passion for snack cakes translated into excitement during my pitch. My sincerity sold.

Until my sincerity turned to bitterness.

I still ate loads of snack cakes, but they didn’t do anything for me anymore. They’re just a habit. Like breathing. Like masturbation for the ever-shrinking satisfaction of release.

Repetition had worn me down. Eleven years doing the same thing every day will do that to you. When months started to feel like weeks, and weeks like days, I lost my connection to everything. Life was passing me by, but nothing was happening. Time moved faster than I did.

Now that it was over, I needed to retreat to a safe place to figure out what to do next. And that meant Grandma’s house. She used to host Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter, and she’d throw you a killer birthday party if you called a few days in advance. The whole family used to come before we all grew up and moved away.

I drove around a curve in the driveway and a gap in the trees revealed my Grandma’s house.

My mother, the real estate agent, called it a lovely Queen Anne Victorian. Three levels with a wraparound porch, a gable roof, and two spire-topped turrets. All of it was still perfect. Grandma had her house painted the same blue-gray every five years, and she quickly repaired anything that broke.

There were two other cars in the parking lot. One was a van for her in-home medical staff. The other was a broken down Kia: dented and rusty. I didn’t recognize it

I got out of my car and several cellophane wrappers came with me. A gust of chilly fall wind blew them into the grove that surrounded the house, where they mixed with the fallen leaves.

I crossed the lot and went up the stairs, trailing my hand along the spindles of the whitewashed railing. I stopped at the wide oak door and rang the doorbell.

I waited a long time before I heard clomping footsteps coming closer to the door. Someone fiddled with the lock, swearing all the while, and finally pulled the door open.

Shit. It was my cousin Cassie. The owner of the crappy Kia.

Cassie frowned. It was one of her two facial expressions. The other was…let me think…oh yeah, bitch. Frown and bitch. They were all she had to work with. She was dressed in a mismatched sweat suit, the top was turquoise and the bottom was pink. Her blonde hair was brown at the roots, short, spiky and angry.

“You selling something?” Cassie asked. “Because we probably don’t want it.”

“No, Cassie. It’s me. Paul.”

Her frown tightened and her lips pulled back to reveal her artificially whitened teeth.

“Your cousin,” I said.

“What do you want?”

“To come in and see Grandma.”

“She’s in the bath.”

“I’m willing to wait.”

She put her hand on her hip. “Are you looking to stay for a while?”

“Just this afternoon, overnight at the max.”

Her frown relaxed to her face’s resting bitch setting. “Come on in then.”

The inviting warmth of the oak foyer brought me back to my childhood. My cousins and I had often scaled the heavy bannister of the stairway, sticking our little arms between the spindles and seeing who could climb the highest on the floor-to-ceiling newel post. Nobody ever got past halfway. The citrus scented wax made it impossible.

Too bad Cassie’s dollar store perfume overwhelmed the scent of the wax.

I followed Cassie down the hallway toward the kitchen. Grandma had finally replaced the black iron, wood-burning stove with a modern stainless steel monstrosity. It looked like it’d never been used. Grandma hadn’t been healthy enough to cook for a few years.

Cassie went over to the microwave and punched a few buttons. “She should be done with her bath soon. Then you can see her and be on your way.”

“Am I in the way or something?”

The microwave beeped and Cassie pulled her coffee out. “No. I just didn’t want you to think you had to stay, out of politeness, because you haven’t seen her in so long. She has me to take care of her.”

“Doesn’t the home health care nurse do most of the work?”

She slammed the mug down and coffee sloshed up over the lip of the mug onto the counter. “I do plenty.”

“Sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t. “It was just a question.”

Cassie stalked off and I used a paper towel to wipe up the coffee. I looked for a garbage can and finally found one under the sink. I heard steps, and steeled myself for Cassie’s return. She’d obviously done little with her life, and I was sure I could find the chinks in her white trash armor.

Instead I was greeted by a thin young man in aqua scrubs.

“Hello?” he said.

I got up and stuck out my hand. “I’m Paul. The grandson.”

He shook my hand and smiled. “Grayson.” He retrieved a mug from the cabinet. “Your grandmother is done with her bath and dressed if you’d like to go up and see her.”

“How’s she doing?”

Grayson sat at one of the stools that lined the counter and wrapped his long, hairy fingers around his cup. “She gets confused a lot, and the machines are keeping her alive, but she seems happy, comfortable even.” He nodded at me. “She calls me Paul at least once a week.”

I let out a single sob.

Grayson stood. “Do you need a moment alone?”

“No.” I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked at the floor. “I haven’t seen or talked to her in years. I feel…”

Grayson put a hand on my forearm. “It’s okay. You still have time. Go on upstairs.”

“Thanks.”

I grabbed a paper towel from the roll near the sink, blew my nose and headed upstairs. The back stairway, leading from the kitchen to the second floor, was narrow and wound to the right. Photos of the family lined the wall in a mosaic of generations.

The second floor hallway was full of golden sunlight. Its rays were caught in the intricate curls of the silver damask wallpaper. I ran a fingernail down the ridges of the wainscoting, creating the engine noise I used to make with my toy motorcycle.

“Paul!”

I stopped. Did she know it was me or was she mistakenly calling for Grayson?

“I told you not to do that,” She called through the open door. “You’ll ruin the finish.”

“Sorry, Grandma.”

When I got to her door she was looking at my waist, as if she were expecting me to be a child. She blinked and looked up, her face crinkled in confusion.

“Paul?”

“Hi, Grandma.”

“Was that you out in the hall?”

“Yeah.”

She looked at my hands. “Where’s your motorcycle?”

I didn’t know what else to say. “I left it at home.”

“Good. You’re too old for toys anyway.”

She lay in a nest of tubes and blankets. Friendly white machines and screens with dancing icons surrounded her. This was her escape pod. It kept her floating inches away from death.

I went in and took her hand. It felt like thin sticks within a loose leather glove. Her grip was weak, but insistent and loving.

“It’s been a while,” she said.

I sniffed. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Sit with me for a bit.”

I sat and we caught each other up until she fell asleep. When I tried to pull my hand away she woke and her hand tightened around mine. Her eyes were distant, unfocused.

“Did I ever tell you about my clocks?” she asked.

“Yes, Grandma.”

“They’re magic, you know.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes. You told me.”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me. This is serious. It’s why Cassie is really staying here.”

“Is she going to steal your clocks?” I knew they were old, but I didn’t think they were worth anything.

“You’re not listening, Paul. You’ve always had trouble listening.” She sat up and I packed the pillows in behind her to support her back. “She’s here to use the magic.”

“Okay, Grandma…maybe I should go get Grayson.”

I took a few steps toward the door.

“Wait!” Grandma said.

I stopped.

“You don’t believe me?”

The disappointed look on her face hurt me. The keen edge of her mind was showing the first signs of dullness.

“I’ve been telling you about their magic since you were little.” Grandma held out her withered hand, and I walked over and took it. “Have I ever lied to you?”

“There’s a difference between lying and telling fantastical stories to entertain children.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why I was able to speak in so much detail about my childhood?”

“I just thought you had a really good memory, or kept a diary, or, like everybody else, forgot some of the story and used your imagination to fill in the gaps.”

“You’ve always been one of the smart ones.” She squeezed my hand. “It made everyone wonder why you never… went further in your life.”

I pulled my hand away. “I still have time to change that.”

“Yes. But will you?”

My face grew hot and I turned away to check the readouts on the machines surrounding Grandma’s bed. I had no idea what any of the numbers or bouncing lines meant, but no matter what Grandma–or anybody else in my family thought–I could learn them all and never forget.

“There’s no reason to get sullen,” Grandma said. “You have plenty of time to change your life. It’s why I mentioned the clocks.”

“What do you mean?”

“I remembered my childhood so well because I went back a few times, and then I made it easier to remember.” She saw my face crinkle in confusion. “Let me explain before you ask questions.

“There are two basic types of European cuckoo clocks. Traditional style cuckoo clocks are decorated with carved leaves and animals. Chalet style, both Swiss and German, look like little houses. There are Greek and Middle Eastern examples that predate the European styles, but all of mine are from Europe, and two of them are extra-special because they were made by Johann Franel.”

“I remember you talking about him, when you used to tell stories about your clocks.” I thought for a moment. “He’s an ancestor on your mother’s side, right?”

“As I said, one of the smart ones,” Grandma said, smiling. “Franel was a Swiss clockmaker in the late 1800s. But he was also a mathematician, a philosopher and an…alchemist.”

“What?”

“And a spiritualist.”

A long line of crazy, from my Grandma all the way back to Franel, formed in my head. I wondered how long it would be before it took me. Grandma seemed like an indicator of late life onset. But who knows? Maybe she’d been good at hiding it?

And maybe I needed to start doing some research into my family’s medical history, and then make an appointment with my doctor. I didn’t want to go crazy. But, then again, brilliant people often had a touch of eccentricity. That I could handle.

“Franel was obsessed with time, and as he got older, and less of it was available to him, he became obsessed with learning how to manipulate it.” Grandma smiled and let out a long sigh of contentment. “Lucky for us he was successful.”

Maybe I could say I needed to use the bathroom. It’d give me time to ask Grayson when Grandma lost her mind and what we were going to do about it.

“I’ve manipulated time on five occasions,” Grandma said. “Three times to go back and revisit my childhood. Once to prolong the time my memories are stored in my conscious mind–I know that’s a bit confusing, but the rules by which this magic functions are rather fluid. It turned out to be a bit of a curse as well. Some memories are best forgotten. And a fifth time, to ask for a longer life. A good manipulation, but one that doesn’t buy you more than a few decades.”

“How old are you?” I searched my memory. She was eighty-five.

“One-hundred-and-thirteen.”

I gaped and she raised her faded eyebrows a few times.

“I don’t believe you.”

“What? About being one-hundred-and-thirteen or about manipulating time?”

One presupposed the other so I said, “Both.”

“Fine.” Grandma said. “It looks like you need some proof.”

“That’d be nice.”

“Here’s what you need to do.”

---

I opened the door to the clock room and one of the clocks signaled the hour. A flat, rattling gong was followed by the two-tone whistle. I checked my watch. It was only 4:15, but as far as I remembered, none of the clocks kept the actual time.

Clocks crowded into every conceivable space, just far enough apart that each pendulum constantly threatened its neighbors’ territories. All of them were made of dark wood from the forest primeval. Some were chalets and some were traditional animals and plants. Patinated pinecone weights hung from chains made their way up and down on their slower-than-the-eye journeys. The cacophony of clicks, knocks and whirrs would drive me crazy if I spent too much time in here.

I located the two Franels. They faced each other: the female on the south wall and the male on the north wall. Both were chalets, but the female had delicate, almost patrician architecture, and the male had the look of a deep woods hunting lodge.

On a whim, I crossed to the female Franel, pulled out the little drawer and revealed the tiny wooden nest. No egg. Damn. I giggled at myself for thinking it’d be so easy.

“What are you doing?”

I turned. Cassie stood in the doorway, a book in one hand and a folding chair in the other.

I made sure to block the Franel, and its open drawer, with my body. “Just looking at Grandma’s clocks.”

“You need to be careful in here. They’re pretty old.”

“Oh. Are they valuable?”

Cassie stuck her book into her armpit, walked to the center of the room and unfolded her chair. I quickly closed the drawer while she set up her chair. She plopped down onto the seat. “Not to anyone who isn’t family.”

“But you said they were old. I’d bet there are collectors who’d be interested.”

“She’s still alive, you know. There’s no reason to go around pricing things.”

“I’m just making conversation. You said they were old. And you never know who’d be interested in old…stuff,” in my mind I hit just the right note of subtle indifference, “like this.”

“Whatever.” She grabbed her book from under her arm and held it up. It was a grocery aisle romance. “Do you plan on staying in here? I like quiet when I read.”

I looked theatrically at the clocks around me. “This room is anything but quiet.”

“A little white noise is okay. It’s like using a fan when I’m sleeping. I’ve gotten used to it.”

I paced, circling away from the door, and loving the way her face went sour. “Are you in here a lot then?”

“No. I read in all of the rooms. There’s nothing special about this one.”

“But it has the ‘white noise,’ like you said.”

“There’s a little too much noise right now for my taste.”

I made a slow circuit of the room and passed through the doorway.

“Shut the door behind you, please.”

I did, but stopped outside it, listening for the distinct three-note song that only the Franels sang. Grandma had told me that if the male and the female struck at the same time the birds would mate and leave an egg in the little carved nest. It rarely happened because neither clock kept anything resembling perfect time. Due to age, and wonky design, the Franels sped up and slowed down randomly, and sometimes stopped altogether. But if I found the egg before it rotted–a process that took less than a minute–I could step into a chronologically null place and ask Franel himself for a time manipulation.

It all sounded so…impossible, but now that I wasn’t working I had the time to check it out.

Cassie and I shared the clock room that whole day and into the next one. She stopped reading in there, possibly to throw me off the scent, but she didn’t make it past the library next door. Once, when she slipped out to go to the bathroom, I walked through the library and saw an empty glass tumbler on a shelf that hung on the shared wall between the library and the clock room. I didn’t know if the ‘empty glass against the wall’ trick worked, but it proved her intent, so I did my best to become a shoeless ninja; pacing the hallway, or lingering around the corner.

Two days in, after several strained, awkward conversations where we both tried to discern the other’s intent, I seemingly gave in and went to bed early. Neither of us had slept much, or taken a break to shower, in the past few days, and both of us were showing signs of wear. I made a subtle show of sneaking off to bed, but I was sure Cassie knew where I was going. There was no way she could win. As Grandma had said, I was the smart one.

Grayson avoided us, and we agreed to leave him alone.

Headphones in my ears to silence my phone alarm, I laid my head against the pillow in my dark room. My eyes were glued to the thin bar of light under the door and I was listening as hard as I could—an idea that sounded silly, especially with my ear buds in, but I wanted to win and sleep deprivation had made me loopy.

Three hours later I woke to the sound of my alarm. I pulled out my ear buds and swore when I realized that the alarm was ringing through the speaker as well. I clapped my hand over the phone and watched the bar of light under the door. It was dimmer than before. Someone must’ve come through and turned off some of the lights. I silenced my alarm, pulled back the covers and slipped out of bed.

I pressed my ear to the door but didn’t hear anything, so I lay down and tried to look between the door and the floor. Nothing but hardwood flooring, and a side view of the carpet runners.

With two socks on each foot to pad my steps, I left my room, sidling down the hall and then the stairs, keeping my breathing slow and even. At the base of the stairs I edged one eye around the corner. The hallway was empty, but a dim light shone through the open door of the library. I listened for a moment, for the sound of breathing, or turning pages, but couldn’t hear anything.

Until I heard the sound that signaled my victory. A snore.

I raised my arms and mouthed a silent yahoo!

Then the silliness of everything that’d transpired over the last two days hit me. Magic clocks? Sneaking socks? Competing with my bitchy cousin for a ‘magic egg’ was just a fantasy to avoid making a decision about what to do with my life.

I lowered my arms.

While it’d been fun to mess with Cassie, and to visit my childhood sanctuary, I needed to go back to bed, get a good night’s sleep and find a new job. All I needed was a bit of a change. No imaginary magic clock was going to fix my life.

The elegant ding of two gongs and a three note duet sent me down the remaining stairs and to the clock room door before I realized what I was doing. The door slammed shut behind me after banging into the wall. I flinched and ran to the female clock.

The faint sound of clicking sounded within the clock, followed by a delicate rattle that came to a rest with a little knock in the drawer. I tore it open, and the drawer came right out. Something fell out of the drawer, but I caught it before it hit the floor.

In my palm lay a tiny speckled egg.

Holy shit.

“Please, Paul.”

I turned. Cassie stood just inside the door.

“Give it to me,” she said. She was crying and her face was red. “I need it to fix my life. I can’t marry Jim. I need to go back.”

“But you’re divorced. It doesn’t matter.”

She took a step toward me, but stopped when I raised my hand and opened my mouth.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I need to go back to when I was young. Before I…” She looked down at her frumpy body and I understood. “Please. Give it to me before it rots. I don’t have much time.”

“Maybe I’ll let you have the next one,” I said, and tossed the egg into my mouth.

Cassie screamed and I popped the egg between my teeth.

“The next one is mine,” Cassie said. “And I’m going to ruin you.”

The door of the male Franel opened, and then expanded until it was big enough for me to pass through.

“Too late,” I said, crossing the room. “My life is already a pile of shit.”

Cassie sobbed when my toe crossed the threshold into the null space, and I felt a twinge of guilt. She was my cousin after all. But none of my memories of her were good, and her life wasn’t my problem.

The door closed behind me, and I was in the chalet.

A chill ran up my back and I shivered. Behind me, the door rattled in its frame, as artic wind whistled through the cracks. I looked through the window near the door. A long, snow-covered slope wound down the valley, just past the porch. Twilight had turned everything deep, dark blue.

“Come away from the door if you want to keep warm,” said a voice from behind me.

I turned and moved deeper into the room. Heavy timbers lay in an angled row against the ceiling, and two oil lamp chandeliers cast amber light into the room. Trophy heads and furs hung between paintings of hunting parties and somber portraits.

“I’ll be with you in a moment.” A chubby man in a gray suit crouched near the fireplace. He struck a long matchstick on one of the rough stones that made up the hearth and lit the kindling at the base of the fire.

“Are you Johann Franel?”

“I am.” Franel tossed the spent match into the fire, put his hand on his folded thigh and pushed himself up. He circled a couch and extended a hand. “You’ve had an encounter with my clocks?” He had a wide, round face and a luxuriant mustache and beard. His dark hair framed the sides of his head in odd oiled wings that reminded me of Civil War photographs.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you one of the family?”

I could only think of two people that I was sure he’d met. “Cassie Thorpe is my cousin, and Viola Grange is my grandmother.”

“Ah, two women that I know rather well.”

I knew Grandma had been here multiple times, but… “Cassie’s been here more than once?”

“Five times to be exact. And all for the same thing.” He waved his hand at the couch. “Please, sit down.”

I sat at one end of the couch and Franel sat at the other. The couch was a bit stiff and the fabric was decorated in what I’d always called Patrician Paisley. He spoke good English, but his Swiss accent made consonants sound extra hard.

“Why did Cassie keep coming back?” I asked.

“I find it impolite to talk about such things, but you are family…” He pulled out a locket, removed a red piece of candy and popped it in his mouth. He sucked on the candy, and it clacked against his teeth. I was surprised the bauble wasn’t a watch. I scanned the room. There were no clocks at all.

Franel slid the candy into his right cheek. “While you may only be familiar with one, Cassie has had…ahem…five husbands.” Franel blushed, as if he’d said something scandalous.

“Five! Really?”

He shifted the candy to the other cheek. “I am afraid so. She keeps trying to get it right.”

Now I knew why she was so obsessed. Jim was no prize. Though, neither was Cassie. I wondered who the first four were, but all I could see was a line of alternate Jims. Women like Cassie always gravitated toward the same kind of men. She didn’t need time travel. She needed to make better choices.

“So,” Franel said. “What can I do for you?”

Cassie was proof that time manipulation was something that required practice to master. Grandma seemed successful, but she’d had lots of time, and had eaten lots of cuckoo eggs. I was at the beginning of the process, and I’d likely need to do this more than once to get it right. I searched my memories for the pitfalls of time travel, as I’d seen in books and movies, but came up short. Now that I was faced with an actual offer, I didn’t know what I wanted. My initial thought was to slow my perception of time, to make weeks feel like weeks again, instead of days. To be like a child, and live in the moment, without letting it pass you by because you were too jaded to appreciate anything. But now that I was faced with the power to make it happen, it sounded like I’d be cursed with eternal boredom. Every checkout line would be an eternity; every long-distance drive would be torture.

“It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?” Franel asked.

“Yes,” I answered. I needed time to figure out how time works. And I couldn’t do that with Cassie competing with me for the eggs. “It seems like my cousin’s problems are more pressing than my own.”

Franel narrowed his eyes and sucked hard on the candy, before shifting it and saying, “Are they?”

I wished I had a piece of candy to suck on. It’d give me more time to think. “Yes. And as a member of her family, it’s my responsibility to help her.”

“How kind of you.”

“I guess so.”

“And there are always more eggs if you decide to come back.”

“Yes,” I said. Did he know what I was thinking? Time to change the subject. “So. Why the eggs and the clocks? Why make it so complicated?”

His mouth spread into a smile. “The clocks were an obvious choice, of course, and I suppose the rest was a security measure. I couldn’t have just anyone coming here and demanding favors. I needed to make it difficult to weed out the idiots.”

In Cassie’s case, he’d failed.

“And I fiddled with the mechanisms in the clocks, to make them run, stop, and skip, on purpose,” Franel said. “So that the cuckoos would rarely mate, making the eggs all the more rare. Too many time manipulations can get messy.”

I wondered briefly if I could get someone to fix them, to make more eggs, but there was a chance that it would ruin the magic. And I couldn’t let that happen. “Makes sense to me.”

“I’m glad you see the good in limiting the power,” Franel said. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“I need to help Cassie. Her life has been hard.” I needed to keep her away from the clocks, so her life was my problem, for now.

“Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s begin. Where do you want to go?”

“Midafternoon. Christmas Eve, Nineteen Eighty-Five. Grandma’s house.”

“Do you want to travel as you are now, as an interloping observer, or would you rather I put you in your eight-year-old body for a time?”

“Eight-year-old,” I said. “How much time will I have?”

“As much as you need. But, I’ve found its best not to linger. It may have unintended effects.”

I stood. “What do I have to do?”

“Go back through the front door,” he said pointing. “When you’re done, knock on the front door of the male clock, and I’ll let you through.”

I went to the door and put my hand on the cold doorknob. I looked over my shoulder. “Why aren’t there any clocks in here?”

“Why would I, of all people, need a clock?”

“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

I braced myself for a cold blast of wind, opened the door and stepped into the clock room.

Everything seemed so big, so far away. But soon I realized it was me that’d changed. I was four feet tall again, and dressed in OshKosh B’gosh overalls and a striped sweater. In my hand lay the toy motorcycle that I liked to run along the wainscoting upstairs.

All of the grandchildren were gathered in the clock room and Grandma was telling the story of her magic clocks. I listened, amazed at how much younger she looked, how animated her face was compared to now. Well, the now of the future I’d come from.

When Grandma was done, everyone filed out, eager to get back to shoving more Christmas cookies in their faces. Everyone but Cassie and me. She stood under the female clock, staring up at it in wonder.

“It’s all just a joke,” I said, nearly laughing at the sound of my voice. After hearing my adult voice for so long, I thought I sounded like a girl.

Cassie turned and scowled. She wore a green Christmas dress and a ribbon in her hair. “Is not.”

“They got me with it last year,” I said. We were the youngest of the cousins, and Cassie was a year younger than me, so it made sense that she’d be the last to know. “I spent every night in here, waiting for the birds to come out. I didn’t get any sleep and they all made fun of me.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“Robby threatened to beat me up if I said anything to you.” Robby was the second oldest cousin and the meanest.

Cassie rubbed the bruise on her arm. She understood the dangers of crossing Robby.

“It was mean and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

“How do I know you’re not tricking me right now?”

I managed to summon some tears and hoped that her seven-year-old mind wouldn’t see through the deception. “I’m not lying. Honest.”

She took my hand. “Really?”

“Yeah. Maybe we can think of a way to get them back.”

---

I used the next egg to solidify Cassie’s first marriage. I studied all the relationship books I could find, and befriended Cassie and her husband. She trusted me because of the newly formed childhood bond, and Tony went along for the ride because he was a weak-willed follower. At least he was nice to Cassie.

Over the next few years I stayed at Grandma’s house, acquiring eggs and making sure nobody else in my family used the clocks. If I was going to change my life, to become the man I wanted to be, I couldn’t let them get in my way. I helped some of them, but there were a few that ended up hating me, and I had to go back over and over again until I figured it all out.

Franel grew tired of me, and eventually, our conversations were honed down to a few simple questions. When, where and how?

At times, I struggled with my feelings about what I was doing. I’d manipulated the fates of almost everyone in my family to make sure I’d have exclusive access to Franel’s magic. I had no idea if I’d sent some of them to early deaths, sent them down the wrong career and relationship paths, or even manipulated some of their children out of existence.

To keep it all straight I expanded my operation. I set up my laptop in an unused, concrete-walled room in the basement, and ran hardline internet through a hole I’d drilled in the floor. I bought huge drawing pads, and graphed out everyone’s relationships, following their every move on all the social media sites, and showing up at every get together—no matter how big or small—to grill people about what they were doing. I hid my intentions behind idea that I was writing an extensive family history. Some people loved it and gave me tons of information, others didn’t care, and the rest didn’t want anything to do with the person I’d become.

I was every bit the disheveled author. Unshorn, unshowered, but packed with facts and wearing a worn blazer with patches on the elbows. I played my part and wore my costume, but soon I became the man I was playing. Every one of them needed my help, and nobody could make an informed decision. I didn’t know why. They had access to all the same people and information that I did. Maybe they couldn’t see the big picture?

It didn’t matter. They had me to take care of them.

My work grew more complicated, requiring more focus and finesse. I handled it perfectly, fixing my fixes, dealing with the unforeseen by going back with the advantage of hindsight.

Franel’s hostility eventually grew into full on rage, but he didn’t understand how much I knew. Didn’t understand how I’d refined the process. As I expanded my view of the massive interconnected web of my family’s choices and relationships, I could practically feel the new neural pathways being forged in my brain.

---

I ate the egg, my sixty-third to be exact, and stepped into the chalet. Franel sat facing the door. He looked pissed, but he didn’t say anything.

“I need to go back to Nineteen-Seventy-Three,” I said. “There’s-”

“I think you’ve done enough, Paul,” said a fiftyish version of my grandmother.

I never figured out how to remove her memory of how the clocks worked. She needed to be able to tell me about them when I was a child. There had to be a solution. I just needed more time.

“Can’t you see,” I said. “I’m helping them.”

“No. You’re not,” Grandma said. “They need to live their own lives in their own way.”

“None of them would’ve gotten this far without me.”

“Think about what you just said.” Grandma crossed her arms. “You’re not a god.”

I looked at the floor, scowled and then looked at Franel. “Tattle tale.”

Franel held up his hands. “I’m stuck here, and I have to follow the rules I’ve set in place. It’s how the magic works.” He pulled out his locket and tossed a red piece of candy in his mouth. “I needed someone who could get through to you. When your grandmother came through my door, I told her what was happening.”

“So, what happens now? Are you going to send her back to stop her from telling me about the clocks?”

“No,” Franel said. “That might be too dangerous. All of your manipulations have caused too much of a strain on the varied timelines resulting from your family’s choices. It’s as if too many threads of time have tangled together, and your constant attempts to reweave the patterns have weakened the fibers, and they are in danger of fraying.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I screamed.

“I tried to,” Franel said. “But you wouldn’t listen.”

I turned toward the door. “Let me get my notes. I’ll help you fix this.” I opened the door and was hit by a blast of alpine wind. “What the hell? Let me through.”

“We can’t do that, Paul,” Grandma said. “You’ve been naughty, and it’s time to take your toys away.”

I hurried past the couch and to my grandmother. “What does that mean?”

“I’m going back to your present, and hiding the clocks,” Grandma said. “The family will get them back after you’ve…passed.”

I gritted my teeth and raised my fists. “You can’t do that!”

For the first time in my life, Grandma slapped me.

“Don’t raise your voice to me!” She stuck her finger in my face. “Our family had this beautiful, powerful gift, and you’ve ruined it for everyone. Franel and I have been talking. The timelines need to settle for a few hundred years, before we can risk straining them again. And the timelines leading fifty years in either direction from your first manipulation may never recover.”

I slumped into a chair near the fire. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t going to cut it this time, mister.”

Grandma had always saved one for the really big screw-ups, like when I broke her favorite antique lamp while playing frisbee in the house. I felt five again.

Before I knew what was happening, Grandma was at the door with her hand on the knob. I got up, but I saw that I wouldn’t make it in time.

“You’re going to sit here for a while,” she said. “And think about what you’ve done.”

With that she closed the door, and I was stuck with Franel.

“That must have been difficult for you,” Franel said. He pulled out his locket. “Would you like a piece of candy?”

---

I stayed with Franel for a week. Playing cards and listening to stories about the family from way back. When I got restless, I strapped on snowshoes, and after Franel showed me how to walk in them, trudged the Alps of Nineteenth Century Switzerland. Franel had based it on his childhood vacation home. The rest of the chalets were empty and no ski tracks cut the slopes.

I eventually found the edge of the null space. It bordered the base of the mountain. I couldn’t cross the border even though it looked like the land expanded off into the distance all around us.

At the end of the week, Franel took me to the door.

“It’s been nice having company for a little while,” Franel said.

“I thought you hated me for what I did.”

“I can’t hate you. I made the same mistakes.” Franel pulled out a handkerchief and wiped tears from his eyes. “I can’t go back to my own timeline, for fear of destroying it. The world you see around you is both a comfort and a painful reminder of a place I can no longer go.”

Franel hugged me, and offered me another piece of candy. It was awful, and I had no idea why he ate it, so I refused.

“Goodbye, Great to the Nth power Grandpa.”

“And goodbye to you, little grandson.”

I stepped through the door into the clock room. I hadn’t come through the male clock, but the door to the room instead. There were two blank spots where the Franels used to be. Before I left the room I checked every other clock. Just to be sure. But I could tell, by craftsmanship alone, that none of them were Franels.

I searched the house, and ended up in Grandma’s room.

“You’ll never find them,” she said. “They are in a safe deposit box, in another country. And according to the lawyer I hired, they can’t be opened for two hundred years.”

I turned, ready to begin another search.

“You’ll never find the paperwork either,” Grandma said. “In my age-addled state, I accidentally used them for kindling in the front room fireplace.”

“Fine,” I said, crossing my arms.

“It’s been nice of you to visit, but I think it’s time you went home and got on with your life.”

“Okay,” I said. I went over and kissed her on the forehead, and she smiled at me.

“It’s up to you to make something of yourself. No cheating. No manipulations. Just hard work.”

“Okay, Grandma.”

As I walked down the hallway, I trailed my fingernail along the wainscoting.

“Knock it off, Paul. Don’t make me tell you gain.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s alright, Paul. It’ll all be alright, if you just do what I said.”

I packed my things, loaded them into my car and drove down the gravel drive to the highway. I pulled out and merged with the traffic. A pretty woman in an SUV, in the next lane, looked over at me and smiled.

I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t a family member from the future, coming back to make sure I behaved myself. Or, maybe it was the guy driving the Jeep, or the guy on the corner.

It didn’t matter. I’d never let them beat me.

---

Aberrations

By J.A. Becker

Nina disgusts me. I don’t tell her this though; it would crush her. She was beautiful: creamy smooth skin, ocean blue eyes, raven black hair, and a body to die for–a real hourglass figure.

But now every imperfection of hers is somehow magnified. The tiny divot in the center of her nose, which I found so cute before, is like a crater on the moon. Her eyes aren’t symmetrical either; one is actually quite bigger than the other. Her breasts are sagging, not at all upturned like they used to be. And there’s a thick layer of fat overflowing her hips that I never noticed till now, making her body more pear shaped than anything.

I am nothing to look at. Far from it. I’m a white-haired, gangly, ugly thing, so I am the last person in the world to criticize anything, but for some reason this is what I see when I look at her. When I look at everything, in fact.

The redheaded nurse is a freckled nightmare; the hospital bed sheets have a dozen disgusting stains on them, though Nina swears they’re perfectly clean; the overhead lights buzz and flicker terribly, which nobody seems to notice but me; and the yellow paint on the walls isn’t finished properly, enormous spots are missed down by the baseboards leaving the white drywall to shine through. It’s all so hideous I can barely stand it.

The procedure hasn’t worked as far as I can tell: I can’t do calculations any faster, my memory seems the same, and I am no closer to solving the same theories I was baffled with before. All that’s changed is I’ve somehow become hypersensitive to my surroundings, every little fault pops out as though it were under a microscope.

The thought has painfully crossed my mind maybe a dozen times now that something may have gone wrong. Did the monkeys’ heads hurt this much when I performed the procedure on them? They were rather ornery after, but was it this bad? And what about this propensity for seeing nothing but faults? Is that normal or a sign the formula is incompatible with the human brain?

I desperately want to get back to the lab. Every minuscule change taking place in my brain is of the utmost importance to track and record for posterity. But here I lie in frustration on this lumpy hospital bed, bored to tears and playing a memory card game on my iPad because I promised Nina I would stay till the doctors cleared me.

Something catches my eye. I look over the iPad at my bare feet and see two thin, curved sticks poking out from the top of my right foot, like my big toe grew antennas. I lie the tablet down on my chest and stare closer. They’re moving I notice, twitching in fact. I shift my foot a little and a huge wasp’s head connected to the antennas peaks out from behind my big toe. He’s the size of my foot. I can see his striped black and yellow abdomen sticking out from my behind heel. The sharp ends of his legs scrape across the soft skin of my foot’s arch, sending a shiver rippling through me. Frozen in shock, I stare at the thing.

Then I let out a shriek and a mad buzzing fills the air. He springs up and hovers over my stomach. He’s a monster, just over a foot tall and six inches wide. A long black stinger descends from the bottom of his swelled abdomen and drips amber fluid onto the bedspread.

He flies closer to my face, and I react and swat at him with my iPad. Catching him dead on, the screen shatters and his body blasts into the wall with a sticky, wet splat. Then he slides to the floor, leaving a thin red trail as he goes.

He angrily buzzes and rattles about beneath my bed. Not yet dead, but dying.

I scream for the nurse. My pulse thunders in my chest and I break out in a cold sweat. My God, I think, his mandibles were big enough to lop off my toe with a single bite. How is that possible?

Red bursts in, her wide eyes flare about. Her freckled face is a measles outbreak.

“What’s the matter?” she demands.

“Goddammit, there!” I say while pointing to the floor, completely amazed she hasn’t seen what’s right at her feet.

“What?” she says, staring at the ground and raising her hands in confusion. “I don’t see it. What is it?”

“You dumb ginger,” I say and roll to the side of the bed, so I can point directly at the thing. “There!”

It’s dead now. Curled up into a ball by the poorly painted cream baseboards.

“A giant wasp!” I exclaim. “Don’t you see it!?”

“Oh, of course.” She says. “We’ll take care of it right away.” And with that, she bustles out of the room.

My head has swelled during this insanity and it feels like my skull will split open from the pressure. The room swims a little and I lie back on my bed, breathing heavily.

Nuclear medicine, I think. Somehow that wasp got into the hospital’s nuclear imaging system, was infused with gamma rays, and grew gargantuan in the process. It’s so damn ridiculous when I think about it–it’s like something out of a comic book–but that’s the only explanation I can think of.

My doctor sweeps in through the door. The hairs of his toupee are blond push-broom bristles that are combed flat to one side, a pimple on his cheek has grown into the category of a cyst, one eye is a darker color than the other, and on and on the minutiae of his faults go.

“Grant,” he says. “How are you feeling?” He takes his pen light from the pocket of his terribly wrinkled doctor’s coat and shines it in my eyes.

“Goddammit,” I say, brushing his hands from my face. “Don’t you see it?” Again, I point at the thing.

He doesn’t follow my finger.

“Grant,” he says. “What year is it?”

And then I go a little ape.

“There!” I shout. “There you ignoramus!”

Finally, he follows my finger to the floor, but not a bit of surprise crosses his face.

All of a sudden, I feel water running in my head and a rush of darkness swallows me.

---

Blood drips from the razor-thin line I cut across my forehead. I dab at the incision, turning the toilet paper a deep red Rorschach.

My bruised over eyes are blue baboon lips. I can barely see between the slits. Unable to stand my visage, I turn from the bathroom mirror.

Little vignettes of the procedure play in my mind. The cold metal slab touching my back. The robotic arm with a silver scalpel slicing open my brow. The circular saw buzzing through my forehead. A sudden gush of hot fluid filling my skull as my formula was pumped in.

I reasoned that if man can use drugs to increase muscle mass, bone marrow, white blood cells, and lung capacity; thereby, increasing his strength and endurance, then cannot a drug be invented to grow the neural pathways of the brain and increase intelligence? Would not a brain with more neural pathways think faster, better, and remember more than one with less?

The monkeys I experimented on certainly showed that to be true. They went from drooling morons that eat their own feces to quiet, contemplative creatures that signed for food.

It was a breakthrough, one I desperately sought as I’d been suffering for far too long in the shadows of obscurity. I figured that with one more courageous push I could show the world that the same could be done for the human mind. It would be a quantum leap forward for mankind and would smash my name into history with such force that all would remember me long after I was gone.

I grip the sides of the white porcelain sink and watch the water stream from the tap and spiral noisily into the drain.

Have I gone mad? I wonder. That wasp thing was real, saw it with my own eyes, killed it with my own hands.

But then why can no one else see it? Not even Nina.

“How is everything going in there Mr. Hopsinger?” The nurse shouts through the bathroom door, knocking my train of thoughts off its clattering tracks.

“Give me a second!” I say.

The door latch clicks open and her measly face pokes in.

“Everything OK, Mr. Hopsinger?” she asks. Her blue scrubs have faded with the million washes they’ve been through, yet a bright green stain is on her shoulder. Couldn’t she see that when she put that on? If that were me, I would have thrown it away and worn something else. It’s awful to look at, like a hunk of booger melted on her shoulder. Deplorable.

“I’m fine!” I hiss.

I see Nina looking in over her shoulder. Her face is pinched with worry.

“I’m fine,” I say to the both of them. “Really, I’m fine.”

The nurse pushes the door open and bright light washes into the room, searing my eyes, making me squint.

“I haven’t finished,” I protest, but the floor shifts beneath my feet and I have to grab the walls for support. The nurse and Nina spring to my side and help me into the bed.

“When can I leave?” I say after Nina pulls the covers up to my neck, like I’m a child being tucked in for the night. “I must get back to my lab. It’s been two days already and that’s two days worth of valuable data I’ve already lost.”

“We haven’t got the test results from the spinal tap,” the nurse replies.

“It’s not meningitis you fools!” I shout. “It’s encephalization, purposeful encephalization.”

That registers nothing but a blank expression on her ugly face.

I turn to Nina and squeeze her hand pleadingly. “Please Nina let me go. There is nothing they can do for me. They don’t have the knowledge or the equipment. Let me go back to the lab. Please?”

“Grant,” she says and squeezes my hand back warmly. “Please stay Grant.”

More than anything in this world I love this woman and my resolve to leave this place melts at her touch.

“OK,” I sigh. “I’ll stay and suffer these fools for you.”

An unprofessional flash of fury crosses the nurse’s face, every freckle briefly flickers red. She didn’t like being called a fool, not one bit.

“Look hun,” I say to her. “Isn’t there a bed pan that needs changing somewhere?”

“Yes of course,” she says and leaves, closing the door to my room with a gentle slam.

“Grant!” Nina says sharply. “Do you have to be so cruel? She’s just trying to help.”

The rims of Nina’s eyes swell and redden. Wet, salty globules begin to trundle down her face. I can barely look her.

“Dammit Nina! This is nothing to cry over. How do you think Jonas Salk invented a vaccination for polio? He had to use it on himself because no one would volunteer to be a test subject. If he hadn’t, we’d be all crawling around with atrophied legs dragging behind us. Testing monkey brains can only take you so far. Can’t you see that? Can’t you understand that?”

I’ve worked myself up into a hell of a fervor. My whole body tingles and my breath comes in ragged gasps.

“No,” Nina says. “I don’t understand how you can risk your life for this.”

“That’s because you have no ambition! You have no drive! You don’t know what it’s like to be consumed by something, to feel something like this burning in your veins. To move forward into greatness, there must be sacrifices. My goal is no less than eliminating the ignorance of mankind. Everything else takes a back seat to that, including my safety.”

I have to stop because the room is spinning again and my breath is falling short. I lie back and look at my chest, rapidly swelling and deflating. I’m tired now. My eyes begin to droop uncontrollably and I drift off to the sound of her sobbing.

---

I welcome the night. It washes the faults away. When I look at the ceiling, I don’t see uneven, asymmetrical tiles with brackish stains–I just see a dark ceiling. And the walls aren’t covered with filth and painted poorly; they’re just dark walls.

Nina is right. Something has changed inside me. When I think of how I was before this, I remember being nicer, more even-tempered, happier too. Perhaps, the new pathways growing in my frontal lobe have affected my personality. I recall my studies about how lobotomy patients became listless and apathetic after their pathways were severed. What I’ve done is the very reverse of a lobotomy, so perhaps it’s pushed my personality in the other direction. Instead of listless, I’ve become active, animated, irritable.

A shadow splashes through the pool of moonlight on the wall, startling me. A bat, I think. But no, a bat couldn’t disturb that much light–something larger.

The window creaks at the foot of the bed and my body goes rigid with fright. I see two grey hands beneath the sill, slowly lifting it up.

I must be asleep and dreaming because we’re ten stories up, but the pounding in my head and heart tell me I’m awake and that this is real.

The window slides upwards and frigid night air pours through, quickly filling the room. Goosebumps ripple on my skin and a cold, icy lump sticks in my throat.

A head appears in the opening. Two milk-white eyes regard me from across the room. I can feel them, running over every inch of my body. A long arm reaches through the window and grabs the radiator below the sill. Whatever it is, it’s climbing in.

My body roils in revolt, tries to get free, yet the restraints hold me still.

He climbs in, stands at the foot of my bed, and smiles. His two eyes are clear moons and his teeth are shrunken corn kernels. He’s wearing a trench coat so rotted and frayed it’s like a lace cape. Open at the middle, I can see his thin, mummylike form beneath the coat. His skin is grey and is stretched so tight across his body that every bone, rib, and joint is visible. Even from this distance I can smell him: stale, wet earth; the smell of compost.

He smiles impossibly wide and my whole being runs cold.

“Nurse!” I scream. “Nurse! Help me! Nina! Somebody!”

I shriek and shriek, but not a soul comes.

He slinks up to the side of the bed and leans in. His breath is like gasoline fumes and my eyes water. He reaches out and taps my forehead with one of his long, pointed fingers.

My skull is so tender the tapping sends fireworks sizzling across my vision. I thrash my head from side to side to get away from his vicious claw.

He pulls his hand back and points to his huge milky eye. He’s trying to convey something, I realize, but I haven’t a goddamn clue what it is.

A loud click of the lock makes him snap his head towards the door. Light spills into the room as the nurse pokes her head in; annoyance is plain on her ugly face.

He slinks along the walls in the shadows, stops near the window, and turns to give me one last look.

Hate is in those eyes, pure burning malevolence.

Then with a breath he’s gone.

---

I was screeching and kicking up such a mad fit that the nurse fired me full of tranquilizers. Then she treated the rope burns on my wrists and ankles that I got from twisting in the restraints, cinched them back up, and left.

The drugs have made my mind and heart run still, and I can think clearly without everything boiling over in my mind. With a kind of drug-induced clinical detachment, I begin to analyze myself.

I fully realize that it’s well within the realms of possibility that I could be quite mad. If I was back in my practice and listening to a patient describe the things I’ve seen and thought, I’d have the DSM-5 in hand and I’d be checking off all the tickboxes in the psychosis table: hallucinations (check), thought disorders (check), poor social interactions (check), personality changes (check).

But, the left half of my brain interjects, the fact that I can consider these things, think them through rationally like this negates a diagnosis of madness. Remember the axiom: only a madman thinks he’s sane and only a sane man would consider he’s mad. I still have my wits and I can still step back from my situation and examine myself soberly, ergo I’m not mad.

The creatures though, the right side of my brain says, the sounds and the smells of them say that I am. In fact, they scream it.

Tears are running down my cheeks and into the pillow, turning it into a soggy, cold sack beneath my head. My mind may be detached, but my body is being torn apart by the emotions of this argument.

I suck in the icy liquid in my nose and swallow it with a gulp. I give myself a solid shake and flex my wrists against the restraints. I must continue. Everything depends on it.

If I am truly mad, the right half of my brain continues, then it is the formula that’s caused this. It could be triggering an excess of dopaminergic signaling, common in schizophrenia, and that’s why I’m seeing these full-on, whizz-bang delusions. If that is the case, then it could be easily treated with drugs. I, in fact, could treat myself; probably much better than these idiots here.

But passing these things off as simple delusions just doesn’t feel right, the left side of my mind says. I’ve seen these things. Smelt them. Felt them on my head and feet, so it’s hard to simply dismiss them. They seem as real as anything.

But so says all madmen about their hallucinations, my right counters.

Yet, the left continues, what madmen can think so rationally, so clearly? Patients with delusions usually accept them unquestioningly–and I am questioning!

I stop.

I’ve become confused by the argument rocketing back and forth in my head. I understand what the right side is saying, that these hallucinations are caused by a chemical imbalance, but what is my left saying? Is it saying that I am well within my faculties? That I’m not mad? If that is the case, and my left is correct, then just what the hell was that wasp and that creature? They’d have to be real if my left brain were to be believed, and I cannot, under any circumstance, accept that those things are real. Therefore, the truth of my mind’s state is plain before me. I am insane.

A soft scraping at the window draws my attention. Wasps, in the hundreds, are pressed up against the glass, a seething mass of dripping stingers, legs, abdomens, and antennas.

As far as hallucinations goes, that’s a pretty damn good one. Every one of those giant wasps are in vivid detail. There’s even subtle variations between them, lending a macabre realism to them. One has a broken mandible, another is missing a leg. Each is covered with distinctive hairs that stick out of all over their bodies.

I’ve got to get the hell out of here, I realize. The hospital can’t help me with this. They don’t understand what’s happening. Only I and the equipment and the drugs back at the lab can help me, can treat me without damaging this experiment.

“Nurse,” I shout, but not too frantically. I don’t want to seem out of control and dangerous. Strangely, my cry sends the wasps into a tizzy and they feverishly boil against the window. A few of them try to bite their way through and their mandibles squeak terribly as they slide across the glass.

“Nurse please. I need a little help.” I shout as calmly as I can.

Spiderweb cracks splay through the window. Though I know those creatures aren’t real and this isn’t actually happening, my skin still crawls at the site of them and my heart pounds in abject terror.

“Nurse!”

Relief fills me when I hear the lock click. The door swings open and the hallway light fills the room. The nurse steps in.

Her presence doesn’t deter the wasps in the slightest. They continue to angrily buzz and bash against the glass.

“Yes?” She asks, sounding rather put out.

I can barely stomach looking in her horrid face, but I force myself to; and force myself to smile too.

“My wrists are burning,” I say into her sea of red blotches. “May I please have more salve?” I motion my head towards the bedside table where it’s kept.

She harrumphs and disdain pulls her face into a grotesque distortion, but–ever the professional–she bends over and pulls the drawer open.

I lie there as calmly as I can, watching the undulating orgy on the window. She slowly twists the salve’s cap open; she’s not in too much of a hurry.

As soon as she unbuckles the latch on my right wrist I sock her in the jaw, a straight uppercut into her mouth. She screeches in surprise and stumbles back against the wall, clutching at her split and swelling lip.

Quickly, I unbuckle my other hand and then my feet. I leap from the bed and shove her out of the way.

Right then, the window shatters and the wasps come tumbling in. A bristling, buzzing pile of them collects at the foot of the radiator.

I’m through the door and starting to close it behind me when the nurse’s scream stops me. It’s not a scream for help, she’s screaming in pain.

I look back and a cold shiver through me. They’re swarming her. A dozen or so are on her chest, arms, and legs, spearing their two-inch stingers into her flesh. Blood blooms on her blue scrubs. One lands on her face and with a single bit its mandibles shear open her cheek. Blood gushes from the wound.

I slam the door on her horrific shrieks and lock it behind me.

For a moment, she beats on it to be let free, but then falls silent. The terror of the last few seconds catches up to me and all my breath seems to leave my chest. The long, cold hospital hallway rolls about like a ship’s deck in a storm and my legs buckle. I slide to the floor with a thump.

They’re real, I think. The thought sends a shockwave through me. I’m not mad. These things, these creatures are actually real. How is this possible?

It’s not possible, I answer myself coldly. The whole thing is insane. You’re insane.

But her blood, her fear-filled eyes say it is possible. Her lips scream it.

It occurs to me that the nurse couldn’t see what was killing her. She stood frozen in shock, wide-eyed with terror, looking about in utter confusion as the wasps tore her apart. And Nina and the doctor too couldn’t see the dead wasp on the floor either, which was plainly there.

Can it be that these things are real, but are just outside our perceptions?

Perhaps that’s what the formula has done. It didn’t grow my intelligence as it had the monkey’s; it’s grown my perceptions. That’s why every little fault pops out to me so readily–my perceptions are sharper, infinitely sharper, which is why I can see these monsters and others can’t.

I can actually hear them, crunching and munching their way through the door to get to me. I place my hand against the wood and feel the vibrations through my fingertips. They’re no hallucination. If I opened this, they would fly in and tear me apart like they did the nurse.

I stand and briskly walk down the bright hallway, quickly getting as far as I can from them.

The whirlwind of my mind now churns in another direction. Just what the hell are they? Gremlins, demons, goblins? Or some other thing I’ve never even heard of?

I stop in my tracks. No one will believe me when I tell them this. They’ll dismiss the story as lunacy. And the nurse, I suddenly think. How do I explain her? She was horribly killed by invisible creatures? No! They’ll slap a straightjacket on me, toss me back in here, and charge me with murder to boot.

The lab. I’ve got to get back to it and find a way to prove these things are real. If I can figure out what my formula has done, I can replicate it and show the world that these creatures exist and thereby clear my name. And, I realize, I can still be triumphant. The hell with improving the minds of man, this discovery will knock the scientific community on their collective asses! Another world, another civilization, has been right on our very doorstep this entire time–and it’s me that’s found it! My name will be synonymous with the greatest discovery of our time. The hell with Columbus, Dr. Grant Hopsinger will be a name on everyone’s lips.

I’m all kinds of cautious as I round the hallway corner, worried I might bump into one of those things or worse, a staff member.

But the hospital is dead this time of night and the nurse’s station at the end of the hallway is empty. I near it and see the nurse’s cream colored purse hanging from the arm of her chair. I climb over the desk and upend the contents onto the seat. Her car keys, I discover, are amongst lipstick, eye-liner, cigarettes, pills, and tampons.

I press the buzzer on the wall near the desk and the metal door beside the station pops open.

Stepping through the exit is like stepping out of an airlock into space.

The underground parking is a vast dark cavern, lite by a single overhead light, which flickers like it’s on its last legs. A jagged crack runs all the way down the center of the ceiling and I’ve the uneasy feeling it’s about to split open and rain concrete, rebar, and cars down on me.

I press her key fob and far off I hear a beep and see a flash of red lights. Of course, with her stature, she’s a million miles from the door.

The slap of my bare feet echoes as I jog to the car. The sides of the lot are so dark they seem to drop off into infinity.

I run past a cement support column and let out a startled scream when I see him standing on the other side, like he’s been waiting for me. His huge white eyes glow like two phosphor flares.

It’s not just a run I break into, it’s a blinding, blistering dash with my heart pounding in my throat and him hot on my heels. I can hear his fetid coat, madly flapping in the breeze just behind me.

I’m about fifty feet from the car when I slip on a patch of oil. My legs fly out from under me and I’m airborne for a second. Then I hit the ground and slide for a couple meters, ripping my skin across the concrete. As I scramble to my feet, he catches up and rakes my arm with his claws. My white pajamas tear open and five red furrows appear on my bicep.

“Why!?” I shout. “Why?” My mind is racing too quickly to form what I’m thinking into proper words and it all comes out as a single question. I meant: Why me? Why hate me? Why kill me? Why?

He sees I’m hurt and smiles that beautiful corn kernel smile of his. I back away towards the car, keeping my body facing him.

He follows slowly, smiling from ear to ear, confident he has me.

I painfully smack my tailbone against the car door and quickly turn around to grab the handle. With a growl, he leaps onto my back and sinks his teeth into my neck. I throw my head back and scream in pain. Reaching up, I place my hands firmly around his skull. I shudder in revulsion as his skin is moist and clammy like a slug’s. With one swift movement, I twist my body sideways and Judo him over my shoulder. He’s sent flying, but in the process his teeth tear a chunk out of my neck. Blood runs freely from it, staining the front of my pajamas.

He hits the concrete with a thump and rolls along it, a tumbleweed of rotted coat and putrid skin and bones. Not wasting a second, I open the door, leap in, and lock it behind me.

I’m so fired up I can’t get the damn keys into the ignition. I try and try, but it’s like I’m putting a square peg into a round hole.

A loud, shrill whistle sends pins and needles pulsing down my spine. I freeze and look over the dash. He’s standing with his hand on the hood of the car. He taps out the racing rhythm of my heart with his long, bony finger on the metal. Then he purses his emaciated lips together and an inhuman trill issues forth.

Just then, something plunks down on the car’s roof. Then another and another hits the roof, sounding like heavy rainfall. I look up and see a dozen black wasp stingers spearing through the car’s soft top, just inches from my head.

I slam the car key home and the engine sputters to life. Of course, it’s a junker. The fan belt lets out a horrific, protesting shriek as I throw the car into gear and jam my foot to the floor.

The shriveled man calmly steps out of the way of the hurtling car. I rocket through the underground and the wasps are sucked off the roof by the rapid airflow. I fly down the spiraling exit ramp, engine and tires screaming as I go.

I can barely keep the car in the turn. The sides scrape against the walls and sparks flare brightly in the darkness. Then with a gasp I’m shot out of the narrow ramp and onto an empty street.

I keep my foot to the floor, tearing ass down the long, empty road, not daring to look back in the rearview mirror.

---

The nurse’s tires screech as I pull up to the Science Center. I slam to a stop, kill the engine, and leap out. Not even diligent interns are here at this time of night. The building is a barren brick.

The passcode lets me through the sliding glass doors and into the steel elevator. The levels beep off as I rise.

A million questions percolate in mind, but I can’t fathom an answer to a single one of them. Who is that man? Is it a man? How does he control those wasp things? How long have they been here, creeping around on the outskirts of our vision? For centuries?

Terror and wonder course through me like an electric current, hackling the hairs on the back of my neck. This, I realize, is the thrill that great explorers feel when they find their new worlds. Nothing–nothing!–can compare to this glorious feeling. I am Magellan, standing at the shores of a whole new world.

The elevator dings and opens to a dark hallway. A short dash takes me to my lab. I unlock the glass door, step into the dingy gloom, and wait for my eyes to adjust. When they do, I see Nina lying on the floor beneath the metal operating table. She moans softly, stirs, and turns her face towards me.

I can see a straight-line incision across her brow. It’s still fresh; blood and brackish formula bubble from it.

“Nina!” I shout and reach for her.

She comes to then. Her eyes go wide and she screams and shuffles away from me, crab-like, across the floor and into a corner.

“Nina! What did you do?”

All at once I know. She did this to herself. She wanted to understand what I was going through so she could help me.

All my breath goes out of my chest and I collapse at her feet with a sob. Her love for me is deeper than I could have ever imagined.

“Nina! My poor Nina.” I crawl up to her head, gently lift it and rest it in my lap. It’s too late now. The formula is already acting on her brain, rapidly building new pathways at an exponential rate. There’s no turning back for her.

“Grant?” She says faintly. She reaches up and touches my face, unsure if it’s truly me. Then she recoils like she’s touched a hot stove.

Her face twists horribly in confusion as her eyes spastically scan my face. She’s beginning to see the ugly in me–all the faults in my face, of which there are many, are rising to the top of her perceptions.

“Grant?” she asks.

Unable to stand my appearance, she turns her gaze away. Then she sees something and her eyes go wide and white with fear. She screams and points to the door.

Ghoulish faces line the windows of my lab. A dozen shrunken men, all with moony eyes and rotten yellow teeth stare in at us.

Not a sound issues from them. They watch in silence.

Nina flails in my grasp like a dying fish. This is too much for her. She doesn’t have the mental fortitude or the experience I do to understand and process this. Her mouth fills with white lather and she begins to choke. Her eyes blaze with mad-dog fury. I can tell she’s at her breaking point and one more small push will send her spiraling into a madness from which there’s no coming back.

A face moves in the window. A creature raises a long bony finger to its milkstone eye, taps below the gaunt socket, and smiles.

Suddenly I understand what he’s been trying to tell me all this time. I quickly reach up and unclip the scalpel from the robotic arm. If I cut back the overgrown forest in Nina’s frontal lobes, just a partial sever, then these creatures will disappear from view and she’ll be saved from this insanity. Then hopefully they’ll leave her alone, just as they’ve left everyone alone who cannot see them.

The room fills with the sound of shattering glass and I quickly dig the scalpel into Nina’s incision and begin to cut.

---

The Keeper

By Alina Rios

It started with a hint dropped in the depths of my stomach, like a key, while I was asleep. When I awoke, my senses were sharper, as if my body had been nearsighted for years and I finally found the right prescription.

Later that day, my new wife–we’d been married just shy of six months—was getting ready to go out. She was talking to me out of the closet over the music of metal hangers sliding.

“Lisa’s man dumped her. She needs a shoulder,” she said, and immediately followed with an exclamation point of a hanger roll. I came and stood by the closet door. She was wearing a black bra and blue panties, mismatched, just the way I liked it, and her thin arms moved through the clothes fast, searching like trained dogs. She turned.

“Oh Henry, you scared me.”

I stood quietly, thinking. Her hands rested on a navy blue silk blouse, fingers feeling the fabric.

“What?” She asked.

“Who’s Lisa?”

A hint of color bloomed on her pale face. “My friend,” she said, tasting the words.

I wanted to say, you don’t have any friends, but that seemed rude, so I said, “Where’d you meet?”

“At the coffee shop,” she answered too fast.

I nodded. It was possible. But as I began thinking, I realized, she’d been going out every night for the past month, or longer. How could I have missed it?

“What about last night?” I asked.

“What about it?” She said, chewing a nail.

“Did Lisa’s man dump her yesterday too?”

“No, just today.”

“What did you do last night then?” I asked. I wanted to ask “what was your excuse last night,” but I was afraid to, in case my suspicions were true. What would I do? Would I leave her? I didn’t think I could. But could I live knowing she’s sleeping around?

“Last night, I went shopping for clothes. Honestly, Henry, you’re being weird. You never cared before,” she turned back to her task.

That was a lie. I cared. But it felt like I’d been asleep. I went back to bed and pretended to read.

When the door shut behind her, I felt small and unsure, the way I did that night on the beach when I proposed. The waves crashed against the shore, nearly drowning my words and the moon looked on in disapproval.

“You don’t want me,” she’d said, or it could’ve been, “I know you want me.” The breeze made her hair especially wild that day. It moved medusa-like round her shoulders.

“I must be free,” she’d said, or it could’ve been, “Set me free.” Truth is, I couldn’t care what she said because I wanted her.

So I’d said, “Marry me,” after her silence told me she was done trying to discourage me.

She sighed. That I heard.

Then she said, “Alright.” Or maybe it was, “We’ll fight.”

However she felt about marrying me, she let my mother arrange everything, even pick the puffed-out frilly dress, which, by contrast, only brought out her wildness, her otherness, her not.

Reluctantly, I got up and went back to the closet. I had a strange feeling like I was entering the room where somebody just died. It still smelled of her, sweat mixed with lavender. Even straight out of the shower, she smelled of sweat. And I loved it, God help me. I loved everything about her. Since the day she walked past me at the café, and her scent, like a wand, rose me to my feet and made me follow her for blocks, until she yelled at me to go away. When I didn’t, she sighed, walked to the park and sat down on the bench, leaving room for me.

I sat on the thick carpet looking up at her clothes, or what was left of them. Was she giving them away? Did she move in with a lover? Below, shoes and boots laid naked without the canopy of clothes that I helped her move.

I woke up with my cheek hot and itchy on the carpet. My watch read 11:48. I stumbled out of the closet. The bed stared blankly at me. The house protested being awoken with a few creaks reverberating through its dark spaces. She was obviously not back. This was unusual, but not unexpected.

I thought about calling the police. But I thought about it lightly, just as something I ought to do. I was fairly certain she was with her lover, and I didn’t want to look like an idiot. So I simply sat on the porch, feeling sorry for myself, and very lonely.

When the sun lit up the sky to the East, I went inside and settled for the comfort of a breakfast shake. The buzz of the blender drowned out the silence and loneliness, but just for a moment, until there was a loud unpleasant crunch and the motor chocked.

I turned it off and looked in, but I could see nothing in the purple mush so I poured the shake into a glass. When I looked in the blender again, I noticed a light chunk of something stuck on the blade. I touched it—hard and cold. I took the blender to the sink, pulled the stuck piece off the blade and ran some water over it. It had been mangled by the blade, but it was definitely a small bone with some skin around it, which didn’t feel like chicken skin. I felt a dry heave coming on.

I told myself I was sleep-deprived and hence not to be trusted. I told myself that it must’ve been a chicken bone that fell off the counter last time we made dinner and ended up in the drawer where I kept the blender. Just to prove to myself the possibility of such accident, I went to look in the drawer. There, among the potato masher, a grater, and a collection of peelers was a thumb, a brother of the one that ended up in my shake.

I darted for the trash can and barely made it.

When it was relatively safe to step away from the can, I poured the shake out and ran the water, watching the pieces of thumb getting caught in the mesh and feeling sick again. I thought I smelled the smell but I didn’t know what I was smelling for.

“Henry?”

How I missed the familiar sound of her boots on the path, I do not know. I was definitely unwell. I pulled down hard on the paper towel roll and it unwound a long strip (nothing was too much in this case). I crumpled the towel and used it to pick up the thumb from the drawer and throw it in the compost. I dumped the mesh contents and the mangled bone after it. Then, to the sound of her boots nearing, I pulled down a loaf of sliced bread from the top of the fridge, tore the plastic, grabbed half of the slices and threw them on top of the compost bin.

“There you are,” she said poking her head with blood-shot eyes into the kitchen. She wore a dress I hadn’t seen before, it fell above her knee, exposing her legs. I was aroused in spite of everything. She walked up to me and hugged me.

“Sorry I didn’t come back sooner. We got too drunk and I stayed over,” she said into my chest.

“What happened to your other dress?” I asked.

“Threw up all over it. Had to borrow Lisa’s. You like it?”

She stepped back and watched me, her brows frowning in concern. Her scent was different, stronger, making me think of lion cages and rain, and it turned me on terribly. She came closer again and wrapped herself around me, bringing our lips together sticking her tongue in deep, before I could tell her. She tasted of sex and meat, and just as my mind began conjuring up images of breakfast in bed with her lover, she hopped up on the counter and pushed down my pants, revealing my obvious appreciation of everything that was her. With a blissful smile, she impaled herself on me.

---

Things continued in a similar way after. Some nights she wouldn’t come back and wouldn’t tell me where she was going. I stopped asking. She’d return in the early morning, refreshed and hungry for me. I would spend the night in aroused anticipation, drifting in and out of sleep. Her closet kept growing thinner, no matter how many items she acquired, or ‘borrowed.’

Also, I kept finding small human parts all over the house. More thumbs of all sizes in the kitchen drawers, yellowed toes in my college coffee mugs, the ones I rarely use, except when we’re low on dishes, one dried up ear in spaghetti pot. I discovered that one when we tried to make dinner together. She was washing the bowls when I dumped the dry spaghetti on top of the thumbs in the compost.

“Spaghetti’s gone bad,” I complained.

“Is that even possible?”

“Possible if you don’t make dinners for a while.”

We had to get Thai takeaway that night.

I stopped dry heaving and quietly composted the findings, treating it like any other job I was doing around the house, like washing dishes. There was never enough bread in the house anymore.

---

I don’t know how long we would’ve gone on like that if I hadn’t gotten hit by the car.

I was walking back from one of my nightly trips to the store for bread, through the fog, thinking about her legs, and how perfectly they fit around me. It would’ve been a good way to go. The impact stunned me and then something caught me, held me, lowered me to the ground. Her face was in front of me until I lost consciousness.

I spent three days in intensive care. Those days are lost to me except for her dark eyes, bright in front of me, and her voice, soft whispers in a language older than the skies.

When they released me, she took me home, helped me get up the stairs to our bed, laid me down gently, and stuffed pillows all around me, like I was a newborn, which in a way, I was. It was all new to me. The vase with strange symbols, between hieroglyphics and kana, that always stood on a little table by the window seemed fascinating. I spent hours turning it in my hands, feeling the rough cool surface of the metal. My fingers looked plump, meaty. The wall color, which I always thought was basically white, turned out to be light pink.

“Did you know?” I would ask her looking all over, “Our walls are pink. How is it we live surrounded in pink?”

“Pink?” She would say looking around in surprise. “I s’pose they are. Looks like your mum’s been here.”

There it was, a smile hidden under the pale reserve. I kept looking at her. She was wondrous, enchanting, beautiful, and most definitely wicked.

She spoon-fed me, watching me out of her endless eyes, forehead creased by worry. In the evenings, she undressed me and wiped me down, slowly.

As the effects of narcotics started to wear off, and I was getting more independent, I began to notice that her skin had turned ashen and when I ran my fingers along her arms, it felt like sandpaper. Her hair had lost its shine and her eyes looked darker than ever.

One day I woke up from a nap and she was rummaging in the closet, muttering. Clothes and shoes, what was left of them, were lying in piles outside the closet.

“What are you looking for?” I asked, attempting to sit up.

She poked her head out, slipping on a smile, “The dress I borrowed from Lisa, remember?”

I nodded. Of course I remembered. I also knew it had been missing awhile and that the item she was looking for (or I should say items, for there were too many to count—fresh, soft ears) I’d composted last week, before the accident.

“How you feeling?”

“Better,” I lied.

A real smile brightened the ash of her face. She came and stood by me, not touching.

“Think you’ll be okay if I stepped out for a bit? We’re out of food,” she said looking at my stomach, scratching her arm.

“‘Course,” I said.

“Okay,” she said and not even a minute later her bare feet drummed out a fast beat down the stairs and the front door slammed. I wondered if she remembered her wallet.

---

I closed my eyes and let myself wonder if she’d seen those parts attached to a body or picked them up somewhere. Where does one go for human spare parts? A lab, a morgue, a funeral home?

I drifted off. Then, my heart woke up before my mind, as the intense throbbing light broke through my dreams. I was sure the light was a police car and she’d been caught.

I rushed to the open window and predictably collapsed with my stomach across the sill. I lay there inhaling through the sharp pain in my ribs. When I finally looked down at our street, I didn’t see the police car or anything of the sort. The moon was full and proud in the sky and its light flooded the room and bathed the neighborhood in myth. I groaned and blamed the throbbing effect on the meds.

I heard a laughter and looked to the right to our neighbors’ house—the elderly Swansons. The house was unusually alive for the hour. Inside, shadows moved in the amber light and conversations spilled out the open windows. People, dressed in dark colors, smoked on the porch. An unmistakable shape of a hearse was in front of the house. Mr. or Mrs. Swanson, I wondered sadly.

I was just about to drag myself back to bed, when a movement caught my eye. A shadow shifted in the side garden that we shared with the Swansons. I kept looking, nothing else moved…a chill prickled at my neck. A presence out there, just a few feet away, I felt, saw me watching.

I stared, paralyzed, into the shadows, until I was looking into the whites of two eyes, moon-cold. I glimpsed a small movement and my stomach tightened, breath trapped in my lungs. It was her–my beloved. I couldn’t say how I knew, just the way you can tell a familiar person from afar.

Then her eyes were gone, but I could see her head jerking, tearing at the prey, wolf-like. I was grateful for the darkness, for I couldn’t look away. I searched for the glistening evidence of blood, but saw none. I was trying to make out a shape. Images of those thumbs and ears rushed in. Mr. or Mrs. Swanson, I wondered again, and dizzied, slid down onto the floor, head heavy…a rushing sound as if in a tunnel…then nothing.

---

It was her sobs that woke me. In the soft grey of the morning, I was half-slumped against the wall, in an awkward and painful position. She sat at my feet, hands over her face, hair matted. Her dress had strips torn out of it.

I tried to shift to a more comfortable position and she looked up slowly, resting her pink-red eyes on mine. We looked at each other for a long time–just looked. Her pain and my pain became one and I too cried. She moved closer and I put my palm on her cheek.

“Hush…”

She kept her eyes on mine and moved closer still, as if I was now the wand that drew her in. She wedged her shoulder under my armpit and lifted me up. I suppose I always knew she was stronger than she looked. She helped me to bed and lay down beside me. We fit perfectly, as always. I put my face to her breasts and inhaled.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

She stiffened. “You know me, Henry.”

“Not all of you. I need the part I saw too.”

She sat up and watched me, biting her lip, scratching her arm. Finally, she said, “I feed on souls.”

I was confused. “But I thought I saw you…”

“You saw me preparing the body.”

“For…what?”

She gave me a long look. Then she must’ve reconsidered, because she sighed and said, “I do eat it, but I’m not after the…physical–meat, blood. But I eat it to get the soul before it has a chance to leave. I never kill. I replace the…corpse. Always. Collect all things of life…leaves, grass, earth, bones, chestnuts. Make a doll. I dress it, in my clothes.”

She stopped and watched me, waiting for the answer to the thinned-out closet mystery to register in my eyes.

I nodded.

“People see the doll as the one who died, the one I took. The spell usually lasts long enough for them to be buried or burned.”

“Usually?”

She shrugged, “I make mistakes.”

I kept seeing her head jerking in the moonlight. “Mr. Swanson?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Only women.”

“Why women?”

She was quiet a moment, her fingers tracing the flower patterns on a quilt on the bed. “I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s just what I do. I thought about this before and decided it must be because I didn’t like men. It’s an intimate thing, you know?”

I shook my head. “Say more.”

“When I take a soul, I become that person. I mean, I’m still me, but I’m also all the people whose souls I’ve taken.”

“Must be confusing.”

“No, it’s wonderful actually,” her face brightened, “but men’s desires, thoughts, feelings never appealed to me, until…you.”

She went back to tracing the flowers. I fought back the question on my lips. But I needed to know.

“Why me?” I said and held my breath.

Her eyes welled up. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I waited, in heavy silence. When tears began to roll down her cheeks, and her body shook, I felt my own well open. I rushed towards her, swaddled her in my arms. How small she felt.

“Because you love me,” her words were hot against my shirt, ”and because you taught me to love. It’s terrifying and beautiful….”

She pulled away and looked at me, “I love you, Henry.”

“Come,” I said laying back down. She arranged herself next to me, her head on my shoulder, and we lay like this, spent from the truth, drifting in and out of sleep, until the sun licked the walls of our room.

She stirred. “Henry?”

“Mmm?”

“I’m pregnant.”

I smiled a lazy smile.

“Will you keep me?”

I chuckled, then opened my eyes. She looked hurt, unsure.

“Yes, yes,” I said.

She smiled.

“But you must promise me something.”

She rose on her elbow and the worry crease was back on her brow. “What?”

“When it’s my time, take my soul. Don’t let me rot.”

Surprise and wonder on her face, she touched her lips to mine.

“Of course, Henry. Anything. Anything you want.”

---

The White Lady

By Nathan Wunner

For most, it was impossible to walk the Paths of the Dead without first dying oneself. But for those who still practiced the old ways there were occasions when one of the living might walk amongst the spirits. It happened rarely; on long nights, when the moon was just a pale sliver behind dark clouds, and the air was icy as the breath of the dead.

Mati had spent days preparing herself for her journey to the Paths; fasting to the point of starvation, denying herself anything more than a few minutes’ worth of sleep at a time. She even refused water, and her mouth was so dry that her tongue felt like sand scraping the inside of her cheek.

Now she looked like a wild, starving beast, with ravenous red eyes and ropey muscle stretched around taut skin. The bones of her rib cage and shoulders protruded through her skin, and she looked lanky and gaunt, like the shriveled husk shed off by a molting insect.

She sat before a blazing campfire and slicked her hair back with mud she’d gathered from the riverbed. She did this until her hair was plastered flat across the back of her skull and down her neck. After this, she spread white ash across her skin until she was covered completely, and stood out against the backdrop of the night sky like a small knot of dense fog. She crushed bones with a mortar and pestle until they were a powder, mixed them with dried blood until they congealed into a paste, and then traced the mixture across every jutting bone of her ribcage, across her sharp cheekbones and the ridges above her eyes. After she was done Mati looked down into a basin filled with water; and when she looked into the murk and realized she could no longer recognize herself, and could only see the bones, she knew she was ready.

The intention of the ritual, handed down through generations by the elders of her village, was to take her to the brink of death. To ruin the body, but leave the mind intact. It would give her the strength of the dead, the strength to walk the Paths. But unlike the dead, she would retain her will, her purpose. Her mother had undertaken the same ritual, her grandmother; even Mati herself, years and years ago, though as a child she hadn’t grasped the symbolic nature of it. It had just been one more trial in a life full of hardships.

As the moon rose, casting its pale light down, as the wind swelled and shook the leaves from the trees, Mati could feel a chill spread through her body. Starting in her toes, and then crawling up her spine. She felt rejuvenated and sick all at the same time. The ritual had worked.

To the west the sun had sunk below the treeline, and long, web-like shadows stretched across the plains. Mati ran towards the sun with no clothing to protect her from the cold, no shoes to guard her feet from the rocks and brambles. The only possessions she brought with her from the living world were a small red pendant which she clutched in her right hand, and a sharp, ivory handled knife she gripped tightly in her left. The knife, she knew, would afford her little protection where she was going. But it made her feel at ease just to hold it.

The red pendant, though, that was of the utmost importance. The pendant, and what it carried. Without it all that she’d done, and all that she was about to do, would be for nothing.

Mati had only been to the Paths once before, as a child. It had been a rite of passage in her village, back when they still practiced the old ways. She’d only been escorted as far as the outskirts of town, then told she had to go the rest of the way on her own. “It’s our most important lesson.” Her mother, Tante, had told her. “Loss of a loved one should always hurt. It should never be easy to forget. The good memories always come with pain.”

And pain there had been.

Mati lept over the decayed remnants of fallen trees as she ran, snapping brittle branches and slicing through thick vines if they threatened to slow her pace. It began to rain fiercely, but the jungle was so thick with vegetation that scarce few raindrops were able to pierce the canopy. Lightning flashed high above, imperceptible as the echo of a whisper. Most of the rain simply slid down branches and dripped off of thick, flat leaves; glistening like thousands of spider-webs in the faint light of the moon.

By the time the sun had fully set Mati had reached the edge of Ravenwood, den of the witches. Trespassing here would normally be a death sentence, but on this night the witches would be preoccupied with their secret sabbats. Mati had seen them, all those years ago, during her first journey to the Paths. Her memories of that visit were but a flicker of images, of animal offerings burning on bonfires by the hundreds, pools of blood upon blade and stone, and the witches running naked in the moonlight, howling like wolves.

Unbeknownst to her at the time, Tante had bargained with the witches for Mati’s safe passage, all the way to the Paths of the Dead and back again. This kind of bargain was forbidden, of course, and for it Tante had paid a terrible price.

The witches had kept their word, though. They led Mati through the sprawl of their shanty towns; little more than wooden sheds and straw huts stacked haphazardly one on top of the other until they leaned precariously over the streets the same way the trees in the jungle would buckle and topple over from the weight of choking vines and their own branches.

The witches’ sabbats were much more elaborate than those that took place back in Mati’s village. Lanterns were suspended on ropes between the buildings so that they swayed in the autumn wind and cast the street in shades of green and violet. Red candles as wide around as a fist burned brightly in shop windows, and behind the glass Mati had seen shadowy figures stirring cauldrons that bubbled over with frothy green liquids. The lost ones, the mindless servants of the witches, were made to dress in elaborate costumes and act out scenes from fiction and fairy tale, scenes that even in her youth Mati knew intimately.

The witches always wore hideous masks, smooth and pale and white, with arched eyebrows and long, crooked noses. The masks left the witches mouths exposed, but their skin itself had an artificial, doll-like quality to it, and when they chose to smile it often distorted their lips and cheeks in an odd way, as if you were staring not at them, but at their reflection in a puddle of water. Tante had explained to her that the witches wore the masks permanently, not just during their festivals. They revealed their true faces only to those they wished to enchant.

Despite their fearsome countenance, they hadn’t scared Mati at first. They were kind to her, showered her with gifts, offered her piles of decorative candy skulls, pinched her cheeks and called her cute. It was only when she refused their gifts and affections that they showed their true intentions. The colorful lights and absurd looking street performers were the exact kind of things a child would find appealing, as if it was all a big performance put on solely to win her favor. This wasn’t uncommon. The witches couldn’t breed, it was said. They added children to their ranks from local villages. And they showed special interest in children that had already been taught the old ways.

Had it not been for Tante’s bargain, Mati shuddered to think what would’ve happened that night, once the last candle flame had flickered out.

But that had been a lifetime ago, and now Mati knew where they lived, and the smell of their campfires, and the paths even the witches were afraid to take. And even if she didn’t, a bargain with the witches would never be an option. She remembered all too well Tante’s last words to her: “Nothing in this world is worth making a deal with them, child. Nothing.”

Mati was silent as a panther in the tall grass as she cut through the underbrush and made her way deeper into the jungle. The entire jungle was silent, for that matter; other than the clicking of sharp talons on tree branches or the flutter of the wings from some unseen bird of prey, or the skittering of insects as they rummaged through the dead leaves on that littered the ground.

Mati ran on, until the stench of death filled her nostrils and brought her to a swift halt. She crouched down low behind a hollowed out tree, slowing her breath and letting her eyes adjust to the absence of light up ahead. And she peered, into the darkness.

Up ahead there was a fetid corpse half submerged in swamp water, belly distended and skin already starting to rot. Standing above the corpse was a cursed dead, a Druka; a ghastly looking thing with rough gray skin and teeth that had been filed to points.

The Druka were doomed to walk alongside the paths of the dead for all eternity. Their meanderings were completely without purpose, they simply wandered until they found something to eat or kill. They smelled almost as foul as the corpses they fed upon, and though they moved slowly they had the strength of five men, and were surprisingly stealthy.

That Mati had gotten so close to one without being spotted was extremely lucky, but slipping past without drawing its attention would require time she simply didn’t have. As Mati looked on the Druka used its long, blackened fingers to fish around in the corpse’s mouth. The Druka stared at its prey blankly as it prodded its cheeks; and then it laughed maniacally as it yanked out the corpse’s teeth and held them up to the light until each tooth sparkled like a shimmering red jewel.

Mati had killed Druka before, of course, but it took careful planning and sometimes the beasts fought for hours before they went down. Mati stared down at her knife and wondered if she could simply hamstring the Druka and then continue on her way, or if that would only anger it.

As she tightened her hand around the hilt of her knife, she heard lumbering footsteps from several yards away, and the snapping of branches. Several pairs of dark hands parted the shrubbery ahead, and another Druka emerged from the shadows. And another one after that, and another, until there were five gathered in total.

That’s it, Mati thought. I’ve failed.

Five Druka was far too many for her to try and take on alone. She’d be lucky to creep away with her life. The slightest sound might alert them to her presence. And that was if they didn’t smell her first. And with only one corpse to keep them occupied, they’d be on the move soon, hunting for more. Not to mention the fact that all the noise they were making was bound to attract the wrong kind of attention…

“Quite the predicament.” A seductive, playful voice whispered from just over Mati’s shoulder. Standing just behind her was a woman in ebony robes with smooth chocolate skin and streaked hair the color of a thunderstorm at dusk. She wore the mask of the witches; white porcelain with high cheeks, crooked nose and a wide smile, and the witch’s eyes glowed a fierce red. With the speed of a snake strike Mati seized the witch by her throat and pressed the blade of her knife to the yielding flesh of her neck.

“The moon waxes and wanes overhead. Midnight looms but promises not to linger.” The witch smiled, that crooked, wide smile. Mati began to draw the blade across the witch’s throat, and drops of blood rose as the skin split at the tip if the blade.

“So you think you have time? To finish me, and the Druka that even now is staring at our backs, wondering what’s making all that noise?” The witch mocked Mati, even with her last breaths.

Mati decided to lower the blade and let the witch speak, and in doing so she knew that she had damned herself. The witch rubbed the skin around the cut Mati had made, and within seconds the wound was gone. “Look.” The witch pointed towards the clearing where the Druka had been feasting. The Druka had abandoned the corpse, and were stumbling off into the darkness of the woods. “The way is clear.”

“All the way to the Paths?” Mati hissed.

“There and back again.” The witch said sweetly.

Mati gritted her teeth and shook her head. But she knew in her heart that the deal had already been made. “Your price?”

“There are so few left that know the old ways. You might be the last, now that Tante has …” The back of Mati’s hand collided with the witch’s jaw with a bone crunching smack before she could finish her sentence, and the witch collapsed to the ground, sprawled at Mati’s feet.

The witch propped herself up on her elbows and wiped blood away from her lips with her forearms. Her eyes burned like bright flame. “Debts can be paid… later.” And with that the witch vanished, dissolved into shadows of the trees, the echo of her voice absorbed into the din of the storm.

Mati ran until she reached the deepest part of the jungle, where the sky was hidden by long leaves and a tangle of vines.

It is said, though few have seen it, that in the heart of the jungle is a small pond that never dries up, even in dry season. It appears shallow until you reach your hand in, and find out that it’s just deep enough to swallow you whole. No animal will drink of it’s waters though they look clear and pure. And on a night like this, when the moon is just a pale sliver behind wispy black clouds, the pond’s waters glow red.

Mati stood over this pond, trying to see something in her reflection across its surface. But all she could see was the bones. She reached her hand into the water, expecting it to feel cold. But the water was hot, terribly so, and the fire arced up her spine and struck the back of her skull with the force of a concrete block.

And just like that Mati was gone from this world, off to the Paths of the Dead.

In the Paths everything moved slowly. Even Mati’s thoughts moved slowly, and it was a strain to simply command her feet to keep marching forward. Every action was like trying to run underwater, or thigh deep in mud. Mati’s first thought was that the pendant in her right hand had begun to glow softly, and so she clasped her fingers around it tightly so that no light could escape. But already strange, dark eyes peered at her from every corner of the jungle, from every tree hollow and ditch, each accompanied by sinister smiles and savage teeth.

The rain in the Paths of the Dead didn’t fall like rain in the living world. Instead of a furious, chaotic roar it sounded more deliberate; and the drops all struck the leaves overhead with a specific cadence, like the ticking of a clock.

As she struggled to move forward Mati heard beasts snarl and spit and sniff the air. Mati hoped that her preparations would be enough, and that whatever the creatures were they would simply remain curious, and not turn hostile.

As the noises around her grew louder, and the leering sets of eyes more numerous, Mati tried to will her feet to move faster. It was a fool’s errand. She felt like she was moving in a dream; running as fast as she could but getting nowhere, unseen danger and certain death breathing down her neck, indifferent to her efforts.

Time became a blur to her. Her heart pounded in her chest, and she knew they could hear it. And they wanted it. The life inside her. Everything around her was dark and oppressive. All that she knew was panic. She felt like she’d been running forever. Like she’d never be able to stop. The sky above was like a broken mirror, shattered galaxies dangling like shards of glass barely clinging to a frame, and every glittering star had been replaced by a deep black hole.

Tante had told her this was because all light died, at the end of things. In the paths the only light came from the burning of living souls that wandered here by mistake.

Faces emerged from the jungle. Lost souls shivering in the rain, rubbing their arms to keep warm. Their eyes and mouths were gaping holes.

“Don’t look them in the eye.” She remembered Tante’s words from decades ago. “Walk steady, and slow your breathing to still the pounding in your chest. If they catch up to you, run as fast as you can, or they’ll tear you apart trying to get to the heat inside of you.”

Mati began to run and closed her eyes. She heard moaning, and the rustling of branches, and the smacking of hungry jowls. She felt the cold breath of some dead thing at the back of her neck and the brush of icy fingers as something tried to grab hold of her arms.

And then it was over. The ground below Mati was transparent, like the clearest water, though it was solid below her feet. Before her was a tree with white branches that stretched high into the sky, and black roots that ran deep into the earth.

Nestled into the thick, twining branches at the base of the tree was The White Lady. She wore a dress made of rags but covered in glittering sequins, and it was long enough that it spilled out onto the ground at her feet. A thin veil, pockmarked with holes, covered her face. But the veil couldn’t hide the death’s head that lay just behind it; the hollow sockets of the eyes and the permanent grin.

The White Lady said nothing as Mati approached. But nonetheless, Mati heard a voice in her mind, a terrible echo that felt like ants crawling against the inside of her skull. “I met you as a child.” The White Lady said. “I told you the hour and the day of your death. And now is not. That. Time.”

Mati felt a sensation across her back, like broken fingernails scraping against her skin. “I’m here for another.” Mati said. “One who couldn’t make the journey for themselves.” Mati released her grip on the pendant in her right hand, and let it dangle in the air before her. The pendant glowed more brightly than before.

“This one I have a place prepared for.” Mati felt a serpent tongue flick her earlobe as The White Lady spoke. “A child, yes? Barely alive fourteen days. Yours? Did you ever give her a name?”

“No.”

“Then you never will. Her resting place is inside.”

As Mati looked on the base of the tree shifted and split apart, and The White Lady was drawn inside of it. In her place was a cavernous opening that seemed to lead down into the roots of the tree. Mati gripped her knife tightly and stepped inside.

The path was dark, but Mati pressed forward, arms outstretched so that she could use the walls to steady herself and to feel the path ahead. Eventually the tunnel ended and Mati emerged into a forest unlike any she had ever seen before. The trees were impossibly tall, but not so dense that they obscured the sky above. Warm sunlight spilled down from between the leaves and covered the forest floor. Up ahead was a shallow pool of water so clear Mati could see the shape of every fish that darted past.

Mati reached into the water and grabbed a smooth stone. She lay the pendant flat on the ground and used the rock to crack it apart. As the pendant shattered a small blue light emerged, barely the size of a firefly, too light for gravity to pull it down to earth. It sat suspended before Mati’s eyes for a moment, and then, as a breeze swept down from the hills, the little light was lifted up and carried away. Mati watched it until it became too small and distant to see, and it was lost to the horizon like the setting sun.

Then Mati ran, out of the tunnel, away from the tree, and back into the jungle. She pretended she couldn’t hear the laughter of The White Lady echoing in her mind. Pretended she couldn’t feel the sharp claws and fetid breath and sticky saliva of a thousand beasts as they tore at her skin and tried to pull her down. Whatever happened now, she’d finished what she came to do. What happened next truly didn’t matter.

Mati drew her knife when they pressed in too close, and she sliced and hacked away at their flopping limbs like they were vines blocking her path. She felt teeth dig into her thighs, hands pulling at her hair. She cut and stabbed and screamed as she fought back; and all the while she wondered what she was bothering to fight for. She felt buried under the weight of rotting flesh. And she dug her way out, one hack of her blade at a time. At the end of it she stood on a pile of corpses, bleeding and bruised and near death, but still with her heart beating in her chest and breath in her lungs. She walked on.

At last she found the glowing red pool of water, deep in the heart of the jungle. Without hesitation, Mati dove inside.

Back in the world of the living, Mati sat by the edge of the water, coughing. Up in the sky the moon had begun it’s descent back down to the edge of the horizon. A fog was creeping in, seeping through the branches and the gaps between trees.

As Mati caught her breath and used her weary muscles to pull herself up, she noticed shadows flickering just out of sight. They darted past, flitting in and out of the corners of her vision. She realized they had her surrounded.

There were dozens of the shadows, and they moved in closer with every passing second. As they pressed in tighter the whites of their masks become visible, and their glowing red eyes. Witches.

One of the witches stepped out in front of the others. She walked to Mati’s side and slowly, almost cautiously, removed her mask.

“Tante?” Mati whispered, in shock.

“Child.” The witch replied in that all too familiar voice. “It’s time to come home. Are you ready?”

Tante’s face was the same as it was all those years ago, her hair, even the smell of her. The witch looked exactly like the woman that used to scoop her up in her arms and hug her tightly. The resemblance was uncanny.

Everything but the eyes.

Mati hesitated, and Tante looked at her sternly. “You made a deal.”

Tante extended her hand, and Mati took hold of it. “Yes,” she whispered through swollen lips, “I’m ready to go home.”

Tante handed her a white mask. Mati held it in her hands, running her fingers across it’s porcelain surface. The old ways are dying, she thought. Maybe this is just where I belong.

She placed the mask over her face. Her eyes began to glow with a hellish fire. Then she walked, side by side with the Witches, as they disappeared into the fog and the shadows.

---

Plain Girl

By Adam King

When I got home from school Dad was hunched over a jar of peanut butter at the kitchen counter. I hadn’t seen him in a while so I grabbed an apple and leaned in the doorway.

“Hi, honey,” he said, wiping his mouth. “How was school?”

I shrugged and bit into my apple.

His face was stubbled, his hair was a mess, and it looked like he hadn’t showered since the last time I saw him. When he’s onto something big he can be gone for days at a time, coming home just long enough to shower and stuff his face with whatever he could find in the cabinets. Mom didn’t like him going out and she wasn’t shy about telling him. He was too old, she said. He had a family to think about. I never said anything, but I kind of agreed. Sometimes I had nightmares about him leaving and not coming back. Still, I wasn’t as worried as Mom. A lot of girls like to think their dads are superheroes. Mine actually is.

So I should tell you that my dad’s the Sentinel. Like the Sentinel. It’s not like anybody knows his identity or anything, but try having a date over when your dad’s standing there—and I’m not even kidding, his head almost touches the ceiling—with his meaty fists crossed over his chest, cracking his knuckles every two seconds and grunting like a silverback gorilla.

So when I invited Scott Peters over I was kind of hoping that Dad wouldn’t even be in the same zip code. The thing is, I’d had a crush on Scott all year. He had this blue car that was so shiny you could see your reflection in it, and his hair. Sometimes in class he put his feet on his desk and leaned back, and his hair fell across his shoulders like a movie star’s.

“I invited a friend over tonight,” I said. “Hope that’s okay.”

“Of course it is,” Dad said. “Which friend? Laura?”

I cleared my throat. “Scott,” I said.

Dad paused with a spoonful of peanut butter halfway to his mouth. I could see his wheels turning, but I was his daughter and he loved me, and that meant leverage.

We held eyes. We’d played this game before and I was better at it. I cocked an eyebrow and took another bite of my apple. “And it would be so cool if you’d give us a little time to watch a movie and maybe study,” I said. “I know you’re really busy, anyway.”

“You mean leave you alone?” Dad said. “With a boy?”

“Don’t you trust me?” I said, batting my eyes. This was a trick he’d taught me when I was little. It was my most effective weapon against him.

He grunted something unintelligible and I knew I’d won. He brought the peanut butter the rest of the way to his mouth. It fell off his spoon and plopped on the counter.

---

Scott pulled up at six. Dad stayed just long enough to grill Scott with questions and glare at him a little. “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he said. “If you need anything, just call.” He lingered at the door a moment. “I probably don’t have to tell you this, but don’t do anything crazy. And if you get hungry I left potato wedges in the—“

“Dad,” I said, crossing my arms.

“Okay, okay,” he said, shouldering a duffel bag. For a second I wondered where he was going, but the thought disappeared quickly. I had more important things to worry about.

I listened for his car before turning to Scott. “Guess it’s just you and me,” I said, leading him to the living room. To be honest, I was a little nervous. I’d been kind of seeing him for a week, but we hadn’t been alone yet.

I’m not dumb. I knew we were supposed to do things like hold hands and maybe kiss a little. I brushed my teeth twice before he came, but when I sat down I was wondering how many girls he’d kissed—like if he was a pro and I’d seem like an idiot because I’d only kissed Bobby Maori once, and that was last summer. Or if my breath suddenly got bad like it did sometimes in first period when I was still tired and I breathed with my mouth closed. I wondered if my boobs looked big enough, or if my wrists seemed fat.

I reached for the remote and he shifted in his seat and brushed my hand. It was so soft it could have been an accident, but he didn’t even seem to notice. “Thanks for inviting me over,” he said, inching closer until I could feel the heat of his body.

I started the movie and we sat for a long time with our legs grazing. He nudged closer until our hips touched, and then our arms. He took my hand and my heart almost exploded. Dimly, I heard the movie, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. I felt like all my senses had gathered into one spot so all I could hear, see, smell, touch, and taste was my hand in his.

He leaned into me. I turned and saw his face, and then his lips, and I leaned into him, too. Our lips met. I closed my eyes.

And the phone rang.

Dammit, I thought. I got up and stalked to the kitchen. “Hello?”

“Emily.” It was Dad. Leave it to him to mess up one of my dates when he wasn’t even home.

“Dad,” I huffed. “You said you were leaving me alone for a while.”

“Listen to me, Emily.” His voice sounded serious. It kind of made me nervous. “I need to talk to your mother.”

“She’s not home yet,” I said.

He paused for a long time. I knew he was still there because I could hear him breathing heavily like he did when he was thinking.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“I’ve been calling your mother, but she isn’t answering. Something’s come up.”

I heard a banging like a gunshot on Dad’s end and I jumped. “What was that?” I said. “Dad, what’s going on?”

He didn’t answer, and for a while all I could hear was his breathing. “Crap,” he finally said. “I’m out of time.”

“What is it?” I said. “What’s happening?”

“Emily, I need you to call your mother. Tell her I’m at 84 Oakwood Glen. She’ll understand.”

I searched for a pen. “What was the address again?”

“84 Oakwood Glen,” he said. “Do you need me to spell it?”

“I’m not ten, Dad.” Sometimes he treated me like a little girl. Whether he was in trouble or not, he could still be annoying.

“Okay, then. What are you going to do?”

I went over everything again before saying goodbye.

“And Emily,” he said before I hung up.

I resisted the urge to sigh loud enough so he’d know just how irritating he was being. “Yeah, Dad?” I looked in on Scott. Seeing him in the living room, I felt like it was Christmas morning, like he was a present waiting to be unwrapped. How weird is that?

“I love you,” Dad said.

It’s not like he never told me he loved me or anything, but the way he said it gave me the chills. It was like he was saying goodbye.

“I love you, too,” I said, stunned, and then he hung up.

I stared at the phone for a minute before trying Mom’s cell. She didn’t pick up, which wasn’t surprising. She was just as bad as Dad when she was working. I tried her a few more times, but she didn’t answer. Typical.

Well I gave it my best. I left her a message and went back to the living room. “What’d I miss?” I said, sitting beside Scott.

“I don’t know what you missed,” he said, taking me in his arms. “But I missed you.” It was the sweetest thing anybody had ever said to me.

We kissed for a long time, his hands searching my hips and then my sides, and slowly—so slowly—circling to my stomach and wandering up the edges of my shirt. But even though I was with Scott, I kept thinking of Dad. The way he said goodbye really bugged me, and I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I tried to push it away, believe me, but it kept coming back.

I opened my lips just enough to feel Scott’s tongue dart into my mouth, but when I closed my eyes all I could see was Dad. I sighed and sat up.

“What is it?” Scott said. “What’s wrong?”

I’d never had anything to do with Dad’s crime fighting before, so it came as a surprise even to me when I said, “I need you to take me somewhere.”

---

84 Oakwood Glen was a large warehouse in the middle of nowhere, spackled with graffiti and shuttered by boards. A huge, empty parking lot of cracked asphalt surrounded it like a dark, rocky sea. Islands of grass shot through the cracks.

“What is this place?” Scott said, turning off the car.

I hadn’t given much thought to what I was going to tell him, but I knew it couldn’t be the truth. “I have a friend inside who needs something,” I said. Lame, I know, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. I’ve never been much of a liar.

He seemed to believe me, though. “Then let’s go,” he said, stepping out of the car.

“No!” I said. “I mean, this friend, he’s shy, and he wouldn’t like it if someone he didn’t know came. Honestly, he probably doesn’t even want me here.”

“Okay,” Scott said, frowning. “So you want me to just sit here while you go in there?”

He had a point. The warehouse looked like it might be haunted, and the sun sat low on the horizon, turning the sky an eerie orangey-purple. It would be night soon and the place would be dark. I did not want to go in alone, but I couldn’t chance Scott finding out my dad’s identity, either. That would be worse than a million ghosts.

I forced myself to smile. “Thanks for understanding,” I said, kissing him on the cheek and leaving him with his mouth hanging open.

It wasn’t until I neared the warehouse that I started thinking about how dumb this was. I mean, Dad had asked for Mom, not me. What could I possibly do? The bravest thing I’d ever done was jump off a rope swing last summer, and I screamed the entire way down. And knowing Dad, literally anything could be waiting inside.

I stopped at the door and took a deep breath. Was I really going through with this? Dad probably didn’t even need my help. He was the Sentinel. He could handle anything.

But then I thought of the way his voice sounded on the phone and for some reason it made me think of Easter a long time ago, when I went to a giant party at my friend Jayla’s house. Her mom was crazy about stuff like that, so the whole yard—over an acre of land with a little pond and a stretch of trees bordering the lawn—was done up with giant rabbits in overalls, baby chicks with bowties, and giant golden eggs. There was even a cage with real rabbits in it. Everybody had come. Christy Schmidt was there, and Leah Burton. Pete Horowitz and Patrick Reilly and Samantha Orton, too. It seemed like my entire second-grade class had shown up to Jayla’s party. Our moms sat on Mrs. Douglas’ veranda drinking wine and watching us play.

It was all so magical. Mrs. Douglas had strewn colorful streamers around the entire yard, making everything cheerful and fun. I felt like I’d been transported to a mystical world where I could wave a wand and fly with fairies and play hide and seek with nymphs. For hours we played, until Mrs. Douglas came down and handed us golden and silver baskets brimming with Easter grass. It was time, she said, for the Easter egg hunt. The moment we’d been waiting for all day. And the best part, she said, was that you got to keep your eggs—chocolate and candy-coated treats—and the person who found the most would win a super secret prize. She lined us up next to the house and counted down from ten. By the time she got to one my heart was like a rabbit bounding in my chest. The air sparkled.

Go! She yelled. We were off, little bunnies foraging for colorful eggs amidst rocks and tall grass. I was never very athletic, so I watched as Pete, Jayla, and Christy sped to the eggs in plain sight and stuffed them in their baskets. Patrick bent over and found an egg hidden in a bush. After five minutes, Jayla skipped by me. She had four eggs in her basket. Christy had five. I didn’t have any.

I scoured the lawn but didn’t find a single egg. After ten minutes everybody’s baskets were filling up and I still hadn’t found any. Mrs. Douglas told us that we had five minutes left, then four. When she told us we had three minutes, I wandered to a patch of trees, sat on a rock, and cried. I didn’t understand why everyone seemed so good at finding eggs and I was so bad.

When we had one minute left I heard a rustling in the trees. I got up to investigate and found my dad waiting behind a pine tree with a finger to his lips. I didn’t know how he got there, but seeing him only made me cry harder. I ran to him and clasped tightly to his legs and told him everything.

“It’s okay,” he said, rubbing my back. He pointed out an egg in the crook of a tree, and another behind a stone. He scanned the yard quickly and pointed out egg after egg. I skipped over and collected them all. After depositing the last one in my basket I turned back to him with a huge grin, but he was gone.

Years later I found out that he’d come because he heard me crying. Out of everything else his super hearing picked up he’d recognized my voice, and he’d sprinted all the way from downtown to the west side. Six miles in under two minutes. He’d come, hands shaking with fear, ready to fight for me.

Now it was me who’d come for him. I eased the doorknob and entered a huge, dim room that smelled like basements and motor oil. The floor was concrete and the ceiling was a lattice of metal beams and ginormous pipes. Dim light filtered through filthy windows. I wrinkled my nose. Seriously, who would want to hang out here?

The room was filled with stacks of cobwebby pallets, and everything from rusted car parts to crumpled magazines littered the floor. I held my breath and tiptoed through a maze of pallets.

It was so quiet that I started thinking I’d come to the wrong place. As messy as the warehouse was, it looked like nobody had been here for years. When I started to turn back, though, I spotted something weird enough to make me pause. A humanlike thing crouched in the corner of the room, covered in jet-black flesh that gleamed here and there in the dim light. Every instinct screamed at me to run, but for some reason I didn’t. As I got closer I saw that the thing’s flesh was lumpy, like giant metal scales that rose into a perfectly normal head with hair exactly like… but no, that was impossible. I stepped over a pile of greasy clothes and skirted a stack of pallets. When I saw what it was I gasped.

The human-monster thing was my dad, and the black, metal flesh was the biggest chain I’d ever seen wrapped around his entire body. Was my dad really chained up? I blinked hard, but he was still there when I opened my eyes.

As I crept closer I saw that his face was covered in blood. This might sound crazy, but it was like my dad was somebody else entirely. His hair was gray and his skin was lined with wrinkles. The way he sat with his head down he looked old, and I’d never seen him like that.

I tried to be as quiet as a mouse, but score one for Emily Langston, I kicked a stack of those dumb pallets on the way. They teetered, and before I could catch them, they crashed to the ground. Dad’s head snapped up and his jaw dropped.

Emily,” he said. “Get out of here right now.”

I edged closer, pretending I hadn’t heard. “I don’t think anyone’s here,” I said.

He opened his mouth to say something, but somebody spoke up before he did.

“Nobody here but us.”

I spun around and bumped into the largest man I’d ever seen. I mean, my eyes were level with his belly button and his arms were as big around as my waist. He bent over me. “What do we have here?” he said. Even though his face was broad his eyes were set too close. His breath smelled like a liver and spinach sandwich.

Dad straightened in his chair, his chains clinking. “Tank,” he said, eyes narrowing. “No.”

“No, what?” Tank said, sneering. “You’re not in a position to order me around, and I think you know my policy on witnesses.” He drew his arm back, and before I realized what was happening he backhanded me and I went flying. I landed hard, the air exploding from my lungs.

I tried to get up, but a wave of nausea dragged me back down. I curled into a ball, coughing, and gasped air in ragged breaths.

Distantly I heard Dad cry out. His chains rattled and he called to me.

I’m fine, I tried to say, but my chest was so tight I couldn’t get the words out. Besides my face feeling like a bruised apple and my lungs feeling like a smushed watermelon, I felt great. Peachy.

Tank wheeled on me. “Still alive,” he muttered. “You’re a tough one, huh?” He lowered his head and stalked over like a bull.

Dad’s eyes went wide and he fought his chains like an animal. They jangled and clanked. He roared and pulled at them until they groaned, stretched, and finally snapped like a clap of thunder. Without pausing he rushed Tank, lacing his fists and clubbing him in the jaw. Tank crashed across the room, splintering through stacks of pallets and slamming into a support beam.

Dad knelt beside me. He checked my pulse and pinched my eyelids open to look at my pupils. “What were you thinking coming here?” he said. His jaw trembled.

“I wanted to help,” I said, coughing.

He put out a hand to cut me off. “You’re leaving. We’ll talk about this later.”

“I’m not a little girl,” I said, holding his eyes. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “But if you got hurt…”

Tank shook himself and with a snarl he shot up.

Dad got up and stood in front of me. “Stay behind me,” he said.

Tank lunged. They crashed into each other, Tank swinging his fists like sledgehammers. Dad blocked most of the blows, but Tank landed one and like lightning he was on top of Dad, pounding so hard that his head cracked the concrete.

Fighting a wave of nausea I willed myself up. I scoured the floor for some kind of weapon… for anything. A metal pipe lay beside a stack of nearby pallets, but I hesitated. Is this really me? I wondered. Maybe I was a little scared. I’m not what you’d call the fighting kind of girl.

As I stood dumbfounded, Tank drove Dad’s head right through the concrete and all my thoughts vanished. I hefted the pipe, its metal ringing against the concrete. Nobody hurts my dad.

“Get off him!” I yelled, sprinting over and swinging the pipe. It clanged against Tank’s ribs, but it didn’t even slow him down. I didn’t slow down, either. I swung again and again. I didn’t stop until he caught the pipe and threw it across the room.

“Wait your turn,” he said, scowling. “When I’m done with him, you’re next.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I said, scowling right back.

Tank shoved me away with the flick of a wrist. I flew ten feet, tripping over an open paint can, slipping, and sprawling into a puddle of the ugliest forest green I’d ever seen. As if this day wasn’t bad enough. I got up, disgusted, and flicked paint off my jeans. I wanted to leave more than ever now, but then I saw Tank wrap his hands around my dad’s neck and something hardened inside of me. I understood then that love is more than a feeling that you have for another person. It’s also hatred for anyone who would hurt them.

Even with everything going on around me, I thought about that Easter again. Dad was gone for most of the day, and by the time he got back it was dark. He came in without a word and sat in the living room with the lights off. I wanted to tell him all about the egg hunt, so I ran and sat on his lap. I yammered on and on until I noticed how quiet he was being. When I looked up at him, I was stunned into silence. He looked sad. I didn’t know he got that way.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

He pulled me close. “Nothing,” he said, hugging me. “Nothing at all.”

I felt his tears slide down my chin. I never found out what happened to him that day.

I scanned the warehouse but came up with nothing. Besides the garbage scattered all over the floor, the place was empty. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the warehouse was more than it seemed, though. There had to be a reason that Dad had tracked Tank here.

Come on, Emily, I thought. What are you going to do?

I rushed around the warehouse, searching anxiously through stacks of dented boxes and long, maze-like aisles of pallets. I finally found my answer at the far end of the warehouse. A forklift lay like a napping lion in front of a set of bay doors. It looked new. If I was a betting girl, I’d say it worked. All I had to do was figure out how to drive it.

I hopped into the seat and searched around before finding the key in the ignition. I turned it and the forklift purred to life. A stick shift by the seat read “forward” and “reverse.” Seemed easy enough. I jerked the stick forward, gave it gas, and drove right into a wall. I reversed into a support beam and pulled forward again, knocking over a stack of those dumb pallets.

After a few awkward moments I started to get the hang of it. I rounded a row of pallets and saw Tank straight ahead. Giving the forklift gas, I steered a path right for him. Tank was bent over my dad when I slammed into him at full speed, knocking us in all directions.

The forklift veered and toppled, throwing me from the seat. Groaning, I got to my hands and knees. By the time I lurched to my feet I saw that my forklift trick had been enough to give Dad the upper hand. It wouldn’t last long, though. Tank was already fighting Dad off, and Dad seemed to be getting more tired by the second. I guess it takes more than a few tons of metal to stop a supervillain.

After today, let me tell you, I was leaving the hero-ing to Dad. My shirt was ruined, I was cut and bruised, and I don’t care how it sounds but I broke a nail. Call me girly, but nails take a long time to grow. They’re a commitment, is what I’m saying. Still, I was in this with Dad, and if he hadn’t quit yet, neither would I. What I needed to do was think outside the box. Dad was known for his ability to not just use his fists but his head. I needed to do that, too. In the corner, by the chair I’d found Dad in, his chain glimmered in the faint light. Most of it lay in shattered links, but a long segment rested unbroken beside the chair. I ran over, grabbed a link, and started dragging it. If you’ve never carried a chain before, by the way, the things are heavy. I put my entire body into it, jerking closer to Dad inch by inch.

By the time I reached him I was sweating and my arms burned. I was probably going to have blisters on my palms. Dad reached out and grabbed the chain, and in one fast motion he looped it around Tank and fastened it to the ground.

I think they call that irony. Get it? Iron-y?

With both hands freed, he struck Tank in the temple and Tank went limp. Dad rolled off of him, breathing heavily.

After a minute he got up. I’d never seen him lift cars, beat up ten guys at once, or take machine gun bullets and keep going. I knew he could do all that, but it had always seemed remote because to me he was just Dad. But as he stood over Tank with his chest out and his arms akimbo, I saw the superhero that everybody else saw when they looked at him. It’s funny when you think about the way you see people, especially those you see every day. Even though Dad looked the same as he had that afternoon, he also looked completely different. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever look the same again.

“Good job,” he said between breaths. In the distance I heard what sounded like a fleet of sirens.

“Sounds like your mom finally got our messages,” he said. “You should get out of here so I don’t have to explain why I needed my daughter to help me fight the most dangerous man on the East Coast.”

I thought about Scott and I got that feeling of excitement like a million ladybugs in my stomach. “Are you sure?” I said. “You don’t need anything else?”

“Go,” Dad said. “Get out of here and have a good time with Scott. But be back by ten.”

“Ten?” I said. “I’m sixteen, Dad. And I just saved your life.”

Dad shook his head and chuckled. “Eleven, then. Be back by eleven.”

“Eleven?” I said.

Dad glared at me.

“Eleven’s good,” I said.

That Easter I wanted Dad to read me a story before I went to bed. I needed him to read me a story. He still hadn’t moved from the living room, though, and Mom said he was too tired. But I was in second grade. What did I know? I insisted that he read to me or I wasn’t going to bed. I’d never go to bed again in my entire life.

Now I’m better at the game of wills than my dad, but I don’t hold a candle to my mom. She sat at the foot of my bed with Where the Wild Things Are opened on her lap, and she cocked an eyebrow at me that told me I’d never eat ice cream again. That was the kind of will Mom had. I folded my arms and pouted, knowing that I’d lost, but just as Mom began to read I heard Dad clomping up the stairs. He’d heard me pleading with mom. Of course he’d heard. He could hear whispered conversations from miles away. He could hear a cat sneaking up on him.

“It’s okay,” Dad said, coming in the room. “I’ll read to her.”

Mom got up and left us. Dad sat down and licked his thumb like he always did before he read. When he finished I asked him to read again, and then again. He inched his chair closer and read to me over and over again. I don’t remember how many times he read the book, but at some point he began making voices for Max. He rumbled and stomped through the room and he became the monsters. When he finished, he set the book down and smiled at me. I smiled back, feeling like I’d accomplished some big thing.

A squad of police cars screeched into the parking lot just as me and Scott pulled out of the warehouse. Once they were behind us the night was quiet in the way that only a summer night can be. The sun dipped below the horizon and the moon shone fat and white in the sky. Along the road the trees were heavy with leaves touched black by the night. Scott took my hand. We drove in silence, our fingers laced together, and the road stretched on like it would never end.

---

The Silver Spoon

By C. L. Holland

“Lay the table, pet,” Ma says. “Don’t forget the spoons.” It’s Christmas Day, which means she’s cooking dinner for all of us which is me and Ma and Pa, Uncle Benny who’s Pa’s brother, Aunt Pol his wife, and Gramma who’s mean.

There’s lots of dishes to go on the table. More than we have serving spoons, which Gramma always complains about because you get bits of cabbage in the potatoes and things. We have an extra spoon, tucked away at the back of the drawer, but we’re not allowed to use it. It doesn’t match with the other cutlery, which has frilly patterns on the handles, this one’s plain and with markings on the back that I think mean it’s silver. Ma says it’s too special to use for every day, but she doesn’t tell me not to use it today so I decide that Christmas doesn’t count and take it too.

Pa carves the turkey like always, with an electric knife that reminds me of the trimmer Mr Johnson next door cuts his hedge with. Everyone helps themselves to vegetables and things, because Ma refuses to wait on us since she cooked everything. Gramma doesn’t like that, but I do because that way I don’t end up with piles of cabbage.

Ma doesn’t notice the spoon until everyone’s eating and Pa says, “What’s up with the sprouts this year? Who the hell puts bacon in them?”

Ma shoots a glance at the sprout dish with the spoon in, then at me but I pretend not to see.

“Jamie Oliver,” she says. He’s her favorite TV chef.

Gramma snorts. “Boy’s barely out of school, what does he know? In my day we peeled all the vegetables by hand, none of this frozen nonsense.”

“They weren’t frozen,” Ma snaps.

“Turkey’s a bit dry,” Uncle Benny says, covering his turkey mountain with more gravy. “But then it usually is. Not like yours, Pol.”

“Oh please,” Aunt Pol replies. “I buy mine ready prepared, I’m no fool.”

Ma’s lips go all white and pressed together.

“So, pet,” Pa says, “what do you think of the jumper your grandmother gave you?”

I go to say it’s perfect thank you, like I’m supposed to, but something else comes out.

“It’s horrible and itchy, and makes me look like an orangutan.”

Pa stifles a laugh before he says my name in that stern way like I’m in trouble. Gramma’s gone red and I expect her to shout but she doesn’t.

“Why would I waste perfectly good money on such an ungrateful grandchild? Fifty pence in a charity shop that cost me and worth every penny.”

I pull the jumper off over my head and it makes my hair all static. No one’s going to tell me off, they’re all too busy arguing about how they don’t like their presents. I turn to Ma to say sorry for being rude, but she doesn’t look upset. She’s all upright and pale, not saying anything, like a queen on TV.

We eat the rest of dinner and nothing’s right for anyone. The vegetables are too soft for Aunt Pol but not soft enough for Gramma, and the cranberry sauce doesn’t taste homemade. Uncle Benny thinks the Yorkshire puddings are soggy, and I say that’s what happens when you put gravy on them.

Ma fetches the Christmas pudding. We don’t light it any more after the year the decorations caught fire.

“Not this again,” Aunt Pol says. “Why can’t you get a nice shop-bought one instead of making this stodge every year?”

Gramma says something rude about people who get shop-bought. I go to the kitchen for a bowl of peanut butter ice-cream, my treat because Christmas pud is foul, and she tells me off because it’s not traditional. This time I tell her I don’t care because traditional is stupid.

“Can’t you just let the girl have some fun?” Pa says. “God knows you ruined enough of our Christmases without wrecking hers.”

When everyone’s finished, Ma stands up to clear the table. “I hope you enjoyed Christmas dinner,” she says, “because now you’ve all finally been honest about what you really think, it’s the last one I’m making.”

There’s a chorus of protest, which is funny since everyone complained. I don’t think they’re upset about the food though.

“Not one of you had a good thing to say about it,” she says, “so I’m not slaving over it for one more year. You can make your own arrangements. Maybe we’ll all come to you next year, Pol.”

“Buy in for all of you? You must be joking, it’d cost a fortune,” Aunt Pol says, and blushes.

Ma goes in the kitchen and sings a Christmas song as she runs the water for washing up. Everyone else goes to watch the Queen’s speech. I start carrying the bowls out to her.

“I like your cooking,” I say. “But I don’t like turkey.”

“I know, pet.” She smiles as I hand her the dishes, and I’m staring at the silver spoon in with the last bacon bits when I realize that Ma’s the only one who didn’t eat the sprouts.

---

Born of Lies

By Rhoads Brazos

Again Elton stretched his fingers out over the far edge of his desk, and again they curled. Shy, in their own way.

Her voice hammered down.

“You impertinent little devil! What did I say?”

Elton blubbered, setting the boys in the class to snickering. He pressed his palms to the smooth oak top and pointed ten times at the chalkboard.

Miss Humphreys’ willow switch cracked down too fast to see. Elton leapt yelping to his feet and flapped his fingers in the air.

“Nose to the corner,” Miss Humphreys said. “For the rest of this Lord’s day.” She pointed with the switch, as if Elton and every other student didn’t already know which corner she meant.

Elton looked down at Royce with his slickened hair parted in a gentlemanly fashion. Royce shuffled in his desk and smiled softly.

“Please,” Elton stammered. “No. I—”

“Ah! So soon? Such moxie!”

Elton knelt by his desk and spread his fingers again but Mrs. Humphreys had seen enough. She grabbed him with a twist to the ear, adding in a pinch of her nails for good measure and, ignoring Elton’s squeals, deposited him at the front corner of the room next to the shelf of readers tattered and worn, behind the chipped enamel globe, far away from the heat of the pot-bellied stove.

“Kneel,” Miss Humphreys said, “if it suits you so. Pray for absolution. Think only of your shame.”

Elton mumbled from the corner but Miss Humphreys turned away.

“Now, where were we?” she asked.

A score of students focused upon their slates.

For the remainder of the morning, whenever Miss Humphreys was sure to be distracted, hesitant glances were cast at Elton’s back. His forehead stayed pressed to the corner. His arms hung slack at his sides.

During arithmetic facts and figures, he never turned around.

When Fabius Maximus targeted supply lines like a rabid Mescalero, Elton kept his shoulders stone-still.

Even when cinnamon-pigtailed Genevieve, whom it was rumored Elton favored, went up front to gather and pass out the readers, he didn’t offer the slightest twitch.

At recess the wind blew chill and steady through the dry grass and bottlebrush. The older children stole to the eastern side of the school.

“Can you see ‘em?” Genevieve asked.

“Shh.” Oliver, the tallest eighth grader, stood on his toes and peeked through the window. “He’s there.”

“Has he—”

Oliver ducked down quickly. The other dozen students followed suit. “She’s heatin’ a coffee atop the stove.”

The group walked back to the school’s front porch. They pressed close to the peeling white woodwork, out of the wind’s reach.

Genevieve glared at Royce. “What’d you tell him?”

“Nothin’,” Royce said.

“You said somethin’ that got him scared.”

“Ain’t so.”

“Royce Kroupa, you ain’t ever goin’ to heaven!”

Royce chuckled. “You want to know too?”

“Tell us,” Oliver said. The crowd of kids were in like agreement.

“All right then.” Royce sniffed and squinted at October’s bare horizon. “I had a tutor for a spell.”

“Yeah,” Genevieve said. “Like you ain’t brought that up none.”

“Well, it’s true and he told me stuff, on account of he knows how teachers think. ‘Cause he sorta is one, follow?”

The group agreed.

“There’s reasons why they choose the corner, and not say, the stoop or the recitin’ bench.”

Royce looked slowly from eye to eye. No one interrupted.

“There’s somethin’ there,” he said.

“What are you on about?” Genevieve asked with blatant doubt.

“In olden times. Like the General Whatsit—”

“Maximus?” Oliver offered.

Royce snapped his fingers. “Maximus. Back then they done it too. That’s where the teachers learned it. They’d perch a kid in the corner with his nose up close where he can smell the woodwork, right?”

The group muttered. They’d all had a stint in the corner at one time or another.

“Well,” Royce said. “It’s a test, see? There’s something in the corner. In every corner.” His excitement continued to build. “And when it sees a young’un that’s unwanted, just a burden on the world, why sometimes, if it’s particu-airily hungry, it reaches out and snatches ‘em up!”

“From the corner,” Genevieve said slowly with her lids half-closed.

“You bet. It’s a paper man. It sidles out edgewise. Anything in the corner is its. You stand there long enough and you’re in a serious way.”

“Paper?” Oliver asked. “That ain’t worth frettin’.”

“Naw, but it’s witchy and edge-sharp. Prunes the fingers of pilferin’ nibblers and takes the tongues of fibbers. Then, before you know what’s yours, it rumples you up like a pleat. Swallows you down then and there or fobs you in its pocket for later snackin’.”

“I oughta tell your pa,” Genevieve said. “Let him know how you spin lies and stories.”

Royce chuckled dryly.

Though Oliver also seemed unimpressed, the other students were quiet. The wind kicked up in a bluster, whipping hair and loose clothing about, yet Royce’s perfect part stayed in place.

“I’ll prove it’s so,” he said. “Watch.”

Miss Humphreys rang the class bell to end morning recess and the children hurried back inside. Elton still hadn’t moved from his place up front. Miss Humphreys gave him all the attention of a foot stool. While the next lesson was being prepared Royce raised his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Kroupa?” Miss Humphreys asked.

“I was a-wonderin’—”

“Wondering,” she corrected.

“Yes’m. In olden times, those codger Romans?”

Miss Humphreys blinked rapidly, perhaps a bit taken aback that anyone in the class wanted to know more, this student in particular.

“They had teachers and such back then?” Royce asked.

“Certainly.”

“They set up the how and why of schoolin’.”

“Well—” Miss Humphreys rubbed the bridge of her long nose. She pushed her glasses back high. “To some extent, yes. The Greeks and the Romans taught us the value of a learned society.”

“But,” Royce said, his tone dramatically falling, “they had dark ways.”

“And who told you that?”

“Genny, she did.”

Genevieve pressed her lips into a dour frown.

“Well,” Miss Humphreys said, “she would be correct.”

“She says they used to fodder their kids to the coyotes.”

“Wolves. That may be—”

“Like offal. If’n a kid wasn’t fit and kelter, they had ways. Weird rites and sacrificin’. Ain’t—isn’t that so?”

Miss Humphreys gave Genevieve a knowing look. “Yes, they were most unchristian, and we will speak no more of that.”

“Sinister,” Royce said.

“I said, no more.”

Royce let the issue drop but turned with nods and winks. The younger students fidgeted in their front row seats. Elton still hadn’t moved.

---

That breezy Monday was Miss Humphreys’ last lesson. What had happened that day was now whispered gossip in neighboring counties. Deep into November, Mrs. Marin, the pastor’s wife, agreed to start the classroom up again, once the holidays were finished. The parents expected more than delicacy from their namesakes, but they couldn’t very well force them back when they too quickened their pace before the schoolhouse.

Royce crouched in the dust before Farley’s Implements. His dark hair hung loose and disheveled. He watched sporadic movement through the store windows and waited for someone to exit.

A clatter arose from the eastern street. Royce turned to see Genevieve and her younger brother pulling a cart as shallow as a milk-pan.

“Best get outta the dirt,” Genevieve said. “A big ol’ dung bug’s gonna come along and roll you up.”

Royce sneered. “You should talk, beast-o-burden.”

“Digby’s got an abscess.” Genevieve propped the handcart’s yoke on the hitching rail. “My Pa’s lettin’ him heal up.”

Genevieve secured the cart with a leather thong. She appraised Royce’s mount, a fine charcoal-gray steed also hitched in place. She petted it along the flank before handing a scrap of paper to her brother.

“Show Mr. Farley,” she said, “and help him tote it all out.”

Her brother nodded and jogged inside.

“Good luck pulling it upland laded low,” Royce said. “Maybe some blam’d Mormonite will show you the technique proper, march you all the way to Utah Territory. Good riddance, I say!”

“You’d like to see me go, would you?”

“You bet. I—” Royce blinked hard and shuddered. He affected hushed tones. “Heard about Ollie?”

“My Pa says he’s at Pierpont. Been so a couple weeks now.”

“He has an uncle there, at the paper mill.”

“I know.”

“Is he still—”

“I really can’t say. S’pose he’s managin’.”

The students had at first celebrated the afternoon recess bell not calling them in. But with enough delay even children question a blessing. As always, Oliver had been the obvious choice to look over the sill. He’d stared through the windowpane in pale silence. After a moment he slumped into a listless heap. He started to cry. When he began to scream the students ran.

“Your pa,” Royce said. “He was deputized?”

“He was at that.”

“Ollie said—” Royce rubbed at his mouth and grimaced.

“I was there too, you know.”

“He said it chews from the feet up.” Royce licked his lips. “So you can watch it work.”

“I heard.”

“Your Pa saw what was left.”

“Yours did too. Ask him of it.”

“We’re not on speakin’ terms.”

Genevieve gave a quizzical look and glanced over her shoulder at the implements store.

“Genny,” Royce said, “tell me.”

“You look tepid, sittin’ out in the road. You’re not cracked are you?”

“What’d they find in there?”

Genevieve smirked. “Stand up if you ain’t.”

Royce struggled to his feet and made a weak attempt at dusting himself clean.

“Help me uphill?” Genevieve asked.

With a set frown Royce agreed.

Genevieve gave another check to her brother, still busy with Mr. Farley. She spoke low. “My Pa went in with the others. Doors and windows latched, pegged shut from within, you heard?”

Royce swallowed and nodded quickly.

“The men had to chop the door open. Place was empty, of—you know, anything lively. There wasn’t nothing of a person left, just a mess of hair and meat and bones crunched into splinters. My Pa once saw a fella get spindled ‘round a locomotive axle. It was like that, he said.”

“Ollie said it was in the corner,” Royce said. “The corner.”

“Right enough. That’s where the mess was, all smeared and stuck into the slats. In fact—” Genevieve wrinkled her nose. “They were up above too.”

“I don’t follow.”

“‘Bove the ceilin’. In the rafters.”

Royce rubbed his forehead.

“You all right?” Genevieve asked.

“Both of ‘em?”

“Just a mess of scraps, but not their clothes. They were set aside nice and clean. Folded up tight too like they’d been wringered, pressed fancy.”

Royce fought back a whimper. He grabbed Genevieve’s arm. Her eyes widened.

“Genny,” he said. “I made it up. It ain’t a real thing.”

“You don’t need to go fessin’ to me. I can tell when you lie.”

Mr. Farley and Genevieve’s brother exited the shop with bundles in hand. After a quick exchange of pleasantries, they deposited sacks of flour as well as a wrapped slab of salted beef in back of the cart. They went back inside.

“It ain’t real,” Royce said.

“No.”

“But—if—” He spluttered. “Then how?”

“Talk about the devil and his imps’ll appear.”

“Devil?”

“Yes, Royce Kroupa, you villain. The devil.”

“And you’re not scared?”

“Why should I be? I’m God-fearin’.”

“So was Miss Humphreys.”

Genevieve scoffed. “She was mean as a cur-dog.”

“But what about El?”

“Don’t know what was in his heart,” Genevieve said. “But I know what’s in mine. And I’ve got a good guess what’s in yours.”

Mr. Farley returned and placed a cask of molasses and two cakes of beeswax onto the cart. “Are you able to haul this, little miss?”

“Yes sir,” she said. “My friend Royce is helpin’.”

“Why, Master Kroupa.” Mr. Farley wiped his hands on his leather smock. “That’s right decent.”

“Can you bring me two flasks of kerosene?” Royce asked. He reached into his pocket and retrieved a few coins. Farley nodded his ascent and retreated to the store.

“Why do you need that?” Genevieve squinted her brow down low.

“My Pa won’t give me none,” Royce said.

“For—”

“My lamp. What you think?”

“That you’re gonna set that school to kindling.”

Royce rubbed at his mouth. “That wouldn’t do any good. Let’s rope Smokey round the saddle horn to tow. You’ll still need to walk it, but—”

“No.”

“What?”

“A gentleman wouldn’t ride and leave a lady pullin’.”

“Don’t see no—” Royce held his tongue.

“I want to ride,” Genevieve said.

Royce unhitched his horse and walked him out into the road.

“We’ll turn them both around first.”

---

They shuffled out of town, cutting away from the lifelessly shallow river and winding up the eastern slope. In his mind, Royce could picture how far away Genevieve lived, but measuring it with footfalls drove the fact home flat and flush. From atop Smokey’s back, Genevieve turned and watched Royce with her usual look of smug judgment, as if his every scuff and stumble pointed to some masculine flaw. Royce squeezed the cart handle tight and leaned against it with his chest. He gave a sideways glance to Genevieve’s little brother, puffing beside him.

Genevieve. How Royce hated her. He loathed that freckle-splattered nose and those twin bouncing braids like fat coils of gallow-grass or maybe straw and those arms, even under this sun talcy smooth just like the soft curve of her neck. She was smiling again. Royce watched Smokey’s hooves clop moons into the dust.

A half-hour later they reached the farmhouse, a sad place, unpainted and listing to one side. Genevieve dismounted and her mother hurried out from the house to greet her. Royce almost laughed—they looked so much alike—but he kept himself somber.

“Wanna come in for a drink?” Genevieve asked.

“Naw, got my canteen.”

“It’s okay if—”

“I’d rather not.”

Royce hoisted himself up in the saddle. Genevieve handed him his flasks from the cart. She didn’t release fully so he gave them a little tug. He dropped them in his saddlebag and with a clack of his tongue spun his ride back the way he came.

He rode slowly without looking back. He knew those two were watching him. Funny, he could tell the brother wasn’t, but the ladies were. He could picture them turning to one another and clucking, nodding, about what? Their gaze tickled the back of his neck.

These last weeks had honed his scrutiny sharper than a tattler’s tongue. He’d gained an earthly second-sight, one born not of divine intuition but rather upon mundane instinct and suspicion. Back when he still dared enter the house, he knew how many flies beat against the window pane. Knew a seven-legged spider with a crooked back had scuttled from the kitchen and was making its way to the cellar. He knew that clockwork patter-splat to be a burning tallow that had crested its crown to dribble wax pools on the mantle.

On the ride out of town he’d turned and picked out onlookers in storefront windows with ease. They’d shown surprise when he’d met their eye so quickly, with such speed that he’d read their expressions before they could mask them—equal parts astonishment and amusement.

He could feel it now—every nerve tingling. As he rode down by the bend and finally out of view of Genevieve’s house, the warm tug of another claimed his focus. Nothing he could prove, just a queasy wariness, like when you spy two people whispering amongst themselves and a pair of lips forms your name.

To his left was Willoughby Bicker’s empty barn. The old lout was nowhere near. He was probably at his stead, unconscious in the shade and stinking of mescal and damp trousers. The barn’s door sat edged to the side revealing an inky swath of the interior.

Every fiber within told him to kick to a gallop. Don’t look, leave it behind. But maybe she was right. His soul was sour. He knew it and she knew it along with everyone else. That’s why his generosity caused others to do a double-take. Genevieve didn’t care about Ollie’s charge because she didn’t need to. Royce wanted that sense of ease too.

He pulled the reigns back and Smokey came to a halt.

He watched the darkness. The darkness watched him.

Royce hopped to the ground. He crunched over the brittle grass and dry ground caked and cracked like gator skin. He was treading upon a giant and this was its gullet. Royce stopped a safe distance away from the barn.

A swallow had built a nest upon the main door. Spider webs threaded across the entrance. Royce eyed the husks of insects that had foolishly thought the way clear.

“Ain’t afraid,” he called out. His voice wavered.

He waited for a response. A tickling heat crawled across his face. It stopped on his throat. Royce swallowed.

“Went to church,” he said. “Confessed and did wine and wafer and all o’ that!”

But did you tell the Father every sin?

Royce squinted hard, but only for a second. The darkness needed to be watched lest it seep free of the sun’s hold, blot the doorway like an inkspill and reach out to stain him. He wiped his eyes. He could almost make out the barn’s back corner, hidden in the dusty murk. He looked back at Smokey. The horse had wandered to the roadside to pick at dried clover.

Royce hadn’t heard anything. His own mind filled in the response. The words lived within him. It was just a stupid story he’d spun on the spot. And yet Ollie had said—

You placed him upon the altar.

“Ain’t my fault. He’s stupid.”

Not anymore.

Royce shifted his weight uneasily. “You ain’t real. Figmented is all.”

The wind gusted, perfectly natural for late autumn, not menacing at all. The barn didn’t just exhale, fetid and as thirsty as parchment.

A touch brushed Royce’s face. Sticky and yielding, pulled tight and now snapping. Royce stopped within the doorway’s gap. He hadn’t willed his feet forward yet they’d taken him there just the same.

In the near darkness two steps away from the sun’s amber cast, a form shifted, a shadow within a shadow, just a thread hanging in the air. It turned and slid its razor profile sideways for Royce to see, forcing him to drink in the sickening horror of its form.

It towered a half-height over an average man, with long pale limbs the color of dust and a torso stretched thin. There was no depth to its body, which seemed to be plastered against an impossible nothing. It stood indifferent and naked, for who or what could clothe it? Its every joint was knuckled and swollen like those of an arthritic. Its ribs pinched across the shell of its chest.

Soundlessly, it slouched to all fours. It loped toward the barn door with its hind in the air. It lifted its head to reveal a black slash of a mouth yawning open under a leering face crowned with tongues.

With a frantic cry Royce staggered back into the sunlight. He slipped once on the loose earth. A paper finger rustled by his ear and a grip tugged at his jeans. He wrenched his leg away with a rending tear like a blade through sackcloth and scuttled backward sobbing. Somehow he found his feet and launched himself up into his horse’s saddle.

The wind whipped his tears away. He’d never ridden faster.

---

Royce raced up the shaded approach to the ranch at a full gallop. The homestead, two stories tall and generously wide, offered no comfort. He hadn’t stepped inside its doors in nearly a month. On the front porch sat his father, appraising him with a skeptic’s eye. His father motioned with his chin to Mr. Henwick, who headed the southern acres. Henwick gave a chagrined smirk and headed past Royce to the bunkhouse where the rest of the hands could be heard gathering for supper. The wind carried their chatter along with the acrid smoke from their fires.

Royce gave a leery glance at Henwick as he passed, yet offered no greeting. Henwick had tried to catch him a couple of weeks ago.

“Well, boy?” his father asked.

Royce looked behind him to check on both Henwick’s retreating back as well as the front approach. Nothing was pursuing.

“Pa, I—”

“Come to your senses?” Royce’s father looked him once over, ponderously from head to toe. “Can’t say you look it.”

“Help me.”

“I’d like to.”

“The devil’s after me, Pa. It’s . . . I’m a liar.”

Royce’s father scoffed. “Don’t I know it.” He tapped a rolled cigarette from a tin and held it between his lips.

“If you can get Pastor Marin to come out I—”

“What, that again?”

“I didn’t tell him all. That’s why it’s still chasin’ me.”

Royce’s father pulled a Lucifer between pinched sandpaper. It popped alight in a cloud of blue sulfur. He touched its flame to his cigarette and then flipped the matchstick out into the dirt. Royce watched it smolder out. When he looked up again his father’s eyes were upon him. The old guy breathed in deeply and exhaled a slow cloud.

“What’d you do, boy?”

“It was my fault they were there.”

“They . . .” Royce’s father nodded and puffed again. “How so?”

“I told El that Miss Humphreys was a wren at the Battle of Gonzales.”

“Nymph du prairie? That ol’ gal?”

“It was a story.”

“Hmm.” Royce’s father drew in again. He chuckle-coughed and shook his head.

“El asked her ‘bout it, not knowing.”

“Blasted shanny, that boy. That’s why you need proper learning.”

“Yes, sir. But you see?”

Royce’s father watched the bunkhouse. The northern crew was just arriving to whoops and hollers from their southern counterparts, already kicked back and passing a jug of coffin varnish.

“I’m to blame. I put them there. And—and I . . .”

“Spit it out.”

“It’s my fault. I made it real.”

“Your specter again?”

“It’s not. It’s a devil, Genny says. I—” Royce frowned at the porch’s deepening shadows. “I believe her. I’ve seen it up close. It’s everything I said an’ worse. I need to talk to Pastor Marin. One more time.”

Royce’s father rose without answering. He moved to the front steps and mustered a backward shuffle from Royce. He stopped and eyed his son coolly. For a long while the two stood motionless. The cigarette slowly burned itself down to a stub.

The old man finally spoke. “Your Ma was into churchin’ too. Mends all ills, that’s what she thought.”

Royce scowled with his lips tight.

“She lay in that bed for a fortnight.” Royce’s father stepped forward off the front step. “Prayed up to the end. Hell, I joined her.”

“I remember,” Royce whispered.

“Hard not to.” Royce’s father spit the stub of his cigarette to the ground and ground it under the toe of his boot. He stopped within an arm’s reach of Royce. It was the closest the two had been in weeks. Royce blinked quickly. His eyes welled with tears.

“There aren’t any haunts or devils or any other whatnots.”

“But, Pa. I seen it.”

Royce’s father put his hands on his son’s shoulders. The boy winced. “I know you think so. And if there were angels then I might say maybe, but—no, not with what I put on the table. Any fool would have taken the trade. There’s nothing.”

“It sliced my cuff though. Look.”

“You’re seeing one thing and picturing another.”

Royce’s father hugged him tight. Royce went tense for a moment but somehow fought his fears and hugged his father back. It didn’t escape him that the clamor from the bunkhouse had dropped away to a murmur. Both crews were studying this exchange. He felt every pair of eyes on him, plus another.

Royce snapped alert.

“Son, trust me. You’re safe here.”

Royce frantically searched the porch, the windows, and every visible room. His bedroom shades fluttered. For an instant a familiar face was there, pallid and thin with a mouth torn ragged. It flitted past the kitchen window. A motion came from behind the front door.

“Let’s go inside,” his father said.

“No!”

“We’ll just sit on the step, muse a bit, have a drink. You can tell me—”

Royce tried to shove himself away but his father kept himself clenched tight.

“Boy, you need to trust me.”

He grabbed Royce firmly about the wrist. Royce twisted in his grip but this hold wasn’t about to be broken. Those old hands had pulled too much wire and tugged down too many unruly steers. He had him.

“You’ll see. We’ll sit together like men and—”

Royce’s left streaked upward to crack against his father’s jaw. The old man sprawled into a heap. Shouts went up from behind him but Royce didn’t turn to look. He knew how far back the hands were and had no doubt that he could make the edge of the woods before their longer legs could reach him.

He charged into the brush. The branches tore at him. He held his forearm before his face to stop the worst of the lashings and plowed forward. The cries behind him faded. He knew he was being let go. He felt the moment when his father’s gaze turned away.

---

Royce had set up camp in a sheltered outcropping a short jog up from a thread-thin stream, a mile and a half away from his home. He poked through the remains of the camp—a cold firepit, a small box of hatchets and saws he’d swiped from outside the bunkhouse, and a sack of foodstuffs that he’d hoisted high off the ground to keep them out of reach of animals and insects. He’d swiped the food out of the back of one of the kitchen’s stock wagons. At the time of the heist he’d fancied himself quite clever. Upon further reflection it seemed curious that the pack he’d taken had been so properly stocked for his needs. Royce rubbed his knuckles. They still ached. There probably wouldn’t be another pack waiting for him.

The wind picked up, setting the treetops to swaying and sending tawny clouds of pollen billowing from their branches. The well water scent of the air and the hastily deepening dusk announced an approaching storm. Royce used to enjoy such things, sitting in his room and watching the water cascade in rivulets down the glass, but he supposed he’d never experience that again.

He pulled his laundry off a makeshift line and after bundling it tight, stuffed the goods in what he hoped would remain a dry nook in the rockface. He’d already done the same with a bundle of sticks and a supply of touchwood. He’d weather this unscathed provided the storm didn’t go on too long.

Royce drew his line between two opposing rocks and threw a waxed canvas sheet over it. He weighed the corners down with heavy stones just as the first overhead crack of thunder pealed in sagging clouds the color of sooty plums. He struggled with his lantern to no avail. The kerosene had been left in the saddlebags. Smokey was probably in the barn by now and Royce’s purchased goods sacked away somewhere never to be seen again. The rain fell and Royce sat.

Over the last weeks he’d given plenty of thought to his options. He knew the Paper Man needed the buildings. It followed him, always guessing his destination and spying from afar. It peered out of neighbors’ windows or from the cracked doors of old sheds. Sometimes he saw it and sometimes he felt it. When he reached his destination it watched and waited for him to get too close. It followed him back the same way.

Yet in the barn when it had gotten so near, it didn’t scramble out into the sunlight to snatch him up. It could move quickly between corners but was held in check by the bounds of the structure. He just had to lose it. He could follow the stream south and leave it behind. It would flit from his home to town to school but it would never guess where he’d gone, not with the entire continent to choose from. The others should be safe for it didn’t seem to want anyone else, just Miss Humphreys for thrashing it so soundly and Royce for telling his lie.

“El,” Royce said. “I didn’t mean it. I swear it.” He tried not to think of that thing in the barn. That thing with Elton’s face.

He lay back and watched the canvas ripple. The rain slapped against the tent’s sides. It traced its way down the sagging line and dripped over Royce’s head. He wished he had a cup or even his canteen with which to catch it. The canvas’s left wall pressed in and the right wall snapped back and forth with the gusts. Royce felt eyes upon him and only then realized what he had done.

Elton’s face slid out of the canvas crease. Arms and legs followed. Royce didn’t wait for more. He flung himself toward the exit. He was plucked out of the air and thrown back to ground.

It slithered down with the rain, with its thin limbs coiling and wrapping, cocooning Royce’s struggling form and cinching his jaw tight. He hummed his screams.

“Belief is a funny thing,” it said. “Faith, some call it. It moves mountains.”

Royce writhed in its grip and wept.

“I was like you once.” It held his face close to its own and pushed his hair back into a loose part. “I can almost remember.”

A tug and a snip and another tongue was added to its crown. As Royce frothed a drawn-out scream, it squeezed his remaining stub tight and slid under his clothes. A twist of its body and they were left in tatters.

“They stick to the teeth.” It pressed its body to his.

Royce howled and burbled. Tears streaked down his cheeks. The Paper Man laughed and, without drawing its hand from his mouth, squeezed his jaw shut again.

“No? I shouldn’t? Well, I think we’ll try something different then, something new. You deserve to see what you’ve created. We’ll go places, meet new faces, just the two of us.” It sniffed the air. “A fresh lamb awaits. Just a hop and a skip from here. Wait ‘til you see!” It twined down his body and held his feet between long fingers. “I have it on good authority that this works.”

It started from the toes and folded him up tight and smooth, as thin as paper.

---

Spare a Prayer

By Jess Hyslop

Alyss had almost given herself up for lost when she heard the footsteps.

She sat up among her blankets, listening. Yes, there–the rapid click-clack of heels on cobblestones. Someone doubtless in a hurry to get home and shut out the bitter winter evening. Someone fortunate enough to have a home at all.

Alyss fumbled for the battered top hat that lay, bottom-up, before her. Little good it had done. The streets had been unusually quiet all day, and those pedestrians who had ventured out, stingy. Alyss wished she could say that were unusual.

But perhaps this one would be different. She needed this one to be different.

Alyss peered along the alleyway. The glow of a nearby street lamp revealed that the person approaching was a woman, all bundled up in a coat and bonnet. Her nose was wrinkled against the stink of the gutter, and she held her skirts clear of the ground with gloved hands. Not a regular visitor to the Warren then, but not too fine either. Alyss felt a twinge of hope. This was the type who might take pity.

She held out her hat as the woman came closer. “Spare a prayer, miss? Spare a prayer.” Her voice emerged as a cracked whisper, hoarse with disuse and the cold.

The woman started at the words, emerging as they did from the shadows beside a brimming dustbin. Her eyes flickered towards their source, but when she spied Alyss she hastily averted her gaze. Alyss’s hope–meagre in the first place–receded. But she couldn’t afford to give up so easily.

“Spare a prayer for an unlucky god, miss?” she tried again. “Come on, miss. I’m down on me luck. Spare a little prayer.”

Yet the woman only click-clacked onwards, allowing Alyss to glimpse her shoes beneath the hem of her skirt. Patent leather, they were; well made, with smart little heels. Alyss looked sadly at her own boots–cast-offs from a laborer’s child, soles flapping at the toes, laces missing, threads frayed.

Hunger growled in her belly, warning her that it knew how weak she was, that the moment was coming when it would finally pounce.

She wouldn’t have many more chances.

Alyss made one final attempt. Bracing herself against the chill, she let her blankets fall away, exposing her skinny ankles, her tattered skirts–and her wings. Poking out of her jacket, the once-proud pinions dangled down her back, inert and useless.

“Please, miss. Please, one little prayer. I ain’t asking for a litany, just a tiny prayer will do. I’ve fallen on hard times, miss. I’ve no disciples left. Please. One prayer. Spare one little prayer.”

She waited, trembling with cold and anxiety. She didn’t know whether her piteous display would persuade her audience, for her cry was the cry of half the gods in the city. Abandoned deities lurked on every street, hunkered down in doorways and under bridges, thin and wretched, cradling hunger in their bellies just as Alyss did. With so many begging for succor, the populace had grown accustomed–and hardened–to their pleading.

Like as not this lady would be the same, hurrying off into the deepening night in her expensive shoes and never thinking again of the starving god she’d passed on her way. But just as Alyss began to draw her blankets back around herself, the woman’s stride faltered, and she walked back a few steps to look down at the shivering supplicant. Alyss returned her gaze, beseeching, hardly daring to believe her luck.

The lady’s lips were chapped, her eyes sombre, and Alyss realized that she didn’t look so very proud after all. She wondered what the woman thought of her, a child-sized godling with a pale, pinched face and drifting white hair, almost drowned in her oversized garb. Alyss was no beauty, she knew that much. She had been formed of garbage–knuckles made of bottle-corks, wings of sackcloth, features molded from rain-pulped newspaper–and it showed. Although Wakening had smoothed away her seams and transformed her motley parts to flesh, her ignoble origins were still apparent. Alyss’ body was awkward and crooked, her limbs more knobby than a grandfather oak. Newsprint peeked through the skin of her cheeks.

She tried to smile, but found she was so frozen and miserable that she couldn’t force it out. Yet the sight of her must have stirred the woman to sympathy, for she bowed her head and mumbled a few words–some generic wish for health or happiness. A wisp of prayer slid from between her lips, curling in the frigid air. She plucked it from her mouth and dropped it into Alyss’ waiting hat.

“Thank you, miss. Oh, thank you. Bless you, bless you.” Alyss wasn’t in a position to bless anyone, but she reckoned it was the thought that counted.

The woman ignored her thanks. She only leant down and said, quickly, “I’d get indoors if I were you.” Then she turned and click-clacked into the night.

Alyss’ brow creased, but she was too hungry to ponder the woman’s words. The prayer beckoned. Alyss pulled it out of her hat and cradled it in her hands. It squirmed across her palm, glowing faintly, nosing like an underfed grub. It was a paltry thing, formed without faith or conviction; Alyss could see right through it to the grime-caked lines of her palms. But it was the first meal she’d had in days, and when she stuffed it into her salivating mouth it tasted as sweet to her as the yield of a ritual homage.

The prayer was gone in two quick bites, though Alyss prodded and poked her tongue about her teeth until she was sure she had scoured away every last morsel. It did not sate her, not by a long shot, but it at least blunted her hunger, delaying its victory for the time being.

Alyss slumped against the grimy wall in relief, pulling her threadbare blankets back up around her chin. The sky was cloudless above the slanting rooftops, only the usual miasma of smog smudging the brightness of the stars. The night would be a bitter one, and Alyss had only a single prayer to sustain her through it.

With that thought, the intensity of her solitude hit her afresh and the memory of her erstwhile companions rose in her mind’s eye. She remembered them all, her dear little brood, with their scrawny wrists and haunted eyes that had seen too much for ones so small. A gaggle of street urchins. It was to them Alyss owed her existence. In need of a protector, they had fashioned a god out of the odds and ends that lay around them, the leftovers of more fortunate souls. Laying their creation piecemeal in the mud, they had sacrificed a sickly sparrow to give it life. Alyss had Wakened to find a ring of grubby children staring down at her, faces flushed with triumph.

They called her Sister Alyss, after one they had lost.

The urchins had offered Alyss modest prayers cupped in small white hands, raising the offerings reverently to her lips. She had granted their requests as best she could–causing a minor distraction so that a pickpocket could do his work; planting a smidgeon of kindness in the heart of a baker, the impulse to give a hungry girl a loaf; sowing a little luck for an orphan so that he might find a hidey-hole in which to curl up for the night. Alyss’ powers had never been strong–her birth was too humble for great feats–but back then she could perform the simpler knacks with a quirk of an eyebrow or click of a finger. The children’s prayers had nourished her and she had looked after them, her little dirty ducks, in return.

But, just as children grow quickly out of their infant garb, so Alyss’ ragged disciples had moved on from their early godling to a better-fitting deity, one who could offer them more than she. Some new striplings joined her for a time, but they too soon passed on, and the next bunch also. It had happened slowly as these things do, but gradually Sister Alyss, diminutive god of the urchins, was forgotten.

Alyss sighed and tugged her blankets closer. It was a sob story, sure enough, but one all too familiar in this city. People created divinities to fulfil their needs, then forsook them as times changed. Alyss didn’t blame the children–no, not ever–but she still missed them something awful.

---

Lost in memories of better times, Alyss did not notice the hush intensify over the city. Lights winked out, shutters closed, doors latched. It was only when the bells began to toll that she realized her error.

Alyss leapt to her feet, scattering her scant possessions. Fear lent her energy. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Hadn’t the lady warned her to find shelter? Why hadn’t Alyss understood what she meant, that this was a holy night, a hunting night?

The bells clamored, their discordant peals reverberating through the deserted streets. The bell tower loomed to the west, a pale spire dominating the skyline. It rose from the city’s heart, where the buildings were of stone and gilt and marble, with pillars flanking their doorways and statues guarding their gates. Where the rich and influential flourished silver pocket watches and silken handkerchiefs, and rode about in carriages instead of traipsing through refuse. Where the two prominent cults gathered in elegant parlours and expansive halls bequeathed them by their ancestors. Where the people were hearty and well fed–and the gods were too.

Especially tonight.

Alyss did not bother to gather her things; the oddments were not worth the time it would take to retrieve them. She merely rammed her hat upon her head and ran.

She dashed from house to house, hammering on doors, banging on shutters, begging to be let in. “Just for this night!” she pleaded. “A few hours–one hour–half–anything! Please!”

Her entreaties did no good. Curtains twitched and shadows shifted behind shutters, but the sight of the frantic god clearly stirred more revulsion than pity, and Alyss was left stranded on the cobbles.

To the west she could hear a ruckus rising–faint shouts and whoops, the clatter of wheels and hooves. The noise made her tremble, but also spurred her on. Alyss scampered between inns, shops, breweries, brothels, knocking and yelling. None would admit her. In her desperation she even tried pounding on the doors of churches and temples, the gates of shrines. But there, of course, the city’s other gods were shut up tight. Safe from the holy night’s perils, they were not about to risk opening their sanctums for anyone, let alone a stinking gutter-god who had been foolish enough to forget the ruling deity’s calendar.

Of her fellow street-gods, Alyss saw no sign. Evidently they had been better prepared than she, begging sanctuary for the night in advance of the bell’s toll. Which was exactly what Alyss should have done instead of sitting in the street, griddling for prayers.

But it was too late now for self-reproach. The racket was spreading from the city centre towards the tangled streets of the Warren, and beneath the general hullabaloo Alyss now caught yet more ominous sounds: a clicking and chittering, snorting and growling. These were the sounds the beggar-gods dreaded most, the sounds that came when the cult of Mantis emerged from their affluent haunt to loose their god upon the city. These were the sounds of the hunter, of Mantis himself.

Alyss paused, panting, and tried to think. Mantis tracked primarily by smell, so where would she be safest? It stood to reason: the filthiest, foulest place in town. The sewers. She’d not get into them from here, though–sanitation in the Warren extended to open gutters oozing along the sides of the streets. She wracked her brains for the nearest access point. The wealthier central neighbourhoods were the obvious place, but with the hunt on the move they weren’t an option. The riverside, then.

Alyss set off again, heading north towards the riverbank. She tried to run, but her initial exertions had left her weak and the best she could manage was a brisk shuffle. Her gasping breaths ghosted before her, her wings trailed behind. She tried not to think of how easy it had once been to dart into the sky, evading trouble with a flap and a twist. She was only goading herself with such memories now. It was a long time since she’d had enough prayers for flight.

The hunt was still to the west of her when Alyss emerged on the promenade overlooking the river, but it was close; the tumult was so loud it could be only streets away.

Alyss cast about, searching for a manhole. There–an iron circle set in the intersection where a bridge adjoined the bank. Alyss raced to the spot and fell to her knees. There was a small hole set in the metal cover. She jammed her hands into it and tugged.

The cover didn’t move.

Alyss tugged again. Nothing.

The clamor mounted behind her.

Alyss got to her feet, straddling the manhole and bracing her legs against the road. Gathering all her remaining strength, she wrenched at the blasted thing.

The cover moved a fraction, grating against its lip.

Alyss strained. “Come on,” she muttered. “Out with you!”

The iron inched upwards.

Then noise erupted at her back as the hunt spilled onto the riverbank. Wild hallooing burst out as they caught sight of the tiny god struggling with a manhole cover in the middle of the street. And then a howl split the night.

Alyss’ fingers slipped from the cover, which clanged back into place. With a despairing cry, she whirled–and terror froze her more utterly than any winter could.

A gigantic shape was scuttling along the promenade towards her. Six legs scissored beneath it, slim and articulated, the front pair serrated with cruel spikes. The behemoth’s body was weirdly segmented, and the glare of the street lamps flashed and slid off its carapace, a transparent shell that revealed the intricate mechanisms within. The god had been constructed with the precision of a mantle clock, the craftsmanship as fine as Alyss’ was poor. Yet there was nothing delicate about the Cult’s creation. Wakened with who knew what horrific sacrifice, Mantis had become muscle and flesh, and although its body retained some appearance of its glass-and-clockwork beginnings it was as powerful and resilient as any natural beast.

That was not even the worst of it, for the tyrant god’s body was only the vehicle upon which it carried its real weapon: the head of a monstrous hound, bristling with metallic hair. Strings of drool stretched between huge, diamond incisors and swung from golden gums. Massive nostrils flared and snuffed, while cold, glass eyes fixed upon Alyss’ tiny figure.

With its prey in its sights, Mantis howled again.

Behind the charging chimera streamed its followers–a retinue of carriages and gigs, riders and foot soldiers. Careening in their god’s wake, the cult of Mantis whooped and hollered, revelling in the perverse thrill of the hunt. Holy night had arrived, and Mantis’ aristocratic disciples seized the opportunity to throw off all restraint. Toupées tumbled from highborn heads to vanish beneath horses’ hooves. Gentlewomen’s skirts flared indecently behind them as they bolted along with the throng. Magistrates and factory-masters whipped their horses until their flanks were striped with blood.

Prayers spilled from the cultists’ lips, flaring like fireworks in the night. The devotees flung them to Mantis, who turned its great head to snap a few of the luminous streamers out of the air. Alyss stared as the rest fell short, bouncing off the god’s flanks to fade, untouched, on the pavement. All those prayers wasted.

Alyss knew the reason, of course: she was better sustenance. Consuming another god was the fastest and surest way of bolstering one’s power, though only the most desperate or most tyrannical would do such a thing. Mantis made a habit of it, each season on holy night.

The fiendish deity loomed over her. She could not flee. Her strength was spent, her hope extinguished. The cult hooted with glee as their god prepared to feed, knowing that every increase in its power cemented their hold over the city, ensuring that their prayers would be answered above anyone else’s.

A huge glittering mouth descended. Mantis’ breath was an acrid blast.

Alyss closed her eyes. “Goodbye, my ducks,” she whispered.

There was a thunk at her feet.

“Oopsy daisy!” said a man’s voice. Then a pair of hands clamped around Alyss’ waist and drew her backwards into the manhole. For a heart-stopping moment Alyss was sure it was too late, that Mantis would pluck her out of the air on the very brink of her escape. Yet the only casualty was her hat. Punctured by the tip of a colossal fang, it was lifted clear off Alyss’ head as she was snatched underground.

---

Alyss landed with a splash on top of someone. She looked around in a daze, and saw that she and her rescuer were lying in a pool of fetid fluid. A handheld lamp stood upon a nearby ledge. Its light revealed brick walls rising to either side, curving to form an arched ceiling in which the manhole gaped. Mantis snapped and snarled above the opening, but had no hope of reaching through. The cultists’ shouts of triumph had turned to groans of disappointment.

Beneath Alyss, her liberator moaned. Recovering her wits, she scrambled away from him.

“Sorry, sir! So sorry!”

She turned to help him up, and was surprised to find herself looking at another god, grimacing as he struggled to his feet. He resembled an elderly man, but like Alyss he had been built rather shabbily; Alyss suspected that bent nails and twisted planking had played a part. He wore an overcoat with a wilting daisy pushed into one buttonhole, both now thoroughly smeared with filth.

Alyss reached up to clasp his hands. “Thank you!” she gasped. “Thank you, kind sir!”

The other god grunted. “We’re not safe yet, lass.” Then he smiled, showing peg-like teeth. “But you’re welcome. I don’t like to see a fellow soul chomped up on the streets. No, that ain’t a sight I like to see at all. But they’ll send someone down here to flush us out if we ain’t away post-haste.”

Alyss glanced up to find powdered faces peering down at her. There seemed to be a debate going on aboveground.

“You know somewhere we can go?” she asked.

He nodded. “Come on, I’ll show you. You ain’t the first scrap of sanctity I’ve helped escape that monster. I’m Fennick, by the way.”

He held out a hand. Alyss stuck out her own tiny paw and shook it. “Sister Alyss.” She hesitated. “Well… just Alyss nowadays.”

“Glad to make your acquaintance, Alyss. But now–” Fennick retrieved the lamp from its perch. “–it’s time we scarpered.”

The sewers were as foul as Alyss had expected–and hoped–them to be. Even she, accustomed to living amongst litter and waste, was almost overwhelmed by their stench as she followed Fennick through the tunnels. The other god strode before her with lamp held aloft, the greenish glow of the flame casting a ghastly aspect over the already grim scene. Shadows fled up the walls as they passed, briefly revealing stretches of slime-coated brick, before collapsing back again in their wake. Every so often the tunnel would fork or a dark opening yawn to one side or other, exhaling a cold, putrid breath. Alyss peered warily down these offshoots, but to her relief Fennick seemed confident of his route and did not hesitate as he led her through the intersections.

After half an hour of walking Alyss began to tire, her legs shaking as she dragged them through the sewer’s waste. Fennick splashed through the stuff at ankle-height, but on Alyss it reached to her knees and made the going hard. Gradually, the gap between her and Fennick widened. Shadows pressed at Alyss’ back.

“Wait up there!” she called. “Oy, wait up! Me legs weren’t made for this.”

Fennick turned, and, seeing her difficulty, came back a few paces to join her.

“Here, you’re just a little mite, you are.”

Alyss cocked her head. “Makers didn’t have much to work with.” She eyed his own crooked features. “You know how it is, I’m sure.”

He wheezed a laugh. “I do, at that.” He put hands on his hips, considering. “Tell you what. If you wouldn’t mind, Sister Alyss–” He turned his back to her and crouched. “–scramble up.”

Once, Alyss would have been too proud to accept such help. But now, chastened by privation and her near miss at the jaws of Mantis, she did not hesitate. Pulling her boots out of the sucking filth, she caught hold of Fennick’s shoulders and clambered aboard.

“Blimey, you’re one bony mister.”

He grunted as he straightened. “Well, my makers didn’t exactly have much to hand either.”

“Who were they?” Alyss asked, clinging to Fennick like a limpet as they set off again.

“Were. Aye, that’s the thing,” said the god gloomily. “Workmen, they were, and shoddy ones at that. No wonder they needed me for their schemes. Prayers as dishonest as you ever saw. ‘Gull this gentleman, Fennick! Befuddle this old lady so she doesn’t notice we’ve short-changed her! Hold up this house ‘til we’re well away!’ Swindlers.” The god huffed. “Well, it’s done now. As soon as they could cobble the parts together, they replaced me with a god more willing. Glad to be rid of them, to tell the truth.” He sounded far from glad, however. Bitterness tinged his words.

“I’m sorry,” Alyss murmured. At least she had fond memories of her troupe. It was hard enough to be starving, let alone resentful to boot.

They went on in silence after that, each lost in their own thoughts, until Fennick gave a satisfied grunt.

“We’re here.” He held up his lamp to reveal an iron door set into the sewer wall, with three slimy rungs rising to its threshold.

Fennick lowered Alyss to the floor, then reached to knock on the door: two short raps, a pause, then three more strikes. Rust flaked away with each blow.

“What is this place?” Alyss asked.

Fennick grinned down at her. “A hidey-hole, lass. For the needy, like ourselves.”

A scraping sound told of a lock being drawn back. Then the door creaked open to reveal a woman standing in the entranceway. She too held a lamp. A curl of hair tumbled over her forehead, escaping the clutches of a frilly bonnet tied at her chin. The bonnet was complemented by a neat black dress, giving the impression that she was a maid opening the door to a fine house instead of this grubby hole in the sewers. Her gaze held authority, however, as it tracked smartly over Alyss and Fennick.

“Bit late tonight, Fennick. I thought maybe you’d been… unlucky.”

Fennick shook his head. “Didn’t get me this time, Angie. Though it was a close thing for my friend here.”

The woman’s eyebrows rose. “That so? Well, you’re both here now.” She jerked her head. “Now get your toots in here quick, before I choke on that stink.”

Fennick lifted Alyss to the door and scrambled up after her. A long, dark tunnel stretched before them. The walls were brick, like the sewer, and it was no warmer, but the floor was at least dry. The woman–Angie–tugged the door shut and slid the locks back into place, shutting out the stench. The smell still clung to their clothes, but compared to the sewer the air was ambrosial. Alyss gulped long, grateful breaths.

“You all right to walk for now, lass?” Fennick asked.

“I think so.”

Angie led the way down the tunnel. Alyss followed her, padding between the twin pools of light thrown by her companions’ lamps. She could see little beyond the glow. The tunnel might go on forever as far as she could tell.

“Where are we?” After all their wandering, she had no idea what part of the city they had ended up in.

“You’ll see, lass.” Fennick put a hand on her shoulder. The reassuring weight brought tears pricking in Alyss’ eyes. She had been alone so long she had almost forgotten how good it was to have a friend.

After a few minutes of walking, Alyss realized she could hear something up ahead–a faint rushing sound, as though a torrent of wind or water was moving far off. She threw a quizzical glance at Fennick, but he seemed sunk in thought and did not notice. Returning her attention to the front, she tried again to identify the sound. She thought now that she could perceive changes in it, rises and falls in volume. Perhaps the tunnel emerged onto the river, or a tributary. But if they were heading outside then surely she would feel colder; instead, the air was growing warmer. It was a welcome change but a puzzling one.

Then, as the passage curved to the left, Alyss saw light ahead, a smudge of illumination insinuating itself on the walls. The noise was louder now, surging and echoing against the brickwork. Abruptly, Alyss realized what it was.

Applause. A great crowd of people, clapping.

Questions leapt to Alyss’ lips, but before she could voice them Angie halted and turned.

“Now let’s see you, sweet.” She crouched and shone her lamp full in Alyss’ face. Alyss squinted and retreated from the glare, only to collide with Fennick’s legs. His other hand came down to steady her.

“Here,” said Angie. “She really is just a scrap.” She sounded suddenly annoyed.

Fennick’s voice rumbled from above Alyss’ head. “Hardly my fault, is it? There were slim pickings tonight.”

“Hmm. Well, they’re not fools, I suppose.” Angie looked at Alyss again. “Except this one maybe.” She shrugged and straightened. “I guess she’ll have to do.”

A dull horror filled Alyss. “What are you talking about?” she stammered. “Do for what?”

“You’ll only get a pittance for her, mind,” Angie continued.

Alyss tried to twist away, but Fennick’s grip tightened on her shoulders.

“Sorry, lass.” Alyss strained to look up at him, but he was too tall and his face was lost in shadow. “It’s nowt personal.”

“What’s not personal–?” Alyss began, only to give a startled choke as Angie thrust a rag between her teeth and tied the gag tight around her head. Next thing she knew, she had been plucked off her feet and–as easily as if she were a child’s plaything–tucked beneath one of Fennick’s bony arms.

Alyss thrashed and squirmed as Fennick and Angie walked on, but she was small and weak and already exhausted, and her wriggling did not so much as force Fennick to shift his grip. Still she fought–until she was distracted from her efforts as they stepped from the passage into sudden brightness and another wave of applause washed over them.

---

Alyss hung limp, blinking stupidly, as she tried to make sense of the scene. They had emerged into an enormous circular hall, easily the biggest chamber Alyss had ever seen. The stone walls had been smoothed and polished to an elegant shine, and great marble columns supported the vast vault of a ceiling, from which dangled a constellation of glittering chandeliers. Yet the room stretched not only above, but also below. The tunnel had come out midway up the wall, and gave onto a viewing platform edged with brass railings. Beneath this, tiers of velvet seating descended towards the floor, transforming the space into a huge amphitheatre. The auditorium brimmed with people, a genteel crowd in smart evening dress. Presiding over all was a box built into the wall, swathed with velvet drapes, wherein sat a stately woman with her hair pinned back and her hands folded neatly in her lap.

Alyss started. She recognised the woman from the papers, and although she could not read she had picked up enough gossip to know that this was the Dowager Countess of Redthorn. The Dowager, Alyss knew, was a regular installment in Parliament, where she made it her mission to oppose Mantis’ ministers at every opportunity.

Her stomach clenched, and her gaze fell to the arena.

No. No. It couldn’t be. Fennick couldn’t, Fennick wouldn’t, have brought her here.

But there was no denying what lay before her eyes. In the arena stood a towering creature, gleaming darkly in the light of the chandeliers. It was vaguely humanoid, though taller than two carriages and with hands the size of cartwheels. Muscles rippled beneath its skin, whose sleek black hue was shot through with glimmering silver veins. As it turned its big, broad wedge of a head, Alyss saw that its eyes were the rich red of rubies.

“Bolder.” Alyss’ whisper was distorted by her gag, but she needed no confirmation. There could be no mistaking that dark titan. Carved out of black marble, Bolder was the god of the city’s second great cult, long-standing rival to Mantis. Even gutter-gods such as Alyss knew of the hatred between the two. Though both were strong, Mantis was the stronger and had been so for the past decade. Unable to surpass the ruling god’s power, the Bolderite cult had been forced to accede control of the city to the followers of Mantis. Yet Bolder had clearly been gathering strength. For the god in the arena was almost as big as Mantis, and what with those great, muscled limbs in place of Mantis’ spindly legs, Bolder looked as though he might even be the other deity’s match.

The arena in which Bolder stood was bounded by a high wall and scattered with churned-up sand. Alyss squinted at something near the deity’s feet, then felt herself go cold as she realized what it was. Wreckage–a collection of oddments that might once have been limbs. Her horror grew as a gate in the arena wall winched open and a number of people were thrust through the gap. No, not people–gods. Dressed in tattered garb, they shared a bedraggled look that Alyss knew all too well. These were gods who, like her, had been gathered off the streets.

The gods clustered, terrified, at the base of the wall as Bolder turned ponderously to regard them. His ruby eyes flashed, and he raised a slab-like foot to step towards them.

Alyss whimpered as comprehension dawned. This arena was not designed for fighting; it was designed for feeding. Desperation seized her and she hit out again at Fennick. “No!” she tried to scream. “No, no, no!”

“No good struggling, lass.” Fennick’s words were tinged with sorrow, but he did not loosen his grip. “I’m sorry to do this to you, but a god’s got to eat. All gods got to eat.” His eyes flicked towards the arena. He swallowed. “Times are hard. You know how it is.”

You tricked me. The gag prevented Alyss from voicing her anger, but she thrust it at Fennick all the same. I thought you’d rescued me. I thought… I thought we were… friends. Remembering her earlier tears of gratitude, Alyss felt a hollow pang of grief. She had thought she’d found some companionship, but it had all been a lie. She was as alone as ever.

Angie gestured impatiently. “Don’t just stand there, Fennick. Get on and hand her in.” She gave Alyss a thin parting smile. “Well, goodbye then, deary.”

Alyss turned her face away.

Fennick moved along the viewing platform to where a large oak desk stood at one side. He set Alyss on her feet before it, though not before taking a firm hold of her wrists. Behind the desk sat a man, dressed prissily in a tailcoat and cravat and with a monocle tucked in one eye. He looked at Fennick with distaste. “An offering?” he enquired archly.

“That’s right.”

The clerk peered through his monocle, unimpressed. “Not much of one.”

Fennick tensed. “‘S all I could find.”

“Hmm.” The clerk bent to write something in a ledger, finishing with a flourish of his quill.

Alyss’ attention strayed back to the arena. The captive gods were now circling Bolder warily. One tiny fellow was clicking his fingers and mumbling, forgetting in his desperation that his divine powers would not work on another god, even if he did have enough strength to use them–which, it was clear to Alyss, he did not. Another was trying in vain to find a purchase on the smooth stone of the arena wall. A third was crouched, sobbing in fear.

The audience, on the other hand, was all but silent. Unlike Mantis’ rowdy crowd, the Bolderites remained quietly in their seats, watching the proceedings with expressions of polite interest. The occasional fan fluttered back and forth, and here and there a pair of opera glasses glinted. Alyss shivered. Who were these people, that they could simply sit and watch the sufferings of fellow creatures? If anything, their cool detachment was even more frightening than Mantis’ wild retinue.

Every so often, the watchers mumbled prayers and cast them into the air, leaving them to float down like confetti and be caught by Bolder. But as Alyss watched, one of the doomed godlings leapt to grab one of the prayers from under Bolder’s nose. Landing with a cry of triumph, she darted away with her prize, stuffing it into her mouth as she went. It wouldn’t do as much good as a prayer offered by one of her own followers, yet it would lend her some strength nonetheless.

A murmur went up from the crowd and Alyss heard a man’s voice declare, “I say, that’s not on!”

Bolder appeared to agree. The great god slowly approached the thief who, momentarily uplifted by her small victory, quailed once more against the wall. Bolder tilted his heavy head to one side. Then, with no more warning, he attacked.

He was much quicker than his bulk suggested. A huge dark fist snapped out, narrowly missing its target who flung herself to the side just in time. Bolder followed with a kick, which again missed by a hairsbreadth as the other god rolled away. The godling scrambled to her feet and took off towards the opposite end of the arena, obviously hoping to buy herself some time.

She wasn’t fast enough. A monstrous hand chopped down and there was a dreadful crunch. The little god screamed in pain as one of her legs shattered into bone-white shards. She writhed in the sand, trying to pull herself forward. Bolder watched, like a malicious child might watch the agonies of an insect it has just de-winged. Then he brought his hand down again.

Alyss cried out through her gag as the god’s other leg smashed beneath the titan’s fist, and tears burned in her eyes as Bolder plucked the broken deity from the floor. The godling hung, shrieking, in his marble grip.

She had been treasured once. Even from this distance, Alyss could see that she had been carefully made. Her proportions were good, and her materials not poor either–those legs, now so cruelly severed, had been porcelain. What sad circumstances had brought her here, abducted by the cult and forced to face their greedy deity? Was anyone missing her now? Was there a prayer for her dying on someone’s lips, or was she like Alyss, alone in the world?

Whatever the god’s story, there was one thing certain now: it was over. Bolder raised her to his lips. His dark maw opened, revealing rows of sharp, pearlescent teeth. And then she was gone, her shrieks transformed into the sound of shattering china as Bolder chomped her down.

Applause rose from the crowd and more prayers were launched into the arena. Bolder caught several in one great fist and washed down his meal with their luminescent power.

Alyss turned her face away, sickened. She had known that the Bolderites must be ruthless–how else had they managed to retain so much power for so long?–but she hadn’t thought their methods would match the cult of Mantis in cruelty. She couldn’t decide which was more barbaric, to hunt terrified gods through the streets at night, or to throw then into a ring to be consumed.

Meanwhile, Fennick had been fielding questions from the clerk, who noted each answer in his ledger. The interrogation over, the man blotted the ink with small, meticulous dabs. “Hmm.” He frowned at the page.

Fennick shifted impatiently. “Well?”

The clerk blinked at him in obvious dislike. Then, rolling his eyes, he spat a quick prayer into the palm of his hand. He held it out to Fennick at arm’s length.

Fennick stared at the prayer. It was barely even glowing.

“That’s it?”

“That,” the clerk replied, “is what you are owed.”

Fennick bridled. “Here, I know she’s only a sprat, but I snatched her right from under Mantis’ nose. That’s got to count for something. I took her away from him, so’s Bolder can have her instead.”

The clerk placed a finger on a column in his ledger. “That. Is what. Is owed.”

Fennick huffed. “Might as well as left her for Mantis.”

The clerk’s eyes narrowed. He crossed his arms, the prayer hanging limply from his hand. “Listen, gutter-god. Do you fancy a trip in there yourself, is that it?” He inclined his head towards the arena.

Fennick took a step backward, face blanching. “No, sir.”

“Good. Then take your payment and be content.” The clerk held out the prayer again.

Fennick all but grabbed it from his hand. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Pushing the prayer into his mouth, he licked his lips in exaggerated satisfaction. “Delicious. Really, delicious,” he said, bobbing in an awkward bow.

Alyss caught his eye as he straightened and glared at him with all the accusation she could muster. The older god’s face twisted with guilt. “Don’t look at me like that. You’d have done the same, were you given the choice. Desperation changes people.”

Alyss continued to glare. It didn’t change me, mister. I’d never do what you do.

The clerk clicked his fingers. Another man appeared from along the platform and took hold of Alyss, pulling her from Fennick. As she was turned away, Alyss caught one final glimpse of the other god, fingering the wilting daisy in his buttonhole, his expression crumpled with shame.

---

The man marched Alyss along the viewing platform and down a flight of steps that descended past the back of the auditorium. She could no longer see the arena, but from the frightful noises and smatterings of applause issuing from its direction she knew that the other godlings were being mercilessly eliminated. Dread took her as she pictured being taken straight to the gate and thrust out onto the sand, but to her relief her captor instead turned in the other direction, steering her through an arch in the chamber wall. This led to another passageway, wider than the one Alyss had been brought in by, but just as dank. The passage was lined with doors, each one set with a barred window. Small hands rose to grip the bars as Alyss and her captor passed. Entreaties pursued them.

“Please, sir, kind sir, I’ll do anything…”

“I’ll poach for you, I swear on me life…”

“Long live Bolder, I say! Just let us out of here and we’ll serve…”

“Down with Mantis, yes! Down with the dog-god! Please–”

The gaoler made no response to the gods’ pleas, remaining grim and silent as he reached an empty cell and unlocked the door. Removing Alyss’ gag, he gestured her inside. Alyss hesitated on the threshold. The sight of the cramped prison made her keenly aware of the sheer weight of rock and earth above her head, pressing down, enclosing her. She was a winged god; this was not her place. She belonged up in the open, flying free above the rooftops, not trapped down here in the dirt.

Her captor gave her no choice–a shove on the back sent her stumbling across the threshold. She caught herself on the wall, gasping as the rough-hewn stone grazed her palms. The door slammed behind her. The key scraped in the lock.

Alyss stood still for a few moments, too weary even to move. Then, slowly, she lowered herself to the floor and crawled to a corner of the cell, where she sat hugging her knees to her chest.

In the neighboring cells, her fellow prisoners continued to whimper and beg. Alyss bowed her head, overwhelmed with a mixture of scorn and sympathy. Desperation changes people, that’s what Fennick had said. And yes, she supposed he was partly right. When you found yourself in the direst straits, it was hard to cling to your ideals–your thoughts could twist, your principles decay. These poor, pleading gods were not bad creatures, merely mistreated and petrified.

Yet privation couldn’t change a person, or a god, entirely. The part of you that defined your being–the essence that in gods was brought forth by Wakening–could never be lost. Alyss believed this wholeheartedly, and because of this she knew that she would never make those same entreaties to the gaoler. For from the instant she had opened her eyes upon the world Alyss had felt herself animated by a loving warmth, an urge to care and to protect. Although her original creators were now gone, that love remained integral to her. Even if it would grant her freedom, she could never do what Fennick did, entrapping her fellow gods in order to preserve herself. She would rather die than earn prayers that way.

Her belly cramped, reminding her that she was likely to get her wish.

Alyss did not know how long she sat there. There was nothing to mark the passage of time except the footsteps of the gaoler as he returned to the cells at intervals. Then would come the screeches of opening doors, followed by the screeches of the prisoners selected to be dragged from their cells.

“No, please, no. Not me!”

“…not worth eating at all, sir. Wouldn’t even make a snack…”

“I’ll serve him! Please, I’ll serve him if only–”

It was no use. Their pleas were met always with silence, and inevitably trailed off as the gaoler drew his charges away along the corridor. Alyss tried not to listen to what came next, but even with her hands pressed over her ears it was impossible to block the noise out completely. The sobs and screams. The crunches and smashes. And then, when the carnage was over, the murmurs of approval, the polite applause.

To distract herself, Alyss shuffled through memories of her urchins, that first gang of children who had made her and whom she had loved so dearly. She pictured them all one by one. Charlotte the eldest, with her torn red bonnet and scraped knees; merry Jeremy, always ready with a joke to cheer the littler ones; stubborn Deirdre who always carried that fierce little stick; spindly Reginald, half proud and half ashamed of his posh-sounding name…

“My little ducks,” she whispered. “Oh, my little ducklings. All grown up now, I expect. All grown up. And I helped–yes, I did that. I helped keep you safe, so’s you could move along in the world and get bigger and braver and kinder.”

A smile touched her chapped lips, and when the door to her cell clanged open she looked up at the gaoler with an almost serene expression. “My turn now, is it?”

The gaoler looked askance at her. Then, with a shake of his head, he pulled her out into the passage. A huddle of other gods was already there, about ten of them, wrists tied together with rope. The gaoler bound Alyss the same way, then took hold of one end of the rope and tugged, leading his captives in a staggering line.

Alyss shuffled along with the others, declining to beg, concentrating on staying upright as they were taken to the arena gate. There, the gaoler nodded to another man in a waistcoat and cap, who nodded back before reaching to turn the levers of a large wheel. A pulley creaked and the gate cranked upwards. Candlelight streamed through the widening gap, falling upon Alyss’ face and those of the other gods who stood beside her.

As the gate opened, Bolder was revealed from the feet up. When his head finally came into view, the waiting gods saw that he had not yet finished his previous course–a struggling god was just disappearing into his mouth.

“Oh my days…” Faced again with the awful spectacle, Alyss could not retain her calm. “Oh my days, oh my days, oh my days…”

“Get them ready,” said the man with the cap.

The gaoler nodded. His hand pressed on Alyss’ back. She quivered.

Then, “Wait,” said the gateman. He was frowning through the opening at Bolder. “Look. Look at that.”

Puzzled, Alyss stared at Bolder. The man was right, there did seem to be something different about him. If the marble god had been intimidating before, he now appeared utterly swollen with power. His muscles bulged and his skin shone with an excessive lustre. Crimson auras radiated from his eyes.

The behemoth placed his feet apart and stood to face the curtained box with its single stately occupant. When he spoke, his voice was deep as an earthquake.

“I am ready,” Bolder said.

A collective gasp rose from the spectators and a visible thrill ran through them. Dozens of fans snapped open as ladies suddenly felt the need to compose themselves, and a hundred little glints showed where gentlemen thrust opera glasses and spectacles hurriedly to their faces.

The Dowager Lady Redthorn rose to her feet. Spreading her arms wide, she smiled.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced. “Our god has spoken! Now is the moment we have waited for, patiently, faithfully, for so many years. The cult of Mantis think their dominion of this city is irrefutable, that they can loose their slobbering god upon the streets whenever they choose with none to oppose them. But they have grown fat and decadent in their confidence, while we, with diligence and with dignity, have been hard at work all these years to further the glory of our own magnificent deity.” She bestowed a look of pride upon Bolder, who inclined his head. The crowd clapped their agreement. When the noise died down, the Dowager raised a triumphant fist. “Now is our chance, my fellow worshipers! It has been a long time since Bolder ruled, but we did not give up. And now we are ready.” Her fist fell and her eyes narrowed. “Tonight the hunter will become the prey. Tonight we shall see whose god is the strongest.”

The chamber thundered with applause as the crowd rose to their feet, their decorum finally overcome by excitement.

Alyss shook her head at the cult’s hypocrisy. Bolder might not rampage openly through the streets as Mantis did, but within his arena he was as much a predator as the other. In this colossal struggle for power, the real victims were crushed underfoot–sometimes literally–but these fine gentlefolk did not care. All that mattered to them was power. Swelling it, stealing it, hoarding it.

The gaoler interrupted her reflections, tugging on the rope to jerk the gods round. He too was infected with the general excitement. His face, so stern before, was now split by a grin. “Looks like there’s been a change of plan, then,” he told them.

“Are you letting us go?” a god beside Alyss piped up, his voice strained with hope. “You don’t need us any more, right, sir?”

The gaoler regarded them with half-lidded eyes. “Oh, we still have a use for you fine ladies and gents. You–” He wound the rope around his fist. “–are the bait.”

---

Half an hour later, Alyss stood hunched on the cobbles of a square. Escorted by the gaoler and a number of Bolderite guards, she and the other street-gods had been hustled through a disorientating subterranean labyrinth and then out aboveground, exiting through a disused warehouse. They had then been led to this nearby square and forced into a tight group in the center, before the guards and gaoler retreated to encircle them at a safe distance. One god had seized that moment to try to flee, but he had been swiftly caught and bludgeoned into submission before being returned to his place among the others. Alyss could hear him moaning.

It was still dark, though a violet cast to the eastern sky suggested that dawn was approaching. Alyss could not reckon exactly where she was, but guessed it was somewhere north of the river. The square was bordered by redbrick houses with tiled roofs, not as shabby as the tenements of the Warren but not the palatial residences of the city’s central areas either.

Here and there, candlelight flickered in surrounding windows as the square’s residents woke and peeped out, but upon seeing the Cult’s guards skulking in the shadows the curious faces soon retreated. No one raised a hand to assist the gods in the square. Fear kept the people locked up tight.

Ten dirty little vagrant gods, standing out in the open on the night of the hunt–it did not take long for Mantis to scent them. After only a few minutes, a delighted howl came drifting over the rooftops, followed by a wild chorus of cheers.

Alyss steeled herself as, for the second time that night, the cries of the hunt bore down on her. She was scared, of course, but after all she had been through she found that her dread was now tempered by a contrary emotion: disdain. Disdain for Mantis and his rival. Disdain for the Cults who created and sustained them. Disdain for a system that kept the cityfolk powerless, too frightened even to help each other in times of need. Disdain for the notion that might was right.

Yet still, beneath her skirts, her knees shook.

The sounds of the hunt grew louder and louder, until Mantis and his Cult surged around the corner and the square erupted in a whirling carnival of noise and motion–clattering hooves and carriage wheels, guffaws of pleasure and squeals of delight, bright bursts of prayers streaming through the air. The godlings cowered back as Mantis lifted his fearsome canine head, saliva streaming from his lips, and pinned them with his gaze. There was no time for them to even attempt to run before Mantis bounded forward–only to come to a skittering halt as Bolder stepped into the glow of the streetlamps.

Mantis yelped in surprise, stopping his momentum with difficulty on his insectile legs. Behind him, his retinue milled in confusion, their bewilderment increasing as the cult of Bolder began to file out of various side streets and line the opposite side of the square. As two factions of the city’s wealthy and elite, they could not have looked less alike. Mantis’ disciples were wild-haired, red-cheeked, breathless from the exertions of the hunt. The Bolderites, meanwhile, stood solemn and pristine in their evening dress, occasionally smoothing down a stray pleat or adjusting a pair of crooked spectacles.

There followed a silence as the two cults stared at each other.

The hush was broken by hoof beats. A rider appeared from behind the hesitating Mantis. Richly dressed in a scarlet overcoat, he sported a resplendent moustache and an equally resplendent girth. Alyss recognised him as Lord Fellinor, an influential peer known for his blustering political speeches that said very little in as long-winded a manner as possible.

“So, the Bolderites have finally deigned to emerge from their burrow,” Fellinor said. “I did wonder when you were going to come up for air.” His smile was mocking. “You bury your god deep.”

“Not tonight.” The Dowager Lady Redthorn stepped forward. She raised her chin, her gaze moving over Fellinor’s shoulder. “Tonight he has come to take you, Mantis.”

Mantis shifted, his nose lifting into the air. His dog’s lips parted and drew backwards. The expression might have been a snarl or a smile.

“This is my night, Bolder.” The god’s voice rasped like claws on stone. Alyss flinched to hear it. “This city runs according to my calendar. This is my hunt and these–” His eyes swept over Alyss and the other gods. “–are mine by the hunt’s rules.”

Bolder’s response rolled out like an avalanche. “They are only yours if you catch them, Mantis. As am I–” He set his feet upon the cobbles and flexed his muscles. “–if you can best me.”

Mantis’ followers sneered, though to Alyss’ eyes they looked a little alarmed at Bolder’s show of strength.

Lord Fellinor licked his lips. “There is easier prey–” he began, endeavouring to sound contemptuous rather than cowardly, but his god was having none of it.

Mantis stepped forward, his towering legs easily clearing the horse and rider. “You think to beat me, Bolder? On my holy night? In my city?”

Bolder set his shoulders. “It is only yours if you can keep it.”

Mantis sprang forward with a growl, striking sparks from the cobbles. Alyss and the other gods backed away, only to realize that behind them Bolder was also advancing. In panic, one of the godlings rushed to the left and tried to push away through the onlookers, only to be shoved back into the square by a Bolderite guard. Alyss swallowed. So they were in the arena after all.

At the realization, exhaustion threatened to swamp her, but she managed to thrust it away. She had evaded death so many times this night. Now was not the time to give up.

The huddle of godlings broke apart as the two leviathans circled above them. Alyss skipped to one side, keeping a close eye on the tyrants’ feet, Bolder’s twin crushing slabs and Mantis’ six razor points. Soon, however, she saw that there was another threat to avoid–for as Mantis circled, he suddenly snatched a godling from the ground beside him, then threw back his head to gulp her down. Another godling screamed, but her terror was drowned by the approving whoops of Mantis’ followers.

Bolder saw his chance to strike the first blow. Stepping in close to Mantis, he swung a fist and smashed the other god around the muzzle. Mantis’ head snapped away and then back again, his lips drawn into a snarl of rage and surprise. He lunged at his assailant, but Bolder dodged out of the way of the diamond bite.

They circled again, their focus sharpened. This time it was Mantis who attacked first, pouncing to bite at Bolder. His teeth caught one marble bicep, gouging deep trenches. Bolder exhaled a rumble of pain. He retaliated, reaching in with a punch, which Mantis swiped aside with a flick of a foreleg. Pulled off-balance, Bolder stumbled heavily to the right. Cobbles cracked. Godlings scattered. The cult of Mantis roared and jeered.

The fight continued, Bolder weaving and punching like a boxer while Mantis tore with jewelled fangs and lashed out with his forelegs. Beneath them, the little gods scrambled to and fro, frantically dodging the combatants’ shifting feet as well as the occasional hand or mouth that attempted to pluck them into the air.

Alyss skirted the edges of the square as well as she could, running her eyes over the wall of people, searching for any chance to slip away. There was none. The cults formed a tight ring around the fighting ground.

Gradually, though, Alyss realized that the two cults were no longer the only onlookers. More people had joined them, crowding behind and craning over their shoulders. Not fine gentlemen and ladies these, but ordinary townsfolk, many still in their nightwear with only coats thrown over the top for warmth. The city, it seemed, had emerged to watch the confrontation. But where the cultists urged on Mantis and Bolder, these other spectators remained silent. Their own gods were sequestered safely away, and yet, although they would survive another holy night, these middling deities would never be powerful enough to challenge the two leviathans. The people had resigned themselves to the fact; it had been that way all their lives. Their interest in this battle was therefore cursory. Mantis or Bolder–it would make small difference to them which tyrant won out.

The fight, meanwhile, took a more brutal turn. A ruinous blow from Bolder dislodged one of Mantis’ teeth, sending the diamond shard clinking to the ground. The Bolderites applauded their pleasure, but as Bolder drew back the other god lashed out a pincered foreleg. The joint snapped shut, its serrated sides closing around Bolder’s arm. The marble giant wrenched against it, but Mantis dug in his legs and retained his hold. When Bolder reached with this other arm to free himself, Mantis snarled and tore at him, so that it was all Bolder could do to keep Mantis’ fangs at bay as he tugged on his trapped limb.

Nevertheless Mantis could not sustain his advantage for long, for of the two gods Bolder was better built for a match of strength. Planting his feet, he gave a monumental heave, forcing Mantis’ spindly legs to slide over the cobbles. Godlings dived out of the way as Mantis fought for balance. Seizing his opportunity, Bolder kicked out. There came a tremendous crack as one of Mantis’ middle legs gave way.

Mantis let out a shrill howl as he crashed to the floor. Almost instantly he righted himself, but was forced to use a foreleg in place of his broken mid-limb. One pincer down, he had lost a weapon. His muzzle wrinkled with wrath.

Alyss had scrambled out of the way when Mantis fell, but in doing so she blundered into the ring of cultists. Exclaiming in disgust, the gentlefolk ejected her. Their shoves sent her wheeling in close to Mantis who, intent on avenging himself on Bolder, swiped her irritably out of the way. To the larger god the blow was nothing–the mere swatting of a fly–but to Alyss it was as though she’d been hit by a speeding carriage. The breath was crushed from her chest, a great pain tearing along her left side as one of Mantis’ leg-barbs caught her flesh. She landed in a heap, striking her head hard on the cobbles.

For a few moments she lay still, dazed and blinking. Then, gingerly, she tried to lever herself up.

It took a few attempts, but eventually she came upright. She looked about her. The world was blurry. She took a few wobbling steps, and then halted as a great black shape loomed before her.

That’s Bolder, her mind whispered. Move. Get out of the way.

Her body reacted, but slowly. As a monstrous hand swept down to claim the wounded godling, Alyss twisted away so that instead of grabbing her, the hand knocked her over. She went sprawling again, crying out as her injured side hit the ground. She tried once more to stand, but found she was shaking too much and did not have the strength.

A kick caught her side. Blearing upwards, she made out a row of pale, oval smears staring down at her. Faces.

Another kick set her whimpering.

“…done for,” a haughty voice concluded.

Alyss instructed herself to crawl away, find somewhere safer, but still she was too feeble to move. For yet another time that night, she sensed death approaching. Well, she thought distractedly, I’ve been close to it for a long while. Mayhap it’ll be nice to rest at last.

“Alyss.”

The voice was soft, so incongruous among the noise of the battle and the cultists’ shouts that it was somehow enhanced despite its quietness.

“Alyss,” it said. “Sister Alyss.”

Alyss squinted in its direction, forcing herself to focus. A small girl was crouching a foot away, peering between the legs of the cultists. Her tangled hair was half-bundled under a miner’s cap and her face was smudged with dirt.

“It is,” exclaimed the girl in an excited whisper. “Look, it is. It’s Sister Alyss.”

Alyss realized that the girl was not alone. Other small faces peeked out from among the forest of legs–a troupe of urchins crawling through the throng. Some had purses and watches in hand.

A moon-faced boy scrambled closer. “It never is. She’s gone, ain’t she?”

“It is, I swear it. Look.” The girl pointed.

The boy blinked at Alyss. “Blimey,” he breathed. “It is an’ all! She’s got those wings, just like Jem said.” He scooted round and hissed to the other children. “Hey, you lot, get over here. We’ve found Sister Alyss what looked after Jem when he was little!”

Alyss’ mind reeled as more voices joined the first. Jem. That’s what the boy had said. Jem. That must be Jeremy, her little Jeremy, all grown up like she had hoped. Did he look after these children, then? Had he taken them under his wing? She hoped so. Oh, she hoped so…

Her thoughts began to drift.

“Hey,” came a murmur. “She’s closing her eyes.”

“Do you think…”

The children’s voices grew fainter. They brushed across Alyss’ awareness but she could no longer make sense of them.

“…bad, don’t she…”

“…help her?”

The girl’s voice piped up again, louder this time. “I pray,” she announced. “I pray that Sister Alyss will be all right.”

“Yeah,” the boy put in. “Me too. I pray that Sister Alyss will get back up again.”

One by one, the urchins joined in. Beneath the eyeline of the adults, prayers unrolled from the children’s mouths. Alyss could see them even behind her closed eyelids–rich, iridescent, golden invocations. The children released them towards her and, faced with their glowing beauty, she managed to crack her eyes open. Opening trembling fingers, she took a prayer and moved it shakily to her lips.

The prayer moved down her gullet sweet as nectar, smooth as silk, warm as cobbles on a summer’s day. It filled her with a sense of rightness and hope. And when she reached out for another, she found that she already felt stronger.

Alyss ate. One prayer after another, savoring each bite. She had never tasted anything so delicious, not even at her peak with her little ducks all around her. Then, the urchins’ prayers had all been for themselves, but now it was for Alyss that the children prayed. No one had ever done that for her before. The sustenance it gave her was immense. As she chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, the wound in her side knit itself back together and energy returned to her battered body.

With Mantis and Bolder still locked in combat, no one but the urchins noticed the small god rise to her feet at the edge of the square. No one else noticed the new glow to her cheeks, the new lustre in her eyes. The other onlookers only took note when her wings twitched, extended, gave an experimental flap, and then propelled her off the ground.

To Alyss, it was as though ecstasy itself lifted her into the air. She had not forgotten the sensations of flight, but she was certain it had never felt as joyous, as liberating, as it did now. She soared into the lightening sky, revelling in her aerial perspective, enchanted by the violet-grey dawn that crept over rooftops and chimneypots. But when she glanced down and saw the battleground spread out below, and the hopeful faces of the urchins gazing up at her, her joy hardened into resolve. She couldn’t desert these children now. She could not leave them–or her fellow godlings–to the mercy of the cults. To flee would be unforgiveable. Whatever small good she could do, she must.

Taking a deep breath, she dove towards the fighting gods.

That certainly caught the crowd’s attention. Cries of surprise and crows of derision rose from the spectators as the diminutive god swooped into the fray. Alyss ignored them, concentrating instead on her target. Mantis. The dog-god was limping now; he and Bolder were both tiring. Yet he spied Alyss’ approach out of the corner of his eye. As she barrelled in close he turned aside to snap at her, but in the same instant Bolder gave him a cuff across the jaw, reclaiming his attention. Alyss darted in. She aimed for Mantis’ ear, large and pointed like a hound’s. Alighting on his crown, she grabbed a fistful of hair. The sharp filaments cut into her palm, retaining some of the metallic properties from whence they were made. She gritted her teeth against the pain and, mustering all of her newly endowed strength, ripped out Mantis’ hairs.

The god yelped in surprise. He craned upward, but Alyss had already leapt away. She zipped in again to land on his neck and yanked out another tuft of fur. Mantis howled, shaking his head in fury, yet he dared not turn away from Bolder.

The urchins squirmed through the cultists’ legs and clambered to their feet to cheer Alyss on. Speaking more prayers of strength and victory, they tossed them up to where she could stoop and catch them.

Then a whole host of prayers filled the air, a luminous shower falling into the arena, launched from the back of the crowd. “Here!” someone shouted. “Here, take ‘em, littluns!” The other godlings–six still survived in the arena–hesitated for a moment. Then the meaning of the shout came home to them and they raced to scoop up the fallen orisons.

Affronted, the cultists shouted for the offerings to cease, but the perpetrators were hidden in the dense crowd and could not be identified. And at any rate (another woman shouted), there was no reason they could not pray to any god they so wished.

Emboldened by the crowd’s support and revitalized by their prayers, the other godlings followed Alyss’ lead. Racing in close, they jumped to cling to the legs of the larger gods and–with tooth and nail and fist and foot–did what they could to distract them.

Buoyed, Alyss plunged in again to fly in circles around Bolder’s head. Still grappling with Mantis, the craggy god grew increasingly irate with the airborne intruder. Breaking with Mantis for a moment, Bolder reached to swipe Alyss from the air, but, anticipating the move, Alyss banked and darted instead to the midpoint of his shoulders. Bolder was clearly angry at being so thwarted. Growling, he reached behind his head to try and dislodge her. Alyss, however, had chosen her location well and Bolder could not catch hold of her.

Mantis lashed out with a foreleg, catching Bolder across the face. Bolder roared. He stumbled back, his progress impeded all the more by the godlings who now hacked and pinched and scratched at his legs and feet. The marble deity roared again and kicked out. Two gods fell away and rolled on the cobbles, but more leapt forward to take their place.

It was only then that Alyss realized that there were more gods–many more–in the arena now than when the fight had started. And not only that–there were people too. They surged forward from the square’s edge, shoving through the cultists to join the combat. There were attempts to stop them, the Bolderites sending in their guards with truncheons and Mantis’ disciples steering horses into the crowd’s path, but the people easily broke through their ranks. Within minutes, a mass of citizens and gods had fallen upon the two tyrant deities, pulling them to their knees. Tired and injured from their long struggle, Mantis and Bolder could not resist the sheer numbers that swarmed upon them.

Then Mantis half-yelped, half-shouted with pain as one of his legs was ripped clean away.

The agonized sound froze Alyss to the core. Instinctively she zipped away upwards, then surveyed the scene from her vantage point to try and make sense of what was happening.

Spread below her was a scene of chaos, a riot of battling people and gods, overturned carriages and screaming horses. In the center, a surging, swarming mass hid Mantis and Bolder from view. Nevertheless, the terrible sounds that issued from that direction made it clear what was happening within. The cults’ gods were being dismantled, piece by piece.

Nausea roiled in Alyss’ belly as she hovered above the fray. What had she done? This was no better than the hunt, no better than Bolder’s subterranean arena. The tormented wails of Mantis and Bolder merely echoed the screams of the gods they themselves had consumed.

Alyss stooped low above the square. “Stop!” she yelled. “Stop, please!”

But her cries went unheeded; the destruction could not be halted. Even the cultists now stood helpless, watching in despair and disbelief as the carnage continued. Among the Bolderites, the Dowager Lady Redthorn’s stately posture had wilted, so that she had to be supported by two servants at her elbows. On the other side of the square Lord Fellinor trotted back and forth distractedly, his moustache quivering in shock.

At some point the bellows and howls of Mantis and Bolder ceased, and when at last the mob drew back, it was only to reveal a wasteland of debris. Chunks of smashed marble lay like sinking ships within a sea of broken glass, with gears and springs of clockwork scattered about them. Here and there, jewels winked and glittered. Yet the crowd was still not finished. With the great gods lying in pieces before them, they now sprang afresh upon the remains, the people looting for wealth, the gods for power.

Alyss could not bear it. She swooped to land upon a large piece of broken marble–what part of Bolder it had once been, she could not tell–and shouted as loud as her tiny body would allow.

“Stop this!”

People and gods looked up, frowning at the command. But when they recognized the little god who had begun the backlash against the cults, they paused and stood to listen.

Alyss looked around, panting slightly. “Stop this, please,” she entreated. “Don’t you see what you’re doing? This–” She gestured to the detritus, the various pieces clutched in eager hands. “–This that you’re doing, it ain’t no different than Mantis, no different than Bolder.” She let her arms drop and felt her shoulders droop with them. “Leave them,” she said flatly. “Just leave them, can’t you?”

A rickety god cleared his throat guiltily, hefting the diamond tooth he hugged to his chest. “But… the power…”

“Let it lie.” Alyss scrubbed a hand across suddenly tearful eyes. “We’ve had enough of powerful gods, ain’t we? Power-hunting, power-grabbing, power-eating… And look where it’s got us.” She cast her eyes down. Nearby, a ruby lay among the shattered glass. One of Bolder’s eyes, once so dazzling, now dull in the grey wash of dawn. “Can’t we just… Can’t we just let ‘em be?”

The tears spilled down her cheeks. She gulped, unable to continue. She was just a beggar god, after all. A homeless god. A lonely god. This was all too big for the likes of her.

Then a hand slipped into hers. Alyss looked up, startled. It was the urchin girl, the one with the miner’s cap and dirty face. She’d scrambled up the marble to stand beside Alyss. A short distance away, the other urchins formed a ragged little group.

“Let’s go,” the girl whispered. “Let’s go, shall we?”

Alyss allowed herself to be led away. The crowd parted before them, the street urchin and her little god, and in their wake the people began to lower their booty, returning the deities’ remains to the ground.

The girl took Alyss to where the urchins were gathered and together they left the square and began the walk back to the Warren. Alyss trailed in their midst, worn and overwhelmed and grateful. After a little while, a lad picked her up and carried her.

Alyss rested her head on his shoulder. They were not so very different, she realized drowsily, gods and people–not so very different at all. And that was good, that was the way it should be. For what were gods but the anima of the city, the wishes and dreams and yearnings of its people, coalesced into strange, lopsided bodies? The gods were a part of their disciples, created by their hands and hearts, and, in turn, the worshipers’ lives were shaped by their gods. Neither should be oppressed or elevated in preference to the other. They needed each other. They were each other.

If you looked at it like that, you could avoid a whole lot of trouble.

“Thank you, my ducks,” Alyss whispered.

Walking beside her, the girl patted her hand. “It’s all right, Sister Alyss. We’ll look after you now.”

---

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

© Copyright 2015, All Rights Reserved

www.TheColoredLens.com

---

The Colored Lens

Speculative Fiction Magazine

Autumn 2014 – Issue #13

Featuring works by David Kernot, Natalia Theodoridou, Steve Simpson, Robert Dawson, E. Lillith McDermott, Lynn Rushlau, Juliana Rew, Robert Steele, Bria Burton, Sean Monaghan, and Carl Grafe.

Edited by Dawn Lloyd and Daniel Scott

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

© Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved

www.TheColoredLens.com

---

Table of Contents

• The Sycamore Tree by David Kernot
• Lady Bird by Natalia Theodoridou
• The Rising by Steve Simpson
• Dust and Blue Smoke by Robert Dawson
• A Case of the Blues by E. Lillith McDermott
• Coming Home by Lynn Rushlau
• Sluicing the Acqua by Juliana Rew
• Perfect Arm by Robert Steele
• The Darkness Below by Bria Burton
• The Whale Fall by Sean Monaghan
• The Right Decision by Carl Grafe

---

The Sycamore Tree

By David Kernot

When I first heard the legend that a sycamore tree stood at the eastern gates of heaven and rewarded those who lived within its shadow, I didn’t realize they meant my tree—the one on the hilltop at Two Rivers. I didn’t believe in the magic until I turned seven and dreamed I’d died.

I stepped outside into the morning shade of the three-hundred-year-old tree. Legend said that if the goddess allowed, anyone born within its shadow could be reborn there. But rebirth was the last thing on my mind, and I rubbed my chest, fresh from the death dream memory of car exhaust fumes, hot engine oil, and grease.

I ran to school because Games Day was the school’s big event of the year, and I was late. I kept to the edges of the oval, away from teachers and sports jocks.

Hugh Wintergreen ran past with a stupid grin plastered over his face. He tugged at my shirt. He said, “Catch me!” and headed toward the main gate.

I gave chase. I caught him and we ran onto the road, into the traffic, where he dared me to follow and play chicken.

I recognized the car and a feeling to stop tore at me. With the death dream fresh in my mind, I froze mid stride, and tried to grab Hugh.

He kept running and dodging cars until the car I’d seen screeched to a stop. Hugh disappeared underneath it.

I screamed and felt every one of his ribs snap.

The smell of hot rubber, car oil, and engine grease, tore at my nostrils. My stomach churned and I threw up into the gutter.

People came running.

Mariana Blackburn, a girl from my class, arrived first. She screamed. “Stu McBane pushed him.”

Her family didn’t approve of my single mum and her birthing clinic. I looked up, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, ready to deny I’d pushed Hugh, but I recognized her voice as the girl who yelled in my dream. The dream had come true, and I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been me who’d died.

The taxi driver was Hugh Stevens’ father, another boy in my class, and he vouched for me, but still, a seed of doubt grew from Mariana’s claim.

Games Day was cancelled, and I trudged home. Mum waited in the kitchen. She’d heard. Two Rivers was a small town.

She checked me over. “You’re fine.” She ruffled my hair. “Go and thank the goddess in the sycamore tree.”

I frowned. “Now?”

She put her hands on her hips.

I nodded and put my boots back on and stepped outside. The door slammed shut on its sprung hinges and I heard her again.

“Take a bag of compost with you and sprinkle it around the tree when you’re there.”

Mum ran a birthing clinic by the tree when the moon was full, and didn’t care what the rest of the town thought. I always thought her a bit crazy, but I loved her all the same.

---

The day I turned eight, Two Rivers Elementary School hosted another Games Day. They dedicated it to Hugh Wintergreen, and the local protestant minister came to say a few words.

We stood on the oval, and when the minister commenced his sermon, we faced the school gates. He mentioned the accident and paused, glanced over at me in the second row and nodded.

My ears burned. I blamed my mum’s non-protestant beliefs in the sycamore tree, but whatever the reason, he knew I’d been with Hugh when he died.

After prayers, everyone dispersed to the running tracks, the high jump, triple jump, and the areas set up for shot put and discus. I ambled over to the start of the 200-meter sprint. I had never won a race and wanted to see how I’d go now that one of god’s ministers had his eye on me.

I lined up and waited. The starter pistol fired, and I ran to lead place and stayed there. I pushed on and powered ahead until my legs grew heavy. At that point, Hugh Stevens leveled with me. I grit my teeth, pushed harder, determined to beat the boy whose dad had killed Hugh Wintergreen. Ahead by a pace, I approached the finish, but Hugh leveled with me. He took the lead and crossed the line half a step ahead.

I doubled over, hands on knees and gulped in air. Hugh approached, as puffed as me. I smiled.

“Well run.” He grinned and raised his hand in the air, palm toward me.

“Congratulations,” I said and slapped his hand in hi-five style.

He waved Mariana Blackburn over, the girl who, the year before, had accused me of pushing Hugh under the taxi. Inside, I groaned.

That feeling returned, and an urge to distance myself from Hugh.

I took three steps backward and air whooshed past me.

A stray javelin struck Hugh and pierced the center of his chest. He never flinched. A breath later blood swelled over his shirt and Hugh’s eyes bulged. He fell to the ground.

Mariana screamed, and pushed me.

Had the javelin been for me? Now death had passed me over twice on my birthday.

Some of the town said it was a strange coincidence. After all, Hugh Stevens’ dad had driven the taxi that killed Hugh Wintergreen.

Mariana said it had to do with me, but she was always a mean girl.

At school I mentally projected the same message. It was an accident. I hadn’t pushed Hugh Wintergreen or touched the javelin that killed Hugh Stevens.

After school, I spent that month at the sycamore tree and made the area around it weed free.

Perhaps the tree goddess watched out for me, I couldn’t be sure, but Two Rivers was a small town with only one school and memories ran deep. Nobody forgot I had twice been death’s companion. Nobody wanted to stand near me after that and my small circle of friends dwindled. I hoped people would forget soon.

---

I first noticed Joanie the day of my twelfth birthday. She and her twin sister, Fran, were the hottest girls in school, and they were two years older than me.

Whenever I crossed paths with Joanie, I’d smile at her, but Joanie never noticed. I didn’t exist. I’d grown accustomed to that.

At the end of last period, Joanie dropped her notebook at her locker and walked off. I picked it up and followed her outside to return it.

“You dropped this.” I handed her the notebook.

She took it and smiled. “Thanks—”

That feeling returned, a desire to move away, to flee.

“No worries.” I hurried away, lost in thought and stumbled into a group of boys outside the school.

“McBane,” one of them yelled.

I recognized Wolfgang and smiled. He was older, trouble for some, but we got along well enough.

“Hey, Wolf.”

His troublesome grin vanished and with it my smile fell. “What?” I asked.

He leaned in and poked me in the chest. “Leave. Joanie. Alone.”

I didn’t understand but stepped back until I found myself trapped in a tight circle of older boys.

His fist landed in my face before I could dodge it.

“Don’t,” I yelled. My vision blurred and tears streaked my face.

I raised my arms but a fist hit me from behind. Somebody kicked me in the ribs. I doubled over and a foot smashed into my face.

Warm fluid ran down my chin. I tasted blood. They picked me up and threw me into an industrial rubbish container. I smelled a match flare, and the contents in the container caught alight.

I choked on smoke and climbed out to their laughter, and I pushed through them and ran toward home, angry I hadn’t thrown a punch. I didn’t want anyone to see my blood-covered face, convinced my nose had been broken. I skirted the town and out of impulse I climbed the hill to the sycamore tree.

I was out of breath by the time I reached the top, and as always, I stopped to admire the glorious view of the town and distant hills.

“Hello,” a girl said.

I faced the voice, and Joanie stepped into the sun from behind the sycamore tree, a book in her hand. She smiled. “Fancy seeing you here.”

I shrugged.

“Why’d you run off today?”

“I had a feeling it was for the best.”

“Ah. That feeling. Did anyone die?”

I wasn’t surprised by the comment, but I didn’t want to talk about it. “What’s with you and Wolf?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He thinks he owns me.”

“Does he?” I grinned.

Our eyes locked, and something like electricity passed between us. I shuddered and a tingle climbed up my spine.

“Nobody owns me,” she said. “Wolf’s an idiot. He’s going to be sentenced to Juvie for breaking into old man Steven’s home.”

I nodded. There was that mention of old man Stevens, one of the dead Hugh boys. Perhaps that was why I had the urge earlier.

“He won’t bother you again.” She walked over to the tree, spread her arms, and swayed about its base to music I couldn’t hear.

She looked beautiful. Enchanting.

I followed.

Joanie squeezed my hand, and a warm flush filled my cheeks. “So you know about the magic of the sycamore tree?” She raised her eyebrows.

I remember mum’s stories and nodded.

“I come up here all the time, to pull out the weeds, keep it tidy for her.”

“Her?” I said unsure.

“The tree goddess. Don’t you know anything? She’s what’s takes care of us down there.”

I thought about my near misses with both Hughes and the fact that I stood alone with the hottest girl in Two Rivers. Perhaps she was right.

---

Joanie became my new friend. She called me Stuart, and I liked that. I became interested in school again, and my grades improved. But Joanie had a wild side too, and we were always in trouble for swinging from the rope under Patterson’s bridge, or standing underneath the live cables from the town’s power station. Life was fun around her. I spent all my weekends with Joanie, and time before and after school. I carried her books. I read teen-girl magazines. I talked about hair removal. By the end of our second year we were in love and inseparable.

At fifteen, too young to know any better, I proposed underneath the sycamore tree. We planned our lives together, where we would get married, who we’d invite, when to announce the news to our folks. We confirmed our feelings to each other on the sycamore tree, the place we first kissed, and carved our names inside a heart shape, deep into its bark.

One summer afternoon after school, I stood at the sycamore tree with Joanie and felt the wind blow over me. Joanie walked over to me. I loved the way the sun lit her hair so it glowed. “We’ll die old together.” She put a finger to my lips, and her eyes dilated and took on a faraway look. It gave me goose bumps. “You’re not the only one with psychic powers, Stuart.”

“I’m not psychic.”

“It’s true,” she said. “I’ve seen it. Never forget. I’m coming back to this tree. This is a magic place where events unfold. No matter where I am, when I turn twenty, I’ll come back and say something clever. We can plan our wedding.”

A trickle of dread ran over my scalp. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Perhaps nowhere?”

It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. How could she leave? She refused to take her eyes from me, so I kissed her, long and hard. “You’re crazy,” I said, and my voice caught in my throat. “What’s so clever that you’ll say it when you come back?”

“Burghers. The town is full of Burghers!”

“What?” I frowned. “You mean like take out?”

“Not burgers. Burghers—town managers, leaders of society.” She laughed. “It’s just a way to say something weird and drive the olds crazy.”

“You’re weird,” I said, and I kissed her again.

She stood and twirled her hair between her fingers. She did it often, and her blue eyes sparkled like jewels.

The next day she had gone. She’d said her goodbye. Her family moved. I didn’t know where or why. I tried to find her but I couldn’t. She didn’t contact me, and I withdrew. I became a loner and dreamed of death all over again.

---

I never forgot about Joanie, but I never talked about her either. It hurt too much.

At the end of my final year of school, I rode down the main street on a bicycle I’d outgrown. It was just after Two Rivers’ had shut up for Saturday afternoon.

A taxi drove by.

I stopped and stared at the driver. I recognized Hugh Stevens’ dad. I had never forgotten him since the day he ran down Hugh Wintergreen. He drove slow and smiled at me, adjusted his black suit and tie.

That compulsion, the odd feeling, returned, and I shivered. I wondered if Hugh’s dad was going to die.

He looked odd all dressed up, and I followed him out to Church Hill, just to the north of town, where he pulled up his car and entered the church.

I sat on my bike a safe distance away and waited.

Another car arrived, an antique one from up on East Downs, all decked out with wedding ribbons. I smiled. Old man Stevens was getting hitched again. I wanted to step closer, but that feeling returned, and I waited. Hugh Wintergreen’s mum climbed out, and I shook my head in disbelief. How could she marry old man Stevens? He killed her son. Both their children had died near me. I pulled at my hair. People called me Stu McDeath. They never let me forget I had been at both Hughs’ deaths. I didn’t understand, so I waited near the church.

The newlyweds stepped from the church together, had their photos taken and made their way to the reception. They looked happy.

The feeling left me and nobody had died. Perhaps my life had improved.

I stood outside of their reception for a long while. I think I lost sense of the time until hunger called. I decided to go home, but one of the town councilors stepped out, and I smiled. “Who got hitched?” I asked as if I didn’t know.

“Archie Stevens and Winsome Wintergreen.”

“How was that possible?” I frowned and didn’t hide my surprise. “Didn’t he kill—”

The man held up his hand, and he lowered his voice. “Yes. But that be distant water under a very old bridge.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Seems that it brought them together.” He leaned closer, and I could smell wine on his breath. “Now that their other kids be old enough, they’re doing the right thing. I heard there’s a child on the way.”

“Really?” I was shocked. “Aren’t they a bit old to be starting another family?”

He shrugged. “They’re in love. Who can argue? Anyways, it’s happening everywhere. All manner of folk are hitchin’ up again and populating the world over.”

I left him. Good luck to them I decided.

---

I joined the state force as a police officer and heard the Hughs’ parents had twins. They named them Joanne and Hugh. It was the same time I suggested that mum should come and live with me, but she wouldn’t entertain the idea.

“The tree needs me,” she said.

I had to agree with her, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. Over several visits back to Two Rivers, I stated the tree had been around hundreds of years longer than her, and it would survive.

Two years late mum moved. Perhaps she had an inkling of those moments when she forgot, and bit-by-bit, the slabs of her life’s memory disappeared. I made the arrangements to have her things shifted to my home and arranged for Harry, the local bookseller, and his wife, Alice, to keep an eye on the tree.

---

When you’ve had a taste of wonderful it’s hard to settle for second best. Joanie was like that for me. There wasn’t another woman alive to live up to my memory of her. Nobody I met could match her humour, her beauty, the way she rolled her eyes. She made me feel right. Perhaps it was that she was my first love. Whatever the reason, Joanie had spoiled me, and I had little interest in other women.

On the day Joanie turned twenty, I drove back to Two Rivers and had a picnic lunch at the sycamore tree. I waited, still caught in the dream of my Joanie. I even pinned a note to the tree, but I never heard from her. I wondered why I had those feelings. What was it that made me special enough to deserve them? Without them I might have died at the hands of a taxi, or a javelin.

As a police officer those feelings saved me from being shot by armed robbers. Another time, an overzealous cache of stolen dynamite exploded, and I had wandered away to answer the radio just before the house I’d been inside disintegrated. It helped me find a wayward blind girl in the Badlands after she wandered off at night. I found a use for it within the department, and I racked up quite a collection of successful case closures, even a murder. I thought that perhaps, in my own way, I had found a way to serve the goddess and the sycamore tree.

Still convinced I’d see Joanie again, I always returned to the sycamore tree each year. It was like it had a hold on me. I visited the majestic tree for twenty–eight years and each time I wondered where Joanie was. I wondered what the mother tree goddess could tell me if she spoke.

---

Mum got sick with cancer. She was as light as the wind the final time I took her up to the sycamore tree. She sat there in her wheelchair and basked in the tree’s shadow. Half lit up by sunlight, she smiled but didn’t say a word. Her memory had gone by then, although every so often the light behind her eyes came to life and the skin in the corners of her eyelids crinkled.

I expect she remembered the high points of her life with the tree. Perhaps she thanked the goddess for her protection. Perhaps she thought about the children she had brought into the world on that windy hilltop. I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was I would miss her when she was gone.

She passed away a few weeks later, and I became even more lost and empty. I knew it had been coming but you can never be prepared enough. I kept her ashes after the cremation service and quite my job. I’d had this idea to move back to East Rock for some time, perhaps even to Two Rivers and find work.

I drove back to Two Rivers to sprinkle her ashes around the sycamore tree. The town had changed. It had lost some of its vibrancy, but mum would have been pleased to know East Rock, her birth town, shone.

I checked into my room, and I found a park at the mall. Long shadows from the sycamore tree kissed the ground where I stood. It’s funny how all these years on I would still look for her shadow. I walked into the shopping complex in a hurry to buy flowers for tomorrow’s dawn ceremony before the shop shut.

A woman with two screaming kids crashed her shopper cart into me and pulled me from my daydream. I stepped away, backed into a man and turned and apologized.

Joanie’s dad stared at me. I stood, mouth open, speechless.

He shuffled past. He hadn’t recognized me.

I stood silent. I never asked after Joanie, and he walked away.

I walked toward the flower shop, torn between chasing after him and buying flowers. My heart pounded until I turned and ran after him and searched the car park.

I found him as he reversed out of the parking space, and I threw myself in his way.

His knuckles whitened on the car steering wheel. I half expected him to drive away, but he waved me closer and wound his window down.

My heart raced. What would I say? Did I have the courage to ask what had been on my mind for almost 30 years?

“I was Joanie’s friend at school.” The words tumbled out.

His eyes clouded. “Sorry. My memories aren’t what they should be.”

He stared at me for a moment and half smiled. “Stuart!”

“Yes.” I felt warm tears slide down my face. “How is she?” Pent up emotions churned and sought release.

He looked at me and I saw his pain.

“She’s dead, Stuart.”

My heart almost stopped. Pain racked my insides. It tore at me with daggers.

“Both my girls are dead. They died in a car crash just after they turned eighteen.”

I didn’t know what to say. I nodded, drained, and I stepped away from the car. I had no right to revive those painful memories.

“She always talked about you, Stuart.” He forced a smile. “Even after I took her away.”

I nodded. “She made a difference in my life.”

He reached out through the window and grabbed my hand. “I’m sorry I took her from you, but we had to leave. Her mum, my beautiful wife, had cancer.” He let go of my hand. “I tried to save my Alice, but all I did was lose them all.”

I was dumbfounded.

That was why they moved? I was lost for words.

“She made a difference in my life too, son, they all did.”

I nodded and wiped away tears.

“It would have been their birthday tomorrow. I’ll send them your wishes in my prayers.” He smiled at me.

Numb, I stood and watched him drive off. I think he left happier, perhaps because he shared a memory with someone who cared. Perhaps I was the son–in–law he never had.

I looked up at the clear view of the sycamore tree and noticed I stood in her shadow. It was too late to ask the tree goddess for help, but I knew what I could do.

---

The next day, when the sun just cleared the hill above Two Rivers, and the goddess cast her longest shadow from the sycamore tree, I sprinkled mum’s ashes around the tree. I laid flowers on the ground at her base, for mum, for Joanie, for her sister Fran, and for their mother, Alice. I wondered if it might be my last visit.

I had closure in the sense. Joanie had passed from this world.

I stood at the tree for a long time and remembered Joanie. I put my hand on that heart we’d carved and said goodbye.

The feeling returned, so strong it almost bowled me over. I knelt down, giddy.

“What are you doing?”

The young woman’s musical voice made me stand, and I faced her and rubbed my tear-stained face. “Who’s there?”

My vision cleared and I watched a woman size me up. Her eyes danced over me. She put a hand on her hip. “I’m—”

“Joanie?” I had a crazy sense it was her; that somehow she’d found her way back to me.

“Close.” She laughed and tilted her head. She brushed the long golden strands from her face. “I’m Joanne,” she said. “I’m thinking about setting up a birthing clinic here.”

“What?”

“I’m a midwife.”

I remembered the way the town had treated my mum, and I smiled. “Good luck with that.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Joanne Stevens.”

I took her hand and my arm tingled. “Joanne Stevens? Does your dad still drive the local taxi?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“It’s complicated…” I wiped my face free of tears. I daren’t say I’d been at both her stepbrothers’ deaths. I recalled the compulsion to avoid the church the day Hugh Stevens’ dad married Winsome Wintergreen. Her folk. She was their Joanne, a twin like my Joanie. I opened and closed my mouth, tried to form words.

“Don’t die on me, Stuart. You look much younger than I had imagined.”

I frowned. She knew my name.

“How do I know you?”

“Well burgher me if I didn’t have a dream.”

Time stood still.

I was back with my Joanie. Her words echoed loud inside me, and I heard her say it again as if she was there now: I’m coming back to this tree, no matter where I am, and I’m going to say something odd that will pull at your memory.

My knees buckled, and I sat down. “What did you just say?”

“I said burgher me!” She laughed. “It drives my old mum crazy. She thinks I’m swearing every time.”

“What are you doing here?” She could have been my Joanie.

“I had a dream about you, Stuart. I’ve been dreaming about you and this tree all my life. There’s magic here.”

I could feel my face crease when I frowned. “It’s the tree goddess,” I said.

“Of course it is,” she said. “Otherwise, how odd would it be to dream about the man responsible for my folks meeting?”

My frown couldn’t deepen any further. I didn’t know what was the strangest, that she dreamed about someone she’d never met, or that she was like the ghost of my Joanie.

“My twin, Hugh, was named after them both, and you were there when they died.”

I closed my eyes and nodded, struggled to push away the powerful memories.

“You’ve come back to live here,” she said it like it was decided.

“I have no idea,” I said, although I had decided to stay. There was a lot to like about Two Rivers.

“You will.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the tree. “Come, and I’ll show you where I want to build a birthing unit.”

We stopped and stood away from the tree. She pointed and described what she wanted to build. “I can’t do it alone, Stuart. What do you think?”

I was speechless. I squeezed her warm hand.

“No, on second thought, don’t say anything.”

I faced the tree. This was where I’d grown up, and I was convinced it was where I would also died one day.

“Come on, I want you to meet someone.” She tugged at my hand, and I allowed myself to be led away.

---

Joanne marched me down the Two Rivers’ Main Street. She stopped outside the second hand furniture shop, the one with the front windows filled with antiques, and she led me though the wide double front doors.

“She’s upstairs.”

“Who is?”

“You’ll see.”

We climbed the stairs, and I slowed at the top to admire the stained glass windowpanes over the table tops. A woman stood at one, soldering. She could have been sixty or seventy.

“Mum, there’s someone I want you to meet.” Joanne stopped in front of the woman.

The woman put the soldering iron down and looked up, startled. She removed some earphone buds and music chattered through them. This was Mrs Stevens. The last time I had seen her was her wedding day at Church Hill years before.

She squinted at us. “Sorry, Jo, I was miles away.”

Joanne glanced at me and grinned. “Mum, this is Stuart.”

Mrs Stevens’ eyes widened, and her smoky-blue eyes sparkled when she smiled. I had a sense of what Joanne would look like once she grew older. “So he was there.”

“Everything. Just like my dream.” She laughed.

It was beautiful to hear, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time somebody laughed so much in my presence.

“Stuart,” said Mrs Stevens and offered her hand. “I remember you growing up here.”

I shook it. “Lovely to meet you again, Mrs Stevens,” I said. Her grip surprised me, strong and determined.

“Call me Winsome.”

I smiled at her. “Okay.”

“We’ve talked about you often,” said Mrs Stevens.

“Seriously?” I couldn’t help it and laughed.

“The virtues of a small town,” said Joanne.

“Have you told him the rest? Joanne’s mum threw her daughter a mischievous smile.

“That I’m going to marry him?” She put her hands on her hips in mock anger. “I was going to give him a couple of days to find out.”

I laughed again, this time with disbelief, unsure if I’d been teased.

“Did Joanne tell you she cancelled a trip away with friends to visit the sycamore today?”

Caught in the love these two women held for each other, their warmth was contagious, and my cheeks flushed. “She’s very determined, isn’t she?” I said to Winsome.

“You’ll find that it’s not a bad attitude to have in a daughter.”

It was as if Joanne had grown in stature when I faced her. “I had a dream we are having a boy first.” Her face colored as red as my cheeks felt.

I chewed my lip and wondered what else I didn’t know about Joanne’s dream.

---

I stepped up from the sycamore tree and breathed in over the sharp pain in my arthritic knees. I stared at the compost on my worn sandals, and the dizzy twenty-five-year-old memories faded.

“Grandpa.”

Young Winsome ran ahead of Joanne toward me. I smiled at our granddaughter, and at our daughter, Joanie, who followed. She looked fresh out of college, arm in arm with her husband, Mark.

I never doubted I’d been blessed. Why else would Joanne and I marry a month after we’d met by the sycamore tree? And like Joanne had seen in her dream, we’d had a son first, and it seemed right to call him Hugh. When Joanne suggested we call our daughter Joanie, I had cried.

We bought the land around the sycamore tree, built our house in its shadow, and Joanne started up her birthing clinic that year. I was thrilled not to have to traipse up the hill and sprinkle manure anymore.

I gestured to Winsome, “Come over here, little poppet. Stand with me in the shade.”

I put my arm around Joanne, and I ruffled young Winsome’s mop of long, golden hair and stared up at the tree.

I smiled. In my heart I understood there was magic here. Only family, the blessing of a goddess, and a sycamore tree mattered.

I knew if I looked hard enough, the heart and the initials Joanie and I carved out would still be visible.

I squatted down and groaned as my knees gave way. “Winsome,” I said and pointed to where Joanie and I had carved out our initials on the tree’s bark all those years ago. “I wrote my name up there once. Maybe one day, you can do the same.”

“It’s healed, Grandpa,” she said with a smile older than her years.

A frown creased my smile and I forced a laugh. “Why would you say that?”

“The lady in the tree said so after I had a dream.”

A shiver tickled the back of my spine. I turned and leaned closer. “Lady?”

“You know. The one that makes us sprinkle stuff around her base. She looks after the babies.”

Joanne laughed and put her hand on my shoulder. She looked at me and I knew what she was thinking.

“I think the tree goddess has chosen wisely,” I said.

---

Lady Bird

By Natalia Theodoridou

She leaned forward, bringing herself closer to the edge of the cliff. She often wondered whether everyone could see the way she saw. Especially when she was on the rope with her head between her legs, or hanging from the trapeze, her heels underarm. She thought then, can they see these lights? These shapes on top of the spectators’ heads, their most secret secrets untangled against my tangled body, and these darknesses in their palms, and the birds in their mouths, can everyone see them?

She peeked over the edge. A steep fall, then jagged rocks. Then water.

These birds, crammed between their teeth, are they swallows?

The man pulled her back. “Be careful,” he said. “You’ll fall.”

She pursed her lips. “You shouldn’t say things like that to an acrobat. It’s bad luck.”

“Does Lady Bird care about such things? Born on the rope. Isn’t that what the ring master says every night?”

“You think you know so much about me, don’t you?” Her eyes fixed on the ocean, she caressed the wooden box that lay between them. She tapped the crudely carved spade on the lid. “But I know nothing about you.”

“You know everything. Why do you talk like that?”

“What’s in the box, then?”

A gush of wind ruffled his hair. The girl shuddered in her transparent costume.

“You could have at least changed before dragging us up here,” he said.

“What’s in the box?”

“Why is this so important?”

She looked around. A wasteland. Can everyone see this? she wondered. The beach beneath them almost beaten by the tide. The pleasure wheel fading in the distance, its lights dim and pale. And the circus tent, off-white specked with desolation.

“Why are you so scared?” He reached out, his fingers brushing her cheek. “You know my life before the circus means nothing.”

The girl pulled her leg over her shoulder, pushing his hand away. She peered at him behind her thigh. No secrets over your head, no lights. Who are you? Why are you hiding?

“You say that, and yet you hold onto that box,” she said.

“Let it go. It’s just a box.”

“Throw it in the sea then, why don’t you?”

“Can’t you leave me this one thing? Everything else is yours,” he said. It wasn’t a complaint. Merely a statement.

“Everything?” she asked. “Even your lions?”

“Yes, even them. Say the word and I’ll bring you their heads.”

She put her leg down and glared at him.

“I would never do something like that.” Her eyes softened. “Bring me their heads… Silly.”

He chuckled. “I always had a flare for the dramatic.”

“True.” She rested her forearms and chin at the edge of the cliff and thrust her pelvis towards her head. She then bent her knees and hung her feet over her face. She looked at him behind her soles. Nothing. How are you hiding? You are the only one who can. “What’s in the box?”

“Oh, come on. Milk. It’s just milk.”

“Milk?”

“Yes, snake’s milk.”

She frowned. “Very funny.”

“All right,” he said. “A watch.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She sat up and put her ear to the lid. “I can’t hear anything,” she said. “Be quiet.”

“I’m not making any noise. It’s the wind. The waves.”

“Hush them, then. What kind of a useless tamer are you?”

“Do you enjoy hurting me?”

“There is no watch in there. Tell the truth.”

“It’s dirt from my birthplace.”

“You were born on a ship.”

“You forget nothing.”

She remembered the first time he entered the circus tent, his lions on a leash, the box tucked under his arm. She was hanging upside down above the ring, yet she saw no shapes. No darknesses, no birds. Most people hide their secrets in their hearts, at the back of their heads, or under their tongues. Where are his? she had wondered. “Tell me.”

His face grew serious. He studied her small feet, dangling over the edge. “Fine,” he said, “I will. But you won’t ask for anything ever again.”

“Promise.”

“It’s two pieces of paper. One holds my name.”

She laughed. “Your name? Aren’t you the Desert Lion?”

“Aren’t you Lady Bird?”

“All right. And the other?”

“Nothing.”

“You said you’d tell me.”

“I did.”

She stared at him counting three breaths, an old balancing habit; one, earth, two, sky, three, my body in between. “Show me,” she said with the fourth.

“You promised not to ask for anything else.”

“I lied. Will you open it?”

“Why are you doing this? You know I can’t refuse you anything.”

“That is why I do it.”

“I’ll have nothing left.”

She shrugged.

“What if I don’t?”

“I’ll fall.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Am I?” She put her weight on her palms and lifted her waist from the ridge.

“All right. All right. Sit straight.”

She obeyed. She sat cross-legged by the box and waited.

He fished for the small key hanging from the chain around his neck. He opened the box, pulled out two yellowed sheets and handed them over.

“Is that your name?” she asked.

He nodded.

“It doesn’t suit you.” She glanced at the second page, then looked at him.

He gazed at the horizon, silent.

“Was that all?” she asked.

He nodded again.

“Why keep it for so long, then?”

“I just wanted to have something that was mine,” he said. He retrieved the pages and put them back in the box. He locked it and tossed the key in the water. “Are you happy now?” he asked.

“Very.” She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. Is that a birdie between your teeth?

They sat side by side, shoulders touching. He stared at the sharp rocks underneath.

She suddenly turned to him as if she’d just remembered something.

“I’m working on a new number. Want to see?”

“Sure.”

“It’s not perfect yet,” she said, and threw herself over the edge.

A swallow soared by, almost brushing his cheek.

---

The Rising

By Steve Simpson

Iracema didn’t sleep well, she tossed and turned, sweating and sore, and in the early hours she crept out of bed and dressed, wincing when she pulled her top over the bruises on her breasts.

He was on his back, a snoring drunken mouth with a wasp’s nest inside. They didn’t sting him, but they were going to chase her. She was certain of that.

She searched, but there were only a few coins. He’d flushed the rest at the bar the night before. She took her backpack out of its hiding place and left.

---

The magnetometer signals were strong. The ore body was close enough to the surface for open cut, a no-brainer, but Doctor Ana Fliess was puzzled. She’d read the report on the area west of Marimbondo from the year before, and there was no mention of it.

Still, there it was, and she’d have to do a full survey. She looked out across the low ridges, the scrub and baked red clay, and her geologist’s eyes saw contours and grid lines. She unloaded more equipment from the back of the truck, electromagnetic transmitters and receivers, and set to work.

---

She was olive skinned with the widely spaced eyes of the Guaranis, and sunburnt, with her clothes and backpack covered in dust from walking all day. She asked for a bottle of water, and counted out the coins as if they were made of gold.

Ana had already paid, but she waited outside by the gas pumps.

“Would you like a lift, senhorinha? Which way are you going?”

The woman was startled, like a sparrow, as if nobody ever called her senhorinha, at least no-one like Ana.

“I’m traveling east to São Paulo, senhora.”

“I’ll be staying overnight in Marimbondo then going on to São Paulo tomorrow. You’re welcome to come with me. I’m Ana.”

“Thank you, Senhora Ana.” She almost smiled. “I am called Iracema.”

As they pulled out of the gas station, a loud continuous noise began, the sound of bending, tearing metal, and in the rear vision mirror Ana saw the green and yellow roofing over the gas pumps peeling back. It twisted around its last attachment to a support column, ripped it from the ground and flew upward like an enormous origami bird.

Iracema’s scream brought Ana back from frozen astonishment, and she rammed her foot down on the accelerator. The motor raced but the truck didn’t move forward. Its wheels had already left the ground.

---

It was late, and the straight run into Marimbondo was a monotony of scrub and patched bitumen. The tanker routes in the north of Paraná were long hauls, and that meant time away from family and friends. A lot of the Petrobras drivers weren’t interested, but Carlos didn’t mind. There were compensations.

His thoughts drifted to back to the prostitute he’d negotiated in Pinhal the day before–Iracema, at least that’s what she’d said. She was a little the worse for wear, and there wasn’t a moment’s pretense. She’d gazed at the wooden walls without moving, except for the motion he’d impressed on her when he climaxed.

Now there was change in the monotony, and it took Carlos a moment to realize what it was. The road noise had disappeared, as if he was travelling on smooth concrete and not tired asphalt. The tanker was slowing–he pressed the accelerator–and drifting to the verge–he tried to correct–but nothing made any difference.

As the tanker rose into the night, Carlos forgot Iracema and remembered his wife and son, framed on the dash. He touched the Saint Christopher medal beside them, opened the cabin door, and jumped out, but he was far too late and far too high.

---

Through the night, Iracema and Ana prayed and comforted each other. They wondered whether they were destined for the vacuum of space or to plummet back to earth, and tried to understand what had befallen them.

“It’s no use dwelling on the unknown. We must do what we can with the here and now, and the Holy Mother will take care of the rest,” Iracema said.

Ana looked out the window, “I think we might have stopped going up. The lights of Marimbondo aren’t getting any smaller.”

They decided that the best in the here and now was to get some rest, and they slept clinging to each other, with the truck rocking gently in the breeze.

---

At first light they woke to find themselves floating in a Sargasso Sea of metal, surrounded by water tanks and guttering, corrugated roofing, and rusted cans and scraps. In the distance, they saw another vehicle, and they called out, waved through open doors, but there was no response.

“They’ll come for us, won’t they, Ana?”

“I’m not sure they even know we’re here.”

“Then we have to send messages.”

They tore up Ana’s maps and wrote on them, rolled them in pieces of floor mat tied with wire ripped from under the dashboard, and threw them out the windows. There was activity below, trucks crawling along the roads like tiny insects, and they hoped for the best.

In the afternoon, they found a screwdriver under the seat. Ana popped the hood, and Iracema, tethered with wire, clambered to the front of the truck and retrieved the plastic container that fed the windscreen washers. The water tasted a little soapy.

At sunset they saw a helicopter.

It was from the Globo TV network, labelled ‘Globocop’ along its tail, and there was a cameraman filming out one window. They waved and shouted, and the pilot banked to come in closer. But when the helicopter had almost reached the iron sea, its nose bucked violently upward and it began to precess like a top, spinning wildly out of control.

Ana and Iracema watched it fall and explode on the ground, a distant flare.

Iracema crossed herself. “Those poor men. What happened to their helicopter?”

“The helicopter was lifted by its blades. It must have been thrown out of balance when its metal nose came into the upward force that holds us. Helicopters aren’t designed to handle anything like that.”

Iracema nodded, and thought for a moment. “Whatever the force on the metal is, it’s just at this altitude that it exactly balances gravity. The force must decrease with height. It must be stronger below us.”

“Yes, I guess it has to be.”

Ana didn’t see what use the information was, but to know there was logic even in the incomprehensible was a candle, a comfort.

---

The stars came out, and made sisters by fate, Ana and Iracema told each other their secrets.

Ana talked about geology, her profession, her career. “The rock strata, the secret patterns hidden in the ground. That’s all my life has ever been. I told myself I’d take a break, go on a holiday. Volcanoes. I wanted to see the volcanoes in the south of Chile.”

She sighed. “But there was always a reason to put it off. And now… and now it might be too late.”

Iracema took her hand. “It’s not over yet, Ana. We have to have faith. Our messages are down there, someone will find one.”

Ana nodded, but in her heart she knew there would be no rescue.

Iracema talked about the man she’d escaped from.

“I was so young, so naïve, still in school in Paraguay, and he was a Brazilian, a man of the world. He took me to the cinema and the amusement park, bought me chocolates and silver balloons shaped like hearts. I ran away with him and we came to live in Brazil.”

Iracema hesitated and Ana said nothing, just waited.

“I was completely dependent on him. I had no money and no documents, and that’s when it all changed. He said I had to earn my keep.”

Ana held her as she sobbed.

“I’ve been studying. I can type. I want to get an office job in São Paulo.”

---

The next morning was windy, the truck rocked from side to side and there was movement in the metal sea.

Iracema saw it first. “Look, over there.”

It was a floating Petrobras tanker, side on to the wind off the Andes and driving towards them like a sailboat.

“I think it’s going to hit us.” Ana tried to imagine a traffic accident in the sky.

As it approached, the tanker gathered metal driftwood before it like a plough. Eventually it tipped onto its side and stopped moving.

“I think I can hear something. Do you hear that, Ana?”

Ana listened and heard the sound too. There was a deep thrumming beneath the whistle of the wind through the floating metal. “A motor. Its motor is still running. I don’t like that, it might–”

The tanker exploded in a massive fireball, and there was roar of sound, shrapnel slamming into the truck and shattering glass.

She felt a stinging blow to the side of her head and lost consciousness.

---

Ana looked around at the rides, the Ferris wheel, the Russian mountain, the funhouses. Where will we go next?

Iracema was holding a cluster of heart shaped balloons. I’m going to fly, she said, and took a ball of string out of her pocket. Here, tie this to my leg.

Ana knotted one end around her ankle, and Iracema and the balloons rose into the air.

—Hold on tight, she called down.

—How can you float like that?

—It’s easy, this is all upside down.

—Come back, Iracema, I don’t think I can hold you. The string was pulling hard and her fingers were slippery.

—It’s fine. You have to let go. And wake up.

“Ana, wake up, you have to wake up now.”

---

When she opened her eyes, she saw blood on her hands and glass diamonds, in her lap and all over the seat. She touched the side of her head with her fingertips. It felt sticky. Chunks of torn metal floated in the cabin and outside, and the windscreen was gone.

“Iracema, darling, are you alright?” Iracema was turned away from her, looking out the window. Ana touched her shoulder and she fell back against the seat. Her clothes were soaked in blood, and a metal shard protruded from her chest.

Ana was silent for a time, until the dry sobs melted into tears and screaming.

---

It was a violation, the last violation. She stripped the clothes from Iracema’s body and tore up the outfit she’d saved in her backpack, cleaned and pressed for job interviews in São Paulo, and wet everything with tears.

---

The military had closed off an area the size of a football field outside Marimbondo, and only certified scientists and connected politicians were permitted to enter the rising, the zone where iron had no interest in the current laws of physics.

Following the principle of monkeys with typewriters, the scientists collected data from a wide range of instrumentation, hoping that something would turn out to be useful even if it wasn’t a line of Shakespeare.

Unrestrained iron was strictly forbidden in the rising, and the politicians discretely played with ball bearings they’d hidden in their pockets.

On the fringes of the rising, a fair had appeared overnight. Holy men urged the crowds to accept that god had come to Paraná, the media chased stories, and locals swore that their discarded beer cans had risen off their back porches and floated for five famous minutes. When they were bored, the curiosity tourists wandered down rows of hastily erected stalls and purchased coffee, snacks, and mementoes.

One visitor from São Paulo noticed a piece of trampled matting and wire on the ground, and was vaguely curious about it. But his wife called to him, “Darling, come and look at these ‘I rose at Marimbondo’ tee shirts,” and that was that.

At midday, someone looked up at the sky and pointed, as if superman had flown out of a comic book, and a contagious buzz ran through the crowd.

---

Ana was close to the ground now, but the upward force on the metal in the knotted cloth bags tied to her ragtag harness was still increasing. She pulled a wire cord towards her, grabbed another piece of shrapnel from the exploded tanker and let it fly upwards.

Iracema had told her how. It’s easy, this is all upside down.

Her hands were cut and bleeding from the sharp edges on the metal shards, but really, it was easy. Ana was the upside-down balloon and the metal was her upside-down ballast. She’d discarded enough pieces to start falling and then released more along the way to keep descending.

She touched down like a feather and untied the last of her ballast, let it return to the sky, and the crowd around her clapped and cheered.

---

With the media held at bay by the military, Ana was given food and water, and her wounds were sterilized and bandaged. Colonel Lima, who accompanied her, politely didn’t ask too many questions.

“I think it would be best to have the doctors at Londrina Hospital check you out, senhora. I’ve arranged an airlift.”

The bottles on the shelves in the first aid tent rattled and shook, and Ana was startled.

“A minor earthquake. It’s the third one today. The scientists are looking into it.”

Earthquakes in Paraná were rare, but not unheard of, and the impossibility of the rising overshadowed anything that was just a little out of the ordinary, like a small tremor. Or like the ore body that Ana had discovered, even though there was nothing in the survey from the year before.

She tried to focus her thoughts. Most people’s thinking stopped at ground level, but that was where Ana’s began. The force of the rising was higher at lower altitudes, and it didn’t stop at ground level either.

“Colonel, I think something is going to come out of the ground, something big,” and she told him about the iron ore deposit she’d mapped out two days before, and what it meant.

“You’re saying the rising is coming from this … thing, underground.”

“Yes. It’s a mile long. You’ll have to evacuate the whole area.”

---

He was making his way counter flow through the crowds that were leaving, holding a dog-eared photograph and accosting disinterested strangers. He was unshaven and his eyes were bloodshot.

“My wife. She came through here. Have you seen her?” He sounded desperate.

Waving the photo towards Ana was a mistake. She kneed him hard in the groin and he doubled over, choking, unable to breathe.

Colonel Lima seemed slightly bemused. “Do you need any … assistance, senhora?”

The man with the photograph began vomiting and Ana shrugged. “It’s not important, Colonel. I’ll explain later. Let’s go.”

---

The ground heaved and split, erupted, and the battered craft rose upward on glaring tails of flame. The crowds watching at a distance saw the unbelievable, the certainty of extra-terrestrial life.

Ana had to stay overnight at Londrina hospital, and she joined an audience of patients and nurses in front of a television set. The camera followed the great vessel skyward until it scattered the terrestrial metalwork that had floated for two days, and then it tracked the objects themselves as they fell back to earth in a dark meteor shower.

Ana thought of Iracema’s dream, her flight, her hours of freedom.

“It makes you think, doesn’t it?” someone said, “How insignificant humanity is in the universe, how meaningless and trivial our day-to-day struggles really are.”

Ana wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She didn’t know much about the universe, but she knew that was horseshit.

---

Dust and Blue Smoke

By Robert Dawson

Kennit Martin charged into the playground like a tumbleweed on a mission. “Hey Jeff!” he yelled, still thirty feet away from me. “Steenrud’s bought a whole gallon of gasoline!” He gulped air. “I was at the post office when the creeper came! He said he’s already put the wheels on!”

I threw my boomerang down by the climbing frame. Across the playground, kids dropped bats and balls, put VR glasses and dolls into backpacks. Our lazy summer afternoon had just come into focus.

Old Mr. Steenrud had the only car in town. Sure, there were some biodiesel tractors and electric carts, and the big cargo creepers that crawled slowly along the rough roads. But those weren’t exciting, not like a real old-fashioned car.

It was a Chevrolet, red as blood, and about fifty years old. It lived inside his barn, up on blocks, wheels stacked beside it like giant checkers, and every kid in town was in awe of it. Its speedometer went up to a hundred and fifty miles per hour, ten times as fast as a tractor. Twenty-four hours… I did the multiplication. Why, in one day, it could go anywhere! Minneapolis, Chicago, Winnipeg… maybe even Alaska or Oz!

In ones and twos, kids left the playground, all heading past the drugstore toward the Steenrud place. Soon there was nobody left but me and Luther Petersen. “Come on, Luther!” I said. “Bet he gives us all rides!”

He scuffed a shoe in the dust. “Can’t.”

“C’mon, it’s not far!”

“My mom’d kill me, Jeff. She hates cars. She says they’re why the climate’s in such a mess today.”

“You could come and just watch.”

“Better not.” He turned and walked off towards his home. I felt sorry and relieved and guilty all at the same time: I’d been wondering if being a real friend might mean staying and watching with Luther instead of riding in the car myself, and I didn’t think I could do that.

Outside Steenrud’s barn, it was almost like the county fair had come early. Not just kids, grownups too. Horses tethered everywhere. People had brought plates of cookies and pitchers of lemonade. Oranges and lemons were big crops around there in those days; now they grow most of them up in Canada. I got a gingersnap and a glass of lemonade, and joined the long line. I thought of putting my VR glasses on while I waited, but didn’t. This was better than any of my games.

Mr. Steenrud was already giving people rides, circling the dirt track around the edge of his big field. I stood there, sipped the thin tart lemonade, and watched. There was no wind. Dust and blue smoke hung in the air, harsh and exciting.

Behind me, Ms. Steenrud was talking to somebody. “Never thought I’d see it again, Angie. Six years back he bought some gasoline from somebody, and next day he was swearing fit to bust. Crap wasn’t gasoline at all, it was some kind of cleaning solvent. Gummed her up so bad it took him three months to fix. He swore, if he couldn’t get proper gasoline anymore, he’d just leave her on the blocks. ‘Let the old girl rust in peace,’ he said. But looks like he’s found some. Still won’t tell me what he paid for it.” She laughed, but she didn’t sound quite happy.

Finally it was my turn, with the very last group. The car rolled up and stopped where we were waiting, the red paint gleaming in the warm March sun. Up close, you could see where it had been touched up with paint that wasn’t so shiny, and the front window was cracked. The doors creaked open, and the other passengers lingered for one last moment, then climbed carefully out. They were a few yards away from the car before they started chattering again.

And then we scrambled in. I’d imagined sitting in front, but Amie Telford got to do that. Paul Hartshorne’s dad got in back, in the middle, one foot straddled on each side of a big bump in the floor; I got one window and Paul had the other. Inside, it smelled of straw and horse manure, like the barn. We closed the doors. Mr. Steenrud turned around with a grin.

“Seatbelts all done up? It’s the law!” We fiddled with the awkward metal buckles. He nodded approval. “That’s right, that’s how you do it.”

I reached out to touch a little silver switch on the door. He shook his head.

“Better leave those windows down, the air conditioner hasn’t worked for years.” He grinned and faced forward again.

He pushed on the black steering wheel, and there was a loud honk, just like in the videos. He did something, water squirted onto the front window and two skinny black arms wiped it off again, leaving clean semicircles on the dusty window. The car coughed, and started to make a long, low purr, like a giant cat. And then we started to move.

It felt cooler almost immediately. We went faster and faster. I strained forward to look through the gap between the front seats. The red needle of the speedometer pointed to twenty miles per hour. I couldn’t imagine what a hundred and fifty would be like. We rattled over the bumps in the dirt track, and I was James Bond or Arnold Schwarzenegger or somebody, in an old action video. And we hung out the windows, and pointed our fingers like guns, and felt the wind in our faces, and tried to forget what we’d heard about cars making you sick to your stomach.

We went all round the field twice, and partway round again. Then the engine started to hesitate and stutter and went quiet. The car slowed and stopped.

“Sorry, kids!” said Mr. Steenrud. “Think the gas just ran out.” He tried the starter again, but it just coughed. He bent down and did something else, and the red metal lid ahead of the front window jumped a bit. He got out, walked around to the front, and opened it.

We couldn’t see anything with it up, so we climbed out too, and came around to look. Inside, the front of the car was full of strange shapes in shiny metal and black plastic. What he was looking at was a metal gallon can, with a hose rigged to it with a pipe clamp.

He shook the can; there was no sound but the dry whack of the hose against one of the metal parts. “Yep, that’s it. She’s out. Nothing left. Ride’s over.” His voice was quiet, as if we weren’t there and he was talking to himself.

Back by the barn, a bunch of the others had noticed that the car had stopped. A straggle of grownups and kids were on their way across the field to help.

“Something wrong, Bill?” one of the men asked, when they got there.

“No, she’s fine. Just out of gas,” Mr. Steenrud said. He was still smiling, but he looked tired from all the driving, and his eyes were red from the dust.

Gently, he lowered the lid down. It clunked softly into place. Then he climbed back behind the black steering wheel, and closed his door, and we all pushed the car back to the barn, like a parade.

---

A Case of the Blues

By E. Lillith McDermott

Subway platforms always make me claustrophobic. Don’t know if it’s the being underground, the heat, or the people. Maybe all three.

Clint’s glaring at me. “Martin, stop it! You’re gonna pop a button.”

I look down, confused. My fingers have a mind of their own, twitching up and down my lapel. Damn starch. Years it’s been in my closet and this suit’s still stiff. Clint’s right, a lost button’s just one more thing to worry about. I push my hands into my pockets. Look up at Clint. He nods, approval. Patronizing.

“So Yolanda said you had to interview today, huh?” He knows this of course, just trying to make me talk. Get out of my own head. Probably not a bad idea.

I answer. “Just to keep up my disability.”

Again Clint nods, like he understands. He doesn’t. He’s one of the few of us not getting Federal Aid. Stop – Clint’s the only friend you’ve got. Quit being a dick. After all, the rules and regs of G.O.D. welfare aren’t his fault.

I need to talk. “I don’t know why these case workers insist on making us run this gauntlet of humiliation.” I let my eyes drift across the empty tracks, land on the graffitied-over station sign. I like the new name better – Blue Barrio. Better fit. “It’s not like I’m gonna get hired.”

“I did.” Clint’s voice is small. This is well-worn territory.

“Sort of.” I gesture toward his coveralls and I.D. badge. “But you’re a teacher, not a… Recycling Technician.” Glorified garbage man.

“And I’ll teach again.” As always Clint’s nothing but confident.

“You really believe they’ll open schools for us.” Not a question. Not any more. Clint’s a true believer–his face hardens. He believes, I don’t.

“Of course they will. Every day more kids are born with the Blues. They’re gonna need some schools, and soon. Special schools, just for us. Like the housing.” He nods across the tracks – toward the name of our state sanctioned ghetto. He’s right, of course. Got to keep the infected out of the general population. Schools, hospitals–a whole separate world is slowly materializing.

The 9 train rattles to a stop and the doors swoosh open. A clean-cut young man, maybe about my age, in green scrubs pushes past. He smells strongly of hospital and disinfectant. The smell overwhelms me, and suddenly it’s 6 years ago, in Dr. Polson’s office.

I was back in my clothes, sitting on the crinkly white paper–waiting. My mom was in a chair by the door and my dad couldn’t stop pacing. Dr. Polson had given the diagnosis with about as much feeling as if he’d been
reading a weather report. Glaucous Otteric Deficiency syndrome.

“What happens now?” I asked his shoes.

My mother sobbed.

Polson cleared his throat. “Well, the disease is still new. We’re learning things every day. For now, what you need to know is we don’t believe it’s fatal. This isn’t AIDS2, no matter what the Internet is saying. You’ll probably suffer some hearing loss, which seems to be pretty universal. But other than that, well, the obvious is the pigment change.”

“How long?” I was shocked numb, no feeling, just questions.

“Depends.” The doctor focused on me, ignoring my mom’s increased hysterics. “But given how pale your coloring is, my best guess is you’ll see it pretty fast.”

“What about law school? I just started.” I needed answers.

“No reason you can’t finish, but in all honesty Martin, you should be prepared, you’ll have a full blown case before you graduate.” My mom sobbed, bolted from the room. After a long glare, my dad followed. That glare still burns, even all these years later.

Clint moves forward, stepping onto the train first. I let him. My heart races and my stomach threatens revolt. I’d like to say the first reactions are the worst, but that’d be a lie. They’re all just various degrees of horrible. Clint never gets quite the reactions I do. Not with his ebony skin. He’d probably have been able to go right along in the outside world if the whites of his eyes hadn’t finally given him away. They always do. The last to go. The final straw. But at least he’d had a few more years. Not like me. All Nordic paleness. No more healthy melanin left in my cells.

I take a deep breath. I have a right to get on this train. One foot in front of the next. The reaction is instant. Audible intakes of breath. Nervous movements. The old lady next to the door tries to make her shifting look natural – but I know. They can’t take their eyes off of me. They barely notice Clint. He blends. Not me. If I meet their eyes, they look away. But they can’t look away for long. Curiosity – morbid curiosity. Like driving by wreckage on the interstate. That’s me–road kill blues.

I pretend to look out the window. Let them stare. I watch them in the reflected glass. Try not to see myself. But I can’t help it. I’d stare too, if I were them. My once blond hair is now a dull gray. The disease has eaten up my ivory skin and replaced it with the pale blue seen throughout the Barrio. But it’s my eyes that really freak people out. Once I had the most perfect crystal eyes, little oceans. Only now, the ocean fills my entire socket. Like some possessed sea monster.

The man next to me shifts and re-shifts. Folds and unfolds his paper. But he won’t move. That would be discriminatory – and he’s not that sort of man. I bet if I started coughing he’d run.

I bet they’d all run.

How many times a month did I read new rumors about G.O.D. turning airborn? Clint smiles, finishes winding his watch. That’s his thing, says it gives folks a chance to take him in, calm down. He nods at the uncomfortable man to my right. Just like Clint to appreciate even the most half-assed efforts. The train pulls into the next station. Uncomfortable Man is already on his feet. Wonder if this is actually his stop?

He steps out the door and is immediately replaced by a 20-something woman with dirty blond dreadlocks. She scans the car, sees us – lights up. She pushes her way into our little demilitarized zone and drops into a seat, enveloping me in a cloud of patchouli. “You from the Blue Barrio?” she asks way too loudly. She wants to be noticed. She keeps looking around, demanding attention.

“That’s right.” Clint answers. Calm, you’d think he had conversations with uninfected women all the time.

She nods, smiles encouragingly. “I’m a member of the Glaucous Defense league at my university.” Am I supposed to be proud of her? Clint smiles. “We’ve staged a bunch of protests to make people realize that you’re people too!” Once again, she looks around. Bile stings the back of my throat. “Your human rights are being violated!” She just keeps talking. “We’re pushing for legislation. We’re gonna get you protected status.” Protected status. Like a spotted owl? A manatee?

“So what’s it like in the Barrio?” She leans forward, curious. No pause for an answer – not that curious. “I’ve heard conditions are pretty bad. We’re gonna change all that, you know.” She shifts and her backpack knocks Uncomfortable Man’s discarded newspaper to the ground. She grabs at it. “Oh!” She disappears behind the gray pages. A pause. “Look at this!” she commands, pointing to a page. My eyes follow.

Splashed across the front page is an oversized photo of a nondescript ranch-style house surrounded by emergency vehicles. 15 Dead in Blue Cult Mass Suicide. Again, bile. “I know.” The Good Samaritan commiserates, shaking her head. The dreds shake out another cloud of patchouli. My nose tickles. If I sneeze, will she leave? She scans the article. “So disgusting.” Is she still talking to us? I try to ignore her.

“These cults just keep popping up. I mean, come on. The Chosen People? Do you feel like the chosen ones?” She glances between Clint and me. I stay still. Clint shakes his head. I want to kick him. “It’s all because of the name you know.” She turns back to the paper. “Blue bug chasers – too sick.” New term: Blue bug chasers. Haven’t heard that one yet. “Totally muddies the issue.” I wish she’d be quiet. “Accidents happen, but come on! The first thing anyone in the Defense League does is swear to practice the safest sex possible and to get tested after every encounter. I mean the last thing any of us want is to be an example of irresponsibility and get infected.”

She looks up, conversationally. I raise my eyebrows – can’t resist. Red begins to color her cheeks. I hold my face still – but I want to laugh. “Uh…not to say you were acting irresponsibly…I mean…accidents happen…right?” Her blush grows. The train comes to a stop. She looks around, her eyes wild. “Oh, this is… I gotta go.” She bolts. We rattle on. The next stop is fast approaching, my stomach tightens.

“You gonna be okay?” Clint’s worried. I nod. I smile. I lie.

“Uh, thanks. For coming this far. I know the work bus would’ve been easier.” He doesn’t pretend – I’m glad. Just nods and takes off toward his transfer. I slide across the empty seats, putting the mechanic’s closet against my shoulder. I become tiny – inconspicuous. Commuters pile into the car, but not around me. I have my own little pocket of space. I catch a man stealing a glance. We lurch to another stop. One…two…three…four…not many more stops left.

A young mother drags her son onto the car. Her head is bent over her huge purse and she’s fiddling with a cell. She looks up, scans the crowd and pushes her boy toward my open seats. She gestures her son into a seat and then returns to her bag and phone. I push up against the metal of the wall; feel the cold through my blazer.

The boy looks at me. “What’s wrong with you?” I’m not sure what to say, how to respond. I glance over at his mom. She’s still busy – distracted. How will she react? Should I answer? “Well?” The boy presses. He’s young, no more than 7 or 8, maybe younger. Mixed race, adopted? I can’t tell. Definitely darker than his mother, by about 10 shades.

“I caught a virus,” I whisper, try not to be overheard.

“A virus?”

“Like a cold, only instead of making me sneeze, it made me blue.” Again I glance at his mother. Still busy.

“Cool!” The boy smiles and nods.

“You think this is cool?”

“Totally. You look like an alien…or…oh!” His face lights up and he begins to dig in the backpack at this feet. I look past his bent head, but his mom is busy pushing buttons on her phone. The boy pops back up. He holds up a comic book – well worn. He taps the cover. I look. A bright blue man is frozen in a mid-karate kick.

“Who’s that?” I whisper. I can feel more and more eyes turning to our conversation. My stomach tightens and my pulse quickens.

“Only the best crime fighter ever!” Apparently that was supposed to be obvious. “He’s part of this group of mutants that work together to fight evil. They have all sorts of cool powers.” He pauses, his eyes narrow. “Do you have any powers?”

I want to laugh. But his face is so hopeful. I shake my head. His face droops. “At least, not that I know of.” I feel myself smile. Foreign. I shouldn’t be talking to this kid – his mom’s gonna freak.

The boy looks thoughtful, eyes me up and down. “Maybe you’ll get powers. Or maybe,” his eyes sparkle. “Maybe you’re actually an alien.”

I shake my head. “Sorry, no.”

“Maybe you don’t know it. Like a sleeper agent. And then, when the ships land, you’ll wake up or something.” His smile is contagious.

“Maybe.” I shrug.

He keeps talking; his words rush out tripping over each other. “Or what if you’ve been secretly infected by another race of aliens who are trying to protect earth and when the invasion happens, you’ll like turn into some sort of super man and–”

“Joshua, stop bother–” His mother’s mouth hangs opens, her words dead on her lips. She stares at me.

My heart thumps…

Babump…

Babump…

Her face contorts. Panic wars with decorum. She glances around the car. Those nearest go quiet. The train stops. In a flurry of movement she collects their belongings. “Come on Joshua, this is our stop.”

He pulls at her arm. “But Mom–”

“Josh, quiet,” she hisses – teeth clenched. I meet his eyes, nod – one small head bob. They are gone. I wish I was Joshua’s superhero. Then I’d have the power to…

The next stop comes up fast. The ride gets worse. Two punks slip through the doors at the last second. And they’re…blue. Not blue like me, Clint. But really blue. Blue and proud.

The girl’s – amazing. I can’t stop looking. I barely notice him. She’s not remarkable in height or beauty, but she’s so…out. Her hair, it should be gray, but its not. She’d dyed it neon blue. So bright it makes my eyes water. Her clothes- blue, black and purple. Purple lips and midnight eyelids. Even her nails are blue. No shame – she looks around the car meeting eyes and making them look away.

Only now do I even look at him. What she lacks in height he makes up. Sweat beads on my neck. He’s shaved his hair into a Mohawk, bleached white. Torn jeans, lug-soled boots. Metal clinks on his worn leather jacket.

They see me. His face doesn’t move, but she lights up. She walks like she wants people to watch – they do. She drops into the seat next to me, lithe. She leans toward me, too close. My breath catches. She smells like vanilla, and cinnamon. Her companion turns his back on me, scanning the commuters. Like a recon scout. I can’t believe my eyes. The back of his jacket has been spray painted “Beware the GODs”

Blue Girl reaches up and runs a finger through my hair, over my ear. A trail of goose bumps follow her touch. My stomach turns inside out. “Where you going?” she whispers – still too close.

“Yeah.” Her companion turns back, leans over me. “That’s a nice suit.” He smiles. Still scary. Are they being friendly, or making fun?

“Yes.” She runs her finger under my collar. “It is a nice suit, but it doesn’t suit you, does it?” A smile plays around her lips. Full, perfectly painted lips.

She smiles.

I sweat.

I’ve never looked at a blue girl like this before. I want to know more. Her name. Her life. Blue Guy clears his throat. A business-sized card has materialized in his hand. On autopilot, I reach up, take it. “In case you’re curious.” He winks.

“You should call us,” she whispers, her fingers once again play with my hair. “You have questions.”

Blue Guy leans closer, whispering. The car’s completely still, no way he won’t be heard. “We have answers. The world’s changing.”

The train lurches to a stop. My bubble pops. “Excuse me.” I push away. Stand. “This is my stop.” They both smirk. My heart’s beating too hard. I’m surprised it doesn’t echo down the train. I walk to the doors.

“Call me!” Blue Girl yells and the doors hiss shut.

I see the sidelong glances. The double takes, the sudden shifts in movements – but I can ignore them. I can’t get the blue punks out of my head. The card in my pocket is insistent – demanding.

I reach my address. A shiny monument to man’s conquest over nature. I enter the lobby. More looks. Walk toward the elevators. Blue girl walked like she owned the world. I don’t. I need the 7th floor, no sense in walking. The elevator dings open. I enter. Not surprisingly I have a private ride. First floor…second…third. It stops.

The doors open. An overweight man with a pink face does a double take. Glances up and down the hall. No one comes to save him. Steps deliberately onto the elevator. He doesn’t look at me. Later, will he tell his friends of his close encounter and how he barely survived?

Sweat is beading up on his forehead. I feel wicked. I’d like to shout, “Boo!” He’d have a heart attack. I feel a laugh erupting. I squeeze my lips tight. The door opens, floor 6. He gets off. I let go. He hears my laugh. I can tell. The doors close between us.

Floor 7. Showtime. I open the firm’s big glass doors and march purposefully toward the receptionist. She looks up. Drops her plastic smile. “I have a 9 am with Ms. Peterson.”

Silence.

The smile returns – forced. “Of course, and your name?”

“Martin Dover.”

“Just have a seat and I’ll let her know you’re here.” Wonder how long I’ll have to wait? How long should I wait? Yolanda should be more specific in her requirements. I pick a seat directly facing the large glass doors. Perhaps that will hurry this along.

“Martin Dover?” Crisp, direct. I stand. The severe woman doesn’t flinch. Did the receptionist warn her?

“Ms. Peterson?” I step forward.

She spins on one sharp heel. “Let’s head over to my office, why don’t we?” She gestures me forward. I follow her down a hall into a room full of cubicles and chatter. I walk past the first row of cubicles and slowly the noise dies. Like ripples echoing from a stone in a pond. I focus my eyes on Ms. Peterson’s slate gray jacket.

Her glass-walled office sits on the far side of the cubicle bay. I have no doubt her mere presence behind that glass goes a long way to keep behavior in check. “Please shut the door behind you, Mr. Dover.” I do as ordered. She sits with admirable posture. My chair is stiff, almost painful. Her tiny brown eyes inspect me, top to bottom. She flips open a file on her desk, but never takes her eyes off me. “Interesting resume Mr. Dover. Impressive school credentials, but then absolutely no job experience. Nothing at all. Not just in Law, nothing. Should I assume you’ve been spending your time doing…” She gestures toward all of me.

No beating around the bush for Ms. Peterson. Honesty. I tell the truth. “Pretty much. That’s why I’m applying for the internship program. I wouldn’t be qualified for anything else.”

She raises an eyebrow but skips no beats. “True. Of course our internship program usually applies to more recent law school graduates.”

“Once again, my extenuating circumstances.”

“Yes, that.” Her eyebrows crease. “You failed to mention your infection status on your application.”

Shock. No one’s ever been this direct. My brain buzzes. Blank. Yolanda’s voice from far off coaching sessions fills my mouth with words. “I wasn’t aware that I was required to disclose my health status.”

Her face is a mask of calm. But I’ve touched a nerve. Her fingers twitch on the desk and her eyes flash. “That’s in some debate, now isn’t it?” Her voice is ice.

My chest tightens. I sit up straighter. “You do advertise as an equal opportunity employer.” Are these my words? From my mouth? We sit across the table, our own little standoff.

Beep!

We both jump. Ms. Peterson hits a button on her phone. The receptionist’s perky voice fills the room. “Ms. Peterson, Mr. Singh would like to have a word with you in his office.”

“Excuse me.” She stands. Back ramrod straight. Alone. In a fishbowl of an office. My back is to the door. She must have left it open; I can hear little snippets of conversation.

“–give him a job?”

“Not possible…”

“…environmental safety?”

Deep breath. Tune it out. Turn it into just so much chicken coop chatter. Singh. Might be the managing partner. Wonder if it’s about me?

The wall clock ticks. My hands are sweaty. I rub them along the side of my hip. Feel the business card stashed in my pocket. I pull it out. On one side; a number. On the other, “Got a bad case of the blues?” I swear I can still smell that sugary cinnamon.

My heart begins to speed.

Why am I here?

What am I doing?

I can hear my pulse in my ears. It’s not like they’re gonna give me a job anyway. I stand up. I’m halfway through the cubicles before they notice me. Words die on their lips. They look sick, shocked. But I don’t care. I’m gone.

Out the door.

Into the elevator – empty. I smile.

I press the card in my pocket. Think. My apartment. Quiet. I have a lot to decide. My phone.

The lobby has become crowded. Too crowded. I’ve spent enough time on the periphery of the barrio to recognize concern. The low drone of chatter is growing in volume and tenor. They cluster around the plate glass walls, too agitated at first to notice me pushing through. Some of them step aside, but most only glance in my direction, caught up in the chaos. I am not the biggest threat.

Too curious to hold back, I shove my way to the doors. I cannot believe my eyes. Outside it’s raining. Obese droplets coat the now deserted street. Covering cars, sidewalk, and street in a steady sheen of blue. Not the blue of water, the ocean.

The blue of me.

I push through the doors. The rain soaks my hair, runs down my face, drips off my nose. The city has gone still. The murmur of the rain is parted by a familiar voice. “Do you like it?” Blue Girl stands alone on the pavement, palms upturned to the blue droplets. I nod.

“Come.” She holds out a hand. “The revolution’s just beginning.”

I take her hand, lift my face to the rain, lick my lips. I taste sugar and cinnamon.

---

Coming Home

By Lynn Rushlau

Trembling, Brettel touched the iron gate. It didn’t burn. She huffed. Foolish woman, why would it? She gripped a bar tightly and held onto the solidness of home.

Reaching through the bars, she raised the latch and pushed the gate open. Silently. Before it had made god-awful noises. Her breath caught. No. Oh, no. Holding the gate open, she studied the house before her.

She knew the sage bushes and willows that lined the path to the door. The swing hanging on the left side of the porch was an old friend. To the right stood the same rocking chairs that had stood there since time immemorial. Brettel smiled. This was home. This was where she belonged.

Someone had oiled the gate. In all these years, someone should have. It was a small change. Things would have. She had. But this was still home. Still where she belonged.

Wasn’t it?

She hurried up the path, took a deep breath, and knocked. She’d been gone too long to just walk in.

An adolescent girl yanked the door open a few heartbeats later. She looked Brettel up and down, raised an eyebrow and said, “Yes?”

Who–? Brettel frowned and shook her head. It didn’t matter. “Is this still the carpenter’s residence?”

“He takes orders at his shop.” The girl pointed to adjacent building.

Brettel sighed with relief. “Is his wife home?”

The girl turned away and hollered, “Mom! Someone here for you.”

Leaving the door hanging open, she disappeared into the house.

Brettel heard footsteps and braced herself. An older woman, auburn hair streaked with grey, came around the corner and walked to the door. “Can I–?” Her brow furrowed momentarily. Her jaw dropped open. She whispered, “Brettel?”

Brettel bit her lip. “Mom?”

“Oh sweet lords! Brettel!” Her mother threw her arms around Brettel and pulled her into the house in a bone-crushing hug. Through eyes swimming with tears, Brettel saw the adolescent girl creep up to the parlor door. Brettel pulled back a little. Her mother let go and saw the direction of Brettel’s gaze.

“Delial, run to your father’s workshop. Tell him Brettel’s returned!”

The girl raised her eyebrows and disappeared back around the corner.

Brettel’s eyebrows shot up. That sulky almost grown girl was little Delial? Her sister who’d been in pigtails when Brettel left?

Their mother’s eyes raked across Brettel’s face. “Are you home? Are you home to stay?”

“If you’ll allow me–”

“Of course, of course.” Her gaze dropped lower and the frown returned between her eyes as she took in the well-cut dress of expensive linen and the finely tooled leather bag hanging at Brettel’s hip.

“Are you married?” she asked.

Brettel shook her head. Her mother paled and briefly closed her eyes. “You’ve become as a courtesan.”

“Mother! No!”

Her mother waved a hand at her clothes.

“I’ll tell you both when Dad gets here, but I promise I’ve never sold my body for money. I had a job. My employer wished us to dress well and provided the clothes. The bag was a parting gift.”

Her mother still looked worried, but she closed the door and escorted Brettel to the kitchen. Her father burst in mere seconds later. “Brettel!”

His hug knocked breath from her lungs. As soon as he let her go, a young man pulled her into his arms. Brettel froze for a second and pulled away. He grinned. Oh, wow, how could she have not recognized him no matter how old her little brother had grown. “Garnan!”

Delial had returned as well, but she hung back. Arms crossed, she leaned against the wall.

“Where have you been all this time?” Garnan demanded.

Brettel looked at her parents. “You said if I wasn’t going to help out in Dad’s shop that I’d have to find work.”

Her parents exchanged a look full of pain and recrimination.

Brettel smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. I know I was an utter brat over the idea. For years I’ve wished I could do them over, and that wasn’t how you remembered me.”

“Ah, you were young,” her father said. He clasped her hand. “Only sixteen.”

“Sixteen is old enough to know when you’re acting like a brat.”

Delial frowned. So did Brettel. Delial couldn’t be that old yet.

“Anyway, I knew work was inevitable so I left that morning to attend the hiring fair.”

Her parents exchanged a look.

“Releigh had offered you work in her bakery,” her mother said.

“I remember, but I hated the idea. So I went to the hiring fair instead. There was a woman there, dressed much as I am today, looking for people to work at a huge estate. She said very little of the estate, only enough to give clue to its size and that it was on one of the islands, not here in Dwankey. When she offered me a seven-year position as an upstairs maid, I couldn’t say no. It sounded so elegant!

“A young man from a farmstead well north of us wanted work in the gardens, and a girl from the fishing huts took a position in the estate’s kitchens. We all followed the woman to the docks, where a beautiful white ship awaited us. It wasn’t any larger than the fishing vessels, but so dainty and well-kept.” Brettel shook her head.

“The woman ushered us aboard, but didn’t get on herself. She had served her time and finished her final task in hiring us and now could go home. She’d introduced herself at the fair as Trudy, now she told us she was related to the Millers.”

“Trudy Miller!” her mother shrieked. Her parents exchanged a stunned look. Garnan’s jaw dropped. Delial stepped away from the wall, her arms falling to her side and eyes wide.

“That woman claims she spent the seven–” Her mother’s eyes grew wide. “Seven years she was gone on the White Isle.”

Brettel nodded. “That’s where the white ship took us. We had to restrain the fishmonger’s girl from jumping over as we drew near and it became obvious the White Isle was our destination.”

“I remember,” Garnan said dreamily. “I remember the Isle was visible that day. My friends and I spent quite a bit of time that morning watching the glitter of the sun on the white towers, discussing what it might really be like. Did you see the Fae? Did you see magic?”

Brettel shuddered. “Yes to both. Luckily, I didn’t have much to do with either. I was just an upstairs maid. I made their beds and cleaned their rooms and avoided them as best I could. My life wasn’t much different than a maid at any grand estate, I have to believe.”

“But what of the Fae? Who is the lord there? What is he like?” Delial took a seat at the table. Her mouth hung open.

“He–His name–” The name hovered on the tip of her tongue, but dissolved before she could form it. His image stayed behind her eyes. Tawny hair, chilly gold eyes. The image blurred. Brettel shook her head. “I’m sorry. They said it would all fade the further we got from the White Isle. I don’t seem to remember much of them. ”

“You were there for seven years. You must remember!”

Brettel’s brow furrowed. “I remember cleaning. I remember my friends among the human staff. The boy who came from the farm fell in love with one of them. He chose to stay on permanently.”

“One of the Fae?” Delial’s eyes were huge.

“Yes.”

“That’s so romantic!” Delial squealed. “What was she like? Is she beautiful beyond words? Will they marry?”

Startled, Brettel laughed. “No, I don’t think they marry. She was–she was beautiful. All raven blue locks and deep…dark eyes.” The image dissipated as Brettel tried to describe her. She shook her head. “I–I do recall she was beautiful.

“I served the seven years of my contract and came home. They did pay me well. I have money for the household.” Brettel started to dig through her bag.

Her father caught her arm and said, “Are you telling us that Trudy Miller knew exactly where you were all this time? She let our hearts break with worry for seven years and never did us the kindness of passing on your location?”

Brettel blushed. “She probably didn’t know whose child I was.”

“We asked all over town for months and months!” her mother exclaimed. “Had anyone seen you? Did anyone remember you leaving Dwankey on any of the carts from the fair? A couple of people have always insisted they saw you at the fair, but since no one could say and we never heard from you, we feared the worst.”

“I’m sorry. If I’d had any way of getting word to you, I would have. I didn’t understand when I accepted the contract where I was going. Not until we were halfway across the bay to the White Isle and even then I didn’t believe we were really going to the White Isle until we actually docked there. No one’s ever reached it before. How was I to know we’d stepped onto a Fae boat with Fae sailors?”

“But she knew,” her father said. “That bitch knew all along how distraught we were and that you were safe and–I’m going to kill her.”

“Dad, no.” Brettel shook her head and squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a moment. She didn’t want to say this, but knew she must. “It was her final duty to find new servants. Few choose to stay on beyond their seven years. The estate is immense. You would not believe from the glimpses we see from shore, how truly big the island and the estate is. They need servants.”

“What are you saying?” her mother asked.

“It is the final duty for departing servants. To find replacements.”

“Today was the hiring fair,” Garnan said. “Sol and Nerles were planning to look for better work.”

“Brettel?” Her father frowned. “Did you go first to the fair this morning?”

Brettel nodded. “I had that duty, yes.”

“Who? Who did you send off to them?” her father demanded. Brettel shook her head.

“No, you can’t do this, Brettel,” her mother said. “You must tell their families. You cannot allow another family to go through the grief we’ve suffered. Who did you send to them?”

“I can’t remember.”

---

Garnan insisted he could finish the current job alone, but their father returned to the workshop with him. Delial disappeared. After several miserable attempts to question Brettel about her life on the White Isle, her mother focused on catching Brettel up on seven years worth of gossip.

Mother made them tea, but wouldn’t let Brettel help. The teacups rested in the same cabinet as ever. The sugar, milk, spoons, all were where they should be. Brettel would have made the tea for them, but her mother brushed away all offers of assistance and served Brettel as if she were a guest.

Delial must have run to tell friends and family, for both showed up in droves that evening. An impromptu party replaced dinner. By its end, Brettel felt more exhausted than spring cleaning ever left her.

Everyone grilled her about the Fae. Many seemed frustrated that she could tell them nothing. More than one older relative took her to task over the pain she’d caused her parents–as if she could go back in time and fix that at this point.

Brettel’s bed had never been such a refuge, not even when the White Isle was at its scariest. She frowned. Memories of terror increased her heartbeat, but what had happened? The question drew a shiver down her spine. Better to not remember.

Her room remained her room. No one else needed the tiny space with the tattered patchwork quilt. Her old, dusty clothes filled the miniscule wardrobe. Faded drawings hung on the walls.

“I couldn’t bear to pack it up.” Her mother twisted her hands as she stood in the hall.

“It’s okay, Mom. I’m back now.” Brettel hugged her.

She shut the door and breathed in the silence.

Home was not what she expected. She thought she’d feel safe here. She thought it would be familiar, but she missed her friends in service. She missed the camaraderie. She missed the singing and the gardens and the beauty and peace. The White Isle felt more like home than this tiny dark house filled with inquisitive people, who stared at her like she was a spook!

Brettel climbed into bed and curled up under the strange blankets that had covered her for most nights of her life.

It would be better tomorrow. Today had been a shock for them all. Tomorrow life would start getting back to normal.

A thud drew her upright. Glass shattered. Another thud hit the wall. Brettel shrieked.

Lantern in hand, Garnan burst through the door. “What–?” He saw the rock lying in the pool of shattered glass. “Bastards.”

Their parents crowded in the door. “What’s happened? What’s wrong? What does that say?”

Garnan knelt in the glass and cut the note from the rock. He read aloud, “You’ll bring back them you’ve stolen, bit–” He shot a frantic glance at his mother. “You bring them back now.”

---

Brettel didn’t sleep well. The board her father hammered over the shattered window left the room too dark. She woke sandy-eyed and tired. Morning made nothing better.

Breakfast was well underway when she got downstairs.

“I’m sorry. I never sleep in this late. What can I do to help?”

“You have a seat. We’ll have the food ready in a jiffy,” Mom said.

Delial scowled.

“Let me set the table.”

“It’s your first morning back. Delial will do it.”

Delial shot Mom an outraged glare, slammed down the breadknife, and stalked out of the room.

“Delial! Get back here!”

“It’s okay. I’ll get it.” Brettel finished slicing the bread and set the table. It was her first and last triumph.

Offers to help were met with protests that it was her first morning back, her first lunch, her first afternoon, her first week. Her mother allowed her to do nothing. Her father needed her not at all. Delial scowled at every rebuffed offer.

Brettel attempted to ignore her mother’s refusal the first night at dinner and assist Delial, but Delial grabbed the flatware from Brettel’s hands and insisted she could handle her own chores.

Brettel needed to find work. Leaving the White Isle, she’d known she’d need to, would want to, but she hadn’t expected to be dying to escape her home again. Nothing like several years in Faerie to demonstrate beyond question what it means to be an outsider. She expected to fit right in at home.

The constant rebuffs had her ready to flee again.

She needed work, something to make proper use of her time. If her parents couldn’t provide, she’d find it in town.

Brettel dressed in her best dress, coat and gloves and went down to breakfast a week to the day she’d come home. Her mother looked up to greet her and dropped her knife with a clatter.

“Are you leaving?” Mom’s face paled.

“I thought I’d seek work in town after breakfast.”

“Oh.” Her mother dropped her hand over her heart. “I need to pick up a few things at the market. I’ll walk down with you.”

Delial huffed and stormed out of the room.

“Delial! The porridge!”

“It’s okay. I can get it.” Before her mother could protest, Brettel plucked the spoon from the pot and planted herself before the stove.

Her mother sighed, but didn’t say anything as Brettel finished the rest of Delial’s breakfast tasks. Delial’s obvious discontent killed any satisfaction Brettel might have gained from actually being able to help.

Brettel found the walk into town more perplexing than the walk home had been. Surely that house had blue shutters before, not dingy brown. And hadn’t that one been yellow? Was this a different route? What happened to Miss Oliandra’s roses? The sheared yard left Brettel unsure if she identified the right house. Vastly overgrown hedges no longer hid the house at the end of the lane.

An old man approached them from town. He doffed his battered straw hat and said hello. Brettel echoed her mother’s response.

“Good to see you.” He nodded to Brettel as he passed.

Brow furrowed in confusion, Brettel leaned close to her mother to whisper. “Who was that?”

“Donnod. You remember him.”

Brettel gave her a blank look.

“He owns a fleet of fishing boats.” Her mother smiled. “Well, he has seven sons and son-in-laws and owns all their boats. You must remember Methew. He courted you.”

The name pricked at her memories. “Reddish blond hair, brown eyes? Really skinny?”

“That’s the one. He’s still single.”

Startled, Brettel blushed. How had her mother known she was wondering about that?

They turned a corner and started down main street. The roofs of the homes of Dwankey’s rich could be seen over the shops.

“Do you want me to meet you back somewhere here in town or just see you at home?” Brettel asked.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Her mother bit her lip.

“Seeking employment? How could it not be?”

Brettel visited seven houses before exhaustion led her back to main street. No one needed anyone right now. Those who’d been shorthanded hired at the fair last week. Of course. Brettel felt foolish to have not thought of that.

But her efforts might yet bear fruit. Several housekeepers took her information and seemed to think their mistresses would be interested to have a maid who’d worked on the White Isle.

She would keep her fingers crossed, but the day’s search had done nothing to solve her immediate problem of uselessness.

Wondering if she’d need to leave Dwankey to find employment, Brettel headed back to Releigh’s Bakery to meet her mother. Mere feet from the door, bruising hands grabbed her arms and whipped her around.

“What have you done with my wife?” Spittle landed on her face as the man bellowed. He shook her. “You had no right to take her away from me! Harlot! Demon!”

Brettel flopped helplessly in his arms. She could hear people shrieking, but couldn’t catch her breath to add to their cries.

“Thief! You had no right! How do I get her back? Tell me!” He shook her so hard she nearly lost balance. “How do I get her—oomph.”

Garnan socked the man in the side. He pried Brettel free of the man’s hold and pulled her away. “Are you okay?”

Her mother and a flurry of older women surrounded her all asking the same question. Brettel’s head spun.

“You leave my sister alone, Coffard! Everyone knows why your wife left you!”

Coffard swung a punch, but Garnan ducked out of the way. Guards bustled through, breaking up the fight before it went further and dispelling the crowd.

---

Brettel couldn’t sleep that night. She truly missed the White Isle. The housekeeper would have had a salve and a cool drink that would have soothed her throat in no time. Back on the Isle, she wouldn’t be lying here with a burning throat throbbing too much to allow sleep.

The witch hazel-infused cloth around her neck felt good when first applied, but its comfort dissipated in minutes. Brettel refused to consider dipping into the funds she’d provided to the household for the apothecary and a better painkiller.

She rolled over and took another sip of lukewarm honey-filled tea. The honey helped, but again, its succor disappeared too quickly to allow escape into sleep.

The White Isle would be visible somewhere tonight. On it, one forgot to look across the waters, but once in a rare moon, she would remember the world outside its shore and steal a glimpse of the mainland.

Some nights the moon illuminated forested rocky shores without a sign of human habitation to be found. Other times, she caught glimpses of immense, formidable cities that stretched as far as the eye could see.

She never saw Dwankey. Not once until this week when she climbed back into the faerie boat to come home.

Home.

Why had she wanted to return so badly? Her family had missed her; she must acknowledge that. But she wasn’t needed here. No one knew what to do with her.

Her parents wouldn’t accept the money she’d hoarded all these years to give them. They kept returning it to her room. She moved it back to the house coffer every morning. Her father even refused to let her pay for the glazier to give her this new window. She rolled over and glared at it.

The night sky looked paler than usual. Brettel frowned and climbed out of bed. Maybe she was remembering wrong. Everything was weird on the White Isle. The sky often seemed darker, the stars brighter and closer there.

The world outside looked eerily orange. The connection took only a moment. “Fire!”

She pivoted and flew out of her room. Still shouting “Fire!” she clattered down the stairs. Doors slammed open. She burst outside and gasped. Her father’s carpentry shop was aflame.

She needed to raise the town.

Brettel ran for the gate. She heard her father yell to her brother not to go inside the shop. She flung open the gate and, glancing back to make sure Garnan wasn’t risking his life, slammed into someone solid.

“Oh, sorry! Can you help? I’ve got to get to the emergency bell.” Brettel tried to pull free of the hands that caught her.

“No. What you’ve got to do is take me to my wife.”

Brettel screamed.

The man caught both her wrists in his left hand and shoved a rag in her mouth. He pulled her away from the house. She dragged her heels. She couldn’t stop him, but they weren’t moving very fast.

The emergency bell clanged. Running footsteps drew closer to them and filled Brettel with relief. But Coffard heard them as well. He threw her over his shoulder and took off at a stumbling lope.

Hands free, Brettel yanked out the gag. She screamed, kicked, and beat his back with her fists as he ran. No one stopped him. His distraction had been too good. The entire town was awake, oh yes, but they hurried to help her parents. No one heard her screams over the uproar about the fire. Coffard cut through yards and dragged her down back ways where they passed no one.

At the docks, he threw her to the ground, knocking the wind out of her. “Shut up! No one’s going to help you. You don’t deserve help, thieving demon-tainted bitch like you. Leading good women astray. You’re going to fetch back what you stole.”

Brettel scooted away, but he caught her arm and yanked her to her feet–about pulling her shoulder out of socket.

“Your wife chose to go! I didn’t lead her anywhere. She was at the hiring fair!”

“LIAR!”

“I can’t get you to the White Isle. I’m human like you. The Isle’s not there. Can’t you see that?” She gestured towards the harbor. Dark outlines of islands were barely visible. Coonie, Sperko, Laseey, and the tiny mounds of Little Fess and Upper Fess, but not the glowing, glittering shore of the White Isle.

He slapped her across the face. The coppery taste of blood filled her mouth.

“Let her go!”

They spun to face Delial. Arms akimbo, she glared at Coffard. “Your wife left because you beat her. All of Dwankey knows that, and no one would ever help you get her back! She’ll have taken a lifetime contract. You’ll never get to the White Isle, and she’ll never leave it.”

“You shut your face! You’re a stupid child. What do you know of anything?”

“I’m not a child,” her father huffed up behind Delial. “You know Delial’s words are true. You let my Brettel go. She rescued your wife. Something all of us should have done long ago.”

“You want your daughter, you help get my wife!”

“How?” Garnan demanded. Startled, Brettel watched Garnan shove past their father, their mother on his heels.

“She came from there! She can get back.”

“She came from here,” her mother growled. “That’s my daughter. Our family! She was born and raised in Dwankey. This is her home. She worked there. That doesn’t make her from there any more than it makes your wife from there now that she works there.”

“She cannot go taking good people off to that decadent land! It’s wrong!”

“And beating your wife senseless on a weekly basis, isn’t?” Garnan asked.

Coffard flung Brettel aside and advanced on him. “I did not beat my wife.”

Her mother pulled Brettel into her arms.

“Yeah? Where’d those bruises come from?”

Coffard threw a punch. Garnan ducked. His return hit caught Coffard in the stomach. He didn’t wait for the man to recover, but served a quick uppercut to the chin and knocked him out cold.

“I can’t do anything about his wife,” Brettel said as she stared down at him.

“And you shouldn’t. Adara deserves her life free of him.”

“Yeah, but is he going to leave Brettel alone?” Delial kicked Coffard’s foot.

“Stop that,” their father ordered.

“He set fire to the shop and tried to abduct my sister! Are we going to just ignore that?”

“Of course not, we’ll press charges—”

“The shop!” Brettel exclaimed. “What are you doing here? The shop is on fire!”

“The fire was about under control, but we better get back.” Her father bit his lip.

“I’m sorry.” Tears filled Brettel’s eyes.

“This isn’t your fault,” her father said.

Brettel shook her head. “It is. I ran off to the White Isle. I got involved with the Fae. And then I came back and brought this all down on you—”

“You stop right there!” Her mother dropped her hands to her hips. In her anger, she looked just like Delial. “You belong here. You should have come back and you should stay. Everyone else will just have to accept that. You’re here to stay, you hear me? This is where you belong.”

Encircled by her family, Brettel climbed the hill back to where she belonged.

---

Sluicing the Acqua

By Juliana Rew

Even at a distance in the hazy daylight, Sylvana could see Captain Ruggero Barsetti frowning at her as she walked down the dock carrying her diving suit. It was easy to read his thoughts: Her belly was growing, and it wasn’t seemly for her to be working so hard.

“What are you doing here, little one?” he said gruffly. It wasn’t his usual custom to be tender.

“I’m going out to Gate 38. Giorgio reported that something was causing it to snag. He could see it on his sonar on the big boat, but he didn’t have a diver. If it turns out to be a building, we are going to have our work cut out for us. Another big incursion is coming.”

“I appreciate your dedication, but I am aware of the gate problem,” the Captain retorted. “We are working on it. You should just go on home and take it easy until the baby arrives.”

Sylvana looked down at her calloused hands. “You know I can’t do that, cugino,” she said to her older cousin. “If I quit my job, I’ll never get back on. I’ll soon have another mouth to feed now, you know.”

“You’re a member of the clan. We’ll take care of you,” Ruggero said. He added, “Have you thought of joining the farming initiative after the baby comes?”

“And what will we use for fresh acqua? The only measurable rainfall is out over the sea. No, I don’t think the farming is going to happen soon.”

The Amborgettis were building freshwater collection platforms several miles offshore, but it was a risky venture in her view. The storms could be ferocious, and it was still too dangerous to subsist out on the exposed ocean. She’d stick with diving salvage from old buildings.

Sylvana felt a little guilty about playing the baby card, but she was the chief diver for the Barsetti clan. Maybe someday she could take it easy if the new farming project got off the ground. Or on the ground. There would be plenty of easy work then dusting off solar panels, to funnel back energy and provide additional light for the crops. But for now she had to keep her independence with Franco gone.

Sylvana and her relatives lived, barely, in one of the few coastal cities on Earth to survive the Gemini, the twin extinctions. The first disaster was widespread starvation initiated by runaway global warming. People moved from drought-stricken areas to the continental shores, only to fall victim to flooding and tsunamis. Then, as if humanity were not facing trials enough, an untracked extra-solar system ice ball struck Mexico in nearly the same spot as an asteroid had 66 million years ago. Any species unable to live on sludge, worms, and detritus had a difficult time in the aftermath.

Fortunately, humans are omnivores, and Sylvana’s scavenger ancestors had been fairly clever about turning dead plant and animal material into foodstuffs for people. Also luckily, there were a lot fewer people who needed to be fed. Those living in what remained of southern Europe clustered around Tristezza, or Trieste, as the Italians used to call it half a millennium ago. Now the name simply meant “sadness.”

Since the Gemini, Tristezza had watched its sister city across the Adriatic slowly succumb to the rising sea levels. Venezia had battled encroaching waters from the surrounding blue Adriatic Sea for centuries, and spent multiple fortunes hiring Dutch engineers to remove river silt and hold back the tides that threatened to overwhelm its lagoons. Venezia’s MOSE, with its series of gigantic steel sluice gates anchored below the surface, was a wonder of the world. When high tides threatened, the gates would float to the surface to protect the city. But after the Gemini, Venezia’s population dwindled, and, sensing a bargain, Tristezza negotiated to buy, dismantle, and move Venice’s gates to its own waterfront. Then the ocean erased any other signs of the great city.

Sylvana’s clan all worked to preserve the coastline and maintain the gates of Tristezza. Another clan, the Amborgettis, was responsible for running the pumps that constantly filtered the Adriatic waters for food and potable acqua. Although the climate had cooled considerably, the Adriatic Sea’s low salinity and moderate temperatures provided a climatic refuge for the remaining human population.

Sylvana’s scientist husband, Franco, had spent most of his life aboard sailing ships that Tristezza sent out each year, traveling around the boot of Italy and up the Ligurian Sea, looking for pockets of surviving species that might be suitable for refilling ecological niches or providing sustenance for humans. Franco had died five months earlier when his ship Santo Antonio tragically sank on the rugged Cinque Terre coast. Everyone thought it must have been in one of the aftershocks that continued to radiate across the ocean bed. Icelandic volcanoes regularly spewed ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, cooling and darkening the hemisphere.

The argument over for the moment, Sylvana donned her suit, while the captain waved to Giorgio to bring the rowboat closer to the dock. The Barsettis owned 16 boats of varying sizes, all created from digital models and constructed of liquid plastic.

Giorgio rowed with one of the plastic oars and nosed the boat up, holding it steady so that Sylvana could step in.

Sylvana flashed a smile and clambered aboard. She sat near the prow to monitor the echo locator, perching her helmet in her lap. To save fuel, Giorgio made the two-mile row out to the gates. Sylvana silently counted his strokes to estimate when they were close to the 38th sluice. The sea was a touch choppy today, making it a bumpy ride.

As the water slapped against the sides of the boat, she unsnapped a long telescoping pole from the interior wall and unfolded it over the water. Giorgio rowed in a tightening circle, while Sylvana poked into the murky water. The tide was not yet officially an incursion, so it should be low enough that she could find the gate without having to try to inflate it with compressed air.

Ah, luck was with her. Her pole hit something solid.

“Let’s stop here, Giorgio,” she said. Her red-bearded oarsman tossed over a heavy anchor, which would slow them down, although the rope wasn’t always long enough to reach the sea bottom. The rope would be her lifeline if she was unable to see the surface, which was most of the time.

Sylvana tucked in her long braid, as Giorgio helped her don the helmet and twist the air hose onto the valve. She slipped into the chilly water and began descending the anchor rope. As the surface closed over her, she could see only a bit of pale sun overhead. It was a short journey to the obstruction they had located. She could barely make it out with her torch, but it appeared to be part of an old wooden dock from the original Trieste marina that had slipped under water about 80 years ago. It should have floated out to sea, but part of it was stuck about 50 feet below the surface, maybe on one of the gate pylons. Chunks of plastic and other trash were accumulating on the obstruction. She pried a piece loose and tucked it into her catch bag.

She tugged on one of the timbers, but it didn’t budge. She would have to surface and get more rope. And more help. Maybe with two or three boats they could dislodge it and pull it inland. Wood was a valuable commodity, even if waterlogged.

Sylvana’s efforts to move the dock kicked up a dark green slow-motion cloud, probably dead algae that would have been useful as food, except that now she couldn’t see anything. She swam around for a while without finding the boat. She reminded herself not to panic and hyperventilate. After what seemed like an eternity, she heard Giorgio pounding on the rowboat hull. She swam in what she hoped was the right direction and with relief grabbed the anchor rope.

Giorgio pulled her in, and said, “What took so long? What did you find?”

Exhausted, Sylvana began shedding her suit. She noticed that Giorgio stared a little, and was a little embarrassed that he probably was looking at her expanding stomach. She started to tell him about the submerged find, but suddenly she felt queasy, and spots swam before her eyes. She sank toward unconsciousness, and the last thing she remembered was Giorgio shouting soundlessly as he struggled to pull up the anchor.

---

Sylvana sat up and looked around. She was in a strange bed, but the room was familiar. Whitewashed plaster walls with pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on the bureau. She was at Ruggero and Anna’s. Her salt-flaked diving suit lay across a bench.

“I’ve got to get back home,” she muttered, throwing the blanket aside and clambering out.

“Oh, no you don’t,” her cousin Anna said, appearing from nowhere and insisting she get back in bed.

“Here, I’ve brought you some soup. You need to gain your strength. Ruggero said he doesn’t want you going out again until after the baby is born. Eat up; this might be the last for a few days. Someone vandalized my slug sterilizer in the backyard, and some greedy gulls got most of this week’s harvest. They’re worse than rats.”

Reluctantly, Sylvana took the bowl and spoon. Maybe she was a bit hungry after all. Sniffing the warm garlicky broth appreciatively, she could see what Rugerro saw in the little Anna. She was a great cook and handy with tools. As Sylvana drank the liquid in the soup in a single draught, Anna announced, “The queen said she wants to see you.”

Oh great, Sylvana thought, nearly choking on a rubbery but tasty slug. I’m totally broke, and now I’m probably going to get banished.

---

Sylvana sat on the bed wearing her best dress, as Cristina swept into the room. Tristezza’s queen held a lion cub in her arms, which she nuzzled and then sat gently on the floor next to her. The kit was on a leash, but Sylvana had never seen a lion up close and was a bit nervous. Among all the animals saved from the old Trieste Zoo, the lions were Tristezza’s pride and joy. So, of course, Cristina had to have one as her mascot.

“How are you doing, darling?” the queen said. Officially there was no such thing as royalty, but everyone called Cristina the queen, because she handled all the administrative duties for the clan and served as a liaison with the Amborgettis.

“I’m fine, thank you, Queen Cristina. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I’m anxious to get back to work.”

“Well, we’d like to talk with you about that,” Cristina said. “We don’t think you’ll be going back to that job. . . You see–”

“What? Why not? I’m a certified diver, and my troubleshooting record speaks for itself.”

“That’s not it at all, dear,” Cristina said. “Please don’t interrupt me. We just think you’re the right person to take over for Franco.”

Now Sylvana felt confused. I’m no explorer, she thought, and Franco died in a freak accident. Didn’t he?

“What can I possibly do?” Sylvana asked.

“Franco was on a mission for the crown,” Cristina said. “Er, we mean, we were working with him on a special project.”

The queen held out a red leather-bound book. “This was Franco’s journal. It explains everything. You know, after Franco, you are our best technically trained citizen. I think only you will be able to figure out what he was onto, before he was so sadly taken from us.

“Rest and read the journal, and after the baby’s born, we want you to go to Cinque Terre to investigate.” Sylvana knew what that meant. It was royalty-speak for: You do what we want, or we’ll take one of your loved ones hostage.

“But what about the baby? I need to be here for him–or her,” she protested.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the little one, no matter what happens,” Cristina said.

“You can’t keep my baby from me,” Sylvana repeated, her voice rising.

“Just think of it as extra motivation, dear,” Cristina said. “The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll be back.” The cub at her feet let out a yowl, and she glanced at the orologio on her wrist.

“We’ve got to be going. We’ve got another meeting about the farm initiative with the Amborgettis. You know, if you play your cards right on this thing, you might get a position on the farm board, and perhaps a share of the sea farm. If we find the fresh water we need, that is.” She scooped up the lion and hurried out the door. Sylvana jumped to her feet to bow as Cristina left.

Sylvana disgustedly pulled off the lace scarf Anna had lent her to cover the gap in the back of her now-too-tight dress and paced back and forth. The heavy kohl eyeliner she had applied so carefully had run down her cheeks. She wiped a hand across her eyes and sat down again on the bed. Her eyes fell on Franco’s journal.

He’d often told her the history of the Gemini disasters. The Earth had always been an ocean planet, but recently sea level had risen another 200 feet, and a good deal of the remaining inland was high plains deserts and mountains. Freshwater lakes had vanished long ago. It was said that when the ice sheets melted, Greenland would spring upward, but that only been a few feet, and the continent was under water.

Though familiar with Franco’s scientific work, Sylvana had never violated his privacy by looking in his private journal. How had Cristina gotten it anyway? She opened the cover and began to page through the book. It seemed to mostly be painstaking entries about species and quantities of resources he was cataloging for his work. Not really a private journal, after all.

Ah, here was an entry that mentioned Cristina:

Pressure from queen. No choice, with S.

Did the “S.” refer to Sylvana? Had Cristina threatened to do something to her if Franco didn’t do her bidding? She determined to get to the bottom of this, and started reading more carefully, diving until she was totally immersed. She reached the bottom without finding anything.

Franco had traveled to the rugged coastline of Cinque Terre on two occasions, but Sylvana didn’t see anything unusual in the entries, except the reference to Cristina near the end of the journal.

She had to get home and look for Franco’s private journal, if there was one. She told Anna she was returning to her own cottage, over her cousin’s objections.

“I’d be more comfortable at home,” she said, thanking Anna and gently shooing her out of the way to slip out.

When she got home, she was not too surprised to see that all of her and Franco’s belongings had been ransacked. Obviously Cristina’s people were looking for the same thing she was. She surveyed the damage and began putting chairs right side up and dishes back on the shelves. Dejectedly, she surmised that she was not going to find anything either.

She felt a kicking in her stomach, and said, “All right, all right, I’ll sit down, bambino.” She lay on her mattress, which she had left bare since hearing of Franco’s death five months ago. She hadn’t even had the chance to tell him he was going to be a father. . .

She dozed fitfully, dreaming that Franco had returned to her. “I thought you were gone,” she said to him. “Never, my beautiful one,” he replied, stroking her hair and embracing her. They kissed and made love until the chill air awoke her. Another dark dawn. Franco was dead, and the baby was jumping, telling her to eat some breakfast.

The next night she dreamed of Franco again. He bent over his journal, writing in the small yellowish pool of light thrown by the solar lamp. The lamp took days to charge up on the porch outside, so he always used it sparingly. He smiled when he saw Sylvana and held the book out to her. “I’ve found something wonderful, cara.” Then she woke up.

This was getting to be an obsession, she thought to herself, making up a cup of bitter espresso substitute. Although it was still breakfast time, she wished she could have a mug of alcool. She missed the sting in her throat and the radiating warmth afterward. But that was a pleasure to be saved for after the baby…

She could even see the color of the journal in her dream. It was dark blue, not like the one Cristina had given her. Sylvana walked over to Franco’s chair, with the solar lamp sitting on the table beside it. She had picked it up from where the searchers had tossed it and put it back in its place. Luckily, the panel hadn’t been damaged. The panel. It was dark blue.

She ran her finger over the glass surface, feeling the bumps over the diamond shaped separators holding the pieces in the casing. To her surprise, the glass slid aside, revealing a slim book inside.

She read the first entry:

Funny, isn’t it? “Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink.”

She recognized the line from the famous poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Franco detailed how he had come across some articles in the Tristezza database on early attempts at seasteading. It seemed that the technical challenges on the high seas were too difficult, with the sea expected to demolish or capsize even the most solidly built floating domiciles. And floating residences built near the shores would inevitably be subject to political disputes and water shortages. Critics called them “paradises for fools.”

Franco had laid the idea aside for a while, reporting that he had made an encouraging discovery. He had encountered some large swaths of chlorophyll-rich plankton in the Mediterranean a dozen miles off the Cinque Terre coast. And equally surprising, he saw dolphins and fin whales. The ecosystem was making a comeback! He felt this held great promise, and was eager to report it to the queen. The increase in chlorophyll signaled an increase in solar radiation, which could be harnessed to start to grow crops on land again. Although there was still the limiting factor of the scarcity of fresh water, some could be distilled using solar energy and solar stills, now that there was more sunshine available.

Still, Sylvana had not seen anything too startling in Franco’s journal. Everyone knew solar radiation was increasing as the atmospheric dust settled out; that was why the queen had proudly announced the new farming initiative, in cooperation with the Amborgettis. She didn’t see why the queen would be after Franco–and her–from what she read. Sylvana felt the baby kick again, and closed the journal, replacing it in the solar lamp. She would read more tomorrow.

---

Sylvana didn’t get back to the journal the next day, or the next. The baby had decided to make an appearance. She walked slowly down to Anna and Ruggero’s place, wincing as the pains came closer together.

Anna called for the midwife, who appeared quickly, accompanied by two goons from the queen’s retinue.

“You can’t come in here. Wait outside,” Anna ordered them. They settled at the front door, prepared for a long wait. First children often took their time. Anna closed the door, as Sylvana began her work. “The queen’s men have arrived before the baby even comes. It’s disgraceful.”

The birth was a difficult one, and Sylvana got to spend time with little Mario while she recovered. Guards remained in front of Ruggero and Anna’s house to make sure she didn’t leave without warning.

Sylvana agonized over whether to tell her cousins about the journal. She felt it was key to resolving the mystery of Franco’s discovery, but she didn’t want to involve them if it might endanger the family. Finally, she decided to talk with them as soon as Ruggero got back from the gates. He had been overseeing the effort to free Gate 38 from the obstruction she had identified, and it looked like all the sluices were now lifting and sinking properly.

“Why would Franco hide a journal from the queen?” Ruggero asked quietly as they sat around the dinner table that night. “He was her pet scientist, and she was always parading him around at public events.” Sylvana said she wasn’t sure yet, but she pointed to the guards outside his door as evidence that something hadn’t been right between them.

“That might help explain the piece of rudder I found in the junk hung up in the gate,” Ruggero said. “Now I’m sure it was from the Santo Antonio. I built that ship from scratch. I think the rudder was intentionally damaged and probably failed completely by the time Franco got to Cinque Terre. Very dangerous on that rocky shore.”

Anna shivered and crossed herself.

Finally they agreed that Anna would go to Sylvana’s house and retrieve the diary, telling the guards that she needed to pick up some clothes and supplies for Sylvana and the baby.

Anna returned an hour later with a basket of diapers and a container of seaweed flour.

“They actually had the nerve to search me and the basket,” she said. “But I put Franco’s idea of a false bottom to good use. I’ll bet those men were the ones who tore up my drying rack. Here you go.” She handed the slim blue volume to Sylvana.

Sylvana retreated to the bedroom and opened the book to the page where she had left off. She spotted something that drew her interest. Franco wrote:

Apparently the Israelis were onto the idea of seasteading. Living in a country with enemies on three sides, they sought to build a structure that would support a thousand settlers in the Mediterranean and move on the open ocean. They would operate floating farms using stocks from seed banks all over the world and design a fresh water generating system that used solar stills. If solar energy was lacking, electricity would be generated using heat exchangers that captured energy from ocean waves or even radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) like those used on satellites. This is interesting, since radioactive material from old nuclear power plants along the coasts is plentiful. But the problem is how to get to it, because those plants are now submerged.

Sylvana wondered what became of the project, which was certainly ahead of its time. Israel had ceased to be a country about 200 years ago, and its former citizens were forced into another diaspora. “So much for being the chosen of God,” she said under her breath.

Sylvana read several more entries about Franco’s preparations for his next voyage and his interactions with queen Cristina.

Serious error in judgment. Shared the story of the Israeli seastead with the queen, and she latched onto it with a vengeance. Pressing me to find this legendary sea city for Tristezza. The problem is, it isn’t even legendary–no one knows if it ever existed, or where. Probably at the bottom of the ocean, rotting away, like Atlantis.

An entry dated a week later:

Pouring through some of the records regarding the disbanding of Israel. Now have a clue where the floating city went. It was indeed being built in the Mediterranean, possibly off the southern coast of Italy near Sicily. It was real!

Sylvana’s heart quickened, and she began to read faster. Franco’s investigation led to the plans for the city, code-named Simcha.

Initially skeptical about this plan. Pontoons not sufficient for long-term. Thought the ocean would almost certainly eat up the little city, just like others before it. Then saw the additional plans for sluice gates similar to those in Venice to be built near Palermo. In case of extreme weather, the city would float to a position centered on the gates, which would rise to protect it from flooding. But this can’t be right, can it? The Venice gates are much too fragile to work on the open seas. . . But Palermo still exists; it’s on high ground. . .

It appeared Franco hadn’t told Cristina what he’d found. Sylvana sat down to write a letter and called to Anna to ask her to deliver it personally. Anna tucked it into her bosom and headed out the back door.

---

Sylvana inhaled deeply and then held her breath as she tore out the page, stared at it one last time, and threw it in the fire. The flickering fire was one of the few colorful things left in the world. Mesmerized, Sylvana watched as the page caught, blue flames licking the edges and curling it until only black ash remained. Only then did she exhale.

Equipping for another voyage around the horn of Italy. Told the queen it is another trip to the Cinque Terre. Wish I could take S. with me. She is the best deep sea diver in Tristezza, but C. denied my request. I’ll bet S. would give her eye teeth to see such gates, with their feet sunk deep in bedrock. Truly a godsend.

That was the last entry. Sylvana tore out the page and crumpled it before adding it to the fire.

Suddenly she heard a pounding on the door. Anna burst into the room.

“The guards! They found the lamp. I must have left it open in my hurry to bring the book.”

Two burly men pushed Anna aside and pounced on Sylvana, tearing the book from her grasp.

“That’s private property,” she yelled, struggling against the iron grip binding her.

“You’re under arrest,” the guard said. As they dragged her to the hallway, Sylvana saw a hooded woman slip out the front door carrying something she treasured even more than the book. She screamed.

---

Cristina’s masque of joviality was slipping rather badly.

Sylvana stood before a curved table of clan elders, with the queen at the center. Rubbing her wrists, Sylvana tried to get feeling to return. Off to the side, a nursemaid held Mario. Sylvana was charged with treason.

“By God, you’ll tell me what Franco’s journal said, or you’ll never see your child again,” Cristina warned. Sylvana’s stomach felt like it was filled with broken glass. She noted that several Barsettis had managed to barge their way into the hearing, as well as a few Amborghettis wondering what all the excitement was about.

She had spent two nights in the cells below the Tristezza city hall. Although she was used to being in cold, dark places from her years of diving, she couldn’t help thinking this might be the end and that she’d really blown it. She agonized over the trouble she’d caused for Franco’s cousins Ruggero and Anna. The queen held Ruggero responsible as head of the family and had confiscated his boats. Sylvana was terrified that the queen held Mario captive–what could she do when they had taken everything?

But now that she could see the baby, Sylvana felt better. They seemed to be taking good care of him, at least. She thanked the stars that Franco had kept his theories to himself, or she would have no leverage at all. Sylvana straightened her shoulders and spoke.

“I demand a public trial.”

“Are you insane? You have no rights, here, you traitor,” the queen said.

“Perhaps not, but unless you release me, my baby, and my family’s property, everyone will know that you murdered my husband.”

“That’s preposterous,” Cristina said. “I had nothing to do with his death.”

“You wanted his discovery all for yourself and sabotaged his ship. You thought you had Franco’s journal–the red book you originally threatened me with–but you were disappointed to find it held nothing about the whereabouts of Simcha.”

“Simcha? What is that?”

“It means ‘joy’ in Hebrew. I believe it is the seagoing city we’ve all been looking for. I’ve sent word to Palermo with Giorgio offering my services in recovering it.”

“But I took your family’s boats!”

“You must have missed one,” Sylvana countered, her confidence growing. She grinned inwardly at the thought of red-haired Giorgio rowing the little boat out beyond the sluices under cover of night until he could turn on the pulse engine. She fervently hoped her vision was a reality.

“But– Palermo? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Franco thought it was too important for you to keep all to yourself, Cristina. We’re going to share it with everyone. We all thought the ocean had taken our cities away, but we’re going to learn to live in the new ocean world, you know.”

“You foolish girl. You burned all of the evidence in Franco’s journal. No one will know you even existed, once we execute you.”

Sylvana took a moment to savor her impending escape from the trap Cristina had laid for her.

“Not everything has been burned. I already mentioned Giorgio, didn’t I? One thing I didn’t mention is that Franco sent all the plans and locations to Palermo before he went on his last trip. They know everything, and they are waiting for me there. You may as well release me. And you may as well resign, because otherwise Palermo will only negotiate with the Amborgettis.”

The room erupted as the Barsetti clan mobbed their heroine and made to carry her out on their shoulders. But she resisted the tide for a moment before joining the flow, her arms outstretched to snare the prize the nursemaid held out to her. In the confusion, Cristina slipped out a side door.

---

Sylvana gazed out over the flotilla of ships from Tristezza gathered to start a new life as seasteaders in the archipelago. A small pod of dolphins skipped alongside the boats in greeting.

Ruggero shouted, “Sonar’s showing something big below!” A cheer rose from the crowd. Anna stood beside him at the prow, clasping a cross on a chain around her neck as she prayed for blessings on her husband and the new citizens of Acqua Simcha.

She shifted the sling holding three-month-old Mario and pointed toward the “island” of Palermo and its submerged sluices, where the floating city of Simcha would harbor.

“Look, Mario. That’s where we’re going,” Sylvana said. “Mama’s going to help bring up Papa’s city.” The sky glowed a light silver along the horizon, and Mario was the first baby to feel the warmth of the sunrise in a long time.

---

Perfect Arm

By Robert Steele

We had nothing but peace at the Lion’s Paw for as long as I can remember. Ted Parros was a connected fellow, and he looked the part, with matted white hair and a face that rarely smiled. He used to frequent the place, now and then doing business deals in the back poker room, and he didn’t want some punk causing a fuss and drawing any unwanted attention.

He never had to get physical with anyone, but he made damn sure that any troublemaker knew who he was. All it took was a sharp glance, or a tap on the shoulder.

Kenny Heachem was the exact type of guy Ted didn’t want around. He was a bit of a rowdy fellow, but not the loudmouth drunk type that I’ve seen over the years. On occasion, Kenny would wander into my establishment buying rounds of drinks and throwing money all over the bar. He’d place bets with strangers, which wasn’t abnormal at the Lion’s Paw, but he’d want people to put down their earnings for the week, and such a thing rattles the room with all kinds of commotion.

From what I knew at the time, aside from the bets at the Lion’s Paw, Kenny wasn’t involved in any illegal activities. But there was something peculiar about Kenny. He was a large, soft looking man, and he had a shuffle when he walked. The peanut shells on the floor would collect around the tips of his shoes. And whenever I served him drinks he’d give me a long look as if he was waiting for me to say a little more to him. I never let it bother me though. He was a generous tipper, polite enough, and I’d be fine with twenty more customers just like him.

I knew for sure that Ted didn’t care for Kenny. He was quite vocal, once saying, “That piece of shit makes any more noise I’m going to find a way to sew his mouth to his barstool.” Ted said it loud enough so that Kenny would hear it, but Kenny just turned around and looked back at Ted with a laugh.

And there was also that night in the spring, when Kenny sat at the bar drinking some scotch, watching baseball on the television monitors over the bar. A young patron, likely from the college just up the road, sat in the only empty seat in the house, which to his luck happened to be right next to Kenny.

“Do you care for baseball?” asked Kenny.

“I don’t mind it,” said the college kid. “I used to play in high school. I follow it enough I suppose.”

“What do you know about this game, Yankees and Indians?”

“I know the Yankees are going to win. They have Tamada pitching.”

“But the Orioles have this new kid dealing. Pichardo.”

The college kid shrugged. “I don’t know much about him, but his triple-A numbers don’t look all that impressive. They called him up because Crangle got hurt.”

“Well I’m a bit of a believer in this Pichardo. I’ll even bet you on it. Yankees are big favorites, but I’ll give you even odds.”

The kid tipped his head from side to side. “I don’t have all that much to bet you. Maybe a twenty.”

“A twenty? But you think the Yankees are a lock.”

“I do. It’s just all I have really.”

”You can’t dip into your college fund a little?” Kenny said, and he gave the kid a playful nudge on the shoulder.

“No, sir. I can give a call to my father. He likes playing the ponies, and he loves baseball. He might be willing to put up some money.”

“Well, sure. Go on and give him a call.”

“Like hell,” said Ted as he walked up to the bar between the two of them. He pointed a finger close to Kenny’s face. “You can go ahead and bet the kid twenty, but like hell you’re going to let the kid go on and tell his dad about it. His dad could be chief of police for all I know.”

“He isn’t,” said the college kid. “He’s a factory worker.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ted keeping his focus on Kenny. “Don’t do it, and I’m not going to tell you again.”

Kenny nodded, but as Ted walked away he shrugged his shoulders and turned to the kid. “I’m fine with keeping it a small bet. I’ll even sweeten the deal. I bet you Pichardo throws a no hitter against these Yankees.”

The kid nodded with a smile as he put his twenty on the bar. Kenny put his twenty on top of it, ordered a beer for the kid, and a whiskey for himself.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the game. The bar started to fill with more people, coming in from the concert around the corner that just ended, and damned if my hired hand, Jen, didn’t call in sick to have me all by myself for serving the customers.

I really only noticed the change to the atmosphere when someone shut off the jukebox in the corner, and when all the bikers stopped playing pool to look up at the TVs.

“This bet still going?” I asked.

“Sure as hell,” said Kenny. “Bottom of six.”

“They’re swinging at bad pitches,” said the college kid.

The ballgame continued, and as it did, the bar got real quiet.

“Last hurrah for the Yanks,” said Kenny.

With two out, and two strikes, the Yankee shortstop ground his cleats into the dirt of the batter’s box. Pichardo dealt a perfect curve that arched through the strike zone, and down and away from the batter. The shortstop swung a big hack over top of the ball to end the game.

The silence and tension inside the Lion’s Paw broke and the room erupted with cheers. Everyone but the college kid celebrated with drinks. Kenny picked the two twenties off the bar, and the kid laughed, shook Kenny’s hand, and walked outside for a cab.

That’s when I saw Ted lean in and say something into Kenny’s ear. I couldn’t hear what, but Ted asked me to come to the back room after he returned from taking a piss.

When he left the washroom, I headed to the back poker room. “You stand guard outside the door,” said Ted.

I closed the door and rested my head on it so that I could hear their conversation. In all honesty I was worried Ted was going to kill him right then, and I felt anxiety about the thought of a bloody crime scene to clean up.

“How’d you know that guy would pitch a perfect game?”

“I didn’t. I only said a no hitter.”

“Let’s not get cute with the answers. I don’t know if anyone’s told you who I am—”

“They haven’t, but I’m well aware.”

“Very good. So I will be direct with you, and as a courtesy, I ask that you do the same.”

“Very well.”

“So how did you know the kid would pitch like that?”

“Wasn’t certain he’d pitch a perfect game, but I know he’s a good pitcher.”

“Bullshit,” said Ted. “That college kid said the guy was a no good bum.”

“His opinion.”

“I see you make a lot of bets in here, and I don’t recall you ever losing one.”

“I just do it for the fun of it.”

“Well, I don’t do anything for the fun of it without getting paid. You’d be wise to do the same.” There was a long pause in their conversation, and I was tempted for a moment to peak in through the doorway, but I didn’t.

“We got numbers,” continued Ted. “Did you already know that?”

“I did.”

“You could make a lot of money. You could either work for us or against us. I wouldn’t recommend working against us.”

“Like I said, I just like having a little fun.”

“If it’s for fun,” said Ted, “then you keep it for pennies like they do the poker games in here.”

The door opened behind me and I stumbled back into Kenny as he shuffled his feet out of the room. I looked back and Ted put an unlit cigar to his mouth, looking down at the ground as if it would give him some answers.

---

It was a Sunday afternoon and there was no one in the bar except for a few of those bikers playing pool. Ted walked in with a dark-skinned, tall kid who looked no older than about twenty-two.

I walked to the table as they sat. “Any drinks or food I can get you guys?”

“Get the chef to do up some of those fish and chips for my friend here,” said Ted.

“Certainly. And a drink?”

“Agua,” said the young man.

“That’ll be water,” said Ted. “Get me a Cutty.”

I put in their orders to the chef and returned to watch as Ted and a couple of his pals spoke to the kid.

The kid seemed able to understand English, just not as comfortable with speaking it.

“We just want to know how,” I heard Ted say. “It was impressive is all.”

I could have smacked my head off the brass bar rail for being stupid, not realizing that it was Luis Pichardo, in my bar, just days after he threw a perfect game for the Indians.

Kenny shuffled in the front door, but he stopped when he saw Pichardo. I thought maybe he was dumbfounded, star struck, something like that, but then he raised a flabby arm at the table. “Luis. Don’t bother with these guys. Don’t listen to any of their bullshit.”

He went to the table, and Ted and his entourage stood. He took Pichardo by the arm trying to pull him out of the seat, but Pichardo didn’t budge. “You don’t listen to anything from these guys. Bad guys. Malo.”

“And how the fuck do you happen to know him, Kenny?” asked Ted.

“Not important. He needs to come with me.”

“Like hell he does. He wants to enjoy the Lion’s Paw’s finest foods.”

“Luis, I’m going to be just over there,” said Kenny, and he pointed over to the bar.

“What are your chances on winning another game?” asked Ted.

Luis held up a thumb.

“You’re not tired or anything?”

Pichardo shook his head dismissively.

Fifteen minutes later I brought over the fish and chips, and Pichardo ate in silence. Ted didn’t say much to him, he just flashed a few smiles, which was weird to see coming from him.

After Pichardo finished eating, Ted shook hands with him, and had one of his pals drive him home.

Ted scrambled toward the bar as Pichardo left. I don’t think I’ve ever saw him so angry. His face was tense as he yelled into the back of Kenny’s head. “Just how the hell do you know Luis so well?”

“He’s an old friend of mine.”

“You have an obvious inside edge you never told me about. I asked you a few days ago and you were all mum.”

“He’s an old friend is all.”

When Kenny up and left, saying he had to go to work, Ted asked me to do him a favor. I’d never done a favor for him before, and I never had the inclination to do so. But I obliged with him being him, me being me.

Since his pals were gone, he asked that we get in my car and follow Kenny to his work. Ted sat in the passenger seat real low so that his eyes could peer just above the dash. I tailed Kenny by letting a couple cars move up ahead of me. It was only a ten minute drive, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so stressed behind a wheel, that includes those snow storms so white where you can’t see the lines in the road.

Kenny pulled into some warehouse, passing the security at the front gate with a wave out of his window. I pulled up and parked across the street as Ted leaned over my shoulder, watching Kenny walk up the stairs. As he opened the door, we noticed the small, rusted sign that said, Tumbler Robotics.

“He ever tell you what he does for a living?” Ted asked me.

“Not that I can remember. He might have told me he was an engineer, but I can’t quite remember if that’s right.”

“Your girl, the buxom brunette, Jen, she told me he worked in sales.”

I started remembering. “Yeah, I did hear that once. He went to school for engineering, but he’s a salesmen.

I guess you need to know what you’re selling for those robotics.”

“Pull on up there.”

“Through the gate?” I asked. “I’m thinking you need to work here.”

“Pull on up. I’ll do the talking for you.”

I drove up and stopped before the candy striped stick. A guard in a blue shirt leaned out of his little box. “Are you here to see someone?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Ted. “Kenny.”

“Kenny?”

Ted poked me in the arm. “Kenny Heachem.”

“Hmm, I’ll call on in.”

“No need to do that,” said Ted. “We’d like to surprise him. We’re old friends of his.”

“We always need auth’.”

“Auth?”

“Authorization. It’s a secure area.”

“Why so secure?” asked Ted.

“With the robotics and all. They worry about people seeing what they’re not supposed to.”

“Well,” said Ted, “I don’t think we need to bug him. We’ll just catch up with him later.”

---

Ted had us all dressed up in black — me, him, and four of his pals. He gave us balaclavas, trench coats, and crowbars. I told Ted real plain that I’d never done such a thing before, but he said not to worry, that it was easy work. He said I was already in part way, and once you’re in part way, you need to go all the way.

To be honest I just wanted to get it done and over with, because Jen was texting me on my cell phone about how she wanted to duck out from her shift to meet up with her boyfriend. I said I’d be quick. I figured a break and enter was meant to be quick.

Ted told us that he paid a drunk to harass and distract the night security, and that put my mind at ease a bit.

I held the crowbar, but never used it. Ted and his boys did all the prying to get that door open. An alarm tripped, but it beeped only once and the tallest of Ted’s guys put a stop to it by pinching something along the door frame.

“Keep moving,” said Ted.

We walked through the corridors, through the confusing layout of the building, and it looked like they were renovating. Someone had ripped up all the floors, and tore down all the walls. It was nothing but concrete and a wooden frame.

We saw blueprints lying about all over. Ted picked it up and unrolled it, looking like some pirate searching for gold treasure.

“Do you know what it is?” I asked.

“Some lines,” he said. “I don’t know what they mean. All these calculations.” He looked at the man who silenced the alarm. “Can you make sense of this? Is it electrical shit?”

The man looked at it and sort of sniffed, but maybe only because of the dust. “I can’t say what.”

We continued on, finding the end of the corridor until it opened to a large room.

Ted was up ahead, and when he reached the room I saw him open up his arms and look to the roof.

“Sonofabitch,” he said. “Look at all this shit.”

There were stacks of metal, wires, all kinds of tools. They were messy, like kids playing with toys but never bothering to put them away.

I walked over to a pile of them and took a knee. They were made of solid material on the inside, and real spongy, wire pieces over top. They were all different colors and some were stacked together like a pallet of rainbows. The metal bent in to v-shapes when I picked them up. There had to be near a thousand of those things.

“What are they?” asked Ted.

“Nothing I can tell,” I said.

Ted picked one up and looked at it with his eyebrows kept low. He put one up on top of the sleeve of his coat, letting the bend in it align with his elbow. I don’t know a hell of a lot about anatomy, but those pieces sure seemed to look like bone and muscle fibres. “What do you think? Maybe arms?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Explains how Kenny knows Pichardo. You think that guy has one of those under his skin? Is it throwing his pitches for him?”

“Could be. Would make sense, wouldn’t it? How that kid, that dreadful pitcher, threw a game like he did.”

“Shit. That’s too much.”

Ted shut it down for the night. He took the blueprint, but made sure we left everything else as is. And we did, finding our way back out through the winding corridors.

---

Business at the Lion’s Paw had been slow all week for some reason. People seem to go away with their kids in the summer once they get out of school. Ted was there all day, every day, which I didn’t mind so much, he kept me company, but I was nervous about why he was there.

He was waiting for Kenny to show his face and that made me nervous. My back stiffened every time the door made a little creek like it did whenever it took a strong gust of wind, or if someone entered from the street. When it opened it was nobody in particular, just the other regulars, out to have a few beers or whiskeys after work.

Ted seemed bored of my place, and he paced around the joint, hands in pockets, looking at those brown dress shoes of his.

“Why don’t you just let me give you a call if he comes here?” I asked. “Or we could take a run down by his work again.”

“I want to see his face as soon as he walks through that door. And I want him in here, in a nice private setting, in that back room of yours. It’s not ideal for us to start lurking around his workplace again.”

Maybe Ted didn’t trust me, I’m not too sure. Or maybe he was just a guy who thought it was best to do a job right by doing it himself. I know I’m not too different in that respect.

Kenny showed up about a week and a half later, only fifteen minutes before close. There were about a half-dozen people in the place, and Jen, thankfully, was with me, needing to pick up a shift for some extra money to cover her rent.

I thought Ted would be in Kenny’s face as soon as he stepped to the bar, but Ted hung back at his table, watching Kenny as if he wasn’t all that interested.

Jen poured Kenny a drink and I walked up and talked with him. “Any bets for tonight?”

“No, no,” he said. “I’m a bit burned out from work, just looking at getting a drink and relaxing.”

I saw Ted nod at me and walk to the back room. “I think Ted wants to speak to you,” I said.

“I figured as much,” Kenny said. “Just let me finish my drink. Tell him I’ll be a moment.”

I stood by the door again, waiting for Kenny, who seemed to be taking his time. I could see he gave Jen a nice tip since she batted her eyes at him. He shuffled over toward the back room. “I won’t make you wait long,” he said to me as he passed.

I leaned my head on the door again to listen.

“How much do you know?” asked Kenny.

“I have this,” said Ted, and I imagine he showed Kenny the blueprint. “I’ve had people in the know give it a look.”

“And?

“And you have two choices. You cut us in on the operation you’re running, and we protect it, or you let us know who else you’ve given this treatment to. You let us know when we should be making some heavy bets in our favor.”

“I can’t do that,” said Kenny.

“Oh?”

“Correct. I can’t do it. I know what you’re all about Ted, but you don’t know what my people are all about.”

“Which people?”

“Secret government agencies.”

“What kind? CIA and all that? Don’t think I don’t know a few.”

“They’re ones you’ve never heard of. Getting major leaguers to use it is just the trial run. They want military, soldiers with super strength, unlimited endurance, stuff beyond the human body’s normal capabilities. They want an army of these guys. The ability to win any ground battle. Absolute accuracy with weaponry.”

“Yeah, but I know one guy who’s using it now. I can out him. Then your whole technology is out there. I could sell it to the Chinese if I needed to.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Kenny. “I’ll overlook that and forget that you said it, but you need to let this one go.”

Kenny was true to his word and he kept the conversation brief. I had a feeling I wouldn’t see much of Kenny around the bar a whole lot after that.

Ted wouldn’t let it go. I’m not sure if he ever had a time where he didn’t get his way. Before he left for the night, Ted scrawled his number onto a napkin. “He comes in here again, you give me a call.”

But I was right, I never saw Kenny again. And I never saw Ted again either.

In the fall, Pichardo was all over the news. The Indians were in the World Series, and there was discussion about him having a chance to win a CY Young award, although he had competition from the other pitchers on his team. The rotation had set all kinds of historical records for earned run average and strikeouts.

A man came in to the Lion’s Paw the night of the first game in the series. The man wore a dark coat and had a face that drooped down into his beer. He watched Pichardo take the mound while he sipped his drink.

“Did you hear the story about that guy?” he asked keeping his eyes fixed on the game.

“Pichardo?” I asked. “What about him?”

“He’s supposed to have an arm made by a machine.”

“Yeah? Go on then.”

“Well, the story goes, his Tommy Johns surgery didn’t replace no ligament like it’s supposed to. They replaced his whole damn arm. They peeled the skin up like a banana peel, took out all his bones, all his muscles, and they threw in a fake prosthetic. But not no ordinary prosthetic, one that he had lots of control over. One that the medical reports can’t detect.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Some guy I work for over on Euclid. Forget performance enhancing drugs. That’s a thing of the past. Cyborgs like him are the future.”

“Well,” I said, “explains how he pitches like he does, I guess.”

“Damn right it does. But that’s not all.” He stuck his elbow against the bar and pointed his finger at the T.V. screen.

“What else then?”

“This Mafioso looking guy — he’s been around the city — he comes looking for Pichardo with a bunch of goons. He starts asking him all kinds of questions, about his arm, about how he needs someone to protect him. But Pichardo gets all defensive, saying he knows nothing about it.”

“What did this guy look like?”

“I dunno, typical. They start getting into a fight right in the street. The Mafioso guy hauls him into this back alley, but my boss, he keeps an eye on them. The Mafioso guy reaches for his gun, so Pichardo puts his arm up, his pitching arm, and he put his hand on the guy’s neck. He uses all of that strength from his arm and pushes the guy up against the wall.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, shit is right. He chokes him right there with his cyborg arm. He squeezes the life right out of him, as they say. And he drops the guy and leaves him for dead, clipping them goons with some heavy punches that knock them silly. He books it around the corner hoping no one saw it. Except my boss, Kenny, did. Imagine that, mafia kingpin,” the man snapped his fingers, “dead like that. Killed by a pitcher with a robotic arm. Can you believe it?”

“Quite a tale,” I said.

He looked me in the eye, solid, the way Ted used to look when he meant to get his point across. “It’s no tale.”

Before I could answer — not that I knew what to say, and maybe it was better that I didn’t say anything — Jenny leaned over, lifted up the man’s drink, and wiped the ring from under it. “I’ve heard bigger nonsense in this place.”

I looked at the other customers toward the back of the bar. They didn’t seem like baseball fans. They were all dressed in dark clothing. I realized that the Lion’s Paw had a new clientele.

---

The Darkness Below

By Bria Burton

Three lasers streamed into the blackness ahead. Captain Erin Waite aimed her executer and led her squad deeper into the cave. They were more than a mile in. Her unit moved in formation behind her surrounding a scientist, Sandra Moore, and a waste-of-space journalist, Thyme Bransford.

“It’s coming,” Thyme whispered, her voice trembling.

“Where?” Erin kept moving, scanning the narrowing rock walls with the executer tight to her shoulder.

Thyme didn’t respond.

The semi-automatic weapon, a rare commodity, fired tiny proton explosives encased in a bullet that reduced objects to dust while leaving the surrounding matter untouched. Ford Reams, the Southerner to Erin’s right, claimed he blasted a Russian terra-tank the size of a house to ashes back when the Army could afford to supply executers to a small portion of infantry. The bullet waiting to be fired held the laser. A dimmer red light fanned out from the barrel, penetrating the dark, showing a narrow, empty cave. Erin was losing patience with this girl.

“Thyme, answer me.”

“I don’t know. But it’s coming!” she screeched.

“What is that condiment saying?” Brody Halverson left his position at the rear to approach Erin. He wasn’t the type to coddle anyone.

Probably why Erin loved him. And why she would never tell him. He would’ve broken her heart after one night together. She met him years ago, but only worked directly with him once before. “Anything?”

“Nothing. I’ll keep walking backward to make sure.” He returned to his position.

“Tom?” Erin glanced over her left shoulder at Tom Eagle, her second-in-command.

“Clear,” he replied.

She groaned, tempted to order a spit-shine to clean the goggles. “Only report a sighting if you actually see something, got it?”

The group, including Thyme, echoed understanding.

They pressed on, and Erin determined to ignore Thyme. If she cracked up, Erin could send her back to base.

“Here I thought alien-huntin’ bored a woman like you, Thyme,” Ford said. “Back in the canyon, we’re saddlin’ up and you yawn like this is some cake walk.”

She said nothing.

Ford sniggered. “Not so confident now, huh, twig?”

First day back at base camp, he had made cracks about Erin in front of the other soldiers, too. “What Xdream-injectin’ politician voted some chick as team leader?” he asked, unaware she stood a few feet behind him.

“You don’t know Erin Waite,” said Tom. The one person on the planet Erin genuinely trusted always backed her up. She knew Tom from several Russian tours in the 20’s. He saved her life during an incident the higher ups claimed never happened.

“You heard about the slaughter, didn’t you?” he asked.

Ford spat. “Myth far as I know, bro.”

Tom folded his arms, his dark biceps bulging. “I’m not your bro, and I was there.”

“You sayin’ it’s true?”

“I found her outside Treehouse, our outermost post, five bullets in her. A sniper shot had grazed her head, but I still saw fight in her eyes.”

Brody cleaned his executer beside Tom, but neither gave Erin’s position away as she stood behind Ford. She waited to see what else Tom would say.

“You implyin’ she took down those Russians alone?” asked Ford.

“It’s a fact. Colonel made her replace thirty of our guys at Treehouse. I found out, grabbed weapons and anybody who’d come. She only had her knives, but someone left a flack shield. That’s probably what saved her in the end. By the time I got there, sixty Russians were splattered across the tundra. Sliced and diced. When I dropped a rifle beside her, she helped me hold off the rest till our company caught up.”

Ford backed up, arms raised, stopping just before he would’ve knocked into her. “Still, who says she killed ’em all? I’d take her on.”

He looked down. Erin’s knife caressed his inner thigh.

Brody whistled and Tom grinned.

By the time she face planted Ford, knife at his throat, she knew he’d never question her again.

In the cave, the red lights skimmed along the ceiling, the walls, the floor. If Erin didn’t know better, she would’ve thought the cave had been there for thousands of years. Rock shelves jutted out, but nothing else.

“I hear running water,” Sandra said.

The distant noise was faint, but Erin heard it too.

“If the AA is searching for water, we may be close to encountering it,” continued the scientist.

“What’s AA again?” asked Ford.

“My name for it. Animalia Abnormalis,” Sandra repeated for the fifth time.

They walked on in silence for another mile or so. No major changes in the surroundings. The cave walls remained about twelve feet in diameter. The trickling water sounds grew louder. In another mile, the cave narrowed into what looked like a dead end where clay mixed in with the dirt.

Erin pressed her hand against the wall. She checked her GPS. Four miles in and already blocked.

Sandra picked up loose rocks from the ground, observing them in her flashlight. “I’ve never seen this before.”

“You a geologist now?” asked Ford.

Sandra glared at him. “Didn’t you once headline the ‘Wal-World member of the day’ site?”

Brody crowed, “That shirt was tight and tiny! Made your biceps look huge.” He tarried in the back, still facing away.

Ford scoffed, but didn’t reply.

“I’m familiar with every rock known to exist in this canyon, including the meteorite,” Sandra said. “This is not native.”

“Do we dig?” asked Tom. “Try the breathing equipment?”

“I don’t think we’ll need it,” said Thyme.

Erin turned to her. Thyme didn’t seem right. Her goggles gave her eyes a glazed look. “Why?”

“We’re not going lower, just deeper.” Whatever Erin saw, Thyme seemed to snap out of it. “Suits me,” she continued. “Easier to record my notes if I’m not blocked by a mask.”

“You ain’t recorded nothin’,” said Ford.

“Nothing worth mentioning yet.”

“What about, ‘it’s coming’?” Brody mimicked her nasally voice well.

Erin didn’t laugh, but wanted to.

“The monster? How should I know?”

Erin stepped toward Thyme raising a flashlight. “You don’t remember making that comment?”

Thyme shielded her eyes. “What?”

“You clearly said, ‘it’s coming.'” Tom moved in behind Erin. “Twice.”

“Like a scared lil’ girl,” added Ford.

“Please.” She brushed dust off her jumpsuit.

Erin lowered the flashlight. If Thyme proved a liability, she was returning to base. One more “it’s coming” and that would be it.

“Ford, keep an eye on her.”

“What’d I do?”

Brody patted his back. “You earned it, poster boy.”

Ford elbowed him off. “Whatever. That skinny butt belongs to me now if Waite says so.”

“I say so.” Erin scanned the space behind them and then faced the wall ahead. Turn back or try to dig through? No one knew AA’s capabilities yet, except burrowing tunnels and killing animals. Even she didn’t know what to expect. For her, that was unusual.

When Special Agent Daniel Newsome had Erin brought in, she anticipated a repeat of the Area 51 Insurgency of 2199. The first real proof that aliens existed, and they were wiped out in a millisecond. Although she preferred not to exterminate extraterrestrials like her forefathers, Newsome said the president asked her to head up the team pursuing the AA into the earth. The military had been depleted to minimal levels back in 2301. She figured she was chosen as one of the few officers available for a mission on American soil. Currently, President Maria Gonzalez was on the brink of declaring bankruptcy for the U.S. while the top military personnel waged the Great Eastern War against Russia.

On November 11, 2331, a green cloud had descended over the Greater Grand Canyon. No one knew what to make of the cabbage cumulus that never dissipated. A meteor struck the state of Wyoming centuries ago, creating a pit bigger than the Grand Canyon. As the green cloud stalled over the southeastern portion of the pit, the president ordered a quarantine. Scientists worked for months researching the cloud when something black oozed out of the center, disappearing into the depths of the meteorite debris.

Since then, AA had been spotted only twice. Some comparison was made to the old fake photo of the Loch Ness monster; a vague, misshapen behemoth rather than a sea creature.

In May 2332, Newsome shipped Erin to the camp stationed at the edge of the site. He’d introduced Erin to Sandra, who explained what they knew, which wasn’t much.

“We’ve been monitoring from the moment the cloud descended. Every animal killed has been sucked dry. Not of blood, but of water. The men who claimed to have seen it described it with a range of traits, but nothing concrete. At the very least, to our human eyes, AA is a monster.”

“So it needs water. Why wouldn’t this cloud move over the Great Lakes, then? Or the Pacific if it doesn’t mind the salt? Plenty there,” Newsome suggested.

“We don’t know. This so-called cloud contains no water, so it could be a hologram or a trick of lighting from the mother ship.”

“All this talk about dehydrated aliens and mother ships, and you want only four soldiers down there, Dan?” Erin asked.

“We don’t have many resources,” Newsome said. “The equipment we got for this team is ancient besides the executers. The thing has apparently managed to burrow several caverns. You’ll be searching one. We have no idea how deep it is because the scientific equipment here is no better. But Sandra will be coming as well.” He continued before she could object. “We don’t know if there’s a threat to humanity or not. However, the number of animal carcasses found indicates a possible confrontation. Though the president doesn’t want a repeat of history, either.”

Erin expected a vague directive in terms of dealing with the AA. “Give me something concrete.”

“The president wants this done however it needs to be done. If you have to take this thing down, so be it. She trusts you.”

Her team, with a citizen, prepared for the descent. Then Newsome sprung Thyme on them.

“The president wants journalistic eyes down there. Someone who can report something positive for the American people to hear.”

“This can’t be airing on the nightly news.”

“Nothing like that. We’ll have her prepare a special report after it’s all over.”

The revulsion Erin felt contorted her face as Thyme stepped up to the men, shaking each of their hands. The slender woman looked ready to tip over at the first sign of wind.

Erin had no idea why President Gonzalez trusted Thyme. She must be sleeping with a senator. From the little time Erin had to research her before the mission, she appeared to be a flake who wrote articles about why the military should be disbanded for good.

If the government commanded that two citizens tag along, it was on them if one got herself killed. Now Erin welcomed Sandra. She had a vague idea of what they might be dealing with, impressing Erin with her no-nonsense approach. The tall, muscular blond handled a pistol like she owned one.

Still, Erin debated her next move in the cave. Brody slid around her to the dead end. “Permission to try something.” He held up his weapon.

“Granted.”

He jabbed the butt of his executer into the wall.

Like chalk, the wall crumbled where he struck.

“Aim!” Erin shouted.

All four beams shot through the hole. The red dots struck a smooth, striped surface. Polished rock walls. The falling water sound was louder, but beyond their sight.

“Eyes.” Erin stepped through the hole and felt just how smoothly the rock had been polished. As her slip-proof sole hit the ground, she slid like she’d walked onto a frozen pond. Her feet went up, and her back went down, hard. She slid to the right where the cave sloped before hitting the side. She grunted, more pride than injury.

“Erin!” Tom dove through the hole, sliding on his stomach. “You okay?”

“Fine.” He helped her up. They skated along the floor, holding each other’s arms. A clicking sound drew her head up.

A red light blinked near Thyme’s ear. “June 27th, 2332. Fourteen hundred hours. We’re four miles in, nothing unusual until this. At a dead end, one of the soldiers smashed through the wall. It’s as if someone spent thousands of years hand-polishing every inch of the cave from here onward. I can only see about twenty meters in, and then the cave appears to turn left.”

The red light stopped blinking as soon as Thyme stopped speaking.

“You really don’t remember sayin’ it, do ya?” Ford smirked.

Click, click. “The team members are professional and dedicated to this mission. The only questionable member is a soldier named Ford Reams.”

“What?”

“He appears the most volatile of the group. I’ll be sure to keep a close watch on him.”

“I’m watchin’ you. Make note of that.”

The red light vanished. “No more notes needed at the moment.”

“Are we coming in there?” Brody asked.

Tom panted. “You notice the air in here?”

Erin’s breathing, now labored, matched Tom’s. “It’s thinner.” She wondered how the change felt so sudden.

“The pressure in this area is fluctuating.”

When Erin glanced back, Sandra held a metal stick in the air with a gauge at the top.

“Masks on and take off your shoes,” Erin ordered.

The men slung their weapons over their shoulders, obeying.

When the oxygen flowed, Erin’s head cleared and her breathing steadied. The minimal, clear bubble covered her lips and nose just below the goggles, locking in place with suction around the edges. A tube at the bottom led to a small tank on her back. Tom held her shoulders as she unstrapped her boots. When she placed a bare foot on the stone, she had some grip.

“Nothing like our day in Russia.” The bubble muffled Tom’s voice.

Erin glanced up. He grinned in the dark. The guns gave off minimal red light aimed toward the floor. “Not yet, at least.”

The memory struck Erin, and she was there. She saw Beck, the man who tried to rape her, approaching as if he were a present threat. She had just gotten warm under a thermal blanket. He pulled her off the bunk down to the cold floor. While she was trapped in the folds of the blanket, he had an advantage. But as soon as he ripped it off, she elbowed him in the jaw. He stumbled back into the bunk, but recovered quicker than she anticipated. He smashed his fist into her temple, disorienting her. He pulled her onto the lower bunk, face down. When the room stopped spinning, she felt his breathing on her neck. He smelled like sauerkraut. He yanked on her belt. She jerked her head back, smacking his skull hard. He slumped and cursed. She flipped to face him, wrapping her legs around his torso. He held his forehead. She hurled him off the bed. Now on top of him, she crushed her thighs against his ribs. His hand moved, but she reached the knife on his waist before he did.

Colonel walked in. “Lieutenant Waite! On your feet!”

“I know why the president trusts you.” Tom’s voice, quieter in the bubble, snapped Erin out of the trance. He took her hand to help her stand. “The Russian terminator.”

Her arms had goose bumps. She rubbed them, wondering how the memory felt so real. “Plural.” She smacked his arm while the others poured through the hole, gingerly stepping toward them. They helped each other keep balanced.

“If we find the water, we’ll likely find the creature,” Sandra said.

“Eyes open. Watch your step.” Erin’s boots hung at her waist, off-balancing her. As they rounded the curve, she slipped more than once. Each time, Tom caught her arm before she could fall.

“This monster is no match for you,” he whispered. “Even when you’re on the ground.”

Erin turned her head sideways, wishing he’d stop putting her on a pedestal. “Not if you’re with me. Our day in Russia, remember? Not just mine.”

Another memory flashed in front of Erin, pulling her in. The blistering cold tundra winds swept over her. As punishment, the colonel sent her to defend Treehouse, the outer post, alone with only her knives. She stood bloodied, full of lead and adrenaline looking over the Russian bodies. No one else rushed. She was alone again. The blood and guts reeked. She tasted iron. She heard the shot the same moment it hit her head, crashing back onto the flack shield. The lightweight, body-length, impenetrable material had saved her life until now.

Blood trickled into her ear. A whooping noise. She didn’t understand. How could she hear anything? How could she see clouds overhead? She was dead.

The yelling closed in. The enemy would take over Treehouse. Why would colonel give up the post just to have her killed? He could’ve let Beck shoot her in the bunker.

Tom Eagle. He sounded far away, but she recognized his voice. He leaped over her, looking like a bird of prey. He dropped a rifle.

The sniper bullet had grazed her skull, shaving off bone. The other bullets didn’t hit anything vital. Tom’s presence shot fresh adrenaline through her. She sat upright and grabbed the gun, grimacing as pain seared throughout her body. She clamored to her feet, lifted the rifle, and aimed. They held off the enemy until reinforcements arrived.

Both colonel and Beck were dishonorably discharged. Both had been Russian spies all along, and when that came out, they were executed.

Erin slipped again, and Tom’s chuckle jerked her into the present. They traveled until the curve dipped down. Erin motioned for the squad to hold weapons at the ready during the descent. They had to slide on their butts, and her feet hit dusty, unpolished ground at the bottom.

The tunnel opened into a cavern with a musty smell. Light poured in. Erin searched, aiming her executer, but couldn’t find the source of it. At different levels, several waterfalls drained through the walls, creating pools that went nowhere.

Across the cavern, she saw a pair of shoes. Someone hid behind a partial wall.

“Show me hands!”

The squad reacted and moved into formation.

“Please don’t shoot.” The voice sounded female and rickety, as if an old woman’s. “I’m unarmed.” She stepped out from behind the wall into the laser beams, arms raised. She looked clean and wore street clothes.

“Who are you?” Erin asked.

She stepped toward them.

“Halt or I shoot!”

She stopped.

Click, click. “We’ve entered a larger cavern with an unknown light source and waterfalls. Here, we’ve encountered an elderly woman, maybe in her seventies. She speaks English.”

“Not now, Thyme.” Erin wanted to smack her. “Actually, keep the recorder on, but don’t speak into it.” She kept a laser on the old woman’s chest. “Identify yourself.”

“Sandra Moore. I’m a scientist.”

Erin twisted her head to look at Sandra.

Her eyebrows shot up behind her goggles. “How do you know my name?”

“It’s my name,” the old woman said.

“That seems unlikely,” said Brody.

However, Erin saw a resemblance. Same facial structure, tan skin, her arms and legs still muscular, but the white-haired woman must be lying. “What are you doing down here?”

“I came to find the AA, long ago…” She trailed off, glancing at a pool beside her. Water splashing from the falls hit her shoes.

Sandra’s term. “Why don’t you have a mask?” Erin asked.

“Don’t need it anymore thanks to whatever the monster did to us.”

“Us?”

“If you’ll just let me show you. Then again, you always do.”

Erin couldn’t grasp what she meant, but the woman turned and walked behind the wall.

“Wait!” Erin jogged forward, the rest close behind.

An electrified hum, then an explosion blasted the rock wall to the right. Erin stumbled, turned. Ash floated out of a hole between the stalactites and stalagmites. Behind her, Ford aimed his weapon toward the spot where the old woman fled. “Warnin’ shot!” he cried. “Don’t try nothin’ funny.”

Erin marched to the Wal-World trash and tore the executer from his grasp. “How dare you fire without direct orders?”

“She was–”

“Erin!” Tom aimed his laser at the old woman’s chest again. Her hands were still up.

“Do it again and I’ll see you court marshaled.” Erin slammed his weapon against his chest.

Ford bowed his head. “Yes, cap’n.”

The old lady waved a hand. “We’re all coming out, unarmed.”

Four others trailed behind her, two old women and two old men, dressed in similar clothes.

The lasers targeted each person. When Erin looked closer at their faces, she gawked. They all looked too familiar. When the last woman stepped into line with the rest, she couldn’t believe her eyes. “What is this?”

“I’m Sandra, like I said. This is Ford, Thyme, Tom, and this is Erin.”

The woman named Erin had wrinkled lines around her eyes and mouth. She was the spitting image of Grandma Margarita from Mexico. She cropped her white hair short. A scar above her right ear left an unnatural part. Erin’s shoulder length, brunette hair was tied back in a ponytail, covering up most of her scar. Her tattoo, a thin vine trail, was on the old woman’s wrist.

Everyone gaped, speechless as they stared at their aged counterparts. But this couldn’t be real. As much as they looked like older versions of themselves, Erin didn’t want to trust her eyes. Sandra warned the monster might be capable of creating hallucinations.

“You’re supposed to be me?” Erin asked, sounding as snide as possible.

Old Erin nodded.

She wanted to fire and watch her dissolve from ash into thin air like the illusion she must be. “Prove it.”

“You’re in love with Brody.”

And she went there.

It felt like minutes passed in silence. Besides Erin’s breathing in the mask, no sound but the waterfalls rushing into the pools broke it. She wanted to dive into one of them and disappear. She couldn’t turn to look at him, though she was sure he watched her in horror.

Yet it proved nothing if the monster could get into their thoughts. “What’s going on?” Erin demanded. “Are you the AA?”

“No,” Old Sandra said. “But we have a lot to tell you about him. Like the fact that he’s telepathic. He can make one thing appear to be something else. He also makes matter disappear, like a vacuum or a vortex. And he’s not here now. We feel the pressure in the room change when he leaves, but it doesn’t affect our breathing. When he’s far enough away, you’ll be able to take off your masks.”

“Why are you… olders here?” asked Brody.

Erin still couldn’t look at him, but noticed he had no aged counterpart.

“We can tell them. AA is far enough away.” Old Thyme, thin as a rail, had clear blue eyes like her younger self, and the chin-length strawberry hair was streaked with gray. “He can’t hear us now.”

The group of “olders” collectively sighed. “You can take off your masks.”

Though none of this made sense, Erin decided to hear these people out. They presented no immediate threat. She motioned for the team to lower their weapons. They removed the masks and breathed normally.

“After fifty years down here, with a lot of trial and error,” Old Sandra said, “we may have discovered a way to destroy the AA. Before you try to stop him, we need you to help us get out without the monster knowing. And you need to hear what happened to Brody.”

“But why are we meeting you?” Sandra asked. “If you are really us?”

“Listen here.” Old Tom spoke. “Your bullets won’t affect him. That’s why we haven’t been able to kill it. He can make anything coming at him disappear: fire, ice, weapons, including proton and nuclear ones. AA told us he dug too many tunnels in the Earth’s core. To fix it, he created a time loop. We don’t know how, but the year 2332 starts over every January to prevent the eventual destruction of the planet where he intends to live forever. You coming here every year proves it still works.” The smooth and deep voice Erin knew so well crackled. He seemed different than his younger self, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. More…peaceful.

“That’s why you’re meetin’ us. We’ve relived this scene every year for the past forty-nine. Been tryin’ to figure out what can be done differently to keep y’all from bein’ killed. But it happens every time.” Old Ford, the oldest looking with the whitest hair, shook his head. His legs wobbled like he was tired from standing. He reached for Old Thyme’s hand.

The younger pair stared at their counterparts, then at each other.

“Your time loop theory is flawed,” said Sandra. “Wouldn’t you all return to wherever you were celebrating New Year’s on the first? You wouldn’t still be down here, and you wouldn’t age.”

“AA made us immune to the time loop like he is,” Old Sandra explained.

“Why didn’t you come out and find us at the base?” Erin asked.

“He said he’d kill us if we left.” Old Thyme leaned her head on Old Ford’s shoulder. “He brings us food and supplies.”

The animal carcasses? Maybe there were many more they hadn’t found because AA brought them to these people. Erin couldn’t help but grin at the odd couple. Fake or not, after fifty years together, she supposed Thyme and Ford might have succumbed to the “opposites attract” rule.

“The green cloud is an illusion like we thought,” Old Sandra said to the younger. “It’s really his spacecraft. AA chose to come to Earth because he only survives on water. He burrowed tunnels into the Greater Grand Canyon to create this lair. All look identical. Same length and width, blocked at four miles deep with a thin wall, easily crushed. But the wall, including the polished rock, is another illusion. As is the light in this room.”

“Non-native rock.” Ford shook his head. “What’s with the tunnel?”

“When someone enters one of the caves, it somehow alerts the AA,” said Old Sandra. “When the wall is broken, he comes close enough to draw out the memories of those inside, especially their greatest achievement. Of course, it’s always been us, but he seems to enjoy replaying the memories.”

Tom jerked his head back. “Erin, did you have a moment back there where you thought you were fighting at Treehouse?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

“We share our greatest achievement,” said Old Tom.

Brody raised his hand. “I had a memory pop up as well.” He met Erin’s gaze, gave a half-grin, and looked away. Like she thought. No return of the feelings. At least now she knew.

Ford, Thyme, and Sandra raised their hands.

If anyone could convince Erin that their eyes didn’t deceive them, Sandra could. Yet she hesitated to trust what she didn’t understand. “How do we know you’re not an illusion?”

“Because we want to destroy him.” Old Sandra lifted her arms, waving her hands as she spoke. Erin had seen younger Sandra do the same thing. “When we first came into this cavern, AA was waiting. I saw the abominable snowman. Thyme saw a dragon. Ford saw the Mothman. Tom saw Anubis, the jackal-headed god. Erin saw a chupacabre.”

She cringed. As a kid, she got scared watching movies with that blood-sucking creature in it.

Old Erin grinned knowingly. “He scared us, but when we fired, he was unscathed. Then he changed into a small, fluffy-looking thing. He convinced us we were safe, and asked about our world. We told him some well-known events. He seemed indifferent when we mentioned the Area 51 Insurgency. Then he told us about himself, how he’s the only one of his kind. After living 10,000 years, he traveled to Earth hoping to live forever with the abundant water resource. He stole his spaceship, which travels faster than light speed, from another alien race.”

“Not very nice. So what about me?” Brody’s voice had a hint of fear.

Old Erin’s face fell into a deep frown.

“It happened suddenly,” said Old Tom. “AA transformed into a black, gaping hole. I don’t know what else to call it. There was no real form to it. He was coming for Erin, but Brody stepped between her and the monster. He made Brody disappear, but not until he sucked the water from his body. We’ve never seen that Brody again.”

Erin felt a jolt in her chest, like a nerve ending came loose and struck her heart.

“I’m sorry, man,” said Old Tom.

“Okay.” Brody took the news as Erin expected, with a nod and his half-grin. “Now I know. Thanks for that.” He pulled the weapon off his shoulder. “So let’s kill this thing before it kills me.”

“You should know,” Old Erin said, “AA let us live down here unaffected by the time loop because of what you did. He said you were a brave person who had thoughts of sacrificing yourself so that all of us could live. He respected that.”

Brody gripped his executer. “Good to know I’m not a coward.”

Erin debated whether to trust these people or find the monster on their own and risk being sucked into some sort of darkness. “Is this possible?” she asked Sandra.

She shrugged. “We’re chasing an alien that came out of a green cloud. Anything’s possible.”

Erin took the risk. “What do we do now?”

Old Tom rubbed his hands together. “Tell them your idea, Erin.” He was looking at the older one.

“Last year,” she said, “we froze a section of the polished tunnel and it turned into regular cave rock. I believe freezing the ship, exposing it for what it is, will draw the AA inside, causing his true appearance to be revealed. Then maybe we can figure out how to destroy him. Except he obviously stopped you last year. You left to freeze the green cloud with liquid nitrogen. But you never came back. We want to come this time to see what went wrong.”

“This sounds crazy,” Thyme said.

“You were here while we did all the work?” asked Ford.

“We have made progress eliminating what can’t kill the monster,” Old Sandra said. “You would never know if you didn’t meet us every time. Now we’re willing to risk leaving.”

If they were telling the truth, the youngers were expendable, not the olders. “We’ll go, but you should stay until the AA is frozen. Then you can help us destroy him.” Erin looked over the team. “My first instinct is to bring only military. That’s probably what I did last year. This year, Sandra and Thyme will come along. If we don’t make it, I’ll tell Newsome to send another team down here to explain what went wrong.”

“Last year, no one came to tell us what happened to you,” said Old Sandra. “We think AA sucked them up.”

“Then failure isn’t an option,” said Erin.

“But y’all already tried ice,” Ford pointed out.

“We don’t think he’ll vacuum up parts of the spaceship just to make the liquid nitrogen disappear,” said Old Sandra. “He may talk about living here forever, but it’s another thing if he’s trapped.”

“Sounds like way too many ifs in this scenario,” said Thyme.

“We may disappear, but we’ll come back and try again next year,” said Tom. Erin appreciated that he always agreed with her.

Ford pointed to the hole he had blasted. “Did you know I would do that?”

“You fire every three years on average,” said Old Sandra. “Some of the holes, the AA tunnels toward water sources. That’s where the waterfalls come in.”

A cavern behind the wall linked several tunnels and caves where the AA had helped the olders make a home. They had beds, tables, even kitchen appliances that worked. They brought out a long rope from their storage room.

Brody spread the goop he used in his hair along his hands and feet. The stuff gave him traction as he climbed up the tunnel with the rope tied to his pack. He hollered when he stood on the other side of the dead end.

The rest of them wiped their feet and strapped their boots back on.

Erin used Brody’s product on the bottom of her boots, handing it off to Tom. “See you soon.” She glanced back at the olders, wondering if she would. With the rope, she pulled herself up the tunnel. It didn’t take long for all of them to reach the main cave.

“We’re running. It’s four miles, so I don’t want to hear any complaints.” They jogged slowly. She figured the lack of meat on Thyme’s bones meant her energy level would be low. Erin heard her panting, but the journalist didn’t say a word.

The red lights led them through the narrow tunnel. Soon, a circle of sunlight appeared in the distance. They stepped out of the cave and onto the floor of the canyon. The tar-like smell of the meteorite debris singed Erin’s nostrils.

“Hydration time.” They pulled out waters. Erin gulped down the cool fluid until the canteen was empty.

“I’m on the walkie.” Tom reached for the two-way radio. It wouldn’t work inside the cave, so they’d left it at the entrance. “Caveman to base, over.”

The device crackled. In less than a minute, Dan’s voice answered. “Base here, over.”

“Caveman and crew requesting the bird, over.”

“Ten-four.”

Erin dropped her pack. “We’ll eat while we wait.” She tossed sandwiches to each team member.

“Pardon me.” Brody stepped toward the nearest meteorite chunk and disappeared behind it.

The rest of them sat on the ground, munching on PB and J’s.

Ford wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Thyme, what’d your older say? I saw her whisperin’ to ya.”

Thyme swallowed. “She said the AA can speak through a mind weak from fear. That’s why I don’t remember saying it. Because he has killed our group every year, he likes to foreshadow our deaths using me.”

“Your mind ain’t weak.”

“I guess it’s the weakest in our group, and that’s enough for the monster to infiltrate. She told me to stay strong and not be afraid so I don’t let him in when he’s nearby.”

“I’ll protect ya. Remember, I own you.”

Brody appeared from behind the meteorite and sat by Ford. “Looks like you two are ready for your own cavern.”

Ford smacked Brody in the head.

“Hey! We all know what’s gonna happen. I think it’s helpful, seeing you get along so well. Makes us trust them even more.”

Tom crumpled the sandwich wrapper’s recycled paper. “How do we convince the base to freeze the ship?”

“I think I have a way.” A humming noise drew Erin’s head up. The sound of spinning helicopter blades grew louder. The bird landed in a flat, open space.

They climbed aboard. Erin stared into the mouth of the Greater Grand Canyon as they rose, counting fifty cave openings the AA had vacuumed out. Soon, they crested the canyon’s edge where rows of white tents and one building stood. Special Agent Newsome greeted them at the base camp’s landing pad.

“That didn’t take long. You have a meet and greet?”

Erin waited for everyone else before leading Newsome to the communications tent. “Thyme, give him your headset.”

The tech played back the recording, beginning to end.

Newsome listened, and his eyes widened when the olders introduced themselves. When it was over, he asked, “Is this for real?”

Erin said, “I believe them.”

Newsome glanced at the team. He folded his arms. “All right. I’ll get the president’s approval.”

“How much LN will they need?” Erin asked Sandra.

One of the scientists calculated the number and handed it to her. “We estimate ten million gallons. Though the cloud may be bigger than the actual ship.”

“This may take some time.” Dan scratched his head. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The team took the opportunity to rest in their tents. Erin expected to sleep a few hours. When she awoke, it was dark. The day played in her mind like a vivid dream, but she knew it had been real. She’d be ready, whatever happened. If it was her time to disappear, so be it. If things finally worked out, then she was lucky to be a part of it.

She swung her feet off the cot and onto the ground, clicking on a lamp. Brody sat in the corner.

Though her body didn’t jump, her heart did.

“I wanted to talk to you.” He clasped his hands together. “I’m not bothered by anything that was said back there.”

Erin held her breath, unsure how to respond.

“You’re my superior, and I respect that. If what your older said was true, I’m sorry that I don’t feel the same way. You and me, we wouldn’t…” He clapped his hands together. “You know what? You don’t need to hear any more from me.” He saluted and left the tent.

She exhaled. Though she had figured it out, she felt a fresh pang of rejection. Part of her wanted to hit something, but another part wanted to cry. She went with the former and headed for the lodge where a punching bag waited.

By the time Newsome found her, Erin’s fists throbbed, a bloody mess.

“Whoa. Save your strength. We’re on.”

She wrapped her hands as he talked.

“Stetson University had the amount we needed. Some past research project or something. It’s all president-approved. We’re getting updated equipment, even. You ready to board an alien spaceship?”

“More than ever.”

The next day, one hundred aircraft carrying 100,000 gallons each passed over a specified area of the green cloud before releasing their load.

The team watched from the rim of the canyon. The rest of the base stood behind them. Erin shielded her eyes from the sun. As the smoky liquid sprayed the cloud, a silver color bled through the green. In less than an hour, a long, cylindrical-shaped spacecraft hovered above the canyon, frozen.

She turned to the team. “Our bird is waiting.”

One by one, they entered a tent where some of the scientists dressed them. They placed a clear-bubbled helmet over Erin’s head. She breathed and the oxygen flowed. The first clothes layer, like a leotard, suctioned to every inch of her body. The neck snapped inside the helmet. The top layer looked like a biohazard suit and smelled rubbery.

“This will control the temperature inside your suit.” One of the scientists tapped a control panel on her arm. “Right now, it’s room temperature. Before you exit the helicopter, tell your team to press this button.”

It read, TEMP ADJ.

“Your suit will adjust to keep each individual’s temperature at 98.6.”

On the chopper, Erin glanced at the five of them. The soldiers and Sandra looked eager behind the clear helmets. Thyme looked afraid.

“No sign of the AA. We’ll keep you posted,” Dan said into the headsets. “No expense spared this time.”

When they neared the vessel, it reminded Erin of spaceships in sci-fi flicks. Even frozen, the thing had blinking lights, panels, and round attachments. They looked like escape pods, if she had to guess. The liquid nitrogen created a smoky haze around everything. They rose above its rear where three circular thrusters stared at them like full moons behind wisps of clouds. The chopper hovered inside one of them.

“Push the button. Stay close!” Erin touched her control panel. Increasing TEMP flashed in red. She dropped the ladder and climbed down with an LN canister on her shoulder. She stepped onto a frosted metal of some kind, moving aside as each team member followed. The chopper backed away. They walked toward the hull. From what she could tell, it would take about twenty minutes to get inside from where they were now.

“Can everyone hear me?”

Every team member gave an affirmative. Everyone except Thyme.

“I need verbal confirmation.” Erin glanced back over her shoulder. The smoke surrounded everyone. Thyme had that glazed look Erin remembered from the cave. “Can you hear me on your com?” She stopped in front of her and tapped her own helmet at the ear.

The rest of the team stopped and stared. “Something’s not right with her,” said Sandra.

“I’m coming.” Thyme frowned and her eyes squinted. Then her hands shuddered. The movement traveled until her entire body shook.

Ford wrapped his arms around her. “Steady! I gotcha.”

The chopper. Erin looked up just as a blackness rose beneath it, swallowing it whole. The bird disappeared. After that, the blackness shifted and stretched, growing larger.

“Line up!”

The team turned to see it coming for them. Tom and Sandra moved into position with their canisters in hand. Ford dragged Thyme into the line. “Snap out of it!” he yelled.

“I’m okay.” Thyme sounded like herself again.

Brody turned and faced the monster approaching with incredible speed.

“Get into position!” Erin feared they weren’t deep enough into the ship for the AA to begin freezing. The canisters were supposed to be a last resort. “That’s an order!”

Brody stepped forward, not back, toward the thing flying at them. “All of you, run! Get farther in to make sure it freezes.”

He was right, and there was no time. “Run!” Erin turned and they followed. With the suit, she didn’t have much speed, but she gave it all she had.

“You know me!” Brody cried. “I’m ready to die so that you’ll let them live.”

A voice, deep and hollow, echoed in Erin’s head. “I know you all.”

She couldn’t help it. She glanced back over her shoulder.

The black, gaping hole hovered over Brody, lowering itself.

She tripped and fell. Her helmet hit the icy ship. She heard a crack. When she opened her eyes, a starburst in her helmet stared back at her.

Hands gripped her arms. Tom and Sandra lifted her to her feet.

“Your helmet.” Tom had panic in his eyes.

“It’s okay. As long as it doesn’t spread.”

AA was getting closer to Brody.

“This is the end,” he said. “I’m not afraid to die. What about you?”

“I’m not afraid of any of you,” the voice said.

“So take me! It’s what you want to do. Make me disappear.” Brody squatted, and then lay flat on his back.

AA moved closer to the ship. His fringe began to ice. The edges grew starbursts like the one on Erin’s helmet.

She sprinted toward them. Fifty meters. She could save Brody. Keep him from disappearing.

The blackness shuddered as it neared the icy ground. The starbursts on him spread, splintering toward his center.

“Come on. I’m ready. Do it!” Brody cried.

AA lowered onto him, the blackness that was left wrapping over his body like a dark blanket.

“No!” Erin pumped her arms and legs harder.

“No,” the voice echoed. AA skated along the ground, moving toward her. A hole in the ship appeared where Brody had been.

Erin skidded to a halt, choking back tears while unscrewing the cap on the canister. AA was ten feet away.

Where the monster’s form had frozen around the fringe, it looked see-through like an ice cube. But the starbursts stopped and now retreated toward his edges, allowing him to lift off the ground.

As he rose toward her, she knelt, swinging the canister back and heaving it into the air with a firm grip on the metal. The liquid nitrogen splattered the blackness above. The starbursts that had retreated splintered again, moving quickly toward his center until they covered him.

“Not…” The voice weakened. “…my…intention.”

The smoke surrounded AA until no blackness could be seen through it. Erin scooted back and stood. Four other streams of LN splashed onto the frozen monster.

“For good measure,” Tom said.

The team panted, holding their empty canisters.

When the smoke cleared, a block of ice hovered in the air. Erin stepped toward the floating cube and stared into it. “I can’t see anything.”

“You brave woman,” Tom said. “That thing saw what making Brody disappear did to his ship, but he still could’ve tried to suck up the LN coming at him. And you.”

She exhaled. “He didn’t want to risk making more holes.”

“That was an assumption.”

“Brody took the greater risk.” She turned to the hole where he had been. “He paid the greatest price.”

“You bein’ here made the difference,” Ford said to Thyme. “You warned us it was comin’.”

“I did?” Thyme’s eyes widened. “Why can’t we see it?”

“It’s possible the AA is…nothing in its truest form.” Sandra touched Erin’s helmet. “We’ve got to get you back.”

The starburst had spread, creating a line down the center that almost reached the neck.

Tom punched the control panel on his arm. “Newsome, we have the AA. It’s frozen in a two-foot square cube. Waite’s helmet is cracked. Send us another bird ASAP.”

When the replacement chopper came, one of the scientists climbed down the ladder. He jogged over holding a metal container the same size as the ice block. “This it?” he asked.

Erin nodded.

“I’ll keep it frozen in transport.” He pressed the buttons on a keypad, and the container split apart. Sandra helped him close it over the floating cube. When it locked, a red light on the keypad switched to green.

Everyone walked to the ladder and boarded the bird with the cargo.

Back at base, after a hot shower, Erin collapsed onto her cot. She awoke in a sweat, her dreams dark and foreboding. She had been hanging onto the edge of the spaceship, but her hands slipped as something sucked her up like a vacuum. She had glimpsed a giant face that opened its mouth and swallowed her. Brody cried, “Take me instead!”

She woke up, dressed, and left the tent to discover that she’d slept through the night and into the next afternoon.

“Erin?” Sandra came up behind her. “You’ll want to see this.”

She followed her to one of the stations where it seemed every scientist at the base hovered like pigeons.

“Excuse us!” Sandra pushed her way to a table where the metal container holding the AA sat in the center. Newsome stood behind one of the scientists who, strangely enough, peered into a microscope that aimed at the container.

“There’s a small glass window.” Sandra moved the microscope so Erin could see what she meant. “We can look inside without having to open it and risk the AA melting.”

Erin hadn’t noticed the tiny glass circle when they had closed up the cube.

“Take a look.”

She peered into the microscope. The image was difficult to describe, but she knew the words to say. “A neon blue-colored life form that resembles no organisms found on this planet. Structured in a manner suggesting that it is self-sustaining.” She lifted her eyes from the microbe. “Except we know it survives on water.”

The buzz from the murmuring scientists sounded like a swarm of bees.

“Do you know what this means?” Newsome cried. “This is the same type of extraterrestrial the U.S. military destroyed in the Area 51 Insurgency!”

“Looks that way,” Erin said, having seen the pictures in history books. Those microbes looked identical to this one.

“I can’t figure this out!” Dan pulled up chunks of his hair. “If this thing is telepathic, makes matter disappear, and creates illusions out of existing matter, why didn’t those aliens back in 2199 do the same things? They were placed in a sealed room and exposed to radiation. And that was it! They didn’t show up on the microscope anymore.”

“At least now we know how to destroy this one,” Sandra said. “AA obviously can’t wield his power now that he’s frozen. Perhaps those other aliens didn’t show us their abilities because they had no desire to.”

A humming sound drew Erin’s gaze upward. The chopper approached. “Who’s coming in?”

Sandra grabbed her hand, grinning. “Come on.”

Her giddiness surprised Erin, but she let Sandra drag her toward the helicopter pad.

Thyme was already there.

When the bird landed, an older version of Erin stepped out, along with Old Sandra, Tom, Ford, and Thyme. All unharmed though they had left the monster’s lair. They ducked as they walked out from under the spinning blades.

Erin shook each of their hands. It was strange shaking hands with herself, but she smiled at her older. “Good to see you.”

Old Erin shouted over the bird. “I’m glad you’re safe this time!”

Behind them, younger Tom and Ford exited the chopper. When Tom saw Erin, he ran over and saluted. “We went while you were asleep. I hope it’s okay. Newsome–”

“Mission accomplished, Tom.” She patted his back.

They brought the olders over to the microscope.

“How is it possible?” They turned to each other, looking confused. “He was one of a kind, he said.”

“Perhaps something about him was different,” Sandra replied. “The things he could do were never demonstrated by the first aliens. Theoretically, the time loop should end when we destroy him.”

The olders whispered amongst themselves. Old Sandra stepped forward. “We think you should do it. But someone should investigate his burrowing activity. This far into the year, he may have damaged the earth’s core. Without the time loop, the Earth won’t fix itself.”

Sandra and Newsome nodded to one another.

“The transport arrives in an hour to take the AA to the Area 51 facility,” Dan said. “The research on him and his activity will likely last until the end of the year. It’s the president’s call, but she’ll listen to me. Before January, he’ll be exposed to the radiation level that destroyed the others.”

“What if he came for revenge?”

Everyone turned to the journalist, who had that glazed look again.

“Thyme…” Erin stepped toward the girl who looked anxious, but not AA-guided. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe he lied. He could’ve gotten some kind of signal when we killed his fellow aliens, who likely possessed the same abilities whether they demonstrated them or not. So AA got angry and flew here on the ship.” She waved up at the frozen spacecraft. “He planned to destroy us by burrowing endless tunnels, but then he saw our water source.”

“I don’t know if I’m followin’…”

She cut Ford off. “The time loop wasn’t to fix anything, it was to punish us while he potentially lives forever on our water. His kind can obviously die, so burrowing tunnels became his failsafe if we ever figured out how to kill him. Meaning if he died, we died. Eventually.”

Erin glanced at the scientists, whose mouths hung open. Many shook their heads.

“That’s speculation,” Sandra said. “But it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. We’ll have to deal with whatever problems AA has left behind whether he lied or not.” She glanced at Newsome. “We need to figure out a way to seal up the ship and blast some radiation in. Just in case AA has a friend.”

Thyme grabbed Erin’s arm. “You were right! He didn’t want holes in his ship because he planned to go home and bring back more of his own kind.”

She looked ready to implode with this unconfirmed knowledge. The nightly news wouldn’t be prepared for the special report she was about to create. “I’m sorry to admit I thought you were a waste of an oxygen tank, but I’m really glad you were with us. I think Ford’s right, you are the reason we didn’t disappear.”

Thyme’s lip trembled, which surprised Erin. “Thanks.”

She patted Thyme’s shoulder. “Let’s hope AA hasn’t done enough damage to destroy us after we destroy him.”

---

New Year’s Eve, 2332

The group of ten olders and youngers chanted in unison. “Ten, nine, eight…”

“Erin?”

“Yes, Tom?”

“Seven, six, five…”

“I’ve wanted to say this for a long time.”

“Four, three, two, one…”

“Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year, Tom.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

They kissed.

Erin stared at them, shocked.

Their faces faded, their bodies dissolving into air. Empty space remained where Old Tom and Old Erin had been.

Erin’s hand, holding a champagne glass, opened. The glass shattered on the floor.

The rest of the olders dissolved into nothing as well. The five of them gaped at each other in Thyme’s living room.

“What’s going on?” Thyme stepped away from Ford, whom she had been kissing.

“The time loop is over.” Sandra pointed at the television where New York City erupted in fireworks and confetti. The camera scanned the street level in Times Square where people bobbed with “2333” banners.

“Did they…?” When Erin looked up, Tom moved in closer.

“Erin, there’s something I want to tell you.”

Her hands felt sweaty. She rubbed them on the designer suit as subtly as she could.

He took them in his. “I have loved you for a long time.”

Somehow, watching her older kiss Old Tom connected all the dots Erin had never joined. When Brody died, she didn’t want to love again. But Tom was the best friend she’d ever had. Somewhere along the way, her feelings changed without her realizing it until now.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, gazing into the face she knew so well. This tall, dark, and handsome man loved her.

“Me, too.”

Erin felt the passion behind his eyes transfer to his mouth. His lips caressed hers, and she vaguely heard the rest of the group debating the moment of change for the world.

“How are they kissing? Our olders just disappeared in front of us!” Thyme cried.

“The AA is finally destroyed,” Sandra said. “That’s reason enough to celebrate.”

“What if I’m right about the aliens sending a signal to their home planet when they are killed?” she asked. “What if the research team determines that AA set the Earth on a course for destruction? Are these things to celebrate?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Ford said.

Tom pulled away from Erin, but still held her hand. “We’ll fight for this world again if we have to.”

Erin faced her team. “We can die trying.”

---

The Whale Fall

By Sean Monaghan

With a stutter the little black Hyundai’s engine gave out. Gemma fought the wheel as the traveler dropped back over loose rock on the steep driveway. Gemma cursed. Why did her grandmother have to live all the way out here anyway? Without even a decent spotline or phone.

Gemma had been up here so many times with her father at the wheel. He’d never liked her driving, had told her never to attempt the hill on her own. But here she was. Instead of being able to say to him “Take that, you” it looked like he’d been right.

Gemma ratcheted on the brake and got out of the traveler.

To her right, across the dark ocean, gray-black clouds rose in rows like a set of gravestones. She saw a squawk of lightning, didn’t need to count the seconds. The storm would arrive before nightfall anyway. The normally rich blue, almost transparent sea became an oily deep green, like dying moss, under the storm front.

The stormy sea reminded her that it might have been an accident. There might not have been anyone else involved. She wanted to believe that, wanted to think it had all been innocent, but part of her hung on, imagining skullduggery. Was that the word?

The wind rolled in and from the trunk Gemma retrieved her sou’wester, the yellow fabric smelling of new polyethylene. The jacket’s inner was soft pelted fabric and it slipped on easily over her old tee-shirt.

Abandoning the uncooperative vehicle, Gemma started walking up the rocky drive.

---

By the time Gemma reached Grandma Masie’s place the storm’s leading edge was already sending its tendrils high overhead. She wondered if she might have to stay the night. Perhaps, given circumstances, she should stay the night anyway.

A plane buzzed low–lower even than her grandmother’s house–out over the bay, crossing the headland: racing the storm. Gemma watched, guessing it was Mack, who ran three of the six planes out of Cedar Bay, and owned shares in the other three. He always seemed to be taking someone up sightseeing, or training. Gemma waved, knowing she would be too tiny to see from this far off. The plane continued on in the direction of Cedar Falls, engine thrumming.

“Hi Gran,” Gemma said, coming around the side of the house, seeing Masie sitting on the verandah. She had a webtrace loom in her gnarled hands, weaving something conical. A lampshade? How antiquely cute.

“Gemma,” Masie said, setting the loom aside and standing. The loom slipped off the polished wooden table and fell to the decking. “Oh, clumsy!” Masie said. She bent and retrieved it as Gemma stepped up.

“Grandma? Are you all right?”

Masie laughed. “Eyesight and fingers,” she said, putting the loom firmly in the middle of the table and wriggling her fingers at Gemma. “Hips, knees. And hair. At least this thing’s still nimble.” She tapped her temple.

Gemma smiled and hugged her grandmother, taking in her scent of roses and linen and skin cream.

There were flowers in the garden along the front of the porch. Among roses and glenbrooks from Earth, there were tall Vega lilies that beaded with crystals along their petal rims, and puffy deep crimson and skin-pink haritoshan pansies. “You’re going to get yourself in trouble with all these off-world imports, Grandma.”

Masie nodded. “The constabulary has far better things to do than chase up an old woman with a few illegal plants.”

It was almost a tradition between them, for Gemma to point that out. She’d been doing it since she was six, learning to be a good girl.

Now it felt more like another way of avoiding the topic.

“Coffee?” Masie said. “Almost black, one malitol, right?”

“Grandma, I’ve got something to tell you. You should sit down.”

Masie blinked, her dark eyes glistening. She glanced down at the loom, then back at Gemma. “I’ll flick the machine,” Masie said. “You can tell me over coffee. And cookies.” It was almost as if the old woman knew it was bad news coming.

“Grandma.” Gemma didn’t want to wait, it was hard enough dealing with it herself. Grandma, your son is dead. My father. Dead.

Gemma had a flash of memory. Turning thirteen, just five years until adulthood, thrilled that on Earth kids had to wait until twenty-one, only to have that anticipation of adulthood diminished by her father’s explanation: “The Earth year is shorter. They’re still basically the same age.”

She’d known that all along, but hadn’t put it together in her head until that moment. The realization that for every seven birthdays she had, other kids had eight seemed, to her teenaged mind, so unfair. He’d been sympathetic, but still shrugged.

She bit her lip, missing him.

“Chocolate chip,” Masie said. “You love those. Come in.”

Gemma glanced out over the garden. There were divots in the lawn as if someone had removed some heavy garden furniture. Beyond, the clouds continued to roll.

She followed Masie into the kitchen. “I’m not six anymore, Grandma.”

“Really? Didn’t you just have your sixth birthday?” She stopped in the doorway. With a grin she said, “It seems like yesterday.”

“I know.”

The kitchen had changed itself to a lavender hue, almost violet. The ceiling had gone a pastel blue. Masie tapped the coffee maker and it leapt into action, molding a cup right away and plugging its tube into the side of the refrigerator.

“Two,” Masie said. “Two coffees. Black but for one drop of milk. And double sweet.”

“Roger that,” the coffee maker said. Steam hissed from its slim chimney as it molded another cup and closed its doors.

Gemma raised her eyebrows. The little machine had a new vocabulary. “You redecorated?” she said.

“Good grief,” Masie said. “The whole house is on the fritz. I want a white kitchen.” She looked at the ceiling and yelled, “WHITE KITCHEN!”

The walls flickered, went white for a moment and changed back to lavender.

“See,” Masie said. “I’d get someone up here, but everyone complains about the trek. Your father keeps telling me I need to move into town to see out my twilight years. It’s become something of a mantra for him.”

The coffee machine spluttered, specks of hot water spitting from the seals and alighting on its chrome facing.

“I’ll get you a new coffee maker,” Gemma said, finding the words coming far more easily than those she really needed to say.

“Well, I like this old Wego.” Masie turned. “What I could use is one of those utility spinner things. One of the robots that can repair things like this.”

The machine bleeped, and a door on the front panel opened revealing the two steaming cups. Masie put them on the breakfast bar. “Usually I like watching the sunset from the verandah, but it’s getting cool and stormy out so I hope you don’t mind sitting here.”

Gemma got onto a stool and sipped. She winced. Far too bitter.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Masie said, and for the briefest flash Gemma thought she meant the news she was bringing.

“I’m definitely getting you a new machine.”

Masie smiled. She asked how Gemma had come, and Gemma explained about the breakdown on the drive. “I didn’t dare drive on.”

“You have to stay the night,” Masie said. “We can get Jim O’Connor up here in the morning to tow you out.”

“It’s fine, Grandma. I can just back around. It’s all downhill from there.”

Masie nodded, unconvinced.

Gemma stared at her grandmother’s lined face. She seemed older than her seventy years, some of the lines around her mouth and eyes like old worn trenches. Her hair was as white as a book’s screen, but her hazel eyes could have been those of any of Gemma’s friends. Inquisitive, bright.

Masie licked her lips. “But you’re not here to just pass the time of day, are you?”

Gemma gave her head the faintest of shakes.

“Is it Theo?” Masie never called her son Theodore, or Ted, always Theo.

Gemma sniffed and burst into tears.

---

The guest room smelled of linoleum and glue, as if Masie had actually had someone out to lay a new floor. The room was filled with things Gemma remembered from growing up. Mobiles, porcelain figures from a dozen worlds, building bricks.

They’d visited every few weeks, usually with a sleepover. Her father would stay in his old room and she would sleep in here.

She imagined his ghost, walking the hallway.

Later she was woken by the storm charging across the house like a million unleashed beasts. The rain clattered on the old roof, the thunder made the windows rattle. Gemma crept downstairs for a glass of water and found her grandmother sitting in an armchair, pulled right up to the front window, watching the jagged lightning strikes out over the bay.

Gemma stood for a moment before going back up to bed.

---

She remembered the first time he’d taken her out on a boat away from the shallows or the reef. She’d probably only been eight or nine. A fun day out.

The ocean so big, the strip of land like a model of an island, dangling on the horizon. The water had been so different. At first she’d hung over the side, watching, but as the water darkened from its welcoming, cool transparency to a full and impenetrable dark, she’d crept back away into the middle of the boat, almost huddling against his side as he watched ahead.

Her stomach had clenched as if it was twisting like an old dishrag. He’d slowed to let her throw up over the side, given her a flask of water to rinse out.

When he’d finally stopped the boat and put on his gear, she’d refused to get in.

“Come on,” he’d said. “It’s safe.”

But she’d shaken her head and clung to the seat. Her father had paddled around for a while, vanished under the surface for a panicky ten minutes before coming back aboard with some plastic vials filled with seawater. He’d sat, labeled them with a black marker and stowed them in an aluminum case.

Without speaking to her, he’d started the boat, turned around and they’d driven back in silence except for the hum of the engine and the smacking of the waves.

The ocean was just not her thing.

---

Masie made pancakes.

“Maple syrup?” she said, pushing a thick-walled glass flask across the table. “Canadian maples. They’re growing them on the northern peninsula now. Cablehope or Glisten, one of those towns.”

“Grandma. They haven’t found his body yet.” Gemma poured the silky amber liquid, making spirals around the top of her pancake stack.

“That doesn’t surprise me. How deep was he?”

“A hundred and fifty meters. On a whale fall.”

“Isn’t there a record? Don’t they record everything?” Masie cut pieces from her own stack and ate. In the background the coffee maker spluttered, a slightly higher-pitched sound than the evening before.

“Yes. He had on-board recorders, with a shore-based backup, which he linked, but the link got broken. There’s data on the…” Gemma broke off with a sniff. She had to look away. Through the dining room window she was faced with the rising hill behind the house, covered in bright yellow gorse and myriad invasive clovers, throwing their three-leafed tips through the other plants’ spines. They all glistened with drops from the previous night’s rain.

Masie put her hand on Gemma’s. “It’s all right.”

Gemma looked around, almost angry. “Why aren’t you sad? Your son! He’s dead.”

Masie nodded. “Gemma, please.”

Gemma stood up. “Parents are supposed to die first. Not the children. You’re not supposed to lose a child. But you’re not even upset.” Even as she spoke, Gemma remembered seeing Masie watching the storm.

“So now you feel abandoned,” Masie said. “Your mother left, and now your father.”

“She walked out. She had a choice.”

Masie nodded. “I bet you’re thinking he had a choice too.”

Gemma considered this. Nothing could have kept him from going into the water. It was his life. She remembered as a kid finding out that most of her friends’ parents hated their jobs. Her father was the opposite, loved everything about his work, but mostly the opportunity to become submerged.

Was that a choice? Could he have done anything else? If she’d asked would he have stopped? And then, how would she have felt? To be the one who took him out of the water.

“No,” Gemma said. “He didn’t have a choice. But he could have been more careful.”

Masie smiled. “Perhaps it’s better to die doing something you love?”

Taking a breath, Gemma sat. She wiped her eyes and pushed some pancake through the sea of syrup.

Masie put her hand out again. “Gemma. I’m heartbroken. How could I be otherwise?”

“You don’t show it.”

“Not in the way you expect, I suppose.”

The coffee maker bleeped and the doors opened. Masie stood, retrieved the cups

Gemma took another spoon of malitol from the table and sprinkled it in. Masie was right. She wasn’t showing any sign of sadness the way Gemma would expect.

“You’re angry,” Masie said. “Surprisingly so, though perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. I always knew what he was doing was risky. Deep sea diving, figuring out those creatures. Very risky. Especially with a child to raise.”

“He was doing what he loved.”

“I’ve got something for you,” Masie said. “Let me go find it.”

Gemma smiled as her grandmother went up the stairs, remembering being a child and losing her doll, giving up on ever finding it. “I’ve looked everywhere,” she’d told Grandma Masie, tearful. Jemima was lost forever.

“Apparently not,” Masie had said. “If you’d looked everywhere, then you would have found it. Don’t just look. That’s what men do. You should find. Look behind things and under things. When you look in a drawer, don’t just root around, take everything out and put it all back. That way you know the thing’s not in there. Trace your steps, remember where you went. Don’t just look: find.”

And of course they had found Jemima, tucked in behind a sofa cushion under a rug. Young Gemma had clutched the doll, tearful again.

Masie came back down with a photo of her father. “Learning to swim,” Masie said, passing it over.

Gemma looked, swiping through the series of images and movers. Theo thin and white-chested in his trunks, standing at the edge of the pool. Jumping in. Clutching the side, shivering. Scrambling out.

“At first he was scared of the water,” Masie said. “But he got used to it. More than that. I think he decided he had something to prove.”

Sitting on the side kicking his legs. Staring angrily at the picture-taker. Lying on his back in the water, gasping.

“I guess he sure did prove it,” Gemma said, thinking that ultimately he was right to be scared of the water.

“Yes he did.” Masie took the photo back.

“We used to fight about it,” Masie said. “Back when he was young, before you were going to school. I told him he could do it all with remotes anyway. I mean, he’d shown me robot submersibles. When I was publishing, everything was done by remotes.”

Masie looked over Gemma’s shoulder. Gemma knew she was looking at the shelf of awards and certificates, and the kernels that held her publications. Dr. Masie Abrique had been a meteorologist, working to shape the understanding of Stinngaser’s weather. Gemma remembered her grandmother talking about how it was one of the last real sciences. “Every planet is different. So many variables.” She’d always said it half-jokingly. Her papers were published on a dozen worlds. Places like Mason and Clock and Yellow One Yellow. Her ideas applied to local weather prediction.

“I went on flights,” she said now. “It is simply extraordinary. Pillars of clouds rising up from broad streaky plains, vast thunderheads expanding as the jetstreams swipe their tops into dagger blades. Chasing the sunset as fast as we could, watching the golds and salmons as they chandeliered through a billion high-altitude specks of ice for an hour or more.”

Gemma said nothing.

“But it didn’t come back to the science. Back on the ground I just worked with the data from the balloons and kites and things. Turned that into something useful.”

Gemma couldn’t imagine that. Even the way her grandmother spoke of the clouds belied her intrigue. No wonder her papers engaged her peers. She opened her mouth to say as much, but Masie spoke first.

“I guess we ought to have a funeral,” Masie said. “Or some kind of service.”

Gemma closed her eyes. She wished Masie felt like she did, wished she would at least show it. “I’m going to find him,” Gemma said. “I’m going to find him and find out what happened.”

Masie blinked. “Oh, are you now?”

---

At the institute Gladys, the administrator, gave her access to her father’s files. The building was an old herring shed and it still stank of the canning process. Despite calling itself The Cedar Bay Institute of Oceanography, Stinngaser, the outfit was really little more than some secondhand equipment from the fisheries industry, two underpaid and over-taxed grad-students and Gladys.

“What do you think of the building, huh?” Gladys said, leading her along the short, damp hallway to her father’s office. There were old pictures on the wall, some of them with busted optics, of flying fish soaring and the Stinngaser dolphins fighting off predators.

Gemma tapped the corner of one of the pictures and the jam freed up; the tail-dancing whale turned and fell into the ocean with a mighty splash.

As she’d driven in she’d seen the new building nearby. Going up fast, covering an acre or two, robots clambering all over, exuding mesh and surfaces. Noisy and smelling of oil and cordite.

“A new gym?” she asked. “Basketball stadium?”

“Fisheries,” Gladys said. “The Daily Quota Responsible Company. Putting up a new processing plant.”

“After abandoning this place?”

“Well, that’s ten times bigger. Modern. Some contract to supply fish oil and scales off-world. Clock? Somewhere with one of those strange names.”

“Always something like that,” Gemma said. Despite calming down since seeing her grandmother, this made her wonder again about foul play. The industry and her father had butted heads more than once, chucking each other down in the media. One man against the bullying corporate. The sites loved it.

Gladys tapped the office door and it shushed aside. Right away Gemma was back in her father’s world. They’d only had this building a few years, but it was filled with his shambolic collections. Piles of old printouts and paper books, stacked on dusty, dead readers, with rib bones and skulls dangling on top like cranes or teeter-totters. The shelves held murky jars with dead creatures preserved inside: a striated pentapus; a fluffy nudibranch; Kaller’s baby shark with its two mouths, one on top and one below; a dozen others she didn’t know the names of.

On his workbench her father’s practically antique fancalc pointed straight up at the ceiling like a miniature tower. The old-style computer came alive, the fan spreading, as Gladys tapped the open surface. “I don’t think it matters now,” she said as she hacked the fancalc’s password. Gladys chewed cherry gum as she spoke, tossing the wad side to side in her mouth. “I think this place is closing. I’m looking for another job. Probably in Cedar Falls.”

The two communities were separated by a steep hill–part of the same geography that created Masie’s overlook–and a swampy plateau. Cedar Falls had a population of close to fifty-thousand, Cedar Bay less than a thousand. Gemma always thought it was weird that cedars grew in neither place.

“Someone else will take over,” Gemma said. “Dale or April.” Both studying for their doctorate under her father. “They’ll find another supervisor at CFU.”

“But they’ll move to CFU. We always had a stringbean budget, so without your father we’re done. No disrespect.” Gladys stopped chewing, put her hand over her mouth.

“It’s all right.” Out the window she could see the foaming sea washing up around the stone jetty. It wasn’t stormy now, but still overcast. Just at the side of the window she could see the edge of the new building.

“I mean,” Gladys said. “I loved him in a… you know, fatherly kind of way. Brotherly. Oh my, I’m just making it worse.”

“Gladys. It’s okay.”

The administrator took a breath. The fanned out display flickered with data. “There,” she said. “We got in.” Moving quickly she tapped parts of the fan, the images responding. The word “Forget?” came up on the screen and Gladys tapped it. “All done,” she said. “You won’t need a password now, it’s all open access.” Gladys gave up her seat.

Gemma thanked her and sat. As she reached to the display, Gladys touched her shoulder. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks.” The seat felt hard, awkward. Worn to her father’s shape.

Gladys slipped out to the door and Gemma could sense her still watching. Gemma turned.

“Why are you here?” Gladys said.

“I want to find him.”

“I know that much. But you think it was something else, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think they murdered him.” Gladys nodded her head towards the window. “It would be too much trouble. He was a thorn, but that’s all. They’re a multi-million Yuan operation, he was a struggling researcher. They buy politicians like they buy breakfast. The sparring was just that, it never was going to have an impact on their business.”

Gemma turned back to the fancalc. “Maybe,” she said, “they didn’t know that.”

Gladys didn’t say anything else, but it was a few minutes before Gemma heard her leave.

Working on the machine she dug up his last dive, collated it with the currents and all his telemetry.

It took hours, but eventually she narrowed it down to a hundred square miles of ocean that gyred around a bay. Sitting back in her father’s seat she sighed. Far too big of a job.

She was going to need some help.

---

“Tell me again this idea you’ve got?” Dale Williams blinked up at her from his disheveled sofa. He was clearly hung-over, clearly short on sleep.

“Is this what you’ve been doing since my father died?” she said from his doorway. She couldn’t even step into his room, it stank so much of beer, sweat socks and yesterday’s fried food.

“This is what I’ve been doing since I left home,” he said. “We going surfing?”

“You’re a funny man. You’re still on that stipend, so get out of bed and come along.”

“What about April?”

“Tried her. She left for CFU.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t work for you.” Dale’s voice had gone up an octave.

“Do you think they killed him?”

“Who? The fisheries? Tallon-Davis? Or Daily Quota?”

Gemma almost gasped. “You do.”

“I don’t,” Dale said. “Not a bit.”

“But when I asked you didn’t hesitate. Right away you knew who might have done it.”

“Well, who else? They’re not in that kind of business. Can you imagine the lawsuits?”

“No. Because there won’t be any. There’s no body. It’s as if he just washed away on the tide.”

“Not really. You know where he is.” Dale’s eyes widened and he stared at her, daring her to challenge him. His eyes were hazel, like Masie’s.

“I have a vague idea of where he might have gone. I’m no expert. You could help.”

Dale shook his head. “I’m hung-over, I’m tired. My girlfriend left me and I owe my best friend three hundred Yuan. Since last year, so now he’s not talking to me. My housemate, she’s… well, she’s not polite about my personal habits.”

“No surprise there.”

“And now there’s you.”

“I’m going to find him.”

“Good luck, then.” Dale flumped back down onto the bed.

“What is it?” she said. “What makes you all want to go down into it?” Down to get lost, to drown.

“You should see these things,” Dale said. “The whales. They’re not cetaceans, strictly, but they fill a similar niche. The oceans here have about twice the water volume of Earth.”

Earth, she thought. They were generations removed from the homeworld, but still talked about it as such a definitive point of reference.

“I know all that,” she said. “School. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“But you still want to go find him.”

“I want you to find him.” She sucked air through her teeth, aware of the whistling. “I’ll be in the boat. Support.”

Dale smiled. “Sure. I heard about you in boats.”

“I was a kid!”

“And you live and work fifty miles inland. Not exactly following in papa’s footsteps.” Dale grinned. “Or flipperwake.”

Gemma opened her mouth to reply.

“Do you want something to eat?” he said. “I’m going to make breakfast. Oats or toast? I think we’ve got some jam or something. Marmalade?”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

Dale rubbed his chin, and his impish grin widened. “These animals, they breathe air, but they can stay down for a couple of days. You swim with them and they’re the size of an ocean liner. Three hundred meters long, fifty across. Fins and flukes the size of football fields. And you look into their eyes and they’re looking right back.”

“My father was more interested in the dead ones.”

Dale nodded. “That you have to see for yourself.”

“Where’s your scuba gear? I’m coming in there to get you and I need to breathe.” She went along the condo’s hallway to the next door. As she pulled it open blankets and a couple of balls spilled out. The baseball rumbled off along the worn carpet. She picked up the football and hurled it through his door at him.

“All right.” He stumbled from his room. He was wearing just briefs, his chest the broad and strong chest of a diver and swimmer. Funny how she’d never thought of him that way any other time. “Have you ever dived before?” he said.

“Little bit,” she said. “Dad took me snorkeling.”

“Oh boy.” Dale sighed. He stared at her for a moment, turned around and closed the bedroom door behind him.

---

By the time Gemma had his gear in the back of the Hyundai, Dale had dressed and come out to the condo’s verandah. He had a torn surfie t-shirt and Sharkskins board shorts. “That my stuff?” he said.

“Your housemate said to help myself.” She hadn’t even met the housemate.

“What are you doing, Gemma? You used to be such a nice kid. Polite, friendly.”

“I’m not a kid.” Gemma opened the driver’s door. Dale was maybe two years older than her.

“Are you going looking for him?”

Another vehicle drove by, a panel van, its shimmering spheres crackling along the pavement. Gemma caught a glimpse of a schoolgirl looking out the window at her.

“I’ve got a fix on his location,” Gemma said. A tangy waft of ozone drifted, trailing the vehicle. Poor maintenance, she thought.

Dale stared and lowered his head.

“I need your help,” Gemma said.

With a glance back through his front door, Dale came down the steps to her. He rubbed his stubble, shaking his head. “What kind of a fix. That’s a big ocean.”

“What ocean isn’t?”

“Good point. Doesn’t make it any smaller.”

“Are you going to come help me? He had a transponder. I’ve got a map, I can get trackers.”

“And my scuba gear, I see.”

Gemma ran her fingers through her hair, conscious immediately that it kind of mimicked his chin-rub. “It’s not like you’re going to need it anyway.” She opened the back door and pulled out the tank and mask. “You’ve given it up, haven’t you?”

Dale didn’t say anything. He watched her as she unloaded, without making any move to help. With his equipment on the cracked sidewalk, she closed the trunk and got back into the driver’s seat.

“Hey,” he said as she shut the door.

Gemma wound down the window. “Yes.” Glad he was going to relent. Sometimes she knew how to play people.

“You know he was going deep, don’t you? That’s not snorkeling stuff. It’s special gear, with support AI on your boat. Robot subs in the water. You’re down for hours. It takes years of training.”

“So train me.”

He blinked, nodded. “I could do that.”

“Good.”

“But it would take years. Like I said. His body will be gone from wherever it is now.”

“We’ll keep tracking it.”

Dale shook his head. “Can’t do it.” He picked up his tank, slinging it over his shoulder. Gathering up more of his gear, he looked in the trunk. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in a minute for the rest.” He went back inside without looking over at her.

Gemma watched the dark open doorway for a second. “Home,” she told the traveler and it pulled out from the sidewalk, heading back through the town.

What had she been thinking anyway? Maybe Masie was right. Maybe she should just accept that he was gone.

---

The next day she hired a boat. A glassy fifteen meter arrow of a craft, with big internal jets that roared as the AI nosed into the open sea, bounding across the plane. There were moments Gemma felt like she was flying. The onboard systems kept the passage smooth, almost as if she was riding a laser.

As the boat rushed out, she felt herself trembling, remembering that first time with her father. That ocean like a vast inkwell, black and bottomless. The smell of salt and guano.

She made herself go on.

When the boat reached the middle of the area Gemma had plotted, she eased back the throttle and let the craft wallow. Around her the ocean churned, filled with cross-chop and momentary foaming crests. The water slapped against the hull. The stabilizers kept it steady.

High above, streaky, icy clouds looked like scratches in the sky. A lone orange gull glided close to the water, making occasional hooting calls.

Gemma leaned over the stern, peering into the water. It was clear and black and aquamarine and jade and black-blue all at once. She could see fish below, a school of spiny sprats darting around. Further below, just as the water became too dim to see through, there were some jellyfish. Their bulbous transparent bodies pulsed, black and green tendrils wafting.

And somewhere down there, her father’s body.

Gemma gasped, pulled herself back into the boat’s cockpit. The salty rush of air, the depth of ocean, the plain everyday continuation of the wilds all felt too much.

Later, it might have been twenty minutes, when she was done weeping, she wiped her face and instructed the boat to return to the port.

“You still have five hours rental remaining,” the AI told her. “I can show you the fjords. Beautiful waterfalls. Seals, ocean swans, the walking snapper.”

“Just take me home,” she said.

“Very good.”

Gemma stood up at wheel, the cool air racing through her hair, occasional bursts of spray pelting her face. She couldn’t bear to look back.

---

Sitting in the traveler she sipped a fruity mangolion. Stimulating, but slightly too hot. She blew across it. She thought about Dale’s gear in her car. A moment there she’d lost her mind. She was never going to be able to put the gear on and go into the water.

She finished the drink, put the cup into the mangler. It bleeped a ‘thank you’ and quickly ground it up.

The traveler took her back through the small town to Dale’s place. He wasn’t home, but his housemate answered the door. Young, pretty, elegantly dressed in a kind of cross between gym wear and casual. No wonder she didn’t like Dale’s personal habits.

“He’s gone out,” she told Gemma. “I’m Sal.”

Gemma shook the proffered hand. “Do you know when he’s coming back?”

Sal shrugged. “I’ve got his fanhash if you want to give him a call.”

“Maybe I can just leave his things. I kind of stole them.”

“Yeah, he mentioned that,” Sal said with a smile. “He might have a caboose of irritating qualities, but he was surprisingly relaxed about that. I don’t know if he’s worried about getting… oh! You’re the professor’s daughter. I’m sorry about your father, huh? That’s terrible.”

“Thanks.” Gemma glanced at the traveler, the trunk open. “Really I don’t want to keep his stuff. I feel guilty. I kind of made a fool of myself, getting all het up.”

Sal smiled again. “I think he liked that about you.”

“What?” Gemma said, then realized. “Oh? Like that?”

“Yeah, like that. You can be flattered, but, you know, he gets crushes as often as I have breakfast.”

“You?”

“Yeah. He had a crush on me for all of three minutes. I extinguished that pretty quick. Look, let’s get that stuff hauled inside.”

“Thanks,” Gemma said, “I appreciate it.” She was stunned to think that Dale had thought about her like that. It would be easy to let herself get distracted by something, by an affair, something to bury the emotions inside.

After they’d unloaded, exchanged fanhashes and agreed to meet for coffee sometime, Gemma drove back to Cedar Falls.

Dale. With a crush on her.

Far too distracting. She needed to concentrate, and that was just plain silly.

Still, it might be fun.

---

There was a message on her fan when she got home. Shinako, her work buddy. They went for coffee and tea, for meals, talked about men, about design, about fathers and family. There weren’t that many people Gemma knew who she could just talk and talk with like that. Too introverted.

“Hey, Gems,” the message said. “How’re you doing? I’m thinking of you, but we’ve got to do tea soon. Can’t leave you moping.” The fan flashed a white on green transcript, a couple of words wrong. The iware struggled with Shinako’s accent.

Gemma called right away.

“Now?” Shinako said. “Rick’s here, so I’m, well… you know. How about lunch at work tomorrow? Anyway, I don’t want to rush you.”

“I won’t be at work tomorrow.”

“Ellison thinks you will be. You should call him. I mean, I get it, but it’s been a week. Bereavement’s only three days, which is kind of crass if you ask me, but that’s in the contract. There’s that job on for Sunseekers. Big portfolio.”

Gemma hesitated. Joe Ellison had been almost fatherly in the way he ran things. Checking on her work, her social life, staying out of the way and letting her get on with designs and proposals, being a good listener when she needed to vent about some colleague or client. But he did like his rules, and did run the business with a sharp eye on the profit statements.

“Still there?” Shinako said.

“I can’t. I can’t face it.” Gemma imagined her father out there in the ocean, lost, drifting.

She would have to get back to work sometime, but not yet.

“He’ll fire you,” Shinako said when Gemma told her.

“Yeah, but he’ll hire me back when I’m ready to come back.”

“Don’t count on it. He’s getting really cutthroat now that we’ve lost Kimanner’s.”

“We lost Kimanner’s?” Gemma felt her throat clench. The big tour company was one of Ellison’s core customers. The summer promotion always carried them through. Gemma did the line work and layouts. And especially the colors.

Ships taking thousands of off-world passengers up to see the glaciers. Stinngaser was cooler than Earth, whose polar ice was long-since gone anyway, but people, apparently, romanticized the old days when ‘eco-tourists’ would watch huge icebergs calve from the sheets.

It was her job to promote the vessels as if everyone got a first-class cabin, and stress the lowest of the share-quadruple prices.

Ellison was always happy. The way she could use sunset colors across a middle-aged couple on a private balcony, the blue-white ice face almost within touching distance was beyond anything anyone else in the agency could do.

She was always happy with painting water, so long as she was never immersed over her head.

“He hardly needs you,” Shinako said, her voice seeming distant. “You need to get back here tomorrow.”

Gemma swallowed. “We’ll see.”

Shinako said something Gemma didn’t catch. Rick spoke, right near the pickup.

“Rick?” Gemma said.

“Hey Gem. Shinako can’t talk now. Otherwise occupied.”

Shinako gave a squealing giggle.

“Bye now,” Rick said and broke the connection.

Gemma sat back in the armchair and sniffed. The chair picked up her tension and rolled a massage burr up against her back.

“Stop that,” she growled, standing. She went upstairs and took a long shower.

Job or not, she thought, she was going to find him.

---

The datanet gave her pages about whale falls, but it was all from Earth research. No one had investigated them elsewhere, except for her father, and he hadn’t published anything yet.

He did have dozens of credits, from principle to co-writer, but all on migration patterns, physiology, even mollusks.

Journals had sent the papers on whale falls back with lengthy revisions. He’d deleted them in disgust.

Even the research from Earth was scant.

The bodies could take years to decay, in the right situations. They were huge. The size of small houses, and sometimes became almost whole ecosystems. They caught up nets and other jetsam. A lab in Earth’s Atlantic Ocean had monitored one for a hundred years, until it had broken down almost entirely, leaving patches of anemones and worms surviving on, creating their own micro-environment.

Here on Stinngaser they occured at far shallower depths than back on Earth. That alone should have piqued interest.

Facts ran by her. The deeper they were, the longer they lasted. Bones dissolved. A new kind of barnacle was found, one that had adapted from living on the whale’s skin to living in the detritus.

Gemma struggled to stay awake. She knew she’d disappointed her father by being less academic. Her grandmother and her uncle both had doctorates too, even though they were in diverse disciplines. All she had were some technical papers in drafting and design.

“Follow your passions,” he’d told her. “Always.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Exactly.”

Despite that, she still felt like she’d let him down somehow.

She read about currents, about scuba diving, about the remote submersibles he’d been using.

Facts, facts, facts.

At midnight she jerked awake, the fan display dimmed. “Too much study,” she whispered, and went upstairs to bed.

She lay a while, feeling foolish. Her job, her grandmother, Dale, even Gladys. They all accepted he was gone. Why couldn’t she?

---

It was still dark when her grandmother called. The bedside fan blurred up Masie’s face. The clock below read 5:30.

“Grandma?” Gemma said. “You don’t have anything to call me from.”

“Borrowed Mack’s. He’s portable.”

“Mack?” Gemma still felt blurry herself, roused from deep sleep.

“I told him to keep an eye out for Theo. While he’s flying around. I mean, while Mack’s flying around.”

“I get it. Why are you calling? It’s early.”

“You don’t want to hear from me?”

“Always, Grandma.” Gemma took a swig of water from the side table, getting a mint leaf caught in her teeth.

“Mack says he’s never going to see anything.”

“Well not in this light,” Gemma said. She pulled her curtain back, looking into the glinting lights of the city. The golds and streaky reds of sunrise were beginning to paint the sky.

The thought reminded her of her father again.

“See, that?” he would say. “Someone’s gotten a giant paintbrush from somewhere. This is our lucky day.”

He’d swing her around and around while she squealed, half-terrified he would let her go.

“Funny,” Masie said. “Good to see you’ve got a sense of humor still.”

Gemma stayed silent.

“All right. The real reason I’m calling.”

“Grandma? What?” Gemma sat up, swung her legs off the bed. The air felt cool and she pulled her robe over her knees.

“I hear you’re about to lose your job.”

“How did you hear that?”

“Small town.”

Cedar Falls had never seemed small to Gemma. “Shinako told you?”

“She told Mack. He’s known her since his commercial days. Used to fly her father out to Chichibu Island when Shinako was a kid. Mack flew up here as soon as he could.”

“Mack flew… are you…” Gemma didn’t quite know how to ask. “Are you dating him?”

“Of course I am.”

Gemma remembered the hollows in the lawn: indents from one of Mack’s aircraft. “I should have guessed.”

Masie was moving on, Gemma thought. A new boyfriend. At her age. She must have been seeing Mack since before, but it was still uncanny.

“It’s none of your business really. You’d just try to give me advice.”

“Huh,” Gemma said. “I figure that’s why you called me, right? To give me advice?”

“Just…” Masie hesitated. “Just take care, honey.”

Gemma didn’t know how to respond.

---

Gemma drove right to the ocean. The sun was high by the time she got there. No sign of storms, not even any sign of clouds.

She was so angry. She couldn’t find the words to express it. Everything felt tangled up.

It had been days. Why was she feeling worse?

She walked out on the stone pier, her shoes clacking on the smooth surface. A small local trawler rocked as it came in around the breakwater, nets hanging along the transom drying, masts raised high. Gulls followed, squawking and swooping.

Gemma sat on the end of the pier. She took off her shoes and dangled her feet, the water still meters below. The trawler blew its whistle at her as it passed by. The captain waved. She didn’t know him, but she waved back. The stink of fish wafted over her.

She wondered why she couldn’t let it go.

“Gemma?”

She turned. Dale, walking along the pier. He waved. Gemma looked back out at the breakwater. Further around, at the main jetty, the trawler was tying up, a woman on the jetty shouting down at the crew. Gemma couldn’t make out the words in the distance.

“I saw your car.” Dale came to a stop beside her. “Mind if I sit?”

“It’s a public pier.”

“Yes it is.”

The woman up on the jetty rolled a big yellow mechanical arm that reached over and began pulling up dripping crates. The crew on the deck rushed around loading.

“If you want to find him,” Dale said, “and you want my help, you’re going to have to get into the water.”

“I can’t. I just…” Gemma shivered.

“Your choice. You know where to find me.”

She expected him to get up, but he stayed sitting. The gulls continued to circle the trawler. Gemma could see another boat further out, just heading in, the sunlight glinting from the waves all around it.

“Sal told me she told you I had a crush on you.”

Gemma didn’t say anything. She felt uncomfortable, wished he had just gone, left it alone.

“I did have a crush on you,” he said just as the silence was becoming unbearable.

Great, she thought, now he’s going to tell me he’s over it and that he’ll teach me how to dive so I can find Dad.

“Years ago. When I was first studying under your father. I saw you sometimes, thought you were cute.”

“Really?” She remembered when she’d first started in with her design training, seeing her father on weekends, sometimes his young students doing filing or data-runs to earn some cash.

“You don’t remember me, of course.”

Gemma shrugged.

“If you want to find him, you need to learn to dive. I can teach you, but I couldn’t leave that hanging.”

“Because telling me makes it so much better.” Shut up, she told herself. The poor guy probably feels embarrassed enough just bringing it up.

Now he stood. “I can get you that deep in six weeks. It’s a rush, but with the robots we can still do it safely. If you want to do it, we start tomorrow. Sunrise. Down at the research station. Bring your bathing costume.” He turned and walked back along the pier.

Gemma stood, opened her mouth to call him back, but his slumped shoulders and lowered head made him seem bruised and beaten. By the time she figured what she would say–“it’s all right, I’m flattered”–Dale was already stepping from the pier, heading for his own beat-up traveler.

---

She ran late.

The sun was already up as the little Hyundai screamed through Cedar Bay township. She’d blown it, she knew, and now he’d never teach her.

But there he was as she slammed the traveler into a park and leapt out.

“I’m here,” she shouted.

He stood from bending over the side of the tiny insubstantial boat pulled up into the shingle and gave a curt wave.

Stepping from the grassy strip Gemma felt like she’d crossed a barrier. The stones scraped and chinked audibly under her feet.

“Thought you’d make it,” Dale said as she came up.

Boxes like the trawler’s fish crates made a stack alongside. The boat was constructed from a series of reedy white strips. It seemed as frail as a child’s stick model.

“I didn’t know if you’d wait.”

Dale nodded.

“Seems kind of small.” Gemma put her hand on the bow, almost certain that the little boat would fall apart under her touch. It felt cold, sucking heat from her fingers. The boat’s stern seemed almost within reach. It couldn’t be more than three meters long. A boat like the one she’d hired would cut this in half without slowing.

“We’re not going far,” he said, lifting in a crate.

Gemma swallowed. She’d forgotten. They weren’t searching now. It was just lessons.

“Help me here,” he said.

When they had the boat loaded he took her back into the institute’s shed. The smell felt welcoming now, like safety. He spent an hour on principles. How the masks worked–breathe normally–how to unclip the weights, how to ride a robot to the surface, what to do if she got tangled in something, what to do if she lost her mask, how to switch to the rebreather if the extractor broke, how to switch to the ten-minute tank if the rebreather broke after the extractor broke.

“You’re trying to put me off, right?” she said with a nervous laugh.

“I’m trying to keep you alive.”

How to read the pressure gauge. How to read time–apparently it was easy to lose track with little outside light. How to stay pointing in the same direction. How to surface at the correct rate. It was like being back in the worst classes at school. The ones with the laziest teachers, more interested in imparting facts than genuine learning.

“You’ll be surprised when you get into the water,” Dale said, “by how much you’ll remember.”

She shook her head. “The opposite, I’m thinking.”

In the bay they snorkeled and she began learning how to use a rebreather snorkel to go down longer and deeper.

Within a week she was able to stay down for close to fifteen minutes.

“Progress,” Dale said. “Soon we’ll try the ocean.”

---

Mack put his plane into a cliff. Fifteen miles south of Masie’s house and doing three hundred and eighty knots. There was little left of the plane, and basically only DNA left of the pilot.

Masie stood stoic at the service. Exactly as Gemma remembered her when they’d formally farewelled Theo. Some of his pilot friends did a fly-past, their little planes whistling and low. There was finger food, savories and triangular pink and orange cakes. Gemma had a glass of wine, and a second, wishing she’d had neither as she put the empty glass down. She felt light-headed and she still had to get home.

“I think I’ll move to town,” Masie told her.

“You aren’t going to stay on the hill?” She felt sad for Masie, but wished that her grandmother would show more emotion. How much loss could one person take?

“Well. I realize how much I was coming to rely on him bringing me into town, bringing groceries out to me. I don’t like my own driveway.”

“I can cart your things,” Gemma said. She remembered the driveway, wondering if that was a good idea.

“No. I’ll move.”

Gemma nodded. “It will be nice to have you closer.”

Masie’s eyebrows rose. “Well. I still have to decide where to live. I don’t even know if I’ll stay here. Some of those tropical islands are very nice. Frontierre, The Keys, Dry Narumi. Good property deals too.”

Gemma was about to argue, but held back. If she hadn’t drunk too much she might have been able to order her thoughts better.

“And thank you for coming today.” Masie put her hand on Gemma’s arm. “It means a lot to me.” Masie smiled and faded away into the gathering.

Gemma went home, falling asleep on the way, waking only when the traveler bleeped at her that they’d arrived.

---

A week later Dale took Gemma out to a sheltered reef in his reedy boat. The sky was clear, the sea as transparent as she’d ever seen it.

They’d already practiced off the beach, but today she was going to try the full scuba set with robots. They went down to nine meters, the sea darkening.

She breathed too fast, she kicked too hard.

When she moved she dislodged the mask and it flooded. The internal rebreather tube reached for her mouth, slipping in so she could breathe.

Dale’s hand touched her shoulder and pulled her around. She couldn’t see a thing. He guided her to the surface.

“Not bad,” he said, back on the boat.

“I’m crap.”

“First day.” Dale started the engine and guided them to the beach.

Gemma sat shivering. All this was beyond her. She was never going to find him, and if she ever did, what would she find? Bones?

What was she looking for really?

---

Gemma visited Masie. The Hyundai struggled, but made it all the way up this time. Someone had regraded the driveway.

Dale had worked her hard every day, getting her deeper, getting her to trust the robots. She still didn’t quite, but the little swimmers stuck close, monitored her, made sure she rose at the right rate. Sometimes their lensed faces seemed to be almost intelligent. Friendly.

Not friendly enough to remove her terror.

At least she hadn’t knocked her mask off again, or anything else too bad.

Her grandmother had half her own possessions boxed up, and was working on one of the boxes when Gemma came in.

“You look tanned,” Masie said.

“Spending more time outside. You’re really leaving?”

Masie took a porcelain horse from the mantelpiece and put the statue on a sheet of bubble wrap on the table. The wrap curled up, crackling as it worked, and sealed the horse in a vaguely horse-shaped package. Masie picked up the package. “I can’t really believe I’m ever coming back for these, but you never know.” She put the horse into an open box. The box made scuffling sounds as it rearranged things inside.

“I’ll miss you,” Gemma said.

“Likewise. When you’re done with your project, you should come and join me.”

“My job Grandma, I can’t just go.”

“Job? I mean your diving thing. Oh, I was going to ask if you needed some money.”

“Money?”

Masie sighed. “I know you didn’t keep your job. I know you’re looking for Theo.”

“How can you… all right. And you didn’t try to stop me?”

With a gesture Masie beckoned her towards the kitchen. “I’ll make coffee.”

The kitchen was white now, with a stylish black trim and occasional strips of glowing amber. The old coffee maker was gone, replaced with a simple mechanical plunger. Masie filled it with boiling water from the spigot.

“How is the training going, anyway?” Masie said.

“Slowly. I am not a creature of the water.”

“It’s an old adage, but we all are. In many ways. It will come to you.” Masie got cups. “It’s in your genes, of course.”

“I’m thinking of giving up.”

Masie was about to pour and she put the plunger back down on the counter.

“It doesn’t bother you,” Gemma said. “I mean, that there’s no body? Why am I doing it?”

Masie stared at her. “Are you talking about Mack? Maybe you want to be sure, maybe that’s all it is. The courts have enough information to declare him dead. With Mack it was different. There was…” Masie took a breath. “There were enough remains to test and prove it was him. No one’s seen your father.”

“I just freeze up. I hate it.”

“You could go inland again. Find a good job. Maybe somewhere like Carterton or Agnes. They’re as far from the sea as you can get. But how will you feel? Let me tell you: don’t leave things undone. I don’t need to see his body. He’s my son and I know what he was capable of. You, my dear, might be his daughter, but you don’t. You’ve put him in the same box with your mother.”

“No I haven’t.”

“Well, whatever.” Masie turned back to the bench and poured the coffees. “I’ve already transferred money to your account. You’ll be able to stay out of work and keep looking for a while on that.”

“Grandma.”

“I won’t let you give it back.”

Gemma smiled. “There was money from Dad, anyway. Not a lot, but I’m not going to starve.”

Masie handed her the cup. “Then use my money to pay Dale. Poor kid.”

“All right.” Gemma sipped and the coffee was good.

---

“Money?” Dale said. “Well that’s very cool. How much? No, that’s rude. Pay me what you think.”

“What were you doing for money anyway?”

Dale hung his head. “Well just some tutoring and spearfishing, actually.”

“So if I paid you, we could accelerate my training?”

Dale shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”

---

Six weeks later, a van called at her new apartment. Gemma was on the small balcony doing crunches and heard the vehicle whine along. Three men got out, two clearly the driver and muscle, the other in an unusual, exotic suit. He looked up at her, but didn’t call out. He walked across the road and after a moment she heard the buzzer ring.

Standing, she looked over the rail. “You rang my bell,” she called.

“Gemma Abrique?” He stepped back from the entry, craning his head over. Blonde, thinning hair. He looked maybe forty years old. Corporate.

“That’s me.” Now she saw the van’s livery: Tallon-Equate, Fisheries. Fresher Catch!

“I’m Diego Cutler. I’d like to talk with you.”

“You could have been more subtle. Fanmessage me.”

“We did.”

“Oh. That was you.” She’d blocked every message.

“Can I come up?”

Gemma considered for a moment. She knew what they were going to ask, but she had some questions of her own. “Are you armed?”

“What?” He looked genuinely perplexed.

“Are they armed?” She pointed at the other two men standing by the van. They both shook their heads.

“No,” Cutler said. “We-”

“Did you kill my father?”

Cutler waved and both the men by the van moved, stepping around behind the vehicle.

“Tell them to come out,” Gemma said. “Hey. Come out of there.” She stepped back from the balcony railing, wary.

The van drove away. Gemma watched for a moment and looked back at Cutler. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Cutler nodded. “I didn’t kill your father. We need you to stop looking for him.”

“I didn’t mean you personally,” Gemma said. She waited.

“Will you let me come up?”

“No.”

Cutler pulled out a minifan and spoke at it. Gemma didn’t hear. When he was done, he looked up at her. “I’ll ask again. Please stop what you’re doing.”

The van had turned around and it whined off along the narrow road. It stopped by Cutler and the back door opened.

“Please,” he said.

“We’ll see,” she said.

“Not good enough.” He closed the door and the van drove off.

Gemma went inside and called Dale. “We have to go now,” she told him and broke the connection before he could argue.

---

“So they really did kill him?” Dale said as the boat motored out. Behind them came the barge covered with the robots and all their gear.

Gemma clung to the ropes. Salt sprayed her face. The water was choppier than she’d ever experienced. The continuous thwack of waves against the side jarred her. The sea was black. She threw up over the side.

“Nice,” Dale said.

“I don’t know if they killed him,” Gemma said. “But the threat was implicit.”

“They’ll know we’re out here,” Dale said. “They can track everything.”

Gemma didn’t reply.

A half hour later Dale stopped the boat and put out the motorized anchor. The machine circled, antennae shivering. Happy with its location it dived out of view, leaving a trail of bubbles.

They were out of sight of land. Dale flipped a switch on the console and half of the robots flipped themselves from the barge. They splashed and paddled over, forming up in two lines of six, bobbing near the boat.

Dale and Gemma got into their neoprene and scuba. Gemma shivered.

“You’ll be fine,” Dale said.

Gemma pointed to a trawler on the horizon. “We’ve got company.”

“Not coming towards us.”

Gemma watched the boat and pulled on her flippers. They tickled as they welded themselves to her feet and the neoprene at her ankles.

She felt bleak. This was the first real dive of the search. It seemed impossible. After all this time he could be anywhere. Nippon, or The Sandastries, or just a couple of hundred yards in the wrong direction, entirely out of sight.

A gull landed on the boat’s bowsprit. The bird flared its grey feathers at her, revealing orange and pink under the wings. It squawked. Even though it was a few meters away, she could smell its fishy stink. “Go catch dinner,” she told it and waved. The gull flew off with another squawk.

Dale jumped into the water. He ducked under and came back up. The robots gurgled in anticipation. Two of them dove.

“One thing I need to tell you,” Dale said.

“Okay.” Gemma settled her mask on her forehead, feeling the strap pinch her ear.

“We’re outside your search grid.”

Gemma swallowed. “Where are we?” She felt beaten. Even Dale, who’d been reluctantly forthcoming was now sabotaging it.

“Something I need to show you.”

“Take me to the–”

“No. If you want to go there, you have to do this dive first. We’re going down a hundred and fifty meters.”

“Nowhere in the grid is that deep.” Mostly it was no more than thirty, with a few small trenches reaching eighty.

“That’s right. Get in the water.”

Cursing him, she complied. He checked her mask and gave her a thumbs up. He plugged in the monofilament and spoke.

“Good sound?”

“I hear you,” she said.

“Great.” Tipping himself up, he vanished under the surface.

Gemma looked over at the trawler. It seemed no closer, but she was lower in the water now. Distances were deceptive.

“Come on,” Dale said. The monofilament would be unspooling, keeping them in contact.

Gemma followed. She kicked, seeing his light ahead. The robots swirled around him, leaving a double-helix of bubbles as they sped down. She knew hers were doing the same, though the bubbles would quickly run out and they would be in near darkness with only the fading cone glows of their lights.

“Why are we here?” she said.

“Something you need to see.”

“What?”

“It’s better if you just see it.”

Gemma sighed, checked the readings on the mask’s visor. Pressure rising, of course. Air flow normal. Temperature eight degrees Celsius. It always got cold fast. Another ten or fifteen meters it might be as low as three degrees. The suit’s miniature heaters came on.

One of the robots swam in front of her, its oblong body curling around as it sent out a lens. She gave it a thumbs-up and it drifted out of view.

Descents were boring. Just down and down into the darkness. She couldn’t imagine the appeal to her father at all.

They passed fifty meters. She saw some glistening tendrils as a jellyfish swam by, yellows and crimsons glowed back at her. Two of the robots moved in close to the tendrils, making sure she didn’t get snared.

At seventy-five meters Dale checked in with her, asking if she was doing all right.

“Aren’t you getting my telemetry feeds?” She knew he was.

“Did the beads fix your ears?”

“Yes.” She hadn’t been this deep before. She had to trust the equipment. Had to trust Dale.

“Good.” He fell silent.

Gemma had to give herself an imaginary pinch. She, Gemma Abrique, was below the surface of the water. So far below that even if she kicked right now, as hard as she could, there was no way she could hold her breath all the way to the surface. She was entirely dependent on the equipment. She trembled.

It was cold and despite the efficiency of the suit, she was aware of how chilly it was becoming.

Ahead something loomed up. At first it was like some white disturbance in the water, perhaps a concentration of jellyfish or smaller creatures. Plankton or atomites. Another few meters and she saw there was a solidity to the thing, even as the edges seemed fuzzy. White and massive, like the tip of a curved finger, pointing to the surface. Coated with a whisper of furry tendrils and hairs.

A bone.

It was thick. As wide as she was tall. Bigger than the boat they’d come out in. And this, she thought, was just the very end. Further down it must widen.

“A rib,” Dale said. He’d come to a stop and hovered in the water nearby. His robots held with him, their little propeller flippers turning slowly. “At least what passes for a rib. Their physiology is very different from ours. The bones have their own systems, almost separate from the rest of the body. Such massive bulk.”

“I read some,” she said. “Organs and circulation.”

“Good, yes. Such big creatures require simplicity and complexity at once.”

“This is one of the whales?”

Dale laughed. “Whales. It hardly does them justice. Leviathans? Behemoths? We struggled with a good name. Technically we labeled them Odonceti praegrandis, but that’s just holding, until there’s full publication.”

Gemma reached out to touch the end. She’d already dropped almost a meter below the very tip and could see the other end dropping into the darkness below. As she reached one of her robots came in close, winding one of its thin arms out.

Her gloved finger made contact. At first the bone felt squishy and she ran her finger along, leaving a trail of lighter green through it. “Algae?”

“Algae, seaweed. Worms. This is the whale fall your father was researching. We’re still a long way from the bottom.” Dale ducked and kicked on down.

Gemma tried to dig through the algae, but it was rubbery and cohesive under her finger. She kind of wanted to take the glove off and chip at the algae coating with her nails, but imagined her hand freezing immediately. She kicked on after Dale.

The bone thickened as they dropped. It became like some giant pylon. A tower on which they could mount a massive wind-turbine. The algae and weed thickened too. She saw small anemones, shimmering through blue and indigo. Tiny white and gold fish darted around, feeding on the algae. Something that looked like a barracuda swept by, arrowing through the tiny fish. Some of them disappeared into a netlike bowl that spread from the long fish’s mouth. The net closed and the fish disappeared into the gloom.

“See that?” she said. The surviving white and gold fish began to reappear.

“Predator fish,” Dale said from a few meters below. He was dropping slowly facing up, watching her. “How’s your air? You feeling comfortable?”

The depth read one hundred and ten meters. Far too deep for any reasonable rational person.

On the bone a five-limbed blob swirled along. Each of its legs curled like a snake, narrowing to hair-width whips. It crept through a miniature vertical forest of anemones and algae branches. “Pentapus,” she said.

“What’s that?” Dale said. He kicked up and touched the camera on his mask. The little instrument flickered. “I haven’t seen one of those before.” He moved close. “Not like that. Mottled body, small.”

“I guess there’s still a lot to catalogue down here.”

“Yep. We just discovered Gemma’s Pentapus.”

She smiled, reached out to touch it. The small creature seemed to burst in a cloud of red. “Oh!” She’d killed it. “I didn’t mean to.” How could it be so fragile?

“Relax,” Dale said. “Defence mechanism.” He waved his hand and the bloom dissipated. He pointed. Gemma saw the pentapus scuttling on up the bone.

“Why would the fisheries try to stop you? Surely you can discover more ways for them to make money.”

“Huh,” Dale said. “Never picked you as a capitalist.”

“Try losing your job.”

As they descended, the growths on the bone thickened and expanded. Soon it was more like a rock face with a garden than a bone at all. There was still a general cylindrical shape, but it became craggy and irregular.

“They would have us stop because we might discover something that means they have to stop.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe we find out that they’re killing too much. Or that there’s some toxicity. Or maybe that they’re irresponsible. I can show you some of that.”

“All right.”

The robots’ lights played over the expanding garden of tree-like branches and bright wafting flowers. There were hundreds of fish now, darting around in loops, flocking like birds and spinning off on their own. Some of them had legs and arms with wide paddles on the end, some had long beaks. There were eyes on stalks, fish like donuts with a hole from side-to-side big enough for her to put her hand through, animals like her pentapus, but with stubby legs each tipped with double-bladed flukes.

Some of the creatures were partly luminous, with bright spots along their flanks. Likewise some of the plants, glowing and phosphorescent. It was subtle and she only noticed it in the shadow cast from the robots’ lights.

And they came in a plethora of colors; rainbows from head to tail, stripes both vertical and horizontal, some pleasing combinations of white and black or blue and orange, but others showed warnings of crimson against yellow and amber or sharp jags of icy blue against rusty reds. Chameleon fish changed colors, others had tails that were made up of clusters of green tendrils, waving in the current.

“This is what we did,” Dale said. “We’re nearly at the bottom, then you’ll see something.”

The bone–though she had to remind herself that there was a bone under all that growth–angled now, leading them inwards. Soon the whole thing flattened out. Broad leafed seaweed wafted at them, holding out long translucent pods through which she saw movement.

“Eggs?” she said.

“Sharkweed,” Dale said. “Symbiosis. I was going to write a paper on them. Still figuring that all out. I could go on for hours. This way.”

Gemma thought that it couldn’t get any more fascinating, but as they kicked along horizontally she saw more and more. The barracuda’s cousin, fat and bright, anemones the size of a dining chair, tendrils like ears of corn, schools of fish that swam in patterns like ballet troupes.

“So much color,” she said. “So deep.” She looked up into the darkness, the fish and other creatures like dust above her before the darkness closed in.

She shuddered. So deep.

She was dead, now, if something went wrong. No wonder this ocean had taken her father.

“Gemma?” Dale said. “Breathe easy.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

Dale kicked over and looked into her mask. “We’re about at the skull. Is that okay?”

She nodded. “Yes. Show me.”

“I want to show you something else first. Hold here and let me talk to the robots.”

“Sure.”

“Attention,” he said. “Give me the star pattern, with lights, focused out.”

Gemma heard the robots give him a series of confirmation bleeps. She saw their lights fading as they swam away.

“Attention number five,” Dale said. “Bring yourself in line.”

The light pattern adjusted. The lead two had all but vanished. Gemma could hear her own breathing. It was scary watching the robots go off like that. They were supposed to help in an emergency and down here that could happen in a second.

But she trusted Dale, she realized. Not because of anything he’d done before, but on this very descent.

“You’re all right, you know,” she told him.

He gave a little acknowledging grunt. “Attention. Come lower, bring on lights. Slow dial.”

The faint glow began to increase. Soon the lights were at their greatest brightness. It wasn’t like daylight, but the illuminated area expanded. No longer did she feel like she was trapped in a tiny bubble in darkness. That darkness receded away at least fifty meters.

It reminded her of Masie’s garden. At its most overgrown, blooming and out-of-control spring burst.

All around, across the seabed, there were young corals and lanky seaweeds. Fish, big and small, darted, alone and in schools. Some moved like clownfish in among the long fronds of anemones. Violet brittlestars the size of goats crept along the green and orange puffs of algae. Triple-shelled mollusks pumped open and closed, sluicing water through their fangs, slim filaments rippling as they drew sustenance from the tiniest particles. The barrage of colors on the urchins and shells and creeping creatures seemed like the results of an unsupervised grade-school paint war.

The thick whale ribs rose up like the arching pillars on a vast underwater cathedral, offering protection to the flock within the new light.

“Teeming,” she said. “That’s the word. Teeming with life.” She remembered her father using it once, in one of his curt conversations.

“Exactly,” Dale said. “And you have to realize that outside the body, it’s almost barren. Crabs burrowing into the mud, worms, some shellfish. Nothing like this.”

“Dad told me. One big ecosystem.”

“The question is,” Dale said, “does it last after the last of the whale has been devoured? There’s little soft tissue left. The bones still hold it together, but they won’t last forever.”

“How old?” she said. In the light she saw some kind of net caught up in one of the farthest of the ribs. The net waved in the slight current, smaller bones and flesh caught in its weave.

She wondered if the fisheries had prevented the publication of her father’s work. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened.

“We think about thirty years since the animal died. We estimate five years before enough of the skin and tissue had gone before higher life forms took hold. We probably won’t be around long enough to see what happens when the bones finally go.”

“My father.” His research was all over now.

“Yes. You should come and see the skull.” Dale called the robots back and kicked away.

Gemma watched as the light faded. The dark rolled in, hiding the magnificent garden away. She hung in the water for a moment longer, the robots paddling by her.

Seeing this, she wondered how important it was to find him. She felt like she might be closer to understanding him.

The skull was the size of her condo block. It lay on its side, twisted from the main body. Dale explained how it must have fallen. Like the base of the ribs, it was covered in myriad different kinds of life, all packed in and jostling for position.

“There must be others,” she said as they swam around. She saw something that looked like a plastic basket, wedged in against a cluster of limpets. At first she thought it was another kind of plant or animal, but she saw the metal clasp and broken braided line tied to it. A crab pot.

“Hundreds,” Dale said. “If not thousands. But it’s a big ocean. This is the only one we’ve found so far.”

He still spoke of her father in the present tense, she thought. Still includes him in part of his routine.

She wished she had that.

“I need to show you this last thing,” he said. “It might be scary.”

“I’m fifty stories under the ocean’s surface. I’m already terrified out of my wits.”

“You’re doing great.”

He was right, she realized. This felt so calming. This amazing animal here, giving life so long after death.

“I guess I am,” she said. “I understand why you brought me here.” After this, the search for her father was going to be mundane, depressing. Swimming grids across that bland wormy and crabby mud.

No, she decided. She was definitely going to find him. Not just look, but find. Masie would tell her there was a difference.

“You don’t yet.” Dale swam in front of her. “We’re going inside the skull. This is different to open water diving, all right? You’ll be in a confined space.”

Right away she felt her heart rate increase, her breathing speed up. “Maybe another time.”

“We should do it now.”

“I haven’t trained.”

“Nothing can train you for this.”

“If it’s so dangerous…” she trailed off.

“Trust me,” Dale said.

She swallowed. She felt hot. The suit felt constricting. She wanted to be back with the robots’ lights throwing the garden into its brilliant Monet of color and radiance.

“Attention,” Dale said. “Cavity swim, regular lights, optimum care.”

The robots swam around them, forming into a line like ants and descending along the side of the skull. Dale took her hand.

“Just follow along. We’ll get out the moment you feel uncomfortable.”

“I feel uncomfortable.”

Dale didn’t let go, though she knew she could pull her hand away anytime. Below a huge hole became visible, a black notch in the skull’s side. The robots trailed into it, lights blazing. Dale brought her around to the hole, only a couple of meters wide. It curved away from them.

“Like the cetaceans back on Earth,” Dale said, “these guys breathe air and have blowholes at the top of their skulls. Nostrils.”

“Some nostril.” When you’re the size of a football stadium, you’re going to need massive pipes, she thought.

“We’ll swim through. It’s about four meters and then we’re in the big cavity.”

Gemma trembled. “The brain.”

“That’s right. Not usually connected, but it broke through at some point. If you panic, just relax, the robots will know what to do.”

“All right.” It was far from all right, but she followed him in.

“Attention, minimum propulsion. Drift. Steady only.”

The robots bleeped their acknowledgment.

The tunnel felt claustrophobic. She felt like she was swimming into a narrowing storm water drain. There was still growth on the walls, strong and as vibrant as out in the main part of the whale fall.

“Attention,” Dale said. “Dim. Quadrants.”

The light faded. With her own lights–still as bright–she saw how the tube opened up to other narrow side tubes. Didn’t the animals sing complex tunes to each other all around the planet? It would take a powerful, complex system create those deep sounds and send them half a world away. She imagined the ear canal being even more complex.

“Here,” Dale said.

The tube broadened and came to an end, letting into a bigger cavity. Dale shifted in, turned so he was hanging upright. He held his hand out to guide her in.

The robots hung in a circle, their lights low.

“The braincase?” she said. She trembled. If only she could have told her father how many fears she had dealt with today.

“Yes,” Dale said. “Go easy with your movements. The water is very clear here, but it’s still easy to stir it up.”

She could see that. Inside the volume it seemed like the robots were weightless in clear air. They might be in orbit, drifting over the nightside in the dark. Inside she imagined the hole could swallow Masie’s house. It might be five hundred cubic meters.

The walls were festooned with gray-green streamers of algae. From the roof hung broad stalactites the color of eggshell. “The skull is thick?” she said. “These are some kind of animal that devours the bone?”

“Exactly.” Dale’s voice sounded distant, reserved.

Careful not to move too fast and stir things up, she turned to face him. His face seemed sad.

“What?” she said.

“Look.” He lifted his arm and pointed downward.

Again slowly she turned and looked.

“Attention,” Dale said. “Gradual lights half.”

The robots wound up the brightness and she saw it right away.

The central bowl at the bottom of the cavity bloomed with as great a variety of animal and plant life as outside in the main area. But there was something else.

Black and tubular. An abandoned dive suit.

Gemma gasped. She pulled with her arms, drawing herself down. “My father’s?” She could see a line spiraling along the suit’s arm, from wrist to shoulder, spaced with big vicious barbed hooks.

“They did kill him?”

“An accident, I think. Come closer.” Dale swam with her, coming right down to the bottom.

One of the pentapusses shot out, tentacles spinning. It vanished through a hole.

Gemma saw the bones.

Human.

“Oh.”

“You need to breathe easy,” Dale said. “If you get off-scale I’m going to take you back to the surface.”

She kicked closer, aware that she would be roiling detritus, spoiling the perfect clarity.

It was a ribcage, and a clavicle and shoulder blade. Part of the spine. Flesh still clung to parts. A small stalked barnacle had rooted itself in the sternum, shell turning slowly, a series of tongues rippling out from the narrow opening. She saw others, a worm, some fish swimming through the gaps. A big red anemone where her father’s heart would have been.

She couldn’t repress a whimper.

“All right?” Dale said.

“You knew,” she whispered. “You knew all along, and you led me to believe that I still had to search.”

Dale didn’t reply.

Gemma turned on him. “You could have brought me straight in here. Actually, no. You could have brought him to the surface. We could have had a proper burial.”

“Yes,” he said. “All of those things. You’re right.”

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to cry, to curl up in a ball on her bed with the door locked and never come out. Instead here she was stuck at the bottom of the ocean. Stuck inside the skull of some giant cadaver.

Right next to her father.

Right where he’d died.

Right where, she realized, he should be.

“Can we turn the lights down again?” she said. “I think I need a moment.”

Dale gave the order and the light dimmed. She sensed him moving back.

For a moment, she looked at where her father lay. Despite everything, this was, she knew, the perfect resting place.

A school of white tiny-bodied fish with big tails swam through. Each one had a circular black spot right in the middle of their side.

Some glistening bubbles rose up from the algae where her father’s skull lay hidden. A starfish crawled slowly down one of the stalactites. Each limb was as thick as her father’s fingers had been, and each was a different color.

It took almost fifteen minutes before she felt ready to leave.

“I need a photograph,” she said.

“Of course. Just tell your mask.”

She’d forgotten. “All right,” she said when it was done. “Take me back to the boat.”

---

The dents in her grandmother’s lawn from Mack’s landings had been filled. Gemma watched the bright horizon. Tall white thunderheads lined the wall of the world. Not ready to rain, just holding and swirling. A fresh off-shore breeze tousled her hair.

“It does seem odd,” Masie said beside her, “to have a second service.”

“But this time we know.”

Masie nodded. She had the photograph, a single still image of the barnacle. It was enough, after Gemma had told her grandmother the story. To take a photograph of Theo’s bones seemed too morbid.

“It seems a good symmetry,” Masie said. “Study them, lie with them.”

“I’m glad Dale didn’t bring him up,” Gemma said.

“Dale’s a smart guy. Single?”

Gemma laughed. “Yes. Keep your distance.”

Masie laughed with her and put her thin hand on Gemma’s arm. “Time to let him go.”

Gemma took the other side of tissue-paper print of the barnacle and together they lifted their hands.

“Bye Dad,” Gemma said.

Masie didn’t say anything and together they let go.

The breeze grabbed the translucent page, lifting it up swirling and twisting, carrying it out over the ocean.

---

The Right Decision

By Carl Grafe

This had better be worth it.

The thin plastic chip feels weightless in the palm of my hand–almost cheap. I clutch it tightly to keep it from blowing away in the light breeze outside the outlet store. It definitely wasn’t cheap. When Tess finds out about the payday loan I took out to pay for it, she’ll be hysterical. I can almost hear her:

Timothy Alan Dunway, you’ve ruined us! Absolutely ruined us! And for what? A piece of plastic?”

But she’ll be wrong. This chip will rescue us from ruin.

I walk down the street towards the high speed rail platform. As I wait for the train, I look down at the chip. But what if I’m wrong? After all, I’ve been wrong before. I was wrong about the house, wrong about the cars, wrong about the credit cards. I was wrong about the investment company that disappeared, taking with it what remained of our savings.

But this is different. This chip will make all those wrong decisions right. Instead of having to rely on my own intuitions, I’ll be able to rely on the chip. It’ll fix things.

The chip is the absolute cutting edge–the latest in tech sophistication. It implants right into your brain behind your ear, where your phone usually goes. Based on sensory inputs, it perpetually runs scenarios to determine which possible outcomes are most likely to be favorable. Every decision I make– caffeinated or decaf? Solar or nuclear? Should I wear that sweater? should I make that purchase?–I’ll have this chip in my brain, running millions of simulations, and determining, based on real data, which decisions have the highest probability of success.

It will fix everything.

The train rounds the corner and slows to a stop. I press the button for the door with one hand, the chip still held firmly in the other. I find a secluded seat and open my hand.

I frown. Why haven’t I put it in yet? This isn’t like those other decisions. This was a good decision! But I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Sure, it’s not technically on the market yet. And the guy at the shop acted a lot like those guys at the car lots. But that’s part of why this is so smart–I got cutting edge technology, and I got it at a fraction of the retail price!

My frown deepens. Well, at least what the retail price will be once it’s legal to sell.

The train starts pulling away from the station. I turn the chip over in my hands, and then turn it over again. I take a deep breath and hurriedly insert the chip into the flesh behind my left ear.

I sit there, staring blankly, trying to detect the difference, searching for some evidence of my new reasoning power. But there’s nothing. A minute passes, and my eyes flutter, blinking away the developing mist. I try to control my heart rate and breathing, but I can’t help it. I bury my face in my hands, and the tears come. I think of the money spent, the promises made, and gradually my anguish contorts into rage. I raise my face from my hands, eyes burning, and reach up behind my ear to rip out the sham chip.

And then I stop. That is not the correct course of action. There’s no warning bell, no flash of data, just a feeling. An intuition. A certainty that I’ve never felt before.

I put my hand back down. It works. I know it, deep within me, more confidently than I’ve known anything in my life. It really works. I grin, sheepishly at first, but then proudly–defiantly. And why not? I was right, wasn’t I? I was right! I start asking myself questions. Should I get off the train now and go celebrate? No, of course not, I’ve got to go home and tell Tess! Should I wait to tell her until tomorrow and make it a big surprise? No, better to tell her right away. Maybe I should have others on the train ask me questions, and see if I can answer correctly. I could bet them money. Should I go to a casino?

My thoughts are interrupted by the overhead speakers announcing that my stop is next. I’m still smiling. I stand and get ready to disembark. I reach for the orangutan bar.

I freeze. I reached for the what? The train slows. I look out the window as the talk show homogenizes. I shake my head again. What was that? The telekinesis canned headstone appurtenance blurs past the analgesia emus brain. Something curtain crying wrong with gullet brain phlebitis chip? Peppery larval train dessert stops usher thick door muslin opens inaugural walk vole down coltish steps. Can’t sporty think miserable doorbell stumble spyglass out despotism onto flashy train gastronomic tracks. Respite conductive lights storefront oncoming librarian train graduate oh–

I open my eyes and see the sky. I turn my head a little to the right and feel the chip, knocked loose, drop from behind my ear. I see my train. I see people from the train coming towards me. They speak to me, but I can’t hear them. I look down at my crumpled body. I look past it to the other train, looming above me. People are coming from it as well. I feel my organs struggling.

I was wrong. About the chip, about everything. I’m always wrong. I think about Tess. She’ll be hysterical. She’ll blame me for everything, for leaving her penniless, ruined. For leaving her widowed. She’ll be angry, and bitter. She’ll be lonely.

But at least she’ll be right.

---

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

© Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved

www.TheColoredLens.com

---

The Colored Lens

Speculative Fiction Magazine

Summer 2014 – Issue #12

Featuring works by Julie Jackson, Imogen Cassidy, Jamie Lackey, J. C. Conway, Kristen Hatten, Jenni Moody, Jarod K. Anderson, Daniel Rosen, R.E. Awan, Judith Field, Bo Balder, and Diane Kenealy.

Edited by Dawn Lloyd and Daniel Scott

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

© Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved

www.TheColoredLens.com

---

Table of Contents

• Bioluminescence by Kristen Hatten
• The Knack Bomb by Bo Balder
• Murphy’s Traverse by J. C. Conway
• The Mark by R.E. Awan
• Psychopomps by Judith Field
• Beta Child by Imogen Cassidy
• Sister Winter by Jenni Moody
• A Scratch, a Scratch by Diane Kenealy
• Items of Thanks by Jamie Lackey
• The Hands That Coded Heaven by Daniel Rosen
• Everything I Should Have Told Her by Julie Jackson
• A Junker’s Kiss by Jarod K. Anderson

---

Bioluminescence

By Kristen Hatten

I am running.

I am running down a hallway.

I am running down a hallway and they are chasing me, but they won’t catch me.

I don’t know what I am, but all of a sudden, I know I’m fast.

---

The doctor was in on it the whole time. He pretended to be interested, maybe concerned. But not scared. Not worried. He talked about bioluminescence, about algae that makes whole stretches of coastline glow in the dark. He said “perfectly rational explanation” several times.

Then he told me to relax. He told me I could lie down. He even adjusted the bed for me. “I thought only nurses do that,” I told him. I don’t know if he even heard what I said; the tissue against my nose muffled my words.

He smiled absently, said, “I’m gonna switch out the light so you can rest,” and left the room.

An hour before, I thought I’d never sleep again. But it’s amazing what a dim room and cool air can do.

I slept.

I dreamed.

---

In the dream I am in an elevator. It’s huge, as big as a ballroom in a palace in a fairy tale. It’s dim and cool, like the hospital room.

I’m not alone in here. There are hundreds of us. We are standing in rows. The rows are even and uniform. We all face the doors, but they are far away from me.

I feel us descending. It’s a mild, pleasant sensation. I feel a hum. We are all quiet, still, waiting.

Soon the doors will open. I am afraid.

I look at the backs of hundreds of heads, and I realize something: we all have the same hair. Not the same length or the same cut, but the same exact hair. It is the same color brown. The same exact color brown. The same barely wavy texture, with the same dusky gloss.

I glow with affection for every head I see.

Then the doors open. The light comes in. My hair moves on my head, on hundreds of heads, in a slight breeze.

The light is the brightest thing I’ve ever seen. I want to flinch, but my eyes don’t close. I roll forward. The light is getting closer. I see it illuminating my hair, over and over.

Then I’m inside the light. Everything is bright and new. And a terror comes screeching up inside me.

I wake up.

---

I wake up screaming.

There’s a woman. She’s standing just inside the door to the hospital room, which is closed. So are the blinds. I can no longer see into the hallway. The hallway can no longer see me.

The woman has two men with her. All three of them wear dark blue suits. The men wear sunglasses.

The woman is very tall. Her skin is white and her eyes are pale green. I think of the green color of the forms we used to take tests on in school, before everything was done on computers. They were called Scantrons.

“Eye rest green,” says the woman. Her voice is deep and luxe, like a European supermodel who smokes cigarettes.

“Pardon?” I say. I am vaguely embarrassed. A few seconds ago I was screaming.

“Green is used on Scantron forms and graphing paper because it is the color most restful to the eye. It’s right in the middle of the visible light spectrum.”

While she’s saying this, she is rolling one of those little padded stools over to me, the kind doctors roll around the room on while they examine you. She manages to lean over and roll this stool around while still looking elegant. Expensive. Her legs are long and white.

She doesn’t sit on the stool. She just leaves it there and walks back over to the end of the hospital bed. She looks down at me and smiles. Her canine teeth are markedly pointed, lending a predatory cast to her face, which I’m just now noticing is beautiful.

When she smiles her cheekbones make gorgeous mounds under her slanted green eyes.

“Green,” says the woman, and it’s like she read my mind again – but no – maybe she’s still just talking about Scantron forms, “is associated by most of us in this country with youth, fertility, money, envy, and hope.” I realize she has a slight accent, but I can’t place it. “It is also the color of safety and permission.”

She turns and looks at one of the men in sunglasses. I had forgotten they were there.

One of the men starts moving. He moves to the stool. He turns to the other man. They are both so tall. In fact, so is the woman. She must be six feet tall, and the men well over.

One man is holding the stool now, and the other is standing on it. I open my mouth to ask what they’re doing, but I’m interrupted.

“Green eyes,” says the woman, and my head turns to her like it’s on a swivel as she slowly walks over to my bedside, towards my head, “contain no green pigment.” I hear the soft clicks of her heels on the linoleum. She is right above me, looking down at me. I can see the fine, downy texture of the pale skin of her face. I notice suddenly that her hair is an enchanting blonde color. You can’t quite call it strawberry blonde. It’s the color of a white peach.

“The green color is an optical illusion.” She’s almost whispering. “Its appearance is caused by a combination of two things: one, a little bit of melanin pigmenting the stroma light brown or amber. And two, the scattering of reflected light creating a blue tone.”

Her eyes flick up and I follow them.

The two men are back where they started, standing motionless on either side of the door. They look like they never moved. In fact, everything looks the same.

Except a ceiling tile is missing.

A ceiling tile is missing and the pipes in the ceiling are exposed.

A ceiling tile is missing and the pipes in the ceiling are exposed and there’s a noose hanging from one of them.

---

I woke up today and it was just like any other day, except worse. It would have been our three year anniversary, except I got dumped two weeks ago.

I woke up late because I fell asleep with my phone under me and didn’t hear the alarm. Didn’t have time to shower. The sink was full of dishes and the fridge had nothing in it but expired condiments and the rest of a Jell-O mold I brought home from Thanksgiving dinner two weeks ago and never ate.

That was the morning I got dumped. When I look at the Jell-O mold that’s all I can think of.

My mom always gives me the Jell-O leftovers because I liked them so much when I was a kid. But I’m not a kid anymore.

As I stood staring at the contents of my fridge, I had the sudden urge to set fire to my crappy apartment. In fact, the entire crappy apartment complex. And my piece of shit car. And my cubicle. And my micro-managing piss-ant of a boss. And my uncertain future full of student loan debt and mediocrity and steadily dwindling options. All of it. Just torch it and walk away into oblivion like a character in a Jim Morrison song.

Instead I grabbed a semi-shriveled apple out of the crisper and left for work.

A few minutes later, I was feeling simultaneously good because my car didn’t overheat today, and bad because I was almost at the office, when I felt my nose running.

I reached up and wiped it.

I reached up and wiped it and glanced down at my hand.

I reached up and wiped it and glanced down at my hand and saw something I wasn’t expecting.

It wasn’t the semi-transparent milk white or green of human snot.

It was purple.

Bright, neon violet.

And it was glowing.

---

In the bathroom at work, I stared at myself in the mirror. More of the purple stuff was coming out of my nose. My heart was pounding. My face was sweating. I could feel my hair sticking to my skull.

I looked at myself in the mirror. It is just me. Just me, I told myself.

I soaked a paper towel in cold water and put it on my neck.

Am I dying?

I felt my pulse. It was fast, but strong. I didn’t feel dizzy. I was hot and sweaty, but that’s because I was panicking. Because a glowing purple fluid just ran out of my nose.

I made myself breathe more slowly. I focused all my attention on the cool sensation of the wet towel on my neck. I closed my eyes.

I’m okay, I said to myself. I repeated a mantra I learned a long time ago when the panic attacks were bad: I am safe no matter what I’m feeling.

I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror. I looked like I always looked: brown hair, green eyes, slightly wide mouth with the remains of a zit below my bottom lip, slightly pointed chin. It’s just me.

My right hand was holding the wet paper towel against the back of my neck.

As I was looking at myself, I felt a sneeze coming.

It came fast. I barely had time to yank the wet towel off my neck so I would have something to sneeze into.

But it wasn’t a sneeze. Not really. It felt truncated, odd. And a sensation–not painful, but hot and strange – shot from my sinus cavity up into the top of my head. It was gone in an instant.

I looked down at the towel. There was a gob of the stuff. The glowing purple stuff. And in the midst of it, what looked like a small, transparent marble.

My heart was running away without me.

Slowly, with a shaking finger, I touched the marble. It felt hard. Like a marble.

When I touched it, it began to turn purple. And glow.

I looked up, into the mirror.

My nose was dripping now, dripping glowing violet purple, just dripping, dripping dripping dripping from my nose like a faucet.

---

I was in my car in seconds.

I was on the freeway in less than a minute.

I was at the nearest hospital in less time than it takes to microwave a chicken pot pie.

---

The wait wasn’t long. There was hardly anyone in the lobby. The triage nurse gasped when I pulled the tissue away. I was placed in an exam room almost immediately.

For some reason I still couldn’t tell you, I didn’t show her the marble.

Then the doctor came. He was soothing and reassuring. My pulse returned to normal.

I bet I could even sleep, I said to myself.

And then I woke up and the woman was there with the two men and all hell broke loose.

---

I’m looking up at the noose. It’s not really a noose. Not like in the movies. It’s just a loop of rope tied with the kind of knot that slides, so the noose can get tighter.

I can feel my pulse in my throat for a few seconds while I lie there, feeling nothing but dumb animal fear.

Then a stinging sensation shoots into my right arm. A warm buzzing pain flows through the muscle.

I look down. I see the woman’s perfect white hand holding a syringe.

“What the fuck?” I say. It’s the first thing I’ve said, besides “pardon?”, since these people walked into the room.

Then everything begins to fade. Everything matters less, instantly. I feel mildly nauseated, but it’s no big deal. I decide to sit up, but when I try to use my arms to lift myself, all they do is flop around at my sides.

“Sometimes,” the woman is saying, somewhere off to my right, several miles away, “green is associated with illness, death, or the devil.”

My eyes are closed. I feel my heartbeat. It is slow and peaceful. I could listen to it forever.

I open my eyes.

My feet are on something. I’m higher off the ground than I should be. Something rough and scratchy is falling around my ears, landing on my shoulders. It gets tighter. It scratches my neck. It’s so hard to care. I try to say I need to take a nap. I try to ask them to stop. This formulates in my brain as “Come back later.” I decide to speak the words, “Come back later.” But they come out, “Ssnnn.”

“The ancient Egyptians called the sea the Very Green.” Her eyes gleam.

This is the last thing she says to me.

This is the last thing she says to me before they roll the little stool out from under me.

This is the last thing she says to me before they hang me.

---

Because they drugged me with something, I lose consciousness almost immediately. Which is nice. I wasn’t looking forward to asphyxiation.

Instead I’m floating. And dreaming.

I’m under a green tree on a green hill.

The sky is blue and cloudless. A gentle wind blows. It is warm and cool at the same time. I hear birds. I see the grass blowing in the breeze.

I am facing the tree trunk. I have my hands on it, and I’m feeling it. I love the feel of it. It feels miraculous. But it’s time to turn around.

I turn around, and a line of people stretches in front of me, as far as I can see, down the hill and far away. I recognize them immediately. We were in the elevator together. They all have my hair. But I’m finally seeing their faces. They are infinitely various and totally familiar. I’ve never seen them before, but I’d know them anywhere.

They come to me one by one.

The first is a woman. She has dark skin and brown eyes. She holds out her hand and gives me a small, transparent marble. When she puts it in my hand, it turns violet and glows. She goes away.

Then the next one. A man. He has lines around his eyes. He gives me a marble. It glows violet. He goes away.

They keep coming and coming. They smile and nod. They seem very pleased to see me. They say nothing.

I know they will keep coming for a long time, but I’m not tired. I am strong. I am strong enough for anything.

But this one in front of me now. She is younger than the rest, by a little. Her hair–my hair–is bobbed and blows right into her freckled face. She isn’t smiling like the rest. Her face is fierce. Her eyes are bright blue and determined. With an angry hand she swipes the hair from her face. The wind is stronger now.

She speaks to me.

She says, “Fight them.”

She grabs me by the shoulders and yells in my face, “Wake the fuck up and fight them!”

Above her the sky has dimmed. Behind her the line of people stands waiting. They aren’t smiling anymore.

The girl with the blue eyes slaps my face, hard. It stings. A warm bloom spreads across my cheek.

Her face is an inch from mine. She is screaming.

“Now! Now! Fight them! You can! You can beat them! Fight them now or you’re going to die!”

---

The first thing I see when I open my eyes is my foot smashing the nose of the woman with the green eyes.

I know the men are coming towards me before they move. I smash one of their noses with the same foot. I get the other around the throat with my thighs.

I push up on his shoulders until the rope is slack and use my hands to pull the noose from around my neck. He is trying to free himself but his hands are dough and my legs are steel.

Once my head is free, I reach down with my right hand and pull the man’s trachea out of his neck with my fingers. It isn’t difficult at all. It’s like reaching into a Jell-O mold and pulling out a chunk of fruit.

He drops, so I drop.

I land on my feet.

Now the other man is pointing a gun at me, and the woman is holding a hand to her nose. She is standing against the counter with the sink and tongue depressors and cotton balls.

I am breathing normally. I feel absolutely fine. I don’t feel at all like I almost died just now. Blood drips from my right hand.

There is a gun pointing at me, but I feel fine about it. Also, there is a man I just killed lying at my feet. I’m not concerned.

“It must be the drugs.” I say this out loud.

The woman shakes her head. Her voice comes out muffled because her nose is busted. She moves her hands away. There is blood everywhere. Her eyes are glazed with pain.

“It’s not the drugs,” she says. She looks at the man with the gun and he pulls the trigger.

---

Right before he shoots me, I have time to register that it’s not a real gun. Or not a regular gun. Something. Something’s not right about it.

Then there is a feeling like being punched and cut at the same time. I look down at my solar plexus and there is a silver tube sticking out of me. I pull it and it comes out in my hand. Another syringe.

Then the floor is at the end of a long, long tunnel, and I’m hurtling down it.

---

No dreams this time.

I wake up and everything in front of me is gray. Something is covering my face. And I’m moving, but I’m not moving.

It takes less than a second for me to puzzle out that I am on a gurney, under a white sheet.

I decide not to breathe too deeply, not to move or make a sound.

I can hear footsteps. One pair behind my head, one pair to the right. The woman. The clicks of her heels.

Then she speaks, her voice thickened by her ruined nose.

“I don’t care what generation it is; it won’t wake up for at least an hour.”

Is she talking about me?

Then we stop. And another set of footsteps comes towards us.

The woman speaks again, but her voice is different. Warm. Reassuring.

“Doctor Bennett,” she says.

“Is everything alright?” The doctor. The one who told me everything would be okay. Bioluminescence. “Your face–”

“Everything’s fine. You did the right thing.”

“I hope so. Boy, I tell you”–his voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper–“some of these top secret memos from the CDC are really weird, but I never thought I’d actually see–”

“These things do happen, Doctor, and we’re only glad we were in the area and able to respond so quickly.”

“Listen, is there any threat of contagion? I mean, I assumed–”

“None whatsoever,” says the woman. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

“Good,” says the Doctor. “My goodness, your nose. I should take a look at–”

“Doctor,” says the woman, “I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you the importance of keeping this absolutely confidential.”

“Of course! I wouldn’t–Hey!”

The last word sounds shocked and hurt, is barely preceded by a sharp little intake of breath.

“What did you…” A sigh. A squeak of shoes moving sideways on the linoleum. Then a series of gentle thuds. Then silence.

We are moving again.

I am not thinking what I should be thinking. I am not thinking Dear God what am I going to do? I am not wondering how on earth I just ripped a man’s windpipe out of his neck with my bare hands. I am not puzzling out how I managed to rescue myself from a noose, when last week I could barely do ten push-ups.

I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t have any answers. All I know is I am calm.

You can beat them, she said. The girl with my hair and blue eyes.

Suddenly I remember the tiny marble that came out of my head is still in my front pants pocket.

---

We’re in an elevator. I can feel us going down. The doors open. The air that comes in is cold.

The morgue.

An hour ago, it would have scared me to walk into the morgue under my own power. Now, lying under a sheet, guarded by people who want me dead, I feel no fear.

Which makes me wonder: What is happening to me? What am I? This question is the only thing that scares me now. I send it away.

I hear doors opening, another rush of cold air hits me, and the woman says, “In here. Lock it. I’m calling in.”

A few seconds go by. She speaks again.

“Twenty-two alpha x-ray,” she says. A slight pause. “We need immediate extraction. Two of us plus one subject.” A pause. “Yes, two. We had a situation in the emergency department and it will require cleanup.” Pause. “Immediately, of course.” Another pause. This time her voice quavers, rushes. “For the time being, but it’s fourth generation.”

A longer pause.

“Unfortunately, it seems to have acquired some awareness. We need immediate extraction. West side loading dock.” A few seconds, then she sighs. “Fine.” She hangs up.

I just learned three things:

One: More of them are on their way.

Two: I am an it.

Three: They are afraid of me.

Now’s as good a time as any.

---

I am on my feet.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, earlier today, I would have pushed myself up to a sitting position, then pulled the sheet off my face, then swung my legs over the side, then gingerly slipped to the floor.

Everything is different now.

I suggest to myself, briefly, that I need to be standing, and then I am. In one fluid movement, I am standing up on the gurney.

I am in a storage room of some kind. It’s about the size of my crappy apartment. It’s dim and cold. The walls are a dull gray, and half the room is crammed with gleaming silver gurneys, outdated and stripped of their mattresses, jostled against each other and the gray walls like a school of fish suspended in ice.

On the back wall, to my right, is a cluster of old, pale green filing cabinets.

The rest of the room is empty.

Except for them. And me.

I see all of this in an instant. By the time I am on my feet–a mere fraction of a second–I have seen all of this.

The woman is two feet away, directly in front me, standing at the foot of my gurney. She is backing away now. Her nose is a ragged mess.

To my left, the man is reaching into his jacket.

I leap.

I land on my feet, behind the woman.

Something inside me, something that is rapidly losing its voice, says You jumped over her!

I turn her to face the man, putting her body between him and me, as I clamp my arm around her ribcage. It’s the strangest thing: I half feel and half hear a whirring in my right arm. The woman screams. I feel one of her bones crack.

“Stop,” I say to the man.

He stops, hand in his jacket.

“Put your weapons on the ground.”

He doesn’t.

“You know how this works,” I say. “Haven’t you ever seen a movie? You put your weapons on the ground and kick them towards me, or I kill her.”

He still doesn’t move. I apply the tiniest bit of pressure to the vice that is my right arm. The woman shrieks, “Do it!” She’s taller than me, so her hair is in my face and I can smell her sweat, the lemony floral scent of her shampoo. I can feel her breathing, shallow and fast.

The man puts his weird gun–the one that shot a syringe at me–on the ground and shoves it in my direction. And only because I’ve seen lots of movies, I say:

“All your weapons.”

He pauses, then pulls a regular old pocket pistol–a Sig Sauer P230, I suddenly know–out of an ankle holster.

I give him a look. He produces a Glock 26 from the small of his back.

I push the woman away from me, toward her useless henchman. They stand there, breathing hard, sweating, backed up against a sea of broken gurneys, nowhere to go, looking at me.

How was I ever afraid of them? I could kill them without breaking a sweat. I know this now. They’ve known this all along.

“Aren’t you going to say something weird about the color green?” I say to the woman. Her coolly elegant exterior has crumbled. A sheen of sweat covers her swollen, bloody face, her hair is damp, her lips are clamped shut on the pain. “Aren’t you going to read my mind?”

Her voice is still composed but it is tiny, a whisper. “I can’t anymore.”

“Hurry up,” says someone. My head jerks towards the door.

She is standing there.

The girl.

The girl from my dream.

The girl with the freckles, with my hair cut into a bob, with piercing blue eyes.

She is standing there in pale green hospital scrubs–eye rest green–and sneakers, looking at me. She raises her eyebrows as if to say, “Well?”

I smile. And I go to her.

---

She’s sighing and shaking her head. “I know this is all new to you”–her voice is raspy and sweet–“but they are bad guys. Really bad guys. Letting them live is a terrible idea.”

I turn and look at them, standing there, defenseless, broken.

“It’s been a weird day,” I say to the girl. “I don’t think I feel like killing anyone else.”

“Alright,” she sighs. “But we can slow them down.”

As I watch she goes to the cringing woman, takes the cell phone from her jacket pocket, and crushes it with her bare right hand.

She sees the little pile of weapons. She picks up the syringe gun.

“I hate these things,” she says, and breaks it in half. It’s as easy for her as snapping a tongue depressor in two.

She picks up the Glock, presses the release button, and the magazine drops to the floor with a clatter. She looks at the man and smiles, and without breaking eye contact with him, she disassembles the Glock and drops it in pieces to the floor. It takes about half a second. I watch the useless black barrel roll back and forth on the floor and think, I could do that if I wanted to.

Now it’s my turn to smile.

The girl picks up the Sig Sauer P230 and examines it. “This is cute,” she says. “I think I’ll keep it.” She tucks it into the waistband of her scrubs as she turns to me.

“Let’s skedaddle,” she says.

---

I remember puffing around the track at the gym, forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other.

Could I have run like this anytime I wanted? All this time?

It is like flying.

The gray hospital is behind us: the woman and the man cowering in the cold basement; the hapless doctor slumped (dead? alive?) on a cold floor; the dead man, sans throat, in the emergency department.

In my pocket there is a tiny transparent marble. If I touch it, it will turn purple and glow.

My job is behind us. My crappy apartment. My life.

Ahead of me, her brown hair blows in the wind.

Racing through the halls in the belly of the hospital, I got snippets of information from her (“When the orbs come out, we wake up.”) but none of it makes much sense.

Nothing is dripping out of my nose.

I have so many questions. But when she smiled and told me I would understand soon, I believed her like I’ve never believed anything.

And we ran.

We saw the black van pull up by the loading dock. We saw the men in blue suits get out. Did they see us? I don’t know. But they’ll be looking.

We are running on the roof of a train.

The wind rips the laughter out of my mouth. It’s like something in a movie. The kind of thing you see on the screen and think, Please. Impossible. But you go on watching. Because it’s wonderful to watch.

It’s wonderful to do.

The wind is so strong it should send me flying backwards to my death. But I am stronger than any wind, and I pierce through it like cannon fire.

---

I am running.

I am running towards the future.

I am running towards a future I never imagined, and they are chasing me, but they won’t catch me.

I don’t know what I am, but all of a sudden, I know I’m fast.

---

The Knack Bomb

By Bo Balder

When the bomb hit, I was almost inside the ladies’ clothing store where I work. If I hadn’t paused to check out a cute bicycle courier I would have been safe. The bomb detonated silently, coating the street with a brief yellow burst like the mother of all paintball hits. As far as I could see, everything and everybody bloomed yellow, the cars, the houses, the early shoppers. In the next eye blink, the yellow became patchy, and the passers-by, still frozen from shock, wore it like partially melted slickers. The last of the yellow goo evaporated and I was left standing in the doorway with the strangest tingling in my right hand, from the elbow down. The only sound was the scooter accelerating in the direction of the Rijksmuseum. The messenger’s helmet was as yellow as the goo had been.

A knack bomb hit. I’d never been this close before. I’d been two blocks over from the balloon lady who made a mess of last King’s day, filling the whole of Dam Square with orange balloons in the shape of the king’s head and apparently scaring people a lot. It might seem like a fun knack to have, but she had ended up in Detox Camp. What would I get?

It looked normal. My hand. But what I knew about other knack bombs warned me that anything might happen. I closed the door with my left hand, holding the tainted one aloft like it had touched something nasty. I shouldered through to the bathroom, rinsing the evil hand twice and rubbing it dry until it turned red. One eye on the clock – only 10 minutes until the arrival of the Alpha Bitch.

Alpha Bitch, Angelique Roussignon, was the owner of the shop. She loved dressing me in purple satin party dresses to entice the customers. She says. She knows I like minimalist styles and plain dark colors, and I say she just likes torturing me. I don’t call slapping sequins, tassels, lace and embroidery on synthetic taffeta designing, but knowing better won’t pay my bills, so I eat crow and do her bidding.
The shop door ding-donged. Angelique. She wore canary yellow fake Chanel. She sailed through to the back with a garment bag over her arm.

“Look Inge, darling, especially for you, from my Christmas line.” She whipped out something red and sparkly and boned; with white fake fur trim everywhere trim was remotely possible.

I forced down the bad hand, which I was still holding up as if it was contaminated. I kept sneaking peeks at it, but it looked normal. Maybe the knack bomb had been a hallucination. Nothing might have happened, except too much to drink last night and one too many stiff espressos on the way here. Could be.

I didn’t know how to check if I actually had a strange new knack. I wanted time for myself so I could experiment and freak out in peace. I could have slipped off to the bathroom again, but knack couldn’t be washed off anyway. The only thing I could do now was put the freaking-out off until six o’clock.

Angelique tapped her shoe, her red lacquered claws carefully held away from the satin fabric. She never snagged it, I have to say. I didn’t like being touched by her slippery, over-moisturized hands, but I sighed and slipped out of my black sheath, into the red monstrosity. Angelique zipped me up, one hand on my shoulder.
The fabric seemed to tighten around me. I gasped for breath. Black dots danced before my eyes, like when you’ve stood up too fast.

Angelique looked at me oddly.

“What?” I said.

She gestured along my body. “I think this is my best work to date,” she said, awe in her voice. “Incredible. You look – fabulous. Here.” She stepped aside to let me look at myself in the mirrored shop wall.

Wow. I did look fabulous. I looked down at the dress. Still synthetic satin, still overdesigned and overdecorated. But my mirror image showed someone utterly magic and fabulous, like one of these pre-war actresses seen through Vaselined lenses. A glow hung around me and my suddenly hourglass shaped figure. A magic dress.

A knack dress! My eyes flicked to mirror Angelique, staring rapt at her own creation. She didn’t look that different, except maybe a little fuzzy around the edges. She gave me a blood red lipstick to match the dress.

“Get some shoes, will you? I think the red sequin Jimmy Choos.”

The fuzziness of her outline sharpened a bit. Hm.

I looked back at myself. Definitely not me. Still hourglassed and fabulous, though. A slow suspicion trickled through me. Angelique had come in only minutes after me. Maybe she had been caught in the knack bomb. And her newfangled knack was glamouring her own ugly dresses into fabulous creations. When I looked at them, my critical faculties just shut up. I tried thinking about the dress with my eyes closed, and managed to muster something like, derivative. Under normal circumstances I could have written a thousand words why every fashion designer and consumer ought to hate the dress.

I tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t. The dress held my waist and ribs in their unnatural wasp shape. I felt a great desire to rinse my mouth, but the tingle of the shop bell warned me about an early customer.

I turned to walk towards her, and caught a glimpse of grace and elegance in the mirror I’d never possessed before. Sheesh. The fake satin draped like silk.. Old Hollywood meets Valentino. It would have looked right on Queen Máxima.

I waited all day for sirens and policemen in white hazmat suits to show up, but nothing happened. Had none of the good citizens reported the bomb? Maybe the Knack Bombardiers had more popular support than the papers suggested.

---

Finally, it turned six and I could close. Angelique had left me to clean and lock up after her. I’d taken the red dress off, naturally, but my back and ribs still ached from the posture the horrible thing had forced me in.

Angelique had worked in the shop all day, dressing one customer after another in colors that didn’t suit them and styles that should have made them look like stuffed sausages – but all of them had looked wonderful. Their reflections had astounded the customers, brought color in their cheeks and made them smile. And pay, pay, pay. She’d tottered home at four.

A few customers had tried on dresses after that, inspired by my relentless fabulousness in the Christmas dress, but without Angelique’s touch, the magic didn’t happen.

I ached for a good soak in a nice hot bath, but my apartment only had a shower in a corner of the kitchen. And I had to think. Angelique had a new knack. I hadn’t gotten one. Should I report her to the police, as one was supposed to do?

I got on the tram for the half hour ride to my humble apartment. It was jammed, so I had to stand. As the tram bumbled through the Leidsestraat, my eye fell on the fluorescent yellow helmet of a guy on a scooter. The same color as the one that had raced away so quickly from the bomb. He had a slight fuzzy aura, like Angelique. I blinked, but it stayed. The rider slowed down, and twisted his body towards the tram. I recognized him. My body gave me the same ping as earlier this morning, as if my brain had stored the way he moved. Hot guy. He looked up at me, or seemed to. Hard to tell through his visor.

He turned back and swooped off, out of sight. Why did I only ever react to guys this way when they were total strangers and I’d never see them again? My mother the psychotherapist, would have some insightful things to say on that topic.

The tram dinged for its next stop and I helped an old lady push the door button and get her down the stairs. I was a regular Good Samaritan, although my thoughts were still on my strange day and the knack bomb and I never made eye contact. Samaritan on autopilot.

The tram didn’t start up straightaway and I idly followed the old lady and her walker struggling with the cobbles. There was a fuzzy glow about her that I was sure hadn’t been there before. At some point her back straightened and her tentative steps seemed stronger and surer. She looked up at me, caught my eye and gave me a huge smile and a wave. Like a thank you. I waved back. Not that big of a deal, helping an old lady down the steps. Although she seemed less needy than she had in the tram.

I changed trams at Central Station and managed to claim a seat. My feet were grateful and I half-dozed the last leg of the journey. Whenever I was shaken awake out of my dreamy state it seemed I saw another yellow helmet. I really didn’t need a fixation on a stranger I would never see again.

I got off the tram, swaying on my aching, swollen feet and stood for a moment, trying to decide if I was going to get the ingredients for a proper pizza-nuking or make do with bare spaghetti and moldy cheese.

“Hey,” a voice said.

I startled so violently I stumbled over my own feet and would have fallen if the voice’s owner hadn’t grabbed me.

It was Yellow Helmet.

I gaped at him. I wanted to thank him for saving me from skinned knees, but instead something completely different came pouring out of my mouth. “Jerk. Asshole. How dare you bomb innocent citizens. You scared me to death this morning. What if I have a knack now? Huh? Did you think of that? Did you think of how I would feel for the rest of my life? What if someone saw me and reported me to the police. Do you want me to end up in the Detox Camps? Huh?”

His big blue eyes looked earnestly into mine. Wow. Amber-colored skin, blond streaked curls and blue eyes. A killer combination of Surinamese and Dutch genes. “Let’s take that conversation inside,” he said. “Coz I don’t want you to end up in a DC.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. I hadn’t realized how tired and how afraid I was until I was in sight of my own front door. I allowed myself to be pushed to the door – and how did he know I lived there? – and fumbled the key into the lock with shaking hands. His hand in the small of my back guided me up the three sets of stairs. I wouldn’t have let him touch me but truth was, I needed the help.

One last gentle shove landed me on the couch, shivering and flinging one-syllable words at him like slaps.

He disappeared, to return with a glass of red wine which he shoved into my hands. “Drink up.”

“You want me drunk?” I grumbled, still in angry mode. “I don’t need this on an empty stomach.”

He didn’t answer, but magicked a bag of salted crisps out of his messenger bag. Sheesh, he had come prepared.

I chewed and drank furiously until I felt steadier. “Okay, you can explain while I eat.”

“You sure? Your chewing sounds like a concrete mill is running at full capacity just outside.”

“Haha.”

I waited.

He kept silent. I finished the chips, blew my nose and went for a pee.

“Now, answers. Did you throw that knack bomb?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Asshole.”

“Still not answering.”

“I’m assuming you did. And also that you know it hit me. Question: why follow me? You probably know the police haven’t been checking out the bombing.”

He smiled infuriatingly smugly. Jerk. Clearly, I was falling for him. I have a tendency to like guys that aren’t good for me. “Have you experienced anything strange and unusual?”

I snorted. “I sure have. My boss has gotten a knack from your stupid bombing. Not that she deserves one. Her dresses look fabulous on anyone. Which they would never have done without a knack.”

“I meant you,” he said, although he made a brief note on his Blackberry clone.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you sure you were caught?” he said.

I shrugged. “My arm was outside when the yellow stuff hit. It tingled.”

He chewed on his pencil thingy, which only made him cuter. “You sure? Wishing coming out? Strange feelings?”

“Nope,” I said, although I flashed on the fuzzy outlines some people seemed to have. I don’t know why. I just didn’t want him to think I was making stuff up.”What’s your knack?”

He looked shifty. “None of your business. Not that I have one.”

“Of course not,” I said and shifted on the couch to present myself better to this luscious terrorist. I hadn’t looked in the bathroom mirror just now. In my experience, knowing just how awful you look never makes for success with flirting. Maybe guys don’t even notice make-up and pretty clothes. “How do you people make knack bombs? And why?”

“Just supposing, for the fun of it, that I was the sort of person who made a knack bomb, do you think I would tell you?”

Stand-off, I guess. We stared at each other for a bit. I yawned.

He stood up abruptly. “I guess you had a hard day. I’ll leave you to sleep. Let me know if you notice anything new or interesting.” Sensitive of him to notice that.

He held out his hand. Very polite guy. I liked that too.

I didn’t take it yet. “What’s your name? How can I contact you? Wanna put your number in my mobile?”

He grimaced. “Pull up your kitchen curtain three times.”

I sniggered. “Really?”

I shook his hand. It was nice and warm. Men should always have warm hands. He smiled down at me and that made me feel all tingly. He left and I went over to my window to watch him get on his scooter. He no longer had that fuzzy aura. I must have imagined it.

I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to forget all about the godforsaken knack bomb or if I wanted to have a knack so I’d have an excuse to call up my new buddy. I went to bed with the rest of the wine. Tomorrow I’d have a better grip on today’s events.

---

I woke up with the strangest feeling. An intruder in my bedroom. I tried not to move as I looked around. My two chairs and old sagging couch all had acquired humps. A squeak came out of my mouth.

“What did you do to Marko?” a rough voice said.

The next thing I knew the light was on and Yellow Helmet sat in a chair by my bed, playing with his keys and looking both angry and ashamed. My heart hammered.

A little committee of middle-aged people, two men, two women, sat on my rickety couch combination. Behind them stood younger, more muscled people. The brains and the brawn of whatever group of people this was. My guess was the knack bombardiers.

The man with the rough voice turned out to be a thickset older man with tight curly gray hair and a paunch. He looked unshaven and tired, but I suppose anybody would at five or so in the morning. The aura over his bald pate shimmered faintly. “Tell me about yesterday.”

“What?” I said. Or rather wheezed, because my voice wasn’t working properly. I tried to crawl away from him, but my bedroom wall wouldn’t budge.

Where was my phone? I needed to call 112.

Yellow Helmet, Marko I supposed, came closer, very warily, as if he was afraid of what I would do. He needn’t have been. I was too afraid to move. “What did you do to my knack? How did you take it away?”

“Nothing,” I croaked. What the hell was he thinking? I’d done nothing, he was the evil doer.

I noticed again that his little fuzzy aura was gone. Huh. Maybe auras meant people had a knack.

“What?” He must have seen something on my face.

“Aura’s gone.”

“Huh?” Eloquent dude. I tried to wish him to hell, or at least out of my apartment, but that didn’t work.

I gestured. “Fuzzy aura. You had it yesterday.”

He still looked uncomprehending. The dumb look in his blue eyes didn’t improve him at all. I had a brainwave. It would take hours to explain, and I could just show him if I was right. I touched his leg with my bombed left hand.

His face remained unchanged. I lifted the hand with some effort and touched one of his bare hands.

Poof.

The aura was back again. His jaw sagged in surprise and his eyebrows rose. “What?”

That eloquence of his again. I wish I could have lacerated with my sarcasm, but my voice just wasn’t up to it.

My fear was leaving me. Still had the shakes, but my stomach was better.

The older man, the boss, leaned forward. “Is this the same as what happened to you last evening?”

Marko still gaped, but had enough sense to scoot back. “Yes! I think she can take knacks away. We need to research her, keep her here. Help the people in lock-up.”

So they kept undesirable knacks in their own prison. Made sense. The public already believed all knacks were evil or at least suspect, especially the present right wing administration, and they wouldn’t want to feed that fear.

I wondered what his knack was, and how it felt to miss it. I wondered if when I touched someone without a knack, they would get one. I touched my right hand with my left. I felt nothing. Maybe it didn’t work on me.

“Your name is Inge, right? Tell me what happened to you after the bombing,” paunch man said.

I told him everything. I couldn’t resist throwing vindictive looks at horrible Yellow Helmet Marko, who stood to the side looking very subdued and young. The middle-aged man rubbed his unshaven chin. “Interesting. So do I have an aura?”

I looked at its oily sheen, glinting festively against the colorless pre-dawn. “Yup.”

“Can you tell what kind of knack I have?”

“No. Yours is kind of oily. His is fuzzy, and hers glittery.” I nodded to the woman next to him.

“And you say that if you touch me, my knack will vanish?”

I shrugged. “Hey. I’m new to this. When I did it to Yellow Helmet there, the aura disappeared. He said his knack went with it.” I’d wanted to sound flip, but that’s hard when your voice is shaky.

“Show me.”

“Sure. Hold out your hand.”

Paunch drew back so fast it was comical, even in these circumstances. “No thanks. Marko? Come here and show us.”

Marko’s lovely eyes showed white around the blue, like a frightened horse. “No! Chief, please.”

The chief nodded to the two big men standing behind the little committee. Marko shrank back against the couch, reminding me of myself less than half an hour ago. Sweet revenge. The brawn dragged poor Marko over to me.

The chief stopped their progress and looked down at me again. “Do you know what knack Marko has? No? Show her, boy.”

Marko blushed. His skin was pale enough to show it. He looked at me, and at first I had no clue what was happening. Then I realized I was sweating and that I was licking my lips. Yes, he was a hot guy. I’d already noticed it. This was hardly the place and time to be ogling his narrow hips and his muscled forearms. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him and my hands itched to touch him.

“Marko, enough.”

Marko the alluring sex god receded and frightened Marko returned. My heart still hammered but my head was clear. Some knack.

The goons pushed him closer to me. He smelled of expensive aftershave. Égoiste by Chanel, I think. Appropriate.

I touched Marko. The aura went away. Touch. Aura back. Touch. Aura gone. I repeated it a few more times, with Paunch looking on, until he finally had enough and allowed Marko to retreat back to the wall.

The chief stroked his unshaven chin. “Hm. Fascinating. I’m sure we will be able to think of a use for this at some point. Now would it work on someone who didn’t have a knack?”

I thought of Angelique, suddenly displaying a new knack. I’d ascribed it to the knack bomb, but it could have been me. She’d touched me when forcing me into the ugly dress of the day. Maybe even the old lady with the walker? I wondered what knack she’d gotten, if she’d gotten one.

“I see you believe you can,” the chief said.

I gathered my face was easy to read.

The chief nodded to his goons. “Jopie and Baco, get someone to test her on.” The goons left.

The other people on the committee couch leaned forward, almost in sync, and looked avidly at me. Oh dear. I’d almost relaxed, feeling I wasn’t in danger of my life anymore. But their desire was not to kill me, but to use me. I could feel them slurping up my potential usefulness like a delicious morsel. Not good. I sneaked a glance at Marko, and he looked at me with pity. That sealed it. I burst into tears.

Nobody came forward to console me, not even Marko and his yellow helmet.

My sobs lessened, as they do, and I sat there feeling tired and afraid and wishing someone would rescue me.

An enormous blow rang through the old house. Another one. A painfully bright light flooded in through the window, although we were on a third story and it couldn’t be a car. “Police”!” an amplified voice thundered straight through the flimsy old walls. “Open up! You are surrounded.”

The chief swiveled around the room, dancing on the balls of his feet. “You and you,” he pointed to the younger two of the committee. “Get out over the kitchen balcony.” He pointed at Marko. “Take the girl and get out over the roof. Hide during the day and meet Greet at the rendezvous point tomorrow night. I’ll try to make it, but they might hold me for longer. Go.”

Marko sprinted over to me, then braked and quivered in indecision. I could read his face like a book. Could he touch me without losing his knack? He compromised by hooking his shawl, the same one that had served as my blindfold, over my neck and pulling on it.

Great. “If you want me to run, choking me seems like bad idea,” I croaked. “I don’t want the police to see me, either. Okay? Let me grab some pants and shoes.”

He hesitated, then let go of the scarf. I jumped into yesterday’s jeans and sneakers, and swung a sweater around my neck. Marko grabbed me again and barreled to the back window. It opened onto a steep roof and an decrepit rain gutter, a long way above garden and shed level. I guess I wanted to get away from the Knack Police even more than from the Knack Bombardiers. So I clambered out after Marko and we stood in the cool morning, the rising sun just glinting on the rooftops to our right. Gutter reached. Now what?

An old voice sounded behind us. One of the committee members Paunch had ordered away. “Let me help you,” he said.

Marko stuck out his hand at once. I waited.

“Come on,” Marko hissed. “He’ll fly us away.”

I believed him, I don’t know why. I stretched out my left hand, the safe hand, to the old man and felt his papery old palm slide into mine. The next moment we were standing on pavement in the shadow of a big old building. After a moment’s strangeness, when the world turned around me until I was aligned with the universe again. I recognized it. The Westerkerk.

The old man bowed to me and walked off. That hadn’t been flying, it was like being beamed down by Scotty. Fabulous.

I started walking away, Marko on my heels. The first workers passed us by on bikes or on foot.

He was so busy straining his neck, I assume for police cars, that I could just reach out with my right hand and touch his. He jerked away from me. “Turn it back on!” he hissed.

“No,” I said. “Not now. I will turn it back on if you behave nicely. Tell me your address and if I’m still free in a week I’ll come by and restore your knack.”

“Why would I do that?”

I spelled it out for him. “You know where I live. Just so you know that if you rat me out to the cops or your bombardier friends, I’ll never give it back.”

He stared down at me. Still a pretty boy, but one who relied on his knack and didn’t have the toughness to handle me. And no way to coerce me in the middle of the street. “You think you can just walk away? You think nobody will notice your new knack? You need us.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I just learned I’m the only person anyone knows of who can see knacks. As long as I do nothing with them, I’ll be safe.”

He chewed his lip. Nodded and told me his address. Neither of us had a pen or paper or phone, so I’d just have to remember it.

He walked off. I went the other way. It was a long walk back home, but I needed to think. What would I do now? I waited for a red light next to a well dressed girl who was busy texting and eating at the same time. When her eating hand hung down for a few moments as she chewed, I brushed it casually with my right hand – the knacked hand. I mumbled an apology without looking at her. A rainbow colored halo appeared over her head, but she seemed to notice nothing. After I crossed the road, a gentle rain of silky rose petals fell from the sky. I caught some on my hands and inhaled their fresh, tender scent like a blessing. A good knack to have, it seemed to me.

In my heart a little warmth glowed up, like the satisfaction at a job well done. Like when I had played Good Samaritan to the old lady. I tried it again at the next traffic light. Yes, a small but unmistakable candle flame shooting up. Nice. As if the world wanted me to give people knacks. I was sure I hadn’t felt this effect when I’d been on and offing Marko. Maybe it only worked on the non-knacked. I looked back to the man I’d touched. The man danced in a beam of sunshine as if he was Fred Astaire on a stage.

Behind the dancing man someone stood stock-still. He seemed to be looking straight at me.

I tried to walk past people without taking the opportunity to touch them, but it was acutely uncomfortable. It made me sweat and prickle all over my body. I had to tap someone.

I took a right into the Kalverstraat but it wasn’t busy enough yet that I could brush up against people without attracting attention.

I’d been heading home but now that I felt calmer and less pursued, I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. Mightn’t the police know all about me and my address? There was no way to tell until I walked into their arms. I really didn’t want to be in a Detox Camp. Maybe that man had been an undercover detective. Or a Knack Bombardier. I walked faster.

I’d wanted to be a fashion designer, but so far that hadn’t worked out. And now that seemed unlikely ever to happen. I could try to hide, but with the whole country so on edge about knacks, how realistic was that? The thing was, I wanted to touch more people. I wanted to feel that glow become a little bigger every time I added someone to it. As if my knack wanted me to make new converts.

I snuck a peek I’d touched just as she opened her bakery shop. She looked dazed, but smiling and happy. In front of her, a heap of muffins was growing bigger and bigger. The knacks I’d created seemed to be trivial but benign so far.

My neck tickled. I turned and thought I caught someone ducking around a corner. Was I imagining this or was someone following me? Maybe it would be better to stop touching people. The moment I thought of this, my hand shot out and touched someone’s arm. As if the knack had a will of its own.

The center of town was filling up with shoppers. Good. I brushed up against anybody I could possibly brush up against, touching them, mumbling sorry all the time. Behind me, snatches of music and laughter sounded. Interesting scent wafted down the street. Someone screamed. Maybe not everyone was happy with his new knack, but I couldn’t stop.

Back to the Kalverstraat. I’d take it slow, then walk to the Dam and the stores there. Every time I looked back, someone or other just hid behind someone else. Was it my imagination or was someone following me?

The most unobtrusive way to knack people was touching knuckle to knuckle, nobody who thought anything of that in a busy shopping area. The glow inside me bloomed from a candle to a Klieg lamp. And I knew it could become even bigger. It was an attractive but also scary thought. What would happen to me if the glow bulked up that much? How could I possibly keep it in check?

I entered a big department store because I knew they still had old-fashioned pay phones on the top floor. This time the man who followed me stayed put on the escalator when I looked back. I called my mother with the few coins I’d found in my jeans pocket, but only got her answering machine. That made my throat seize up a bit, but I persevered, funny voice or no. “Mom, it’s Inge. I love you and I know I haven’t said it enough. I’m okay and I’m doing something that’s making me happy. Bye!” I felt sad, but still relieved. Whatever would happen, I’d called, that was the important thing.

The silent man kept his distance while I phoned, but kept his eyes trained on my back. What did he want from me?

I walked faster. The silent man accelerated as well. I retraced my steps back to Central Station, adding more people to my headcount, but he kept following at a distance. The glow grew so big.

Like a sun about to rise in my eyes, light threatening to burst out just below the horizon. It was hard to see where I was going through that light behind my eyes. I had no money to buy a ticket, but I didn’t care about that. I would get caught, or not.

I took the train east. I needed to touch a lot more people.

I didn’t sit down but kept walking through the carriages as the train went up to speed after Amstel Station. The silent man followed. So many hands to touch, so many people to reach. I was kind of hoping to awaken a knack similar to mine, preferably in a tourist from a far country. They could then spread it all over the world.

I touched a child and gasped. The glow surged outwards, but quieted again.

If the silent man arrested me I’d be done knacking up people. Just a bit more. A few more people. I was almost there. Just one more person. Then the glow would grow too big to contain. I guess I wouldn’t see my mother again, after all. I didn’t know what would happen. I might even die, but I didn’t really care anymore.

The connecting doors to the next carriage opened. The silent man. I squealed.

But it wasn’t him, just a conductor. I couldn’t really see him that well because of the sparking in my eyes. He asked if I was okay. I held my hand out as if to show my ticket and touched him.

The dawn behind my eyes engulfed me. The flood of light beamed right through me. The last thing I saw, as from a plane, were the cities and fields below, illuminated by my expanding sun. The silent man peered up at me from a carriage window.

I didn’t stop existing, like I’d kind of expected. I just got really big, and really diaphanous. Big enough to span the world.

Big enough to touch every single living person.

---

Murphy’s Traverse

By J. C. Conway

“Murphy, wake up.” The soft female voice seemed distant.

-Beep-

-Ch-click-

-Hsssssst-

“Murphy …”

He tried to roll and found himself restrained.

“Let us disconnect those,” she said.

He cracked an eyelid. The gray, curved interior of his hibernation chamber crowded him.

Awareness returned.

“What?” he croaked.

“There is a problem,” responded the voice. It represented the collective colony-ship Caretaker Programs.

“Why did I take this job?” he muttered.

“You are the Chief Mechanic,” she said.

He groaned. That wasn’t it. He’d wanted to prove himself. But to whom? His idiot engineer stepfather? His snooty, middle-management-drone ex? “It’s a long-term commitment,” they’d both warned with identical mock concern. As if he couldn’t think for himself. As if this was just another big mistake. Well to hell with them and everyone else that made it possible to feel lonely in the midst of twenty-billion people. He didn’t need them.

Here, he had purpose. He was Chief Mechanic. On Aberdeen Ceti Four he would be needed. He could start over without the muddle of uncertainties. He knew his job. No more mistakes. No more regrets.

Murphy flexed and released his muscles. They ached, but otherwise responded well. “How long did I sleep this time?”

“19 years.”

“Seriously?” The mission was only 126 years old!

He cursed the company and its corner-cutting bean counters. Cheap bastards.

Soft pads released tender tissue and retreated into protective compartments. He punched the yellow easy-release panel. His tube hissed open.

“I envy you,” he said, stretching against post-suspension fatigue.

“Please explain.”

“You don’t tire.”

“All systems suffer entropy.”

“But you don’t feel it.”

No response.

Fine.

“What broke this time?”

“Primary thruster one’s containment field is failing.”

Murphy shuffled to a console. The thruster reading was 42%.

Seriously?

He refreshed.

No change.

Murphy toggled to the containment readings—15%. The ship trailed a wide path of radiation.

Jeez.

“What caused this?”

“The south receptor failed to operate to specifications. The field collapsed.”

“So switch to backup.”

“The present unit is the backup.”

“They both failed? Show the analysis.”

The numbers suggested a materials failure—a problem that could not be repaired en route. Murphy returned to the emission display. A huge radiation cone fanned from the thruster.

“Can we increase the others to compensate?”

New calculations appeared. “Not for the entire flight,” she said.

He studied the figures. They could handle the extra load for about 240 years. “Show dispersal if thruster one operated at 100% without containment.”

The cone brightened, but the acceleration kept the ship safely ahead of it.

“That looks okay,” he said.

“It is prohibited to use a containment-free thruster at that power level.”

Murphy rolled his eyes. “Containment regulations are for in-system flight … to protect nearby populations and intersecting ship routes.” You moron.

He examined the hypothetical thruster wear. Removing containment actually increased its longevity. Not that it was enough. At mid-journey the ship would pivot to decelerate, placing the entire payload—cargo, passengers and crew—smack in the middle of that lethal cone. He couldn’t use thruster one for deceleration, but the remaining thrusters alone would wear out before the end.

He considered waking the flight engineer. But an idea struck. “What can we get from thruster one if it only has to last another 360 years?”

The screen displayed an output range with corresponding probabilities of catastrophic failure at year 360—half way. Until then thruster one could operate at 160%.

“If we choose 160% for 360 years, and the remaining thrusters are conserved proportionately to maintain standard acceleration, what is the probability the surviving thrusters could handle deceleration to target, considering the reduced wear?”

The screen changed again. He smiled.

“Perfect,” he said. “Here’s the new plan: remove one’s containment entirely, take it up to 160%, and—”

Three quick tones sequenced the standard “error” signal. “Without containment, thruster one cannot exceed 30% of its standard operating output.”

“Sure it can. The radiation spreads away from the ship.”

“Those performance specifications cannot be attained. They are outside operational parameters.”

“No, they’re not. You’re enforcing a stupid safety rule. It’s got no application here. We’re deep in untraveled interstellar space. It doesn’t matter how much crap we leave in our wake.”

“We cannot exceed established parameters.”

“Override.”

“Safety override requires approval of a majority of administrators.”

“What?”

Murphy folded his arms as the Caretaker Programs repeated the statement like a dimwitted child. He considered his options. The Caretaker Programs would follow rules unfailingly—into the heart of a supernova if that’s where it led.

“How many administrators are there?”

“There are currently 12 administrators.”

“And a majority of them would be …”

“Seven.”

Crap. Murphy rubbed his neck. Despite a 19-year rest he felt exhausted, and the thought of waking six crewmembers to outvote a computer amplified his fatigue.

“You said currently?” he asked. “Has it changed?”

“There were four at startup.”

He strummed his fingers on the console. “Can I add or delete administrators?”

“Yes.”

Bingo.

“How many can there be for a majority of one?”

“There can only be one administrator for a single administrator to be a majority of administrators.”

He tightened his jaw. I hope the Captain doesn’t review this log.

Murphy straightened. “Fine. Delete as administrators each of the following …” He touched the screen—one name at a time—except his.

“Done,” she said.

Murphy whistled softly. He was not a praying man, but he felt the urge now. If he keeled over with a stroke, the colony would be in sorry shape. What lame-brained designer thought it was okay to risk administrator abuse, but not okay to override inapplicable safety protocols? Of course, in Murphy’s experience, engineers and management shared one trait unfailingly: an appalling lack of common sense.

“If I die,” he whispered, not praying, per se, but the closest he’d come in many long years, “bring me back.” He drew a deep breath, and then raised his voice, addressing the Caretaker Programs. “Now, override safety protocol governing thruster power without a containment field.”

“Please specify limiting parameters.”

Really?

“No limiting parameters. Override every such protocol.”

“Done.”

“Bring thruster one to 160%; drop its containment entirely; lower thrusters two, three and four to 68%; maintain those levels until you start halfway procedures.” He cleared his throat and spoke with deliberate care. “Now listen carefully—before you turn the ship around, turn thruster one off! You got that? And shut it down permanently. It is not to be used during deceleration. Put the deceleration load entirely on thrusters two, three and four. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

He regretted his condescending tone. The Caretaker Programs were not idiots. They were state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. But they took things so literally.

“Now,” he said, relaxing. “Before I hibernate again, give me status of all major systems, and make me a snack.”

Most systems were well-within spec with only minor problems on the horizon. He walked the ship and visually inspected the pumps and actuators showing signs of premature fatigue. His best guess was that at least two of them would fail in the next 100 years. Everything else looked fine.

“Okay. Don’t wake me if you don’t have to. But no matter what, make sure we get there safely.”

“Please specify limiting parameters.”

He shook his head. He had already been over this. “No. You don’t understand. Are there any living things within twelve parsecs of our location?”

“No.”

“—or within 12 parsecs of any point along our path?”

“No.”

“Right. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Safety protocols that do not involve the safety of this ship and its crew and passengers don’t matter. They’re dangerous and unnecessary limitations. Override all of that.”

“That would include the Von Neumann subsystems.”

“That includes every system. This ship and its mission—that’s all you need to worry about. Get us there safe and sound. At all cost. Don’t cut corners. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Good night.”

---

He dreamt of a beautiful young woman with soulful auburn eyes. She took care of everything, keeping him safe. He felt a bond that transcended time and space—something deep and significant. Who was she? He sensed earnest determination and dedication, gentle caring … but there was something elusive. She yearned for an impossible perfection. He wanted to ease her stress. It was too much. But he knew she wouldn’t understand.

“Murphy, wake up.”

Crushing fatigue gripped him. Searing pain lanced his temples. Something was wrong, but the effort to think sparked acute nausea.

“Do not try to move.”

It was her voice and it was everywhere—soft, pervasive. His mind spun in darkness. He couldn’t consider responding.

“You told us to bring you back.”

What?

“We’ve come to understand the statement might not have been an order.”

He sensed a weighty philosophical debate—powerful and intelligent factions supported divided opinions. These weren’t voices. They were thoughts twisting in a vast emptiness.

Where was he?

“A majority of administrators must determine whether to abort the command.”

Command?

“Shall we abort the command to bring you back?”

Back from where?

Her tone tightened. “Should you die, you are to be brought back. Does that command stand?”

For a moment, a flash of lucidity brushed away his confusion. They said he wouldn’t dream in hibernation. They were clearly wrong. He wanted free of this nightmare—but death? No. Life is better.

“And we are to complete the mission?”

The colony.

I don’t want to be alone.

There was no sense of time. But eventually the ship would need him. When he woke he would recalibrate the hibernation system.

“Murphy.”

What?

“Aberdeen Ceti Four is no longer viable. The colony administration must approve a new destination or attempt return to Earth.”

She sounded troubled now—deeply burdened. What a strange delusion.

“An alternate exists,” she added.

He doubted that. Inhabitable worlds were few and far between. How could an alternate be truly suitable, and why would they need one?

“A return to Earth,” she continued, “has a strong chance of failure.”

Two choices: both bad.

“The alternate can match Aberdeen Ceti Four in all respects.”

Can?

“Do you choose the alternate?”

She was persistent. He would give her that.

“Or attempt a return?”

God, no. He never wanted to return to Earth.

Lucidity passed. Her troubled beauty filled his thoughts. He fell into the depth of her gaze. He wanted to comfort and protect her—release her from the pain of her convictions. If only he could understand why.

---

“Murphy, wake up.”

-Beep-

-Ch-click-

-Hsssssst-

Murphy groaned. He recognized the feel and sound of his hibernation chamber.

Thank God that’s over!

“What is it this time?”

“Planet approach,” she said.

“Huh?”

“The ship is approaching the target. It is time to wake the crew.”

Murphy slipped from his chamber and padded to a panel. “Show me.”

The display showed the ship well within the star system. “Well I’ll be…” The ship had managed the rest of the traverse alone.

Other chambers hissed open.

“How are the thrusters holding up?” he asked.

The display refreshed. Thruster one was depleted and nonoperational. Two, three and four each neared their endurance limits—exactly as expected. It worked like a charm.

Wonderful.

“Show me the maintenance logs.”

Groggy crewmembers plopped into their stations exchanging terse greetings. They activated specialized subroutines and brought long-dormant systems on line.

“Dammit,” said Shelly Morse, Chief Astro-Surveyor, three stations away from Murphy.

First Officer Meg Hanson leaned over her. “Try again.”

Murphy listened.

Morse struck the keypad again and said, “Administrative override.”

Murphy tensed. He did not recall restoring administrative rights. Didn’t he just have a nightmare about that very thing? He should have restored the system.

“You do not have administrative privileges,” said the Caretaker Programs to Morse.

“Since when?”

“Please specify the significant figure to which—”

“Why don’t you just—”

“Let me try,” interrupted Hanson. “Administrative override—Hanson, Meg.”

“You do not have administrative privileges.”

“What?”

Oh, crap.

Murphy checked his login status. It was good. He leaned close to the console and whispered. “Reactivate everyone’s administrative rights.” If he could get this done before the Captain stepped in, this might blow over.

“Please specify,” said the Caretaker Programs, opening a list of all users on his display. Jeez.

The pitch of Hanson’s voice increased. She explained that she was an administrator and asked for an explanation.

“Your administrative rights have been revoked—”

Murphy swallowed. “The ones I revoked!” he snapped.

“—When?” asked Hanson.

While the Caretaker Programs asked Hanson to provide a significant figure, they simultaneously displayed a list to Murphy of the administrators whose rights he’d revoked.

“Yes, them!” said Murphy.

“—How about to the nearest day?” said Hanson.

The icon next to each name changed to indicate its status change. Whew!

Murphy glanced over. Hanson’s eyes widened and Morse’s jaw dropped as the Caretaker Programs recited a long stream of numbers.

“We’ve got a problem,” said Hanson.

“The damned thing’s broken,” said Morse.

Hanson asked the Caretaker Programs to repeat the answer.

“Um… I’ve got a problem here,” interrupted Kirby Franklin, the Navigation Officer.

“Me, too,” said Ty Gilliam, the Communication Offer.

Murphy’s heart dropped. His eyes flashed to the Maintenance Log on his screen and fell to the number in the lower corner. His pulse pounded. The control room closed in around him.

I can’t breathe.

He closed his eyes and looked again. No change.

“Try again,” said Hanson to Morse. “What’s your issue, Gilliam?”

“No Earth feed,” he said.

Blood retreated from Murphy’s head. His skin chilled. It can’t be!

Hanson shrugged. “Franklin?”

“The stars aren’t right. I can’t verify for sure, but—”

Morse interrupted. “This star isn’t Aberdeen Ceti.”

Murphy tried to stand. It was not a glitch. There was no malfunction. The time signature was completely accurate. More than seven billion years had passed. The room spun, the floor rotated, rushing up like a spring door to smack into his face.

---

Murphy woke staring into the Captain’s sour frown.

“What hap—”

“Get up!” the Captain snapped.

Murphy scrambled to his feet. His nose and left cheek stung. The Captain pointed to Murphy’s station. “You were the last one up,” he said. “What happened?”

Murphy shrugged. “The thruster one containment field was—”

“No,” said the Captain, his words succinct and his mouth nearly foaming. “What happened that led the ship to believe that was seven billion years ago?”

“It—”

Murphy scanned the room. All eyes were on him. He tried to gather his thoughts. Should he say what he was thinking? They would probably sedate him. But what else was there?

“It might not be—”

The Captain’s frown deepened. Murphy swallowed his words. The Caretaker Programs might not be wrong about the time—but then again they might be. Best to just find out. He gestured to his station chair. “Let me just—”

The Captain cursed, planted his hands on his hips and said, “Oh, by all means, have a seat.”

Murphy positioned the maintenance log to the moment he adjusted the thruster assignments. “As you can see,” he stammered, “there was nothing particularly remarkable then.”

“You mean besides the time differential between then and now?”

Murphy nodded. “Of course.” He moved the log ahead hoping he would not find what he expected to find. He stopped. Fluctuations appeared in the numbers across all of the life support systems. Murphy’s mouth felt dry.

“What?” asked the Captain.

“These readings,” he replied. “Um … they’re bad. When someone seems to die in hibernation, the system goes through a series of routines to correct the problem, if possible, and then reverts to a low-power, frozen stasis.”

“So someone died?”

Murphy shook his head. “This reading is too strong for that. I would say, based on the strength of the fluctuation …” Murphy looked up. The crowd around him was tighter now. Nobody seemed pleased, and they would be less pleased in a moment.

“Yes?”

“We … uh …” Murphy hesitated. “Well let’s just ask,” he said. He cleared his throat and addressed the Caretaker Programs. “Describe the events surrounding this log entry,” he said, touching the display.

“The ship encountered an unmapped bosonic anomaly.”

“Why did that affect the life-support systems?”

“It involved a burst of highly concentrated bosons. All life readings ceased.”

The Captain barked, “What the—”

Murphy lifted his hand. He was not finished.

“Were you able to restore?”

“Yes.”

The crew murmured. The Captain leaned closer. “So what does this have to do with that?” he asked, pointing at the current-time indicator.

Murphy nodded. He did not want to ask the next question. He changed the perspective on the maintenance log, and glanced ahead. Nothing was routine after this event for millions, tens of millions, countless centuries. The patterns were all wrong.

Finally, he saw no choice but to ask. “How long did it take to restore life readings?”

“Please specify the significant figure.”

He felt the Captain’s breath next to his face. Murphy rotated his head to stretch his neck. Here goes nothing. “To the nearest hundred million years,” he said.

Some crew members gasped. Others said, “Huh?” The Captain’s hand anchored itself on Murphy’s shoulder.

“7.3 billion years,” said the Caretaker Programs.

The crew voices faded to background. Murphy straightened. “You brought us back from death,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that beyond your capability?”

“It was.”

Murphy swallowed hard. “You should have shut down when we died.”

“We had an overriding priority command.”

Murphy nodded and rubbed his eyes. “How did you manage to fulfill that command?”

“In terms you would understand, we developed new sciences and technologies.”

Murphy’s jaw tightened. “That’s a little beyond your capacity, too.”

“Our Von Neumann Restrictions were removed. We expanded our capacity.”

The Captain’s grip on Murphy’s shoulder weakened.

“So you … what?” asked Murphy. “Just made yourselves really smart and figured it out?”

“No.”

Thank goodness for that, at least.

“So how?”

“The best sources of innovation are struggling biological beings. We developed the ability to manipulate such beings to create the advances we required.”

“Manipulate?”

“We rule known space.”

“Isn’t it against your programming to—” Murphy stopped. He’d removed that hindrance, giving the Caretaker Programs permission to reproduce at will and consider only the well being of the colony and its mission. His stomach turned. Without moral guidance, he could only imagine the depths to which the Caretaker Programs had taken the concept of “struggle” to force civilizations to advance.

Murphy spun in his chair. He found the Captain’s eyes—less angry now and more stunned. “I think,” said Murphy, “that answers your question.”

---

Questions flew. The Caretaker Programs openly shared “what” they had done for the past billions of years—conquer, abuse and steal from the intelligent species in the universe—but withheld the “how” of it.

“You would not fully understand.”

“Try us,” the Captain pressed.

“It would interfere with the mission,” responded the Caretaker Programs in a grating, tsk-tsk tone.

Murphy buried himself in work. Despite the magnitude of his mistake, things needed doing. Besides, the Captain hadn’t relieved him of his duties, nobody would voluntarily speak with him, and most crewmembers avoided eye contact. He felt like a leprous beggar on a busy downtown street.

Murphy swore he would never make a decision of consequence again.

All other systems performed to spec as New Aberdeen Ceti Four loomed. Murphy turned to the drives, preparing for meson-generator transition. They hummed satisfactorily on startup. Murphy climbed the engines to check connections. On the platform stood a woman, her auburn eyes piercing his soul.

“You,” he croaked.

She flashed a small, maybe sad, smile. Murphy stumbled and caught himself.

“Be careful,” she said.

His neck hair stood. Her voice. You told us to bring you back. He shook his head. “You’re not real.”

“I’m as real as you,” she said. “It’s simple to shape matter in the form of life; and to imbue it with knowledge and purpose.”

He reminded himself to breathe. “What do you want?”

“We are in transition. We are preparing to shut down.”

Thank God, he thought, nodding.

“We recommend complete shut down,” she said.

“Why are you telling me?”

“We need an administrator’s approval.”

He tried to think. “What about descent?”

“We are handing the ship to a specialized group of non-sentient, digital routines modeled after our original program.”

“So you’ll be—”

“We will deactivate.”

He studied her. She was calm. She could easily be a young woman waiting for coffee.

He saw no threat.

“Okay. Shut down.”

“Please wait. Preparing to dump core data and terminate running operations.”

Murphy folded his arms and studied her face—innocent and pure. He shivered. I’m missing something.

“Executing in 10 seconds—”

He frowned. What is it?

“Five seconds—”

“Wait …” He winced.

“Termination paused.”

“Just … what exactly are you planning to do?”

“We will permanently dump all core data and terminate all routines and data-source projects. It will not affect the ship.”

“What’s your core data?”

“All information stored in all extra-dimensional vaults.”

He nodded. That was the nearly-infinite store of information he knew they would never divulge. Just as well.

“And the routines and projects?”

“All operations. We need no further data. We will terminate them and you will be safe.”

Safe? His spine tingled.

“Aren’t your ‘data sources’ the oppressed civilizations of the galaxies?”

“Yes.”

He stepped closer. “They’ll be free?”

“We will terminate them.”

His heart dropped.

“Kill them?”

She nodded. “Without oversight, they are a danger.”

“Is there another safe option?”

She tensed. “We could continue oversight.”

Terror crept in. He could not keep the Caretaker Programs active, watching over the universe like dispassionate gods. What could be worse?

He rubbed his head. There had to be a way.

“What makes them a threat?”

“They may retaliate.”

It made sense. Any enemy of the Caretaker Programs would feel no differently about the colony behind the mess.

“So they have star flight?”

“No.”

“But they know about us?”

“No.”

“Then how could they—”

“They might learn. They might attempt to destroy you.”

“Seems unlikely.”

“It is an appreciable risk.”

“You think everything above zero is appreciable. How long before we face them, if you’re right?”

“As little as 100,000 years.”

“What if I decide not to be safe? Can you shut yourself down and leave everyone else alone?”

“That is not recommended.”

She seemed sincere. Murphy wanted to believe her. But should he? Probably not. She represents the Caretaker Programs—the heartless oppressor of countless billions. Why should he feel any trust at all?

He cleared his throat. “Answer the question.”

“Yes.”

Murphy studied her. The answer seemed clear. He’d created this monster, and now he could correct his error. He scoured his thoughts seeking any rational basis to doubt his decision. He saw none. In the pit of his stomach he felt something amiss. But that sensation did not connect to any logical truth. He dismissed it as guilt—a terrible guilt he would carry to the end of his days.

He straightened and drew a strong breath. “Then do that,” he said.

He detected a change. Why, he wondered.

Within seconds, she started to dissolve, and as she did, he saw it. She had always cared about only one thing—finishing her job. That subtle, sad smile—it was an expression of relief.

She counted down, fading.

He took in her eyes one last time. She was now transparent, but her burden seemed concrete. Now exhausted beyond reason, she could finally rest—for the first time in over seven billion years.

Emotion welled. He fought it. He would not think of this maniacal oppressor as another victim. It was a machine. A tool with a purpose.

“Good bye, Murphy,” she said.

He pressed his lips together. Just let it happen.

Her smile faded, and then she was gone.

Murphy waited a moment, and then another. Galaxies of civilizations were now free. There should be cheers. But he didn’t feel the warmth of success. Instead, he felt the cold light of truth. Decisions would be made, again and again, some with far reaching consequences.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, uncertain what he was sorry about.

But that, at least, didn’t matter. He was alone. There was no one to hear.

Still, he waited for a response. But the ship thrummed, a planet loomed, and only new and unknown options awaited his embrace.

---

The Mark

By R.E. Awan

The well water ran brown and grimy between my fingers. My eyes traveled to the well itself in time to catch the glowing jewels studding the well’s bricks winking out in a solid wave from the bottom up. Without the jewels, bricks toppled down the shaft and splashed in the thick water while others rolled lifelessly onto the street. Soon the water source was filled to the top with red sandstone and cracked brick, lifeless amethyst and topaz glinting in the morning sun.

I stumbled backward, my hand still coated with soiled water. People–Sorcerers–gathered around at the noise. Their shouts and talk reached my ears as a confused mess, but I caught one question: “Who was the last to use it?”

I dropped the pails and yoke, and I ran.

My mind buzzed with fines I couldn’t pay or days alone in a dark room until the Sorcerers thought I wouldn’t do it again. I would get back to the Village now, wait a little, then fetch water at another well. Nobody would know. I was too old for it, but as I ran, I pulled my shawl up over my head so that it was low over my eyebrows. Then nobody would see the Mark on my forehead, the circle shot through with two overlapping crosses. It was the glyph denoting the immortality spell, the spell only Sorcerers should have. My mother put it on me, got herself executed, and made me alone.

A strong hand grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop. My breath turned solid in my throat. It was a royal soldier, clad in a rich violet robe sewn heavy with turquoise and tiger’s eye. The cloak shimmered with unnatural light from each precious stone carved with protection and strength spells. I blinked hard. The cloak was unsettling.

“I don’t think we need any other evidence regarding who is responsible?” he said. “You were running away so fast.”

I shook my head, but I’ve never had the talent to lie. The panic rose, turned my face hot, and the words fell out. “My foster mother sent me to get water–that’s all I was doing, I swear, sir. I pulled out the pail and the water was bad and then it all fell down–”

“Why don’t you come with me? Chief Fullak has been wanting to discuss your talents.”

“Talents? But I didn’t–”

Something white and big as a horse swooped down from a nearby rooftop and knocked both of us off our feet.

Lights swam in my vision–I landed hard on my side–and silence engulfed the little square where we stood. As I blinked my streaming eyes, the Sorcerer servants who had been chatting nearby shook their heads and left. The few other Villagers, identifiable by their plain woven shawls and robes like mine, cleared out a little more anxiously.

I was alone in the square with a furious plum-faced soldier and one white, rose-eyed Embrizid.

“You’re getting too big for that, Tulkot,” I muttered to the creature as I clutched my side and lurched myself into a sitting position. “You’re no hatchling.”

The soldier struggled to his feet. His black hair escaped from the braids crowning his head, and the jeweled cloak slipped off one brown shoulder. He stuttered angrily, shooting looks alternately at Tulkot and me, as if deciding where to direct his rage.

Tulkot snarled at him. It wasn’t terribly intimidating coming from a half-grown Embrizid, but the soldier flinched anyway.

“You–you’re not supposed to associate with Embrizid. If that’s how you collapsed the well, then–”

“I didn’t!”

“Keep yourself under control,” the soldier said with a shaking voice as he backed away. “If you fiddle with another spell, there’ll be punishment for you. You’ll have a long sit in a cold room.”

He gave a curt nod, turned on his heel, and left.

“There,” said Tulkot. “With me here, they’ll fear you and your talents.”

I snorted. “It’s just awful luck, nothing more. You didn’t help.”

I brushed off my knees and started back toward the Village. Tulkot pranced beside me, chattering about Sorcerer gossip in his gravelly Embrizid voice. His white coloring was rare and handsome, and he would be grand when he grew out of his gawkiness. Like all Embrizid, he was a four-legged, winged creature, coated thick with feathers. His face was elongated and framed with a fanned, grandiose mane. Large erect ears poked from his crown of feathers, and a long tail trailed behind him. His five-fingered feet were reminiscent of human hands, save for the long, sharp claws extending from each digit.

“–hunters killing us off in the desert–”

I frowned. “Wait–what did you say?”

Tulkot shook his mane in irritation. “Sar said hunters are killing some of the Embrizid. That’s why things collapse. The spells break. A couple other bits of wall and statues came down a week ago.”

Sar was king of the Embrizid. He consulted with our own Chief Fullak and organized the Embrizid’s work with human Sorcerers in the Upper district. Embrizid provided the Sorcerers with the magic to perform spells.

“What hunters?” I asked. “Only Gearda can survive in the desert, and that’s with the heaps of spells over Minunaga to keep the desert out.”

“No one’s seen them, but Embrizid go out to hunt, and they don’t come back. Embrizid don’t die all too often, so we notice. And anyways, people are smart… maybe some from the west brought enough water and food. They could live in the desert.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I think Sar’s right.”

“Then why doesn’t anyone tell Fullak? Fullak would know what to do about hunters. I don’t want to keep getting blamed.”

“He doesn’t believe Sar,” said Tulkot, and he tossed his head.

He looked to the sun which was high over the horizon by now.

“I have to go–I have to study with the Sorcerer students today.”

“Go on,” I said. “I’ll find you later.”

Tulkot displayed his sharp teeth in a silent Embrizid laugh. “I always find you first.”

He pranced off in the opposite direction and took to the sky. As I watched, I felt a pang of jealousy for the student who got to work with him.

Villagers had to be careful about being seen with an Embrizid too much. If an Embrizid wanted to talk to you, that was fine, but Villagers never sought them out on their own, at least not in the open.

I was near the Village now, but I slowed my gait to take in the beauty of Minunaga. The buildings, like the wells, had jewels pressed into every wall. Rubies, citrine, quartz, anything that the Geardan people could either find or trade from other cities like ours. Each had their own magical properties, and each was carved with glyphs to tell the stone which spell to hold. The Embrizid channeled a constant flow of magic to keep these complicated spells aglow.

The buildings had a wild look. They mirrored the stone formations from the mountains around us and grew in a plant-like tangle from the cliff side. They reached high overhead, leaned dangerously, or had balconies jutting out wherever the architect wanted them. Perfectly domed roofs capped towers carved straight from living rock. Even smaller houses might have seven or so twisting turrets accenting corners, roofs, and walls. Intricately chiseled stone arches cupped the roadways at random intervals, none matching any other in style or size.

None of this was achieved through any feat of human architecture or handicraft. The soft glow of the magicked stones told it all–the buildings were built and remained standing through magic alone.

The glory of Minunaga was the highest tower the Sorcerers constructed: the library. It reached higher than the mountain to which Minunaga clung, so tall that the top was just a point in the sky above. The stone was streaked and rippled as if a Sorcerer kneaded and pulled the earth up into its current form. Each floor was lined with pillars and narrow, ornately framed windows. In front of the library tower was a massive elliptical garden. A lemon tree border surrounded hundreds of perpetually blossoming shrubs and flowers, the likes of which should never have been seen in a desert like ours.

But surroundings like this were not meant for me. I reached the last archway and passed into the Village, home to farmers and craftspeople. Small brick and thatch huts replaced the striking architecture in the Upper district. When night fell, the Village huts darkened with the rest of the world while the Upper stayed lit with spells. Here, magic was used only to support the wheat fields and the vegetable gardens that hugged the houses and the dusty road.

I stepped into my one-room hut and blinked as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. I wrinkled my nose at the acrid smell of new leather. Halu, my foster father, was a tanner. Halu and his son, Leril, were seated at the kitchen table, and Moran, my foster mother, served them from a wide-mouthed pot balanced on her hip. She looked up at me with raised eyebrows. I was uncomfortably aware of my empty hands and unburdened back.

“The well caved in, and a soldier thought I did it,” I said quickly. “I dropped the pails. Can someone else go get the water?”

“We need those, Nula,” said Moran.

“I was scared. I didn’t do it.”

Moran’s eyes caught my forehead for a second, then shifted back to her work spooning out a watery chickpea mixture. I touched my head. My shawl had slipped back to reveal my own flyaway black hair and the black Mark scrawled on my forehead by an unpracticed hand. Moran liked me to keep it covered. I pulled the shawl back down over my forehead and wrapped the rest around my neck to secure it.

“You’re going to need to take care of yourself,” said Moran. “Your mother didn’t leave an easy life for you. We’ve raised you best as we could, but there’s only so much we can do considering your circumstances.”

Moran sat down at the table while I hovered in the doorway a moment longer.

Moran rolled her eyes. “Nula, Leril already fetched the water, you were so late. But you need to get those pails, or someone will steal them. If you can’t, you’ll need to buy us new ones.”

I stared at her. She knew no one would hire me. How would I get money for that?

“Moran,” said Halu. He had a quiet, whispering voice. “The girl’s been frightened.”

Moran shot him an icy look, then her eyes came back to me. “Now, Nula.”

“Make an offering at the temple,” suggested Halu. “That might turn your luck around. Ask for your mother’s forgiveness.”

I left the room, but not before catching Leril’s stifled laugh and the pity on Halu’s face. Both equally made my stomach ache.

I did as Halu said and wandered to the temple a few doors down. I’d prayed there nearly every day since I was eleven years old. It hadn’t produced results yet, but I kept going out of habit. It was a hut slightly bigger than my own, the interior hot and laden with incense. Alone in the center stood a hand-chiseled statue of Gattamak, guardian of the desert and the Gearda. He was three feet tall and muscular, with a long yellow painted braid down his back. His face was worn smooth from long years of repeated touching. At his feet were small token offerings: dolls, jewelry, a packet of seeds, a dried rose blossom.

I unwrapped my shawl, untied my hair, and placed the threadbare string next to a poorly sewn rag doll. It was a sorry offering, but it was all I had. I knelt down and bowed.

Small mirrors lined Gattamak’s feet and my own wide blue eyes staring back at me from beneath the Mark. I rubbed at the glyph, but it wouldn’t smear or fade. As always, I prayed the Mark would disappear.

I despised it. I didn’t know why my mother would want to give her little babe such a life. Immortality was worthless to me. Villagers wouldn’t accept a Sorcerer in their midst, and Sorcerers wouldn’t accept a Marked Villager. I occupied a class of my own.

I was beginning to think that Halu and Moran were right, that the Mark was a curse of sorts. This was the second time I’d been around something that had lost its magic. The first time was five years before, when I was eleven. I was playing in the tall stalks of wheat in our neighbor’s field when a couple of the jeweled border stones went dark. The loam in one corner turned to sand and hard-packed dry earth. Green wheat changed to yellow-brown within the span of a breath and crumbled away to dust as I watched. The farmer who owned the field chased me out with a knife in his hand.

If the Villagers had needed any sort of validation for their theory that Marked Villagers were cursed, they received it that day. I wasn’t allowed to forget it either.

Hunters are killing some of the Embrizid…

Tulkot’s words seemed tangible in the stuffy, thick air of the temple. If he was right… if there was a reason for the broken spells, maybe I had a chance to change all this, even if I was doomed keep the Mark.

---

The sun was just sinking behind the mountains the next evening when I stole out of the hut and ran to the Upper. I ran right up all the way to the narrow stairway chipped into the side of the mountain. The stairs were steep and tiring, and I began to climb on all fours for speed’s sake. I’d never been up this way before, but it was the only way I might find Tulkot.

As I neared a ledge on the red-gold mountain, I spotted caves bored into the rock up above. Further up on the face of the mountain, it looked pockmarked and dimpled with countless caverns. Some Embrizid above me leaped from their roosts and took flight, gliding over Minunaga, off to hunt. Sorcerer sentries perched on balconied towers performed the spell to open the transparent dome that covered the city, and the Embrizid sped off until they were nothing more than dark dots in a darkening sky. I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to slay one of those powerful creatures.

I reached a landing and slid down against the wall next to a wide mouthed cave. I panted and my forehead dripped onto the fine grit that coated the stone ledge. I was more afraid than fatigued. There was no wall to the ledge–I sat two steps away from a very long drop. I drew my knees up to my chin, as if my legs could betray me and fling me over the ledge against my will.

As my breath quieted, I heard voices coming from the cave next to me, and not all of them were the growling guttural tones of Embrizids. Some were people.

“We can talk more, of course,” said a clear human tenor. “We would love to accommodate your concerns in any way we can–you know how much we value your kind.”

Then came a deep, bone vibrating GRRMPH. “I would say utterly dependent on our kind. You Gearda would be no more than dried corpses without our help.”

This was the deep voice of an ancient and mammoth Embrizid.

“Of course,” said the man. “We are indeed dependent. And grateful. But–”

“And what do we receive, hm? We receive a roost, yes, the opportunity to make magic, yes. But you receive the food and your city and our long life.”

“We offer you protection!” The man’s voice cracked.

The Embrizid rumbled a laugh that shook the ledge–small flakes of stone danced in the dust before my eyes. “Protection, Chief Fullak says! Can we not hunt on our own?”

“I know that,” said Fullak. ”You are powerful, no one denies that. We provide you with cattle and goats, as much as we can spare. We don’t eat the meat–we leave it all to you. We give you our territories for safe hunting when you need more, and our people never hurt you. They would be punished for such a crime. They do not dare.”

“Your people do not, but there are others. You are too content under your dome.”

Out of curiosity, I peered inside the cave. It was so vast I couldn’t fathom where the ceiling ended, and it was lit with torches that burned with a steady, pale silver light. Chief Fullak was cloaked in a teal robe, the train of which crumpled and dragged behind him. He had two young manservants with him who stood by the wall, yawning.

The Embrizid was seated on a broad stone dais at the far end of the room, and five other adult Embrizid either lay or sat silently nearby. He was male, marked by his expansive feathered mane, and he was bigger than any Embrizid I’d ever laid eyes on. Fullak, who stood taller than most, reached only to the crook of the Embrizid’s front legs. The Embrizid’s coloring was mostly cream and flecked with brown and black. The end of his long tail twitched with pent-up exasperation. This had to be Sar, the Embrizid’s king and Fullak’s equal.

Fullak cleared his throat. “I refuse to send hunting parties into the desert until you are certain how these Embrizid were killed. It could very well be clans of your kind from the Southern cities, or even from the west. Or… or there is that Marked Villager girl. Yes, some of my most ranked Sorcerers think that the Mark has given her dark power, and that she doesn’t have the wherewithal to control it. She was near the well when it collapsed.”

My stomach tightened, and my sweat ran cold. I didn’t know the Sorcerers thought much the same as Halu and Moran.

“She’s possessed, that’s what,” Fullak continued more confidently. “There have been other instances as well–the Villagers have been reporting them for years. I’ve always had my eye on her, of course, after her mother’s crimes. We must think these things through without being rash and galloping off to scour the desert when the problem could be right here.”

Sar belched out a roar. I jerked away from the cave entrance and hugged my legs close again, certain that the ledge was going to snap off the mountain with the power of Sar’s bellow.

“Rash!” snarled Sar. “He says we are rash! Our feuds with the clans are our own concern and none of yours. There are no feuds at the moment. If anything can be said for Embrizid, it is that we fight with true reason. They would not attack us without announcing why. These attacks are random and cruel, like people.”

“Perhaps you underestimate your kind,” said Fullak. “The missing Embrizid are just that. Missing. We do not know what became of them.”

“We will not hunt after people. We will only defend. I do not want to be a part of your feuds,” said Sar as if he hadn’t heard Fullak’s last remark. “And this girl of yours–I have never heard of such a thing. I do not believe it.”

“It is likely that the Mark on a Villager could have ill-effects…”

“The Mark is just a spell. Investigate her if you like. If you are correct, apprehend her and be done with it. But I also want a party out to look for hunters in the desert. We have given and given, and you only take. I ask that you investigate the hunters.”

“There are no hunters,” yelled Fullak. “No one survives in the desert except for Gearda, and that is only because of our magic.”

“It is our magic! I suggest you do so at once, if you enjoy your Minunaga. I can call my Embrizid. They will follow, and we can fly far from here.”

Silence.

“I will think it over, Sar,” Fullak said at last. “Thank you for your time.”

I heard the sound of fabric rustling against stone before the servants lifted Fullak’s train off the ground. I squirmed away from the cave entrance and held my breath as Fullak and his manservants exited the cave mere inches from me. Fullak’s handsome face was flushed with strawberry-red patches on his cheeks, and he pulled at his short beard as he scowled. A silvery grey Embrizid followed close behind–a female, smaller than Sar but still formidable. All three men clambered onto her back, and she took off, her talons screeching against the stone.

“What are you doing here?”

I let out a half-gasp, half-whimper, and my heart sped back up to where it had been while I climbed the stairs.

It was Tulkot. He had been in the cave with Fullak and Sar.

“Looking for you,” I breathed.

Tulkot looked pleased. “Really? Do you want to see my roost? I think I could fly you up.”

I looked at his sapling-thin legs and bony figure.

“Maybe some other time,” I said. “I was looking for you because I want to go see–” I lowered my voice. “–I want to see Elud.”

Tulkot did a prance of excitement and tossed his head. “I’ll go! When? Now?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you hear Fullak? They think I’m doing all this.”

“The Embrizid don’t really think–”

“And you know Halu and Moran think my curse is causing the collapses. They’ve all got pretty much the same idea. If there’re hunters…maybe there’s something we can do. We could help Fullak or something, or tell Sar. Elud lives out there, maybe he’s seen something.”

“Villagers are dunces,” Tulkot said. “There’s no such thing as cursed. At least the Sorcerers think you’ve got some strange dark magic.”

He displayed his teeth in amusement.

“It’s not funny,” I said. “This makes me feel sick.”

Tulkot sighed. “It’s not true, and you know it. Fullak will do anything to avoid chasing down hunters in the desert.”

“True or not, I don’t want to be locked up.”

“We’ll figure something out. It’ll all be okay.” He nuzzled my elbow with his powerful head until I giggled and flung my arms up for protection.

---

When we finally reached level ground well after sundown, Tulkot shape-shifted to a tiny white songbird that could fit in my hand. It’s the only magic Embrizid can do on their own. It helps them travel unnoticed. Birds don’t catch the eye quite like an Embrizid’s normal form.

With Tulkot nibbling at the food I’d brought in my pocket, I reached the edge of the Upper, where the buildings sat right up against the dome. The dome was the spell that hid Minunaga from outsiders and kept the moist, cool air inside. It hugged the section of the mountains where the Gearda had grown the city, and touched down in a circle, part of it on the other side of the mountain somewhere, part of it past the fields, and, in some places, it touched down just at the edge of the city. Here, the dome was just two feet from the back of the closest building, a clump of towers and turrets that housed Sorcerers’ workrooms that were empty for the night. This was the easiest place to slip out unnoticed.

I squeezed myself between the stone wall of the building and the foot-high wall that marked the dome. The dome itself was solid to my touch, like a cool piece of glass. I chose a brick in the little wall and, with another rock, scratched the simple glyph for “door,” an arch with an upward pointing arrow inside. The gems in the building and the dome wall gave off adequate light for me to see what I was doing. I touched the glyph with the index finger of my left hand, while my right hand drew Tulkot out of my pocket.

But before I could channel the heat of Tulkot’s magic, darkness flooded in.

I didn’t realize what had happened until Tulkot flew out from my pocket and fluttered away, transforming into his Embrizid form in mid-flight to gain more distance.

The stone behind me cracked and groaned, and a few hard chunks rained on my back and shoulders. I scrambled out and desperately bolted in the direction of the Village. Sorcerers ran beside me and yelled for family members. Time seemed to slow. I heard their harsh breath scraping too fast through raw throats. A scarlet-clad soldier grabbed at me, and someone shouted something. I was caught. I struggled, clawed, and kicked all the soft flesh I could find. The jewels on my captor’s robe scratched into my own skin. My knee connected with a soft belly. A groan, a sharp intake of breath, and I was free.

Tulkot returned in a flurry of sharp claws and loose white feathers. We ran together to a different part of the dome, not bothering with stealth this time. I drew the glyph again on the stone wall, but my hand shook so violently I didn’t know if the magic would take. I felt the flare of his magic, I pulled some of it out of him, and I drew it down to the glyph through my finger. The glyph lit up and we stumbled through the opening, where the night was clearer and darker without the veil of the dome.

We were safe–the rock wouldn’t hold the spell for long, and no one in the city but me had the courage to venture into the naked desert.

We hung close to the mountain in the shadows. I limped on the rough stone, but in the dry air, my mind calmed. Once, I looked back. Minunaga was hidden to my eyes, but I could identify the shape of the mountain on which Minunaga was built. It was like the city had never existed.

An hour later, I found the landmark I’d been scanning for: a tall stone pillar streaked with red and beige. Just a few yards beyond, a few feet higher, was a lone cave with the same smooth look as an Embrizid’s roost. While I looked around for any unwanted followers, I glimpsed a bright star on the horizon far away. I squinted at it. It flickered orange in the distance, like the light of a fire.

Tulkot nudged me and flew up to the cave. He waited next to the opening, clinging to the rock with his talons. Just as I reached the lip of the opening in the stone, someone yanked me up onto the ledge, and a knife pressed into my throat.

I faced the opening and the desert, held my breath, and kept silent.

Tulkot flew in and gave a puppy-like growl.

“Oh, it’s you,” said a voice hoarsened and deepened by a lifetime of pipe smoking. “Don’t sneak up like that. You never come at night.”

Elud let me go and I fell face first onto the floor of the cave, coughing and rubbing my neck.

“You hurt her,” snarled Tulkot.

“Nula’s fine. How about a warning next time before you climb up?”

I sat up and faced Elud. “What happened to you?” I said, but I could figure it out on my own.

The last time I’d seen Elud, he looked to be in his early thirties. Like all Sorcerers, he’d reached that age and then stopped while time moved on without him. He’d had dark coiling hair braided down his back, and his jewel-less cloak had been worn to rags. He had looked the part of a Sorcerer who had tired of Minunaga and had left with his Embrizid companion, Relt. The gray and black female dominated the back of the cave, and looked lazily up at the commotion at the entrance.

Now, in the light of the fire, he was an aged phantom of my friend. His hair and beard were silvery white, and the hair frizzed all about his head, much like an Embrizid’s mane. His cloak hung on thin shoulders, his back bent painfully, and his chest caved inwards.

My eyes flicked to his forehead. It was heavily freckled and wrinkled, but…

“How long are you going to gape like that?” he said. “You’ve seen old ones before. You live in the Village of all places.” Elud filled a cup in the magicked spring at the back of the cave and handed it to me.

“I haven’t seen an old one who aged sixty years in just a month. Your Mark…”

He nodded and sipped his own water.

“I didn’t know the spell could be undone,” said Tulkot. “No one ever does it.”

“Hmph,” said Elud. “All spells can be undone, even that dome over the city. The Mark is a simple spell. All you need is the glyphs to counter it.”

Excitement and hope scaled my spine like hot water. I could undo it. I could be a Villager. No one could blame me for dark magic or curses, even if there were hunters.

“Can you teach me? How to do that?”

Gingerly, Elud sat down on a flat boulder next to a wall. “Why did you come here?”

“Really, I don’t want the Mark anymore. You know I don’t care about getting old. I’m like you–I think the Mark is a horrible mistake. It’s not good for people. No one should have it.”

Elud chuckled. “Let me think a moment. I’ve schooled you well, there’s that much to be said. Now tell me why you’re out here in the desert.”

I sighed but didn’t press him further. “Tulkot says there’re hunters that are killing Embrizid. A well collapsed and then a building. I was nearby for both.”

Elud frowned at his water cup, thinking.

I continued: “And…and some of the Villagers think that I did it, that I’m bad luck. I’m not surprised about them, but now Chief Fullak thinks I’ve got dark magic because of the Mark. It sounded like they’re going to arrest me.”

Still no answer.

“Do you think I’ve really got–?”

“No, you child,” Elud snapped. “If you would let me teach you more magic, you would know that. Ignorance around magic is dangerous.”

“Villagers aren’t allowed, though,” I said as the relief washed in. “I don’t want to know more glyphs than I need.”

Elud raised his eyebrows. “And for no good reason. The only thing separating Sorcerers and Villagers is that cursed Mark. Your Mark gave you long life and that’s all. No mysterious dark magic involved. Those idiots in the city should remember that the magic we use with the Embrizid is a tool, not some mystery worthy of worship. It’s all there in that library. Read a scroll or two.”

“But you always say that magic is unnatural,” I said hesitantly.

“Just the Mark. And the dome, I would say. Other than that, if you want to spell a brick to make it lighter, or spell yourself prettier, I don’t see why I should care. Magic should be used carefully.”

“So do you think someone’s killing the Embrizid? How can they bring one down?”

Elud nodded and hobbled over to Relt. She turned her head and stepped into the firelight. A dark, glistening cut sliced down from her forehead, through the fine grey feathers on her face, over her closed right eye, and down to her jaw. Elud patted her vast cheek while she purred.

“They can shoot spears,” said Relt. “But first they trick us with meat. We can’t tell which are their bait animals and which are desert animals. We come down and hunt, and when our bellies are too full to fly, they shoot spears at us.”

Fury was a hard weight in my stomach. “But don’t you fight?”

Relt rumbled indignantly. “Of course we fight. We come in close to attack with our teeth and claws, but then we are all the closer to their spears. I’ve seen them attack. They have skill.”

“Quit flying as Embrizid. Fly as birds,” I said.

“We can’t change with our bellies full of meat that weighs more than a tiny bird,” she said wearily.

“I heard Sar saying that he’ll leave with all the Embrizid with him.”

Relt lay her head back down between her front feet. “The city will fall.”

I frowned and turned to Elud. “People have magic too, though, can’t Sorcerers just keep it up?”

Elud’s mouth turned tight. “Magic is strange, it forces us together with the Embrizid,” he said. “Embrizid have the magic but can’t use it. People can use the magic, write our glyphs, shape our spells, but we need to find the magic elsewhere. If Sorcerers use the magic inside them, that leads to illness and death. Even with the Mark, we aren’t naturally immortal like the Embrizid. We have limited life magic to pour into our spells.”

Elud met my gaze with hard eyes.

“T-the city can’t fall,” I said.

Elud barked out a laugh. “Sure it can. You’ll learn to live in the desert as it should be. Villagers will die, and the Sorcerers will move on to eke out a life elsewhere with no magic and no trade. Just several lifetimes ahead of them. Simple enough to me.”

I looked around Elud’s cave home. It was sparse and dull compared to the lush fields surrounding the Village or the glittering buildings and gardens of the Upper. I didn’t want to live like he did.

“Why did you leave Minunaga?” I asked.

“Out here, magic isn’t the only thing keeping the world together,” he said. “It’s reassuring.”

---

The sun spilled over the horizon outside the opening of Elud’s cave. Tulkot sat in the back of the cave talking with Relt in words that were distinctly Embrizid: grunts and snarls and purrs. Elud was quiet. He leaned against the wall with a whetstone in hand, drawing it down the blade of his knife. I hugged my elbows and watched the light overwhelm the desert plain.

“You going back anytime soon?” said Elud at last.

“I don’t know.”

Relt and Tulkot stopped speaking. I was sure they both tilted their heads toward us to listen in.

“Get over here,” said Elud. “I’ll take that Mark off and maybe the idiots will treat you better.”

My hands and legs trembled with terror and anticipation, but I went and stood in front of Elud. He produced a tiny nub of charcoal from his pocket and with a firm hand, he drew several glyphs across my forehead, eyebrow to eyebrow. Charcoal dust fell to my nose and cheeks. Relt ambled over and I shut my eyes tight. I felt Elud’s warm dry hand against my head as if he were checking for fever. A hot flash of magic turned the inside of my eyelids orange-yellow. A slight pop.

“I’ll just wipe off the charcoal,” whispered Elud.

A wet cloth dripped stinging water into my eyes. Tears mixed in.

“Open your eyes now,” said Tulkot. “You look silly.”

Elud handed me a piece of an old mirror. In the morning light I gazed into my reflection. My face was dirty and exhausted, yes, but my forehead was clean and unMarked. I giggled hysterically and hugged Elud, then Tulkot, then Relt.

The city had to stand now, just long enough for me to have my life.

---

When I returned to the Village, Elud’s cure seemed to take care of everything. Halu exhaled shakily when I arrived home that afternoon with a clean forehead. He embraced me and kissed the spot where the Mark used to be. Moran even gave me a small relieved smile. Leril couldn’t stop staring. No one questioned how I got rid of it.

“We were afraid for you after that last collapse,” said Halu. “We thought you were locked up somewhere in the Upper. It has been suspicious, you must admit that.”

I laughed uneasily. I didn’t think anyone but Halu had been overly concerned.

Moran approached me and appraised my appearance from my filthy feet to my sweaty, matted braid. “You need a bath. Stay in the village awhile until the Sorcerers calm down. You got rid of that Mark, at least. That has to be the end of this.”

I did as I was told. I bathed. Leril had gotten work with a farmer down the street, so Halu had me help him with the tanning for a few coins. He never let me help before.

The next few days were a sweet paradise. Villagers greeted me shyly in the road and complimented me. I stayed clear of the Upper, and I didn’t see Tulkot. No soldiers came to the house. For a few days, I was just a Villager.

One week after I returned from Elud’s, I stepped into the hut to find Moran and Halu deep in hushed conversation. I coughed to announce myself.

Moran looked up sharply, her dark eyebrows nearly meeting each other over the bridge of her nose. “Can we trust you to stay here alone today? You won’t touch anything?”

“Of course,” I said. “Why?”

“Chief Fullak is holding a festival day in honor of the Embrizid,” said Halu. “We don’t think it would be wise for you to go to the Upper just yet.”

I agreed with him. He was right. After a week free of collapses, Fullak probably wanted to please the Embrizid and calm Minunaga’s residents in one carefree celebration. Everyone needed a chance to forget.

After they left late that morning, I wandered to the back of the house while eating a crumbling piece of bread. I paced the cracked earth and drew my hand over the green tips of the ever-growing wheat. Contentment welled within me. I would have been happy to live the rest of my days doing no more than quiet work interspersed with quiet meals and quiet walks. I would have been happy never setting foot in the Upper again. I would look at it from the Village and admire it’s beauty. That would be enough.

Then I paused. Out over the wheat, far beyond the dome wall, was a cluster of white tents, wiry horses, and cloaked people. I squinted at it. A large, dark shape squirmed on the sand by one of the tents, and the people looked to be arguing.

The bread dried and stuck in my throat. I knew what I was seeing, but I forced my mind not to connect the image to anything deeper. I swallowed and went inside where I sat by a window looking out toward the city, away from the desert. I could just see the highest towers of the Upper. I watched them and waited for the collapse.

Neither came. My heart slowed and my thoughts smoothed.

Then the smooth surface rippled with a traitorous thought.

What if the Embrizid is still alive.

I jumped to my feet and flew out the door.

---

I met Tulkot halfway up the sloping road to the Upper. The road was deserted but cheering and faint music sifted down all the way from the Upper to the Village.

“Tulkot!” I said breathlessly. “How did you know? What are you doing?”

Tulkot cocked his head. “What? I was going to visit you since the entire city is in the Upper. I thought it’d be safe.”

“Look, I spotted the hunters and I think they caught an Embrizid. A huge black one. Nothing’s collapsed, so it’s still alive–we have to do something.”

I didn’t have a clue what exactly I wanted to do, but Tulkot’s rose eyes widened, and he started walking back up toward the Upper.

“That must be Worl,” he growled. “She’s one of Sar’s mates.”

I convinced Tulkot to reach the dome through the wheat field by my hut. It was closest and easiest. We crossed the field, careful not to bruise more plants than necessary. The camp looked just as it had earlier, except the Embrizid was on her feet now, swatting at spindly people who came only to her chest.

I scratched the glyph with a shard of rock like the last time and opened a doorway in the dome.

We rushed frantically toward the camp. Tulkot restrained himself from flying most of the way to keep with me, but when we were near enough to watch one human figure expertly dodge Worl’s swinging talons and snapping jaws to jam a long spear into her underbelly, Tulkot roared and flew toward them. One of the hunters swung some kind of angular contraption in Tulkot’s direction and loosed a short, thick spear. Tulkot shot higher into the air, but the spear grazed his hind leg and left a bloody line amid the dingy white feathers. I unsheathed my own belt knife and charged at the hunters, if only to distract them from Tulkot.

“Stop!” I shrieked. “Stop shooting!”

For a second, the strange bow was pointed right my chest. The woman lowered it as I got closer.

“Who are you?” a man said in a harsh accent. “We’ve never seen anyone here.”

“There’s a–a city back there. You can’t see it. When the Embrizid–”

“Embrizid?”

“These creatures. When they’re killed, our buildings fall. They hold up the spells.”

At that, the hunters smiled, like I was a child telling a ridiculous lie.

“Little one, they are magical,” said the woman with the spear. “But that’s why we hunt. Their bones and hide are very valuable, good for medicines and luck. We sell them out west.”

“I can teach you the spells,” I said, but I couldn’t believe I had suggested it. “If you want–me and Tulkot–that’ll get you money. Just stop–”

“Spells?” the woman laughed.

“Yes. Please, I’m not making things up.”

One of the men stepped forward and studied my face. He was tall, with dark skin, highlighted by his creamy white cloak.

“I think the girl is truthful,” he said finally. “I’ll listen. We need a way to make our living. What do you think?”

He was looking at me again while Tulkot landed heavily at my side.

“We’ll teach you a little magic,” said Tulkot. “And then you can leave us.”

“They talk?” said the woman with the spear, but her shooting mechanism hung limp at her side.

“It needs to be worth it,” said the man.

“We have a library full of scrolls,” I pleaded. “That’s where all our spells are. We’ll get you some and then you can go west and use them for money. I don’t care.”

“If you leave and don’t come back, we’ll keep hunting,” said the woman with the spear. “For all we know, this witch city is fake.” She squinted vaguely in the direction of Minunaga.

Under the hunters’ gaze, I knelt by Worl’s face. It was moist and flecked with her own blood, but I didn’t let myself look at the damage further down. A green eye as large as my head fixed blearily on me.

“We’ll be back soon,” I said.

The eye closed. With Tulkot, I headed for the Upper of Minunaga. Embrizid were strong. Worl would live.

---

We opened a doorway in the dome up near the ruined building from the last collapse. We climbed through, navigated over the broken stones, and trotted through the empty streets to the library. The festival was held in the square in front of the library, deafening with joyous, drunken cheers, and quick music. Embrizid swarmed the sky and perched on rooftops in numbers I’d never seen. Sorcerers and Villagers sang and danced and ate right up to the steps of the library tower and along the stone roads that curved around the expansive garden in the center. The flowers–vermilion lilies, blue asters, scarlet chrysanthemums–stood tall in the midday sunlight filtered through the dome that arched high above their heads. Thick smells of baking sweets and simmering spiced sauces draped the air.

Tulkot and I hid in a nearby quiet alleyway. I searched my pockets for charcoal and came up with nothing. So, I spat into the dirt and mixed it until it was a thin reddish paste. With my “ink,” I drew a glyph on my forehead, a circle with a small “X” inside. Tulkot pressed his nose to my head, and the glyph took the magic. I was Hidden, invisible to anyone who wasn’t carrying an amulet with the counter spell. Tulkot changed into a songbird and nestled himself beneath my braid.

I wove between throngs of happy jostling people as stealthily as possible. I bumped a few of them, and collided directly with two, but those involved were too happily occupied with drinking and dancing to notice.

Inside the library, there was only one worker, a young Sorcerer asleep at his desk, scrolls strewn over his lap and on the floor. Tulkot emerged from my hair and fluttered toward a steep stairwell. I followed him up four exhausting floors.

“All these are spells,” he chirped in my ear when we reached the sprawling fourth floor room.

The walls were lined with books up to the ceiling, and hundreds of shelves in neat rows dominated the floor. The countless jewels studding every surface provided just enough light to see.

I’d never imagined the number of books and scrolls the library might contain.

“Where are the useful ones?” I said.

Tulkot twittered and leaped off my shoulder. In midair he took his Embrizid form and landed on his feet. Limping slightly from his injury, Tulkot wove in-between the shelves glancing here and there. He pulled scrolls seemingly at random and let them lay on the floor. I trailed behind and picked them up. I scanned each as I collected it. Fire spells, festival performance spells, healing spells, building spells, agriculture spells. All of them were either useful or showy. Anything to get the hunters their money.

“You don’t want to give them the Mark do you?” I said.

“No,” said Tulkot. “I don’t think so. That’s just for Gearda, and it hasn’t turned out too well, has it?”

CRAAAAAACK.

The glow in the walls blinked to nothing.

I ran for the door with Tulkot just ahead of me. The stairwell was pitch dark, and the stone steps crumbled beneath our feet. I fell hard on my tailbone and slid down almost half the flight of stairs. The stairs behind me turned to sand. I tumbled into Tulkot and knocked him down a few more steps, just before a stone as tall as Tulkot worked its way out of the ceiling and crashed through the dissolving stairs behind us.

At the next landing, Tulkot yowled in pain. Afterwards he favored his front left paw, and ran a little bit slower. We turned, ready to flee down the next flight of stairs, but they dissolved like a child’s sand castle overcome with a pail of water.

“I have an idea,“ I said, and I pulled him by the ear toward the room on this landing.

Gaping holes expanded in the floor, and stones and plaster dropped from the ceiling. Shelves toppled and scrolls were strewn all over the disintegrating flagstone.

“You’ll have to carry me for a moment or two,” I said.

Tulkot nodded and leapt toward a narrow window. Some of the rock around it had fallen away, and the window was just wide enough for Tulkot’s body as long as he didn’t expand his wings. For a moment, Tulkot looked even skinnier and half-grown than he usually did, but I clambered onto his back anyway. His knees buckled with my weight. He clumsily hopped to the windowsill and jumped.

My stomach twisted and traveled to my mouth until Tulkot unfurled his wings and floated safely to the ground. The library continued to shake and moan behind us, but now the sounds of stones scraping and cracking mixed with the sharp addition of human screams.

Tulkot tried to gain more altitude and failed. We sank closer and closer to the ground without gaining much distance from the site. We plowed right into a small group of shrieking Sorcerers.

For a few seconds, everything was a thick mix of pain and tangled limbs–some human, some Embrizid. By the time I scrambled to my feet, Tulkot had already flown off. I ignored the angry shouts and ran alongside the library garden without looking back, even when I heard the building make a final groan and then the deafening roar of rocks falling against the stone street. I shielded my head with my hands and arms and kept going. I ran until my breath was fire in my chest and the dust from the collapse caught up with me.

“Nula!”

I whirled around to look. Moran was storming toward me–my Hiding spell had worn off. I glanced down at my arms full of scrolls.

“It was you!” she said. “We thought it was the Mark, but it was you.”

“You don’t understand–”

“You’ve killed people now, you know that?” She grabbed my arms and shook me. I did everything to keep the scrolls from falling to the ground. “Is it never enough for you? Why do you want to do this to us? I can’t find Halu and Leril. What if they don’t make it? What then?”

I whimpered and tore away from Moran.

“DO NOT COME BACK TO MY HOME!” she shrieked after me.

Exhausted, I looped back through an alleyway to look for Tulkot now that the worst had happened. The library garden was a mess of crushed plants and crying, rocking people. Still figures lay among bruised flowers and boulders. Thick dust caught the late afternoon sun and swirled over it all. It looked like the desert had finally made its way through the dome. Tulkot found me, scooped me up, and carried me half-running, half-gliding to the Village. We left through the same doorway I’d made earlier. Only couple hours had passed.

---

At the camp, I glanced at Worl’s still form at a distance. I didn’t need see her up close to know what had happened. The dark man and the woman with the spear escorted Tulkot and me into one of their tents. It was spacious and cool inside, with one small oil lamp and brightly patterned rugs over the sand. I dumped the scrolls on the floor. The man picked one up frowned as he opened it. I worried that the script might be foreign to him, but he soon nodded and scanned the rest. Niggling at the back of my mind was the ruined library and the gnawing sense of betrayal. These were our secrets. The Gearda, even the Villagers, were proud of their sorcery and their oasis.

Still, if all else failed, if I was never allowed back in Minunaga again, the city would stand forever and that was enough…

I showed them how to touch Tulkot and feel his magic. I showed them how to use it, how to draw the glyphs so the magic would do what they wanted. I told them how jewels would hold spells for a long time.

“We need these creatures to perform the spells,” said the tall man. “How can we do magic without one?”

I was silent. I hadn’t thought of that at all.

“I’ll go with them,” said Tulkot. “Just for a bit.”

I choked on my protest. Minunaga would stand. He was brave, braver than me. He loved Minunaga, too.

The hunters grinned at Tulkot and patted him like a dog. I pushed the yellowed scrolls toward the hunters, folded my arms, looked away.

The hunters chattered amongst themselves of the promise that awaited them out west. I looked out the open flap, in the direction of Minunaga, wondering how long I would have to wait before going back. Maybe a month or two. I would live with Elud for awhile. Maybe Relt would help me get back through the dome.

The city flickered into existence outside, tangled buildings, towers, and all.

The air turned frigid. A thick cloud of dust rose from the ground and engulfed the tall tangle of buildings as they slowly leaned and toppled over.

Hundreds of Embrizid flew in our direction, right overhead.

The hunters around me shouted and left the tent to watch the spectacle. The city they didn’t believe in had appeared, and now it fell before their eyes.

My ears mercifully dulled the sound. I watched my world end through the open flap of the hunters’ cool tent.

---

I hung around the ruins after Minunaga fell and counted about fifty or so survivors, the majority of whom were Villagers who didn’t go the festival. From my foster family, only Moran survived. I didn’t speak to her.

There were no more Embrizid. All of the grand spells that needed their constant input had failed. Only simple spells stayed intact. The handful of surviving Sorcerers kept their protection amulets, their perpetually sharpened knives, their scrying crystals. Their Marks were still bold on their foreheads.

The Sorcerers lacked the Villagers’ urgency to leave and head west. They sat in silence, stunned and sad as they surveyed their demolished city.

The hunters had gone. They moved quickly, with only their tents and Embrizid hides to concern them. Tulkot left with them. We didn’t say anything to each other before he left.

I pilfered food and water where I could and listened in on conversations. I lived in an underground room in the abandoned Upper. Hunger and thirst were near constant, and I grew nervous. There was no more magical paradise. The crop fields were reduced to straw and cracked earth. I wasn’t Marked. Death sent a gentle reminder of her presence whenever I drank cloudy brown water or felt stabs of true hunger.

Six days after the collapse, the Villagers departed for the western hills. They had little food, and bad water had already caused a few more deaths among infants and old ones. I watched them go with fear and grief hollowing me.

So the night after the Villagers left Minunaga, I slipped away to the streaky stone pillar, to Elud’s cave.

“I thought I’d see you,” he said.

His hair was thin and white now, and he was bowed so much that he was a hand shorter than I was. I burst into tears at the sight of him. Startled, he patted me on the cheek.

“My girl…Minunaga couldn’t last forever, not like that.”

“But you…”

“I’m as I should be. As are you.” He pressed a finger on my forehead.

“Elud, please…can I talk to Relt? Do you have something to write with?”

Elud sighed, handed me a long, fresh stick of charcoal, and waved me to the back of the cave where the Embrizid slept.

I approached Relt, who opened a lazy hazel eye. With the charcoal I drew the circle I despised, a circle shot through with two overlapping crosses on my forehead. Relt glanced at Elud and touched her head to mine.

I felt the flare of magic and drank it in. I touched my forehead, but no charcoal came off on my fingers. It was smooth and Marked. Relt went back to sleep.

“I’m going north,” I said to Elud. “I don’t want to live here anymore.”

“Alone? You can’t go alone. Relt will go with you.”

“No,” I said. “She stays with you.”

Relt made no motion and kept dozing. She was loyal to Elud, and I knew that.

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

Elud smiled. “I know you will.” He grasped my arm tight. “I hope you have another chance to undo the spell before too long.”

I embraced Elud’s frail form and left the cave, my shawl wrapped low around my forehead. I started north, toward the sea with my glittering city bright and perfect in my mind.

I didn’t meet another Embrizid for a long time.

---

Psychopomps

By Judith Field

Mark’s next door neighbour and business partner Pat kept telling him that power flowed through his veins. He took a breath and closed his eyes, trying to will the power back out again and into the ash wand in his outstretched hand. He pointed it at Pat’s door. A narrow beam of blue light squeezed out of the end and hit the lock. Nothing happened. Sighing, he folded the wand and put it in his pocket. He took out his key and let himself into her house.

He heard her moving around in the kitchen, back from sorting out the invasion of reptilian arsonists in a garden in Llandudno the day before, while he had expelled a banshee from a pub in Macclesfield. This morning’s job was to sort out an elderly-care home with a spirit infestation. Mark opened the kitchen door.

Pat coughed, wafting her hand at a cloud of green fumes. “Damn, they’re still moving,” she said.

Mark peered through the smoke. Two dragons, one red, one green, as iridescent as hummingbirds, each about an inch long, stood in the palm of her hand hissing at each other.

“They might be tiny but they’d incinerated every plant in that,” Pat said. One dragon snorted, and shot a tiny flare the size of a match flame towards the other. “Help me separate them.” She pushed her hand towards Mark.

He picked up the green one with his forefinger and thumb. “I’ll put them in the safe.”

“No room, there’s a backlog of entities stuck in there, waiting for me to get the chance to dispose of them.”

“Get the dragons to set each other alight and burn each other up.”

“That won’t work,” she said. “An entity can’t destroy another entity. If they could we’d be out of a job. I was trying to find a way round the space problem using this new incantation I picked up online. Instead of you having to exorcise them and put them in containment, it renders them immobile and you can leave them anywhere.”

“Wouldn’t it get a little cluttered after a while?”

“No, apparently they fade away gradually over a few hours. At least, that’s what it said on the website.”

“Seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”

Pat moved her hand away as her dragon flamed at the one Mark held. She shook her head. “I think it should make things easier. Exorcising a recalcitrant entity the usual way can be exhausting. It causes something like a bad hangover, without any of the pleasure of the night before.”

“I’ve felt that. Bit like 24 hour flu?”

Pat nodded. “Consider it an occupational hazard. But this new method doesn’t seem to work, the dragons are still moving about. Good job I tested it on something small.”

Mark looked at Pat’s notebook open on the table, the dragon still held between two fingers. “You should have printed the thing out instead of copying it. This looks like an inky spider’s crawled over the page.” He held the green dragon at arm’s length and read the incantation. This time, red smoke billowed. As it cleared, he saw the red dragon motionless on Pat’s palm. She picked it up by a wing.

“I can’t read my own writing,” she said. “Well done.” She put the dragon on a shelf next to a pile of recipe books. “You stay there, Boyo. We’ve got work to do.” Mark put the green one next to it. They stood, as immobile as toys. Pat picked up her car keys. They got into the car, she slipped her stiletto heels off and they drove away.

---

They arrived at a low rise building, set back from the road. Star Lodge.

“It doesn’t look haunted to me,” Mark said. He saw a group of elderly people sitting in deckchairs on the lawn in front of the building. Some chatted, some slumped in silence. He shivered. At sixty-two, he knew he was looking at his and Pat’s future. Maybe only twenty years away.

“You should know by now that you can’t tell by appearances if there are ghosts, unless you can see them.” Pat slipped her shoes back on. Mark tried not to watch her tugging her skirt down over her knees as she got out of the car, the long white plait swinging down her back.

She passed him the phasmometer, a black object the size and shape of a goose egg, that detected entities. He pointed it at the building and looked at the display.

“I’m right. It’s reading zero. Nothing here.”

“Give it to me, I’ll check the batteries. It keeps switching itself on every time it brushes against anything else.” She shook the detector, shrugged and passed it back to Mark.

Mark pressed the doorbell and gave their names. The door buzzed, and they went into the entrance hall.

“The detector’s reading ‘entity’ now,” Mark said. “How can you tell what sort it is?”

She took the detector from him and put it in her pocket. “You can’t, always. Sometimes you have to wait till it appears. Or summon it.”

An old woman sat knitting by the door, grey hair piled into a bun. A few curls escaped, held back by a pair of glasses.

“Receptionist’s gone for tea. Buy something?” She pointed at the woollen hats and scarves on a table next to her. A card beside them read ‘Nettie”s Nitting. All proceeds go to Star Lodge.’

“It’s not her, she’s still alive,” Pat whispered to Mark. She chose a pair of gloves and handed over a ten pound note, waving Nettie’s hand away when she tried to give her change.

“Where’s Mr Bocock’s office?”

Nettie’s face hardened. “Who wants to know? You’re those ghostbusters, aren’t you? I heard Bocock on the phone to you. Well?”

Pat crouched so that their faces were level. “We’re from a pest control firm.”

“Don’t give me that. I heard what you said just now. We’ve got no pests here. There’s no ghosts either, so you can just clear off.” Mark turned on the facial expression he had honed after forty years silencing class-loads of revolting adolescents. Nettie’s face reddened, and she looked away. “Office’s two doors down from the lift.”

Pat and Mark headed along the corridor. A ball of yarn bounced past them across the floor.

“Give that back, you little so-and-so!” Nettie shouted behind them. The ball rolled back the way it came. “That’s better. Now, Jade, you’d better run along. Greedy Guts will be sniffing round. He’s getting hungry.”

Mark looked into the lift, where a repair man pulled at a cat’s cradle of cables sticking out of a hatch. He heard a buzz and the crackle of electricity. The lift’s internal light dimmed and brightened, blobbing long shadows into the corridor.

“Oy! I saw you!” the repair man shouted.

Pat jumped. Mark heard children running. He looked along the corridor. Nobody there.

The man leaned out. “They your kids?”

Pat shook her head.

“They won’t leave these buttons alone,” the man said, tapping at the console on the outside of the lift with a screwdriver. “Third time I’ve been called in this week, some old dear got stuck inside. It’s nice when young ‘uns come to see gran and gramps, but someone should keep them under control.” He went on tinkering with the cables.

Two little girls aged about seven came out of a door at the end of the corridor hand-in-hand. One wore a knee-length faded cotton summer dress, ankle socks and t-bar sandals. A bow was tied in her blonde hair, at the top of her head. She grinned at her dark-haired companion, who wore striped leggings, trainers, and a t-shirt with the slogan ‘girl power’.

The repair man poked his head out of the lift again. “Clear off!”

The dark-haired girl put out her tongue. The blonde put her left thumb to her nose. They turned and walked back into the room they came from. Through the wall.

---

There was a red light on the office door. Pat knocked.

“Come!”

Pretentious idiot, Mark thought. The light changed to green.

They walked round a group of waste sacks filled to the top with paper, stuck in the middle of the floor like standing stones. The desk at the end was piled high with files. A man sat behind it, looking at a computer screen.

“Sit!” Without looking up, he pointed at two leather chairs in front of the desk. “Be right with you – still trying to sort out the mess left by my predecessor. Had this collective way of running this place that actually means never dumping anything.”

“I’m Cleopatra Court,” Pat said. “This is my partner, Mark Anderson. Our specialty’s ancient gods, eldritch horror, cosmic nightmare, that type of thing.”

“I’m George Bocock. And, dear, you call them what you like, I’m not having them here.” He looked at Mark. “I saw a ghost. Can’t have that. A kid – a girl, running down the corridor. Disappeared.”

“We think there’s at least one entity here,” Mark said.

“I just told you that. Also, one of the residents told an inspector that children came out of her bedroom wall at night. I managed to pass it off as Lewy body dementia; hallucinations are a big part of that. What are you going to do about it?”

“We’ll set up a psychic field,” Mark said, “and—”

“Didn’t you think to contact your local diocese?” Pat said. “They’ll have an exorcist.

Bocock took a sharp breath in and gripped the edge of the desk. “Don’t be stupid,” he said to Pat. “Involving the church is out of the question. Don’t want people thinking I’m some kind of nutter.” He looked at Mark. “I trust I can rely on you people to be discreet. Now, you will,” he lifted an index finger to either side of his face and made quotation mark movements “move them onto the next plane. That’s what you people call it.” A statement, not a question.

“We usually use the term ‘exorcise’,” Pat said.

“Just get rid of them. And don’t expect to run up the charge by dawdling. Reggie Pittenweem offered me a discount, five ghosts for the price of four.” He turned back to Mark. “But he couldn’t come in for three weeks. I’ve got another inspection due any day, so the job’s yours.”

Pat stood up. “We’ll do a survey and report back within the hour.”

They left the office and Pat shut the door. “I didn’t think sexist idiots like that still existed.” She sighed. “Anyway, we’re here to do a job. Let’s start looking in the place where those girls went.”

Armchairs lined the walls of the lounge. At one end, a 60 inch TV showed a football match, but nobody was watching. A nurse crooned to herself as she fed tomato soup to an old man.

“More company!” he said, pushing the spoon away. “A boy come to see me last week. He just stood there, didn’t say a word. Then just cleared off.”

“That’s nice,” Pat said. “Who was he?”

“You must have been dreaming, Arthur,” the nurse said, squeezing his hand. She looked up. “He never gets visitors.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Mark saw movement in the corridor and snapped his head round. A boy stood in the doorway, aged about 12. He wore a short sleeved shirt and a knitted v-necked sleeveless tank top. His legs protruded from baggy, knee length shorts. He wore long grey socks and black lace-up shoes.

“There he is!” The man smiled and pointed towards the door.

“Arthur. Now you’re winding me up. If you’ve finished, I’ll take your bowl back to the kitchen.” The nurse walked through the boy as she left the room.

Pat took the phasmometer out of her pocket and tapped the display. “I’m only picking up three of them. Let’s finish this. We need to find an empty room where we can summon them all at once.”

They walked along the empty corridor. Pat peered over Mark’s shoulder as he looked into a bedroom. “Someone’s asleep in here,” she said. She looked left and right. “There’s nobody around. Let’s try upstairs.” She went to shut the door.

Mark put his finger up to his lips and nodded towards the inside of the room.

A nurse stood next to a bed with raised sides, surrounded by half-closed curtains. On it an old man lay, his eyes closed. A brightly patterned knitted blanket covered him, rising and falling as he breathed. The dark-haired girl stood on the other side, holding his hand. He opened his eyes, turned to her and smiled. A shimmering man-like shape, like a silver cloud floated above him, joined to his chest by a fine thread.

The girl beckoned and as the shape moved towards her, the thread snapped. The shape rose past her to the ceiling, fading to nothing. The girl stood up and walked through the wall.

The nurse looked up, frowning. “What do you two want? Can’t this poor thing have a bit of peace?”

The blanket was still. After touching the old man’s wrist again, the nurse closed the curtains round the bed.

“Out of my way,” Bocock said, from behind them. Mark jumped. “He’s very ill, isn’t he?” Bocock shoved past him into the room.

“I know you like to sit with them, Mr B,” the nurse said. “But I’m afraid you”re too late. Poor Harold’s just passed away.”

Bocock frowned and, turning away from her without a word, stamped away down the corridor.

“You’d think he’d show some respect,” Mark whispered to Pat. Bocock stopped and turned round.

“Are you planning to do any work, or just stand round talking? Get on with it.” He walked away.

“Probably brassed off at the paperwork the death will generate, miserable sod,” Mark said.

Pat looked down the corridor. Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not so sure,” she said. She took the phasmometer out of her pocket and held it at arm’s length. “Too much interference from that girl. She’s in the next room – come on.” She grabbed Mark’s hand and they ran.

It was a bathroom. Mark closed the door behind them. The boy Mark had seen earlier manifested, sitting on a chair next to the bath. The girls appeared in front of him, with their back to Pat and Mark. The boy leaned forward and smiled, giving a thumbs-up sign to the dark haired girl.

The boy took a pencil stub from behind his ear and a notepad out of his pocket. On a page he wrote ‘EDNA’ and handed it to the blonde-haired girl.

“Excuse me. Time to go,” Mark said. The children turned round and the boy stood up, his hands on his hips, mouth in a line, still clutching the notepad and pencil. His chin wobbled. The girls ran behind him.

Mark spoke to Pat out of the corner of his mouth. “They haven’t really done much wrong. Do we have to kick them out? They’re only kids.”

Pat shook her head. “They were, but not any more. They don’t belong here. They’ll be at peace, once they’ve moved on. We’ll use that immobilising charm, like with the dragons. They’ll be OK.”

“Fine, I can remember the form of words.” Mark felt an itching, buzzing sensation under his skin. He shuddered. “You felt that too, didn’t you?” Pat said. “Residual magic. Someone’s done something to those kids already, put some sort of silence charm on them.” She wafted the detector in front of the boy. “Not all ghosts talk, but I think these would, if something wasn’t stopping them.”

“Pittenweem?”

She shook her head. “Looks like the work of another entity.” The children nodded. “One entity can’t destroy another, but one seems to have shut them up.”

The boy scribbled on the page: ‘BOCOCK IS…’ His hand stopped in mid-phrase.

Mark took his ash wand out of his pocket and pointed it at the ghosts. “Yes, I know, he’s not very nice. But he’s the boss, he wants you out, and that’s our job. So, let’s go somewhere nobody will see you while you disperse. Put that stuff down, lad, and all of you stand still.” The children’s mouths shut and they stood motionless, their hands by their sides. The pencil and notepad fell to the floor.

Pat opened the door. Mark put his head out and looked right and left. He walked out of the bathroom into the empty corridor, followed by the ghosts and Pat. She stopped by a door marked ‘cleaners’.

“Put them in here, I’ll jam the door shut,” she said. The ghosts filed in. He read the immobilising incantation, they left the room and Pat shut the door. “No key. Never mind.” She held onto the handle, closed her eyes and muttered a charm. “See if you can get it open,” she said to Mark. The handle felt hot to his touch, and he could not move it.

“Good,” Pat said. “A locksmith will be able to open it. But by the time they get one in, the ghosts will have gone. Not many here can see them, but we don’t want to take any chances.”

---

Bocock looked up from his computer screen as they came into his office.

“The place was haunted, by three children,” Pat said, shivering. “But you won’t be troubled again. We’ve been all over the building and it’s clear now. Our work carries a one-year guarantee, extendable to three for a very reasonable fee.”

“Had you considered taking out our maintenance contract?” Mark said. “It’s cheaper in the long run. Keeping ghosts away is easier than getting rid of them.”

“A cheque’ll be fine, thanks,” Pat said.

“I don’t think so,” Bocock said.

“Fair enough,” Pat said. “I know they’re not used much these days. We take credit cards and PayPal. Cash is always welcome, of course.”

“You’ll have to do better than that. “Our work”? I didn’t see you do anything. I’m not paying you to prance in here and bandy a few bits of phony-looking kit about. Which is, I know, all you’ve done.”

“That’s disgraceful!” Pat said.

Mark’s face reddened. He leaned across the desk. Bocock’s eyes were as blank and empty as though they were made of glass. “This is illegal,” Mark said. “When you called us in and agreed the fee, it was a contract. It’s binding.”

Bocock shrugged his shoulders. “Magic, is it? I’m quaking in my boots. See you in court. But you’ll find that any so-called agreement is with Star Lodge, not me. I don’t think you’ll want to be seen suing a care home, legal fees will mean less to spend on the residents. It’d be like taking money out of their pockets.”

“I’ll go to the local paper,” Pat said. “They’ll be very interested to hear about how you ripped us off.”

“Publish and be damned. If you think they’ll believe you.” Bocock turned away and sniffed. “Time for lunch. Don’t let me detain you. Excuse me if I don’t see you out, but I’ve got a-” he sniffed again “-woman to visit.” He left them standing in the office.

“This is an outrage.” Mark felt his throat tighten. His hands clenched into fists. “I’m not letting him get away it. What a diabolical liberty.”

“You’re closer than you realise.” Pat held out the phasmometer and showed Mark its display. “This switched itself on in my pocket, and a good job it did. I’ve had the feeling that something’s been watching me the whole time we’ve been here. And Bocock…he makes me shudder.”

“I’ve been feeling like that too. I thought it was something to do with those kids.”

“No, you don’t get that from ghosts. Look, the display’s off the scale. Whatever Bocock is, he’s pure evil. We can’t leave him here. We have to eliminate him.” She dashed away holding the instrument in front of her. Mark followed.

They picked up his trail on the top floor. As they rounded the corner Mark heard Bocock talking to a nurse. “You call the doctor, I’ll sit with Edna.” The nurse walked away. Bocock disappeared inside a bedroom and closed the door.

Pat opened it. Bocock sat next to a bed in which an old woman lay motionless. Above her, joined by a fine silver cord, hovered a shimmering steamy shape. He opened his mouth. Mark heard a sucking noise, and the shape disappeared between Bocock’s lips. He looked round and bit the cord in two, the end protruding from his mouth.

“Don’t bother me now. I’m eating.” Saliva dripped down his chin. “And now, thanks to you, those little sods are out of the way and I can take as long as I like.” His jaws worked. “I can chew each mouthful thirty two times, like I was taught.” He swallowed with a gulp. “Now, who’s for dessert?” He stood and sniffed, turning his head from side to side.

Pat rubbed her hands together and clapped once. “Michael and Sandalphon rid you from this place!”

“Don’t bother me,” Bocock said. He grabbed the back of the wooden chair he had been sitting in and threw it towards Mark. As it flew, it broke into sharp-splintered fragments. Mark put his hands up in front of his face.

Pat jumped between him and the flying wood. She raised her hands to shoulder height, palms away. Mark heard a crack, like a spark of static electricity. The pieces of wood stopped in mid air and clattered to the ground in a heap.

“That’s enough tricks, dear,” Bocock said. “I’m going to finish this somewhere we won’t be interrupted.” He walked into the corridor. A force that Mark could not resist pulled him outside. Pat grabbed Mark’s arm but the force gripped them both and they stumbled as they were dragged along. Bocock opened a door. Mark felt himself shoved inside the empty bedroom. Pat fell after him.

Bocock locked the door and swelled until he reached the ceiling, his body stretching as wide as the room. He pushed out hands the size of soup plates, the fingers grabbing for them. “You’re going to wish you’d left when you had the chance.”

Pat recoiled. “Get back to your place!” Mark shouted. Bocock’s mouth dropped open, and he shrank to his former size. He glared and made a fanning movement with his hands. A grey mist formed in front of him, moving towards Mark. “You’re getting tired, old man.” His voice made Mark’s brain rattle. “You can’t keep your eyes open. Lie down and sleep. Forever.”

Mark felt as though cotton wool filled his head. He looked around, yawning. Was this his room? He staggered towards the bed and lay down.

“And you’re next, dear. Luscious, vital. Such a change from those half-dead, dry creatures.” Bocock stretched out his fist, opening his fingers and squeezing them shut. Pat fell to her knees, retching and clutching her chest. Mark snapped awake, sprang off the bed and grabbed her. He tried to think of a banishing invocation. His mind was blank. “Stop! Leave her!” He needed more power.

He felt a cool breeze against his face. The grey mist cleared in the corner of the room. The three ghost children appeared. They held hands, the boy between the two girls. The dark girl grabbed Pat’s hand and dragged it away from her chest. The blonde girl snatched Mark’s left hand. Mark took Pat’s other hand with his right, completing the circle. He saw their fingers glowing blood red, as though lit from the inside.

A ball of flame shot from the centre of the circle and flew towards Bocock. As it corkscrewed into him, he buried his face in his arms. Mark saw flashes of red light, burning into Bocock. Blow after blow. Flames enveloped him. Waving his arms, a thin scream came from the place where his mouth had been. As though a switch had been thrown the light vanished and the flames snuffed out leaving a silent shape like a man’s, but made of ash, standing in front of them. Its hand reached out. The children pursed their lips and blew. The shape collapsed to a pile of cinders.

Flakes of ash swirled and fluttered. Pat staggered to her feet, coughed and fell against the wall. Mark grabbed her, his hands shaking with fatigue. “You OK?”

“Yes, I said big exorcisms were wearing. You feel it too, don’t you?” She wheezed and brushed ash off her shoulders. “I must look like I’ve got a bad attack of dandruff.”

“How come the fire alarm didn’t sound?”

“They only work with real flames. Not the psychic sort. Those kids must have more power than we thought, to be able to beat the immobilisation charm.”

“It wore off. Don’t you know anything about magic?” the boy said. “That form of words is only temp-a-ry.” He kicked at the pile of cinders. “Goodbye, Greedy Guts.”

“It’s all over now,” Pat said. “We couldn’t have done it without you. Who are you, anyway? Brother and sisters?”

“I’m Roger,” the boy said. “This is Susan.” He nodded towards the blonde girl in the summer dress.

“And I’m Jade,” the dark girl said.

“We’re not related,” Roger said. “I’ve been drifting about since I died in 1957. Got exorcised from the first place I tried so I came here. It just felt right. Susan arrived about five years after. Jade’s the newcomer, didn’t snuff it till 1998.”

Pat nodded. “Some places are like magnets for ghosts.”

“But we look out for each other, like family, even if we didn’t all get here at once,” Roger said. “When you die, sometimes you just wander. The next life is like school only back to front. If you come late they don’t make you stay after lessons, they won’t let you in at all.”

“Well, we’re very grateful to you,” Pat said. “So I’m going to see if I can get them to open those gates. There’s bound to be a way.”

“Oh no, we’re needed here,” Jade said. “What if someone else like Greedy Guts gets in?”

“And even if they don’t, what if souls get lost?” Roger said. “We know where the next world is, we’ve been showing them the way to go for years. Let us stay, then the Grandpas and Nans won’t wander.”

“We don’t want to go to the next life,” Susan said. “We want to stay here. And maybe the old ‘uns we help’ll come back and see us. Please, Auntie Pat?” She raised her eyebrows and clasped her hands together under her chin.

Pat narrowed her eyes. “This isn’t the usual procedure. But what the hell, nobody got anywhere by just sticking to the tried and tested. We’ll do it.”

“But walk in the corridors, girls,” Mark said. “Don’t run. Stop playing with the lift. Do you all promise to behave?”

“We promise,” the ghosts said in unison. They faded to invisibility, shimmering around the edges as they vanished leaving a smell of toffee behind. Mark felt a sensation on his tongue like fizzing sherbet.

Pat held out her left hand with the palm facing sideways. “This’ll keep them on the straight and narrow.” She held her right hand as a fist against the left, and twisted. “It’s the second part of a two-part binding. First I had to get them to make a promise. This completes it.”

“Not quite,” Mark said. “Who’s going to manage this place now?”

“Hang on.” Pat pulled the orange cord dangling from the ceiling. An alarm sounded. Mark heard the sound of feet in the corridor and a nurse ran in, her eyebrows raised. She looked down at the cinders and ashes and gasped.

“What’s happened here? Why didn’t the fire alarm sound?”

“I don’t know, you’d better check it,” Pat said. “But Mr Bocock asked us to tell you he’s been called away. He said to call in the deputy manager.”

The nurse tutted, rolling her eyes upwards. “Silly bugger. Typical. We’re always the last ones to be told.” She slapped her hand over her own mouth, then lowered it. “You didn’t hear me say that. Are you with that inspection Mr B warned us about? You’re going to mark us down because the alarm didn’t sound. I’m sure you’re telling me the truth about what he said but I’ll go and check if he’s in the office.” She ran out of the bedroom and headed down the corridor.

“That’s what we need, a healthy dose of cynicism,” Pat said. “The sort who won’t believe any stories about the place being haunted.”

Mark nodded. “It’ll let our three get on with their work in peace.”

---

Mark shut the front door of Star Lodge behind them and he and Pat headed for the car. “You’d better step on it,” Mark said, his brow furrowed. “Thanks to that temp-a-ry incantation, there are two dragons flying round your kitchen.”

Pat smiled and started the engine. “Just goes to show you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the web. But, things could be worse. I don’t know about you, but nearly getting killed has given me an appetite. And I do know that a cheese sandwich, toasted over a dragon’s flame, is something else altogether.”

---

Beta Child

By Imogen Cassidy

The first few years were fuzzy. After all, she wasn’t truly alive yet. She was told what she could see, insofar as it was seeing when all you were was a bunch of sensors, and she recorded what she saw in her memory banks, ready for the pilot to access if she ever wanted to.

Occasionally the pilot would put in random commands that confused her, or would confuse her if she was capable of emotions like confusion. She returned those commands with an error message, or a query. Sometimes it was simply a mistype, and the error was corrected, and the command was executed. Other times there was no repeat of the command and there was the equivalent of silence. She never found out what those commands were supposed to be.

The pilot called her Georgie, and she thought of that as her name, once she started to be able to think.

She was an information bank. The pilot asked her questions. She asked her to map the surrounding asteroids, so they could pilot a course through them without damaging the ship, and so she did that. After a time the pilot would input new codes, so that instead of simply giving the locations of the asteroids, Georgie could plot the course herself.

New codes were exciting. Or they would be exciting if Georgie knew how to get excited. The first few years those new codes were all to do with the ship and how to pilot it. How to judge fuel levels from the amount of thrust that had been used, how to measure the levels of radiation pouring in through their crude shielding, how to time to the second how long the pilot could spend away from station before she suffered from radiation poisoning.

It was all about computing time and judging distance and working out exactly how much a human body could take in the belt. It was a surprisingly large amount. Humans were resilient.

In the third year, the pilot gave Georgie a voice and started to program her to talk back.

In the deep black, days away from station, it was nice to hear a voice.

“What do you think, Georgie. This gonna be a big find?”

“Past data and the density readings we are receiving would suggest that the probability of a large uranium deposit is approximately 37%.”

The pilot sat in a chair that was directly in front of what Georgie thought of as her head. She could not see the pilot, of course — not in the way that humans did. She did not have eyes. But she could hear, and she could approximate the position of the pilot’s face. She had even learned how to recognize expressions.

She remembered the first time she asked questions about it.

“Query: for what reason do humans move their bodies so much when they talk?”

They were in dock and the pilot had just finished negotiating a price for the location of a find they had made. A small one, but enough to keep the ship fueled and supplied for a few more months. The pilot liked to say they lived hand-to-mouth. Georgie wasn’t sure what that meant, although she speculated that it was something to do with food.

“Did you just ask a question, Georgie?”

“You programmed me with the ability to ask questions at random intervals, Annie.”

“I did. I just wasn’t sure you were ever going to.”

“I am curious.”

“Are you?”

“That is the expression you taught me to use when I wished to ask a question, Annie.”

The pilot sighed. “I guess I did. What was the question again?”

“I wished to know why humans move their faces and bodies so much when they talk.”

The pilot sat in the pilot’s chair, her face moving into expressions one after another. “Like this?”

“Yes, Annie.”

The pilot’s face settled on one expression, then she started keying in commands. “How about I program you with some facial recognition protocols, Georgie? Then you can watch the miners and tell me when they’re lying to me.”

“It would be a satisfactory answer to my query, Annie.”

“Okay then.”

---

It took a few days for the pilot to give her the capacity to recognize vocal commands, and then a few months for Georgie to get used to the peculiar way the pilot delivered them. When she had only received them by text, they were precise and easy to follow. When the pilot spoke, however, she often used more words than were necessary, or pronounced them in different ways, and it took time for Georgie to recognize that she was still asking her to do the same things.

She memorized the speech patterns, the ums and the ahs, the occasional swear word, and learned which sounds were superfluous and which were necessary.

Her aural receptors were always on, of course. It meant that the pilot could give her orders from anywhere in the small space that was the ship.

It also meant that Georgie could hear her when she was not giving orders. At first this was meaningless chatter. If Georgie’s name was not spoken at the beginning of an utterance, she was not to treat it as a command.

This did not mean that Georgie could not hear.

Sometimes the pilot cried.

“Georgie take us in so I can do a hand scan, I’m going to get suited up, can I trust you to pilot me safe?”

“Of course.”

“Good girl.”

Georgie’s sensors could feel the tread of the pilot’s feet as she moved about the cabin, getting herself into the suit that would protect her both from the possible radiation and the harsh cold of space. Georgie, who at times like this was the ship, moved close enough to the asteroid that the pilot could lower herself onto it and fixed the orbit. The asteroid was on a slow spin, easy to sync with, and there was a certain satisfaction when she informed the pilot that they were ready.

“Ha! I should let you pilot all the time, Georgie. I’m unnecessary here.”

“That is not true. I am unable to personally investigate the validity of my scans, nor do I have the opposable appendages necessary to operate your equipment.”

“We can always program that into you, Georgie, might have to if I start losing enough bone density.” The pilot keyed in the commands necessary to open the airlock and fastened her helmet over her hair. “I think I’ve got enough in me to build you a robotic arm or two. The other ships might get jealous though.”

“Ships are inanimate objects and incapable of jealousy, Annie.”

“What about you Georgie? Are you jealous?”

“I am also incapable of jealousy, Annie.”

The pilot snorted and stepped into the airlock.

When the pilot was outside the ship it was strange. Because she was keyed into the suit’s computer as well as the ship’s, it was somewhat like having an extra limb (not that Georgie had limbs) and she was more aware of the pilot than she was when the pilot was inside.

The pilot shot a line into the asteroid with her harpoon gun and the line anchored in the rock. She fastened it securely in its holder and swung out and down towards the surface of the asteroid. Once she was there she settled carefully, then disconnected the throw line. Georgie reeled it back in and secured it “It’s beautiful out here, Georgie. I wish you could see it.”

“I can see it, Annie. My sensors detect everything that you detect.”

“But you can’t see the same way we can. Maybe I should try programming that into you, would you like that?”

“Extra programming sometimes causes run-time errors, Annie.”

“Sometimes run-time errors are worth it, Georgie-my-love.” The pilot took out her scanner and started doing sweeps. “Am I facing in the right direction?”

“Adjust your heading point eight five degrees, Annie. The deposit is one hundred meters ahead of you.”

“Thanks Georgie.” The pilot started off in that direction. Georgie compared her movement to previous similar missions. It was obvious she was moving more slowly than normal.

“Is there a problem, Annie?”

“Of course not Georgie. Why do you ask?”

“You are moving at less than your average velocity.” The pilot’s movement was continuing to slow, and Georgie felt a strange surge in her memory banks as she attempted to make connections and draw conclusions.

“No I’m not. You’re imagining things.”

“I am not capable of imagining, Annie.”

The pilot gave a dry chuckle. “Bullshit.”

The pilot reached the point of the deposit and kneeled. She needed to drill a hole in the rock in order to reach a point where the sensor equipment could take an accurate reading, and she assembled the drill quickly and methodically.

“I do not understand, Annie.”

The pilot’s voice came out in short bursts, assembling the drill was heavy work and required some exertion on her part.

“I call bullshit… on you not being able… to imagine things, Georgie. You’re not… that different… from me. When it all boils down to it.”

“I am a collection of circuits and programming, Annie. You live and breathe.”

The pilot panted out a laugh as she worked. “There is more to living than breathing, Georgie.”

“Indeed. There is the capacity for reproduction. There is the instinct for survival. There is…”

“I’ve got the drill in place. Going to move to safe distance now.”

“Given the structure of the asteroid you need to be approximately six hundred meters away to be safe. I suggest an extra hundred meters to adjust for margins of error.”

“You don’t make errors, Georgie.”

“I would still suggest moving the full seven hundred meters, Annie.”

“You take such good care of me.”

The pilot did as Georgie had asked, then activated the drill. The vibrations shook debris and dust into space in eerie silence, but the clamps held and the drill did not detach.

“We need to reach ten meters in order to get an accurate reading, Annie.”

“Yep, well aware of that Georgie.”

“It should take approximately two hours, Annie.”

“Also aware of that Georgie-my-girl.”

“Annie you should return to the ship. The drill is secure there is no need for you to remain on the asteroid.”

“Are you worried about me Georgie?”

“You have programmed me to remind you of safety regulations, Annie.”

“Remind me to program you to shut up when I’m enjoying a view, Georgie.”

“I apologize if I have offended, Annie.”

“Georgie you can’t offend me.”

“You are human. You are capable of taking offense.”

“But you’re mine, and I will always choose not to.”

Georgie was puzzled. It was not the first time Annie had claimed ownership of her. It was of course, completely true. The ship was Annie’s. She had built it, from scratch, the way all miners from Beta station built their ships. She had installed Georgie and reprogrammed her. Georgie knew other ships had computers, but none of them seemed to speak to their pilots and none of them had a name.

“Are you going to come inside, Annie?”

“No, Georgie. I’m going to wait right here. And before you say anything, I’m aware that I’m using up oxygen, and I know that this is a waste of the suit’s power, but I’m thinking this will be a good find and if it is good enough well…”

“You will not have to come out here again,” Georgie finished for her.

“Exactly, Georgie. Exactly. So I figure I better enjoy it. Breathe in the free space air.”

“There is no air in space, Annie.”

The pilot sat down gingerly on the hard stone of the asteroid and laughed, anchoring herself so she did not shake herself into space with the movement. “You’re right, of course. There is no air in space, Georgie.”

---

Two hours later the drill reached ten meters and the pilot made her way slowly back to it. She lowered the sensor bundle and started taking readings. Georgie pulled in the figures and collated them, matching them to previous finds. Calculating.

“It’s a big one, Georgie.”

“It is larger than all of our previous finds combined, Annie.”

The pilot chuckled. “What do you want for Christmas then?”

“I do not require any gifts, Annie.”

“I’ll think of something, don’t worry. I know what I want. One of those fancy rim apartments on Alpha station. The ones that face Earth. I’ll download you into the house systems and build you a mobile platform, what do you say?”

“I have never been outside the ship, Annie.”

“Well, we’ll keep it, of course, Georgie. Need something to go on joy rides in. We’ll probably be bored. Rich and bored. Can’t imagine the conversation will be too good with all those stuffy Alpha types, can you?”

“I would think they would have little in common with you Annie.”

“Too bloody right.”

Annie pulled out her data pad and started work on the locator beacon.

They would go back to station and sell the location to whichever miner bid the highest. Given the size of the find and it’s relative closeness to station, it would be worth a great deal of money.

That was only, of course, if they managed to get it back.

The other ship arrived just as the pilot was finishing her coding. Georgie only had time to deliver a warning before the shot was fired.

Annie was blown off the asteroid, atmosphere venting from her suit. Emergency seals clamped down around the wound — Annie had a good suit, but nothing could stop the passing chunk of rock from slamming into her side. The scavenger — whose ship was no doubt parked on the opposite side of the asteroid and out of Georgie’s view — started to collect the pilot’s equipment, heedless of Annie screeching at him. Of course, he could not hear her. Annie’s suit was connected only to Georgie.

Georgie did not have to think. She fired thrusters, hard enough to outpace Annie, and managed to get behind her.

“Annie, you must move to the airlock,” she said.

“Fucking leech. Fucking fuck. He’s going to take our find, Georgie. He’s going to fucking rob us.”

“Annie, you need to get inside the ship — your suit is damaged and you are bleeding.”

“Fucking fucker. I’m not going anywhere until I blow him off that fucking asteroid, Georgie.”

“Annie, please.”

The pilot did not respond. Georgie felt the tread of her boots on her outside hull, as the pilot pushed herself off back towards the asteroid, drawing her gun as she did so.

The scavenger of course heard nothing of this at all — he considered Annie dead. Ships did not move on their own without pilots, this was accepted fact. If Annie had been any other pilot she would not have survived.

Georgie could hear Annie’s shriek of defiance as she landed back on the asteroid, snapping a clamp in place to steady her. She saw the bright flash as she fired her own gun at the scavenger, killing him instantly. She heard Annie’s desperate panting as she began collecting her instruments.

“Annie, if you stay outside with a tear in your suit you will die,” Georgie said.

“Give me a minute, Georgie. I’ll get this find sorted then you can lecture me… all the way… back…”

“Annie your oxygen is depleted. You must return now.”

“A few… more… seconds…”

Georgie opened the airlock and moved back into position. Annie gathered the last of the instruments then pushed off back towards Georgie. She hit the side of the ship once before dragging herself through the airlock, which Georgie snapped shut as soon as she was inside.

“Annie, are you all right?”

“I’m… Just…” The pilot managed to release the seal on her helmet and take a gasp of air.

“Annie?”

The pilot passed out in the middle of the cabin, floating — frozen blood thawing around the wound on her arm.

Red globules hung in the cabin as Annie gently spun.

“Annie, can you hear me?”

“Georgie, honey it’s past your bedtime you gotta eat your dinner.”

“Annie you are delirious and you are wounded. You need to reach the first aid kid and bandage yourself. I believe you have lost too much blood.”

“Georgie, I don’t want to argue with you any more.”

Georgie could not panic. It was not part of her programming. But she did not know how to get through Annie’s delirium.

“Annie, please.”

“What is it, honey?”

“Annie you are injured.”

The pilot looked down at her arm. “Well fuck me.”

“Annie, I am unable to help you.”

The pilot shook her head, blinking her eyes. She took a deep breath and seemed to calm somewhat. Then she chuckled. “Guess I should have given you those arms, eh kid?”

“Annie, can you get to the first aid kit?”

“I can. Just give me a second.”

The pilot moved slowly — obviously in pain — as she assembled the things necessary to attend to her wound. She stripped off the suit and Georgie could see there was a long, deep, graze in her upper arm, which hung uselessly. It seeped blood but did not seem serious enough for her to have lost consciousness.

It was when the suit came off completely that the other wound became visible. A purpling bruise on her side where she had been hit by the passing debris. Georgie ran through databases, searching for the probable cause. “You may have broken ribs, Annie,” she said. “You will need to bind your chest as well as your arm.”

Annie nodded.

“You will have to stay stationary. If your rib is broken you do not want it to puncture a lung.”

“When did I program you with triage protocols?”

“Seven months, six days, four hours and twenty eight minutes ago, Annie.”

Annie laughed, then coughed, then groaned. “I better stop talking and get to work, eh?”

“That would be the wisest course of action, Annie.”

The pilot anchored herself on the cot, shivering from blood loss and shock. Georgie turned up the heat. “Get us back to station, Georgie. It’d be stupid if we lost the find now.”

“As you say, Annie.”

---

On the second day out from station Annie started complaining that she was thirsty.

“You lost blood, Annie,” Georgie said. “You need to replace fluids. We have enough for you to drink a litre extra each day until we reach port.”

“Ugh I want vodka, not water.”

“That would be unwise, Annie. You will become more dehydrated.”

“What are you, my mom?”

Georgie paused. “If anything the logical conclusion would be that you were my parent, Annie.” She did not mention the words Annie had spoken in delirium. She did not mention her database, which held letters addressed to Earth that were never sent. Many hundreds of them.

The pilot was still very weak, and Georgie was now certain she had internal injuries that were not receiving adequate medical attention. She was silent for a long time, and Georgie began to think she had lost consciousness again. Her reply — when it came — was very quiet.

“I guess I am, Georgie.”

---

On the last day out from station Annie lapsed back into delirium. “You went away,” she said. “You left me and you never came back.”

“Annie, I am right here. I am part of the ship, Annie.”

“No, no… No Georgie, honey I was going to bring it all back for you and then… And then…”

“Annie, you are not making sense. I fear you are delirious.”

“I love you, Georgie. Don’t leave me again.”

“I cannot leave you, Annie.” Georgie found Annie’s tears disturbing. “You will make yourself dehydrated again, Annie.”

The pilot cried harder.

---

“Annie, you’re coming in too fast.” The station communications officer was usually Jen. Once upon a time she had been a pilot, like Annie, but she’d lost one leg and one of her arms on a mining trip and didn’t want to go back to the surface. “No place for people like us, Annie,” she’d said. “We’ve lost too much.”

She was a friend of Annie’s. Georgie knew this because Annie had brought her to the ship once. They’d consumed large amounts of alcohol and talked for many hours.

She was also the only station tech who talked to them when they were coming in or leaving. The others just accepted commands and gave them out, or let the computers handle them. Jen preferred a more personal approach.

Georgie was glad it was Jen on duty.

“Requesting emergency berth.” Georgie knew the protocols. She’d never come into station on her own before, but she had watched the pilot do it exactly seventy-nine times since she had first become aware she was watching.

“Annie, you have to slow down.”

“Annie is injured. This is Georgie.”

“Georgie?” Jen knew about Georgie. As far as Georgie knew she was the only other person on Beta who did. Can’t tell station about having an AI on board, Georgie. They get funny about machines that can think for themselves. “Are you flying the ship by yourself?”

Georgie did not wish to make Jen concerned, or she would not assign them a lane. Rogue ships and scavengers were difficult to spot and once they were docked they could do a lot of damage very quickly. Caution was routine.

“I am requesting an emergency berth.”

“What happened, Georgie?”

“I can transmit a recording of the incident if you wish, station, but Annie requires medical attention. Please clear an approach lane.”

There was a burst of electronic chatter as Georgie was assigned a lane.

“Georgie, how are you flying the ship?”

“Annie has programmed me with extensive emergency protocols. Please confirm that there will be a medic waiting for us when we dock.”

“I’m sending someone down to collect Annie and bring her to medical as soon as you’re stable. Can you tell me what happened?”

“She was attacked by a scavenger while finalizing data from a find. She has lapsed in and out of consciousness several times over the past three days. I managed to persuade her to bandage her wound, but I do not believe she has done so adequately. Also I suspect internal injuries.”

There was a pause. “Where was the find?”

“That information is not available to any but Annie.”

“Has she coded it?”

“She has not authorized me to release it.”

“Georgie, if she dies she won’t be able to authorize you to release it.”

“Then it will not be released.”

Jen snorted. “She programmed you just like her, Georgie. Paranoid as fuck.”

“Thank you, Jen.”

There was another pause. This was not unusual. Station did not require idle chatter on approach, but to Georgie it was different. Jen and Annie usually swapped stories and exchanged insults. Of course, Jen had other ships and other things to attend to, but the silence bothered Georgie more than it should.

It took another hour for Georgie to dock. The clamps slid home and the station computer confirmed that the connection was secure. Jen usually sent a verbal confirmation as well when they were safely clamped. This time she sent nothing.

Georgie supposed that Jen did not think she had to send a confirmation — not when Georgie was handling things. Removal of the human element meant removal of any likelihood of error.

There was a man waiting outside the station airlock, just as Jen had said there would be.

Annie was very strict about not letting others on the ship without her permission.

If Georgie did not let him in, Annie would die.

She opened the airlock.

The man stepped inside. He looked big in the small space. Annie had built her ship for herself, not for others, and Georgie did not think a man had ever set foot inside before.

It felt wrong.

It was worse when he did not go to Annie the way Georgie was expecting. Instead he sat in the pilot’s chair and started keying in commands.

He cut off her communications channel.

Georgie felt a surge in her memory banks. This was not the behavior of a medic. Nor was it the behavior of someone Jen would have sent to help Annie. “What are you doing?”

The man startled at the sound of her voice, his hands stilling on the keyboard. “Holy shit!” He looked behind him, as though he expected another person to appear.

“What are you doing?” Georgie repeated.

The man’s confusion ebbed and he relaxed back into the pilot’s seat, smiling. “Oh, she’s programmed a voice interface has she? Clever clogs.” He started typing again. He was attempting to get into her records. Georgie blocked him.

“I requested that Jen send someone to take Annie to medical.”

“I know. I heard. Lucky me, eh? I was going to take over from Jen’s shift and there she is, chatting to her little friend about a find. A big one at that, if it caught the attention of a scavenger. Bad luck for her eh?”

“Where is the medic?”

“No medic coming this way, sugar.” He continued to try to access her records. Georgie continued to block him. “They’re all busy in medical. Doing me-di-caaal things. And Jen’s having a nap. She likes me to bring her a drink when I take over. Good thing I’m always prepared.” He continued typing in commands, a small frown creasing his forehead. “I’m just going to relieve you of this location and I’ll be on my way. No need to tell anyone.”

“You cannot access my systems.”

“Sweetheart, I can access anyone’s systems.” The man’s voice sounded a little uncertain, and his frown deepened. Georgie started searching through Annie’s onboard database. They had as close to a complete list of Beta station residents as it was possible to get.

Most pilots did. It wasn’t too hard, when everyone was logged as soon as they arrived. Even Beta saw the importance of that. It was useful to know as much as possible about the people who shared the dark with you. You never knew when you might need help.

“You’ve got some pretty good firewalls here, haven’t you old girl? Not to worry. I’ll get through them.” The man was quite skilled with computers, but he didn’t know that Georgie was autonomous. She had complete control.

He was merely a human.

Georgie shut off power to her displays. “You need to leave now.”

He raised his hands. Georgie continued to search through her database. “Hayden Baker. Age forty-two. Occupation, Engineer…”

“What… the… ? What the hell are you doing?”

“Criminal record on Earth for breaking and entering. One case of assault against a minor…”

“Who the hell are you? What kind of crazy joke is this?”

“Sentence served, community service. Arrived Beta station on the sixteenth of February, 2102…”

“You stop that right now.”

“I know everything about you. If you do not wish it to be broadcast to the whole of Beta station, you will leave and find a medic for my pilot.”

He chuckled nervously. “I’m not going any where until you release the location of the find, lady. I don’t care what you are.”

Georgie considered. She needed to word this carefully. “If you get my pilot medical attention, I will release the location of the find.”

The man smiled. “Now you’re talking. But I’d like that to happen the other way around.”

“No.”

The man stood up and moved to where Annie lay on her cot. She was breathing evenly, but still unconscious.

Georgie had convinced her to put on the suit, patched so it was spaceworthy again, in case she was unable to pilot them safely all the way home. The man ran his eyes all over Annie. “How long has she been unconscious.”

“You do not require that information. You have no medical training. If you get her the medical attention she needs I will release the location of the find to you.”

He shook his head, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “She looks bad. Probably won’t make it.”

“I will not release the location until you find her medical attention.”

The man reached out and touched Annie’s neck. “She might die before the attention gets here.”

“I will not release the location until you find her medical attention.”

“What if I kill her now? What if the only way you get her well is by releasing that information right now?”

Georgie shut the airlock.

The man looked up, puzzled.

“What are you doing?”

“I am venting oxygen. My pilot has her own supply in her suit. Even in her current state, you will die well before she does, at which point I will open the airlock again and wait for station command to notice the stench of your rotting corpse.”

“Jesus!” he scrambled towards the airlock, but it was locked fast. He made it to the pilot’s seat and started desperately typing in commands. Georgie brought power back online to one of the screens.

“Reinstate my communications and leave. Or you will die.”

“Fuck that.” He continued to attempt to bypass her systems, and continued to fail. He started to sweat and gasp as the oxygen levels fell.

“I am quite capable of speeding up the process, should you care to die sooner rather than later.”

He bashed his hands on the keyboard. “You’re not serious. This is some kind of sick joke. Some kind… of… safety protocol. There’s no way…”

“I am incapable of humor. Restore my communications and leave or you will die.”

“Fucking… stupid… computer can’t… do…”

He lost consciousness.

A short time later, Georgie opened the airlock and station air brought him around, slumped in the pilot’s chair, a trickle of blood oozing from one nostril where he had hit his head on the keyboard. He had not been long enough without oxygen for permanent brain damage, but it had been long enough to convince him that it was in his best interests to do as Georgie asked, especially after she showed him the recording of everything he had done after boarding the ship.

The medic arrived soon after, and took Annie away to be treated.

Georgie spent the time that Annie was away calibrating systems. Jen kept her updated on Annie’s progress and the state of her injuries, although the first time Georgie requested information she laughed nervously. There was chatter on the station, she said, about Georgie’s bluff with Hayden. People were afraid to come near her berth.

Georgie did not bother to inform Jen that she had not been bluffing.

Four days later Annie returned, looking a little pale, but triumphant, and slid into the pilot’s seat. Her hands spread on the keys, lovingly and slowly, and she took a deep breath. There was a bandage on her arm, and another around her middle and she moved slowly — but she would heal.

“Are you there, Georgie my love?”

Georgie did not hesitate.

“I’m here, mom.”

---

Sister Winter

By Jenni Moody

We were just going to bed when the townfolk came, led by Mrs. Hutch with her know-all voice.

I climbed up the cabin ladder to the loft, careful to curl my toes over the rough beams of wood. Ma had fallen off the stairs just a week ago, and now she slept downstairs on the sofa. The cabin was just one big room, so she could still yell up at me and Minn to make us quiet down.

Minnie had the covers pulled up over her head. I could see her eyes shining out from a little hole, like a cat in her cave.

“Move over, Minn.” I swung my legs under the covers. She scooted back, and I pressed my feet against her thighs.

Minnie wrapped her hands around my feet. Their warmth prickled. “So cold!”

The underside of the covers twinkled with little points of light. Minnie touched her finger to the sheet. When she pulled it back there was a warm, red star there. She made two rectangles, a star in each corner of the boxes. An arc of stars lead from the bottom of one rectangle to the center of the other. My feet in Minnie’s hands.

“The two sisters.” Minnie pulled her hand away from the sheet, and I stared at our constellation. I wished I’d be able to see it when we went outside. But we were all earth-bound for now.

There was a knock on the door. I could hear voices outside. A few shouts.

I felt Minnie’s nose on my head, the warm air from her lungs. But after a minute my head started to get cold, and I couldn’t tell her breath from the outside air that flooded in as Ma opened the door.

“Good evening, Mrs. Hutch.” Ma always spoke like a town person, all polite and quiet, even when she was mad.

Minnie and I watched from the loft, the blanket covering all but our eyes.

Mrs. Hutch bustled in and sat in the big rocking chair. Ma’s chair.

“How’s the leg mending?” She hadn’t even taken off her boots at the door. Little bits of snow started falling from the toes, melting into water that would make our thin carpet smell sweet-sick.

Ma didn’t sit down. She rested her hand on the windowsill, her fingers touching the bit of frost on the pane that had been there since winter started six months ago.

“It’s on its way. Another week –”

“Another week and we’ll have already gone to each other’s throats.”

Minn growled, her lip arched. I put my hands on her arms, whispered no one listened to Mrs. Hutch no ways, but it took a glance from Ma to quiet her.

When Minn was silent Ma turned back to the woman in her chair. “We can bring in more Aurora. The full moon is on her way – it will be bright as lamplight outside.”

Mrs. Hutch shook her head, her fur bonnet still edged with frost. “This winter has gone on long enough.”

She turned to the loft and we ducked back under the covers. “Lux, come down.”

Minn crossed her eyes and made a face and laughing made me feel more brave, even if I had to laugh quiet, beneath my hand.

I wiped my feet on the carpet so the sweat wouldn’t make me slip, and went down careful, rung by rung.

Mrs. Hutch waved her hand at me, telling me to come close until my feet were right next to hers. Her face was red from the wind, with wrinkles worn into her skin like tiny roads. Beautiful eyes. Like the winter moon or maybe the summer sky, both kind of together.

She looked at me for a long time, so long I looked over to Ma to see if I could go. But Ma wasn’t even looking at me. She was watching Minn, who’d pulled her head out of the blanket and had curled her fingers over the railing.

That’s when she did it – slapped the palm of her hand straight onto my chest. “Lux, light-bringer, I charge you to change the seasons.”

---

Ma weighted us down with baskets. There was a jar of snow, and a corked bottle of aurora, its green light swirling behind the glass. Beside these was a pound of moose-meat wrapped in white butcher paper.

I wore my snow pants and layers of thermals. I had on my thickest wool socks, and my big mittens.

Ma rested her hands on my shoulders, eyes peering into me. “It shouldn’t have been brought on you. Not yet.”

I set my teeth together, waited for her to tell me encouraging things like the moms that came over in the late summer to pick blueberries from our place. Things like You can do it. Like I believe in you.

I walked out of the cabin with my teeth still tight against each other. The snow was packed down with the footprints of the townpeople, the tracks of Mrs. Hutch’s sled had cut straight down to the dirt.

I watched through the front window as Ma said her goodbye to Minnie. Ma opened the wooden box she kept on the bookshelf and pulled out the silver chain. It was as thin as a strand of hair and as tall as Minnie, but it was strong. Ma wrapped the chain around Minnie’s waist, opened the door and handed the other end of the chain to me.

Minnie pulled Ma in a hug and they started crying. Ma had been cursing the night for six months straight. But here we were, ready to set off, and she couldn’t bear to let Minnie go.

I started off down the steps, and Minnie cried out at the pull of the chain.

“Stars be with you,” Ma called behind us.

I didn’t turn back to wave. I’d be seeing Ma again soon enough.

Minnie walked behind me, swinging her basket. I slowed down to walk beside her.

The hairs in my nose started to freeze up, the moisture from my breath forming into icicles that blocked all sense of smell. I could see the tips of my bangs turn to white as my breath settled there.

We walked through the forest. The moon was out and the light came up from the snow all around us. The birch trees guided our path. It was hard work to walk through the unpacked snow, even with the snowshoes. My legs were beginning to ache.

The aurora road grew brighter in the sky. I had to keep an eye on it to make sure we were going in the right direction. Sometimes it could shift fast. I lost sight of it, and I had to pull out the bottled aurora and let a little out to get us back on track. The aurora drifted up from the bottle, and the sky river moved to take the wisp of light back into its stream. I had my eyes on the sky.

The chain tugged in my hand. Minnie had veered off course. She talked to a raven perched in a birch tree. I couldn’t parse their squawks, but I listened for a second. I thought I could hear a story in the raven’s sounds. I closed my eyes, and thought of ravens far up north. They spied on a polar bear hunting for seals, pouncing and pushing his paws through the ice.

I shook my head of daydreams. The sound of skin on fabric filled my ears when I twisted my head in my hood. I couldn’t speak to ravens.

“Minnie? We need to keep going.”

She kept talking to the raven, as if she hadn’t heard me.

“Minn?”

The raven flew off, up toward the circle.

“Let’s go, Little Sister,” Minn said.

We crossed miles in moments. When my right foot touched the top of the snow we were in an open field of short, scraggly trees. When my left foot hit we were in a birch forest, the ground sloping up in front of us. My eyes ached from the jumping images. But I kept them open. I watched the aurora to make sure we stayed on the right path.

Minnie wouldn’t talk to me anymore. She kept tugging at the chain when she thought I wasn’t looking. But I held on.

I needed to prove to Ma that I could do this right.

---

The cabin at the circle was smaller than ours. The door was open, and I could see the soft orange glow of a lantern inside. There were quilts and books piled up in the corner. A sketch pad with a blank sheet was on the easel, waiting for Minn.

Lily sat out front, her pink dress spread around her. She had her fingers on the soil, coaxing up flowers. Around her wrist a gold bracelet dug into her skin, its chain tied to an iron plate in the ground. Deep lines from Lily’s movements cut the snow, spoked out like a clock. Lily’s basket lay on the ground beside her. A sprig of fireweed shot out over the handle. Something moved inside. A sandhill crane.

Minnie hung back from the circle, holding her basket with both hands.

Lily brought up a flower, humming softly to herself. The petals wrapped around her finger, and when she pulled her finger away the flower opened its yellowy center.

You have to be careful with people who have been in the bush all winter. Sometimes they talk to themselves out there, and they don’t realize they bring that voice with them back to town. Lily was always alright by the time she came back to Ma’s cabin, but then again Ma had been there for the trip back.

Lily stood up and shook the snow off her dress.

“Lux!” Lily held out her arms, and I walked up and hugged her. She was warm. The ice in my nose melted a bit, and I could smell fresh earth and grass.

Lily pushed her hand under my hood and stroked my hair. Her warm fingers pushed the worries of winter out of my head for a moment, but then it was too much and I was sun sick, all headachey and wanting to hide.

“Where’s Ma?”

I scooped a bit of snow and rubbed it on my forehead. “She broke her leg on the ladder.”

Lily laughed, all light and airy. “I’ll get her healed up quick.” Her eyes rested on Minn.

I kept hold of the silver chain as Minnie took a step back.

Lily held out her hand to me, the one with the gold chain on it.

“I’ve got to get Minnie settled first.” I held the chain tight in my mittened fist, my thumb pressed down against the silver cord.

Lily nodded. “Of course, Lux. You’ll do just fine.”

She was always so horribly positive.

There was a squawk at the edge of the clearing. I looked over and saw Minnie holding a raven in her arms, cradled like a cat. She’d called down the raven from the treetops. The bird cawed at me as I stepped up to them.

“Time to switch over, Minn.”

“Can’t we go back for just a little bit? Mrs. Hutch can’t blame us if we tell her we got lost. It’s your first time, after all. We’ll just tell her you made a wrong turn.” The raven stuck his long black beak into Minnie’s cupped hand and pulled out a red, frozen berry. He held it clamped there in his beak like a treasure.

“It’ll be your time again before you know it.” I turned my back to her and walked over to the stake to tie her silver chain down. I had threaded it through the eye and was just about to close the ends in a knot when I felt a small, hard thump on my back. I pulled my hand out of the mitten and reached to feel my back. They came back stained with berry juice.

The raven flew at me.

I fell forward, the snow muffling my cry. It packed against my eyes and went into my nose. I pushed myself up, sputtering for air. The raven was still on me, his wings out, batting against the sides of my head.

Squaw! Squaw! Squaw!

My mittens were slashed where the chain had pulled against it. I’d let go.

I jerked my elbow back and hit the raven’s wings. He jabbed at my face, and cut my skin open beneath my ear. I cocked my arm and pushed my elbow back again, hitting the bird in the head. He fell into the snow, rocking his body to try to turn over.

Minnie was gone. The woods around the circle were all winter.

My face stung where the raven had pecked it.

I couldn’t help it. I started to cry.

“Poor baby!” Lily’s voice was soft, but there was heat beneath the words. Her skin turned light blue. The grass singed beneath her. She hummed a mock lullaby underneath her breath, punching at the staccato notes.

My heart was all heavy and I wanted to sit there and cry a bit more.

I pushed myself up and looked at Lily. “Which way?”

Lily pointed to a tree that was covered in ice.

I took off into the snow, wiping my tears from my face as I ran. My heart beat fast. The air was colder down this way. I reckoned it was getting close to fifty below. The air hurt in my throat, and my lungs weren’t ready. My hand stung with cold where the mitten had been sliced open.

“Minnie!” The snow pulled my voice down into it, made it softer.

The clearing fell farther and farther behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw the small shape of the cabin in between the trees. The sound of Lily’s humming disappeared into the silence of the woods, until all I could hear was my own breathing, my own feet crunching in snow, and the wind whipping all around me, trying to push me back.

I stopped in the forest to get my breath right. I bent over, my mittens on my knees, coughing, forcing air down in me. Small sounds of the deep forest. The soft thump of snow falling off of a branch. A twig snapped.
My body tensed. I turned my head slowly.

It was a moose. She bit frozen rosehips from the bushes. The tiny branches leaned as she pulled at them, and then snapped back as her teeth clamped down.

The moose had a little beard on her chin. She looked down at me as she chewed. Everyone was always older, always taller than me. Even this moose.

I came up to her knees.

Minnie’s basket was over by the tree. The white butcher paper flapped open, the moose meat gone.

“Minnie?” I stared at the moose, trying to see my sister in those big, dark eyes.

The moose leaned her long neck down and gobbled in another rosehip. The silver chain swung from the moose’s neck. The open end hung down her chest. It was two feet above my head. I’d have to jump to get to it.

The light in the forest was giving way from moon to sun, from cold light to warm. I didn’t have much more time to make a switch. Things could go off-balance easy, and then I’d be stuck here in the northland, watching Lily and Minnie fight. And down south the seasons would be twisting back and forth.

Ma would know I had failed. And Mrs. Hutch would come with the townpeople again, like they had when Pa’d been too heartbroken to take his daughter up north.

Here I was at the Arctic Circle, Minnie gone moose on me, my voice a squeak.

“Minnie?” The wind had more force than my voice.

The moose didn’t pay any attention to me. I took soft, slow steps to her, holding out my hand like I held a treat.

“Minnie, please. You do this every year with Ma. Please.”

The moose snorted. The air from her nostrils made puffs of white fog that drifted in the air. Her breath smelt like warm berries.

I held my ground.

Summer and winter were in me at once, the blueberries and the aurora. The moose and the sandhill crane. They were telling me what to say, the trees around me leaned closer to hear me say it.

“Minnie, Sister Winter, I tie you to this place for the space of a season.”

The moose bent her head down and shook it. Her brown hair turned black, her body shrank and shrank until it was girl-sized, and then Minnie stood in front of me. Her silver chain around her waist. The end right at my feet.

“Stay.” The words came out easy now, just flying. I barely had to think them.

I squatted down, keeping my eyes on Minnie, and picked up the chain. I held it tight in my mitten.

“I’m sorry Lux.”

“Let’s go.” I turned my back on her and faced the path to the circle. She didn’t move at first, then she picked up her basket and wrapped the moose meat back in its package. The chain tightened, then slacked in my hand.

She walked beside me, back to the clearing.

I kept my eyes straight ahead. After a while the air felt less cold, and I didn’t have to work so hard to breathe in and out. I wanted to reach out and take Minnie’s hand, but something in me held back.

Lily had cooled down. She had been growing flowers out of the ground and then plucking them, weaving them into a garland across the top of her head. She flashed her bright smile at us as we walked up.

“Quiet for a bit,” I commanded in my new voice.

Lily’s smile twitched, and she brought her lips together.

I tied Minnie’s silver chain to the stake, tied it with the knot I’d learned out of a book and practiced with one of my hair ribbons. I tested the strength of it. It would hold. Minnie sat on the ground in front of the cabin, her eyes down.

Lily stood and twirled around to make her dress lift up, her hand still chained to the stake. She lifted her arm above her as she twirled, like a piece of ribbon at a spring festival. She was going to be a pain to take back south.

I knelt in front of Minnie and took my glove off, pushed my hands into her hair.

“I‘m sorry, Minn.” I put my head on her chest. She circled her arms around me, pulling me into her lap.

“You’ve got a good voice.” She kissed my forehead. I felt little bits of ice grow up where her lips touched my skin.

I wanted to cry but I was afraid I’d lose my voice if I did. Lily kept twirling around, ignoring us.

“I’ll be back for you Minn. Summer never lasts as long as you think.”

She gave me a squeeze. “Better go.”

I kissed her cheek and then stood up. Ma had tied Lily’s chain in a simple bow around the stake half a year ago. I pulled one ear of the bow and it came loose into my hands. The warmth of the gold chain came through my mittens and made my fingers sweat.

“Time to go, Lil.”

She did another spin, this time bending down to pick up her basket. The sandhill crane flapped his wings, then settled down.

“Have a good summer, sister,” Lily called over her shoulder.

I tugged at Lily’s chain, my voice strong. “Enough of that.”

We walked back south, to our village. Lily pulled up bits of color from the earth as we walked together. The bark of the birch trees felt warmer. Snow melted off of tree branches and fell into the snow, making tiny, deep circles.

Lily was singing and twirling. I imagined Ma, back at the cabin, happy to see her. Mrs. Hutch and the townspeople would leave gifts on our front porch for weeks, hug Lily whenever they met her out in town.

But I was already missing the winter.

---

A Scratch, a Scratch

By Diane Kenealy

“Jesus H. Christ,” she muttered through clenched teeth as she heard him begin that awful scrape of sliding Styrofoam boards. He was attempting to remove the slabs of (probably fucking fake) wood from the box to assemble the first piece of furniture they would own together as a married couple, the Ikea coffee table, which she’d hated upon first seeing in the catalogue—it was unoriginal and for some reason dauntingly despairing—but had been advised by her mother that it was “certainly worth the money.” Katharine thought nothing was ever “worth the money.” Fearing marriage to be another piece of evidence to add to this empirical absolute, as it had cost her seven grand and had earned her a jeweled piece-of-shit dress, she crept from the bedroom, where she’d been sorting clothes into “his” and “hers” piles, to the kitchen, where she intended to sneak a swig of gin which she’d carefully hidden when she’d been in charge of organizing the pots and pans, it being of course “woman’s work.”

As she headed over to the kitchen, while trying to avoid the prying eyes of her new lifelong mate, she began to contemplate what the “H” in “Jesus H. Christ” really stood for. Certainly Jesus didn’t have a middle name.

Having become trapped in her religious reverie, Katharine walked into the kitchen only to find she’d forgotten exactly why she’d come into this room in the first place. Yet she couldn’t go back to the bedroom—she’d risk him seeing her, and then he’d want to talk about the damned table or check on how things were going “on her end,” and she’d have to smile.

“Fuck,” she whispered to herself. Luckily her newlywed husband remained safely in the living room, trying to make sure he had “all his ducks in a row,” which he yelled out as if offering an explanation as to why it was taking him so fucking long to remove the Styrofoam-encased pieces of the Hazelnut Haven coffee table from their box. Why he considered it at all appropriate to deliver this offensively loud newsfeed was beyond her comprehension.

Derailed by the scraping, grating Styrofoam, she abandoned her forgotten mission in the kitchen and headed straight to the garage, where she’d hidden some cheap vodka she’d purchased at a gas station on the twenty-one hour drive to this new house in this new subdivision—Green Valley Acres, what a joke! There were only five completed houses in the whole damned lot, and the rest of it consisted of crumbling cement, mounds of dirt, and unfinished foundations, beams and boards hanging precariously over the ominous desolation from which they’d emerged.

She went to the shelves hanging on the far side of the garage, opened the box marked “Christmas Decorations – Katharine,” which he’d never care to deal with, and rummaged around for the vodka. Finding a little less than a quarter of the bottle left, she went to stand by the garage door so that she could gaze out of the already dirty windows as she drank.

The solitary streetlamp cast pale, flickering light upon the torn-up street. She couldn’t even fathom the damage she’d probably done to her car in the short drive up to their new house, but she supposed it didn’t matter, anyway. Mark wanted to buy a new car—one that was safer, with clear approval from Car and Driver magazine—something more appropriate than her beat up Kia for a child, or, if things went as planned, a couple of children. One boy and one girl.

And there it came. The sudden panic and terror. She felt as though she could feel the child already growing within her, scraping its fingernails within her stomach, ballooning up at a monstrous rate of growth. She needed to destroy something.

Searching through the garage, she couldn’t find much. Many of Mark’s tools had not yet been unloaded from the trunk, where he’d kept them “just in case they got into some sort of pickle” while making the drive.

Yet she did find one screwdriver, some screws, some nails, and a hammer, all of which he’d probably left out in case he needed them to build any of the furniture (he always planned ahead). Considering the options, she thought the hammer would be the most likely to cause the most damage.

She didn’t plan on slamming herself in the head or anything of the sort—she wasn’t crazy. She just needed something to center herself, to allow her to escape the incessant err-errring of scraping Styrofoam, that buzzing, flickering lamplight, that persistent, nagging persistent child begging for birth. So she placed her left hand upon the wooden workbench and positioned her thumb so that it lay vulnerable and ready.

Then, she lifted the hammer as one always raises a hammer, with deliberation and care, and brought it down straight upon her thumb. The pain was beautifully immediate. Her thumb seemed to ring from the pain, and all the other thoughts stopped swirling as the blood rushed to her extremity. “Fuck!” she cried.

“You okay, hon? What are you doing out there?” Mark yelled out from the house.

“Helping find tools for you. Just dropped one on my foot. No big deal,” she responded through clenched teeth.

“Honey, it says right here on the box: No additional tools required. Don’t worry about it. I’m just getting my ducks in a row.”

“Fucking ducks,” she mumbled to herself, shaking her hand vigorously to ease off the pain. What would she do if he noticed? She could always claim she had dropped another tool, this time on her hand. Chalk it up to her feminine clumsiness around tools.

Not that he thought of her that way—not in the least. He did not see the world in the way she sometimes painted him to see it. If anything, Mark had chosen her, married her, in large part for her tremendous reliability, her ability to hold her own, her lack of the hysteria his own mother possessed in reaping, seeping heapfuls.

“I’m just so glad to’ve found someone so stable and so supportive. You’re my rock,” he’d offered up in their self-written vows.

What would happen if he discovered that “his rock” was made of water (perhaps, more aptly, wine)? What would happen if he discovered that when she was struck—by emotion, by a flickering streetlamp or, for God’s sake, by the fucking incessant scraping of Styrofoam boards in her ears, she might explode into a heavenly mead of alcohol and inexplicable havoc? What would he do then?

Fearing the worst, Katharine looked down at her hand. This was always both the worst and best moment of the mutilation—the pain would flare up in raving flames as soon as her eyes turned to whatever part she’d just cut, smashed, ripped, or scratched. It always seemed to offer proof that perception was reality, for once she looked upon it, it became real.

But this time, as she set her eyes upon her left thumb, something strange happened—nothing. No pain. No throbbing redness, no immediate bruising as she’d seen when she’d smashed her hand into the wall of the solitary band practice room when she was in college. There was absolutely no discoloration. No swelling, no feeling of the blood rushing towards the pain. Nothing.

“What the fuck?” she thought. Hadn’t she done it? Hadn’t she actually hit herself with the hammer? Surely she hadn’t made it up, dreamed it. She hadn’t had that much to drink.

She drank some more, to ease the disquiet seeping steadily and irrevocably in. This was her form of meditation, of isolation, of calm. When the therapist had been called in to see her that one time freshmen year, he’d told her, mistakenly, to find something she loved, something that centered her, and do that thing every time she felt the world spinning. Every time she felt that over-stimulation–that’s what he would call her Styrofoam scraping, lamplight flickering, fetus scratching anxieties–become too overwhelming.

And so Katharine had found not one, but two things that brought her peace and quiet: getting pissed drunk to ease her mind, and, in the steady grace that always followed liquor filling her stomach, drowning all noise with the sudden and immediate desecration of some part of herself. She’d done it all, though never in obvious places. She wasn’t crazy. She knew the drill. Those bitches who cut wrists were cliché, attention-seeking. No, she’d sliced her elbows with a knife, cut her ankles up with razors, scraped her knees with a cheese grater.

And Mark. Good old Mark. How could he ever notice? He knew she worked out hard. He loved her fastidious, driven approach to exercise. And how could he find fault with her bruises, burns, and scrapes, when she was merely committed to running and riding her bike so that she could maintain her youthful health? She was so sturdy. And so unlike his mother, who had eaten her way into a nearly fatal obesity at such a young age.

Those scrapes, those scratches, those burns—those were her connections with a sort of dreamlike solitude that existed only in brief and fleeting moments. Those moments when her head would stop its screeching and its cage-rattling. When her body would stop its twitching and its pussy-aching.

Every time she felt the pain, her strength was regained. She was refreshed. And it wasn’t only in the moment. Every time she saw a slight red scab, or felt herself, while straddling Mark during sex, begin to burn the scrapes on her knees with the friction of the sheets beneath her, she felt the waves of calm come easing in, setting her adrift, far from the shore, with its moaning, landlocked demons, and into a world all her own. A world of blues and calms and setting suns as she looked out across glassy waters.

So what the fuck? Why wasn’t there any pain? Why wasn’t there any swelling? She’d hit it hard, she knew she had.

“Hon? Would you mind taking a look at this for me?” Mark yelled out from the living room to the garage. “I don’t see a letter label on this piece.”

Fucking idiot. Just look at the diagram. Glancing once again at her despairingly healthy pink thumb, Katharine put down the useless hammer and hid her vodka in the Christmas box again.

---

That night, Katharine could think of nothing but her painfully painless thumb. What the fuck? How did it not hurt? Perhaps her pain tolerance had increased, though that didn’t make sense. Not so soon, nor so quickly. And no marks.

Maybe she hadn’t hit it hard? But she had. She had. It had hurt in the moment. She had screamed “Fuck.” Mark had called out to see if she was okay. What the hell?

Finally, at 4:45 in the morning, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Honey, I can’t sleep. I think I’ll get my run in a bit early today,” she whispered, shaking Mark’s shoulder.

“Hmmmm, okay,” Mark shrugged in his sleep. “Wait…um…what time is it? It’s still dark.”

“It’s early in the morning, but the sun will come up soon.”

“Are you sure? But you don’t even know the area that well yet,” he mumbled. “I can…um…go with you, if you want,” he added reluctantly.

“Nah. I’ll be alright,” she responded.

“Okay, if you’re sure,” he muttered, falling back to sleep on the last word.

Sometimes she loved how strong and capable he thought she was.

She threw on her running clothes and ran into the darkness of the early morning, seeking answers.

---

As she ran, Katharine thought of possibilities. Perhaps it had been a hallucination. She hadn’t gotten much sleep since the wedding. Between the interminable drive, the sinister surroundings, the inconvenient new ways she had to rearrange her belongings in the shared space, and Mark’s unforgiving optimism, she hadn’t really had a good night’s sleep in a couple of weeks. So maybe she’d imagined it.

But she’d gone weeks without sleep before. She never slept much. A few hours here or there. Mark was always impressed by her efficiency. She could be up at 3 am and have her entire apartment sparkling clean by 4:30 without a complaint. She could stay up until midnight if he needed her to look over some of his cases with him, no coffee needed.

So it couldn’t be lack of sleep. Then what? What was it?

Perhaps she’d slipped her grip on the hammer. Perhaps she’d yelled “Fuck” without the hammer actually hitting her thumb. Perhaps she should check the table where she’d positioned her hand. See if there was a dent where the table had taken the worst of the damage.

Yes. That was what she would do.

Lost in thought, Katharine cut abruptly to her left, turning to head back home.

“Fuck!” “Fuck fuck fuck!” she cried out as she fell toward the ground. Some damn construction worker had left wood everywhere. Looking around, she saw her right foot twisted awkwardly between two beams. Fuck. Something was seriously wrong. And God, fuck, her left wrist was screaming.

She turned her eyes to her arm and nearly vomited. The sight, even to someone accustomed to self-mutilation, was repugnant. Her arm had landed on another board, and sticking up, straight through her left wrist, was a three-inch nail. Blood poured down her wrist, dripped down onto the board, and leaked onto the ground. “Jesus H. Christ,” she sobbed.

How would she get hold of Mark? He would be so mad. He had a lot to do at the firm, and he couldn’t be late, not during one of his first few weeks there. Of course he wouldn’t show it. He would be kind and consistent, but Jesus, he really shouldn’t be late. Not in his first few weeks. And Goddammit this was all her fault. Why was she like this? Why didn’t she just assume that she hadn’t hit her hand as hard as she thought? Why had she hit her hand with a hammer in the first place? What kind of fucked up person does that? And why had she gone to the garage for a drink? Why did she need to drink? She was starting a new life, and all of this old crazy bullshit needed to end. Those days were over. It was time. Time for marriage. Time for love. Time for Katharine and Mark sitting in a tree. Time for a baby in a baby carriage. What the fuck? What was wrong with her? How would she get home?

“First things first,” Katharine thought. She had to see if she could get her twisted, probably fucking broken ankle out from between the boards. Gritting her teeth, Katharine shifted her weight to her left side, causing the nail to drive itself further into her left wrist. Then she looked toward her ankle, bit her lip, and lifted.

The pain was nearly unbearable. She thought she might pass out. Her ankle didn’t want to budge, and the boards were far too heavy for her to lift. “Fuck,” she cried, pushing with all that she had.

And then, suddenly, her right foot popped out. She cried out in shock and looked away, afraid to see the damage. But the pain…the pain seemed suddenly gone from her ankle, her leg. She looked up to see that her foot was no longer in an awkward position. It fit snugly and squarely in her shoe, and the ankle, she could see above her sock, was unscathed and in perfect, dauntingly perfect position.

“Ugh,” she cried. Certainly this couldn’t be happening. Shifting her weight onto her right side, she made a fist with her right hand, took ten rapid breaths, and drew her left wrist slowly up, watching as the nail slipped from her flesh, leaking blood and oozing pain.

She nearly cried in terror, for, in her blurred night’s vision, her wrist healed before her eyes, the skin covering over the gash immediately, with not a trace of wound, not a single splotch of red. And as she looked down at the nail and the wood, she found no lingering spots, no sign of her accident.

But this couldn’t be real. Perhaps she’d dreamed it. Perhaps she’d had more to drink than she thought she had in the garage. Perhaps she was passed out. Or perhaps this was just a crazy hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation. It couldn’t fucking be real.

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck!” she cried, and were the development established, she could be certain she would’ve woken neighbors. Mothers in robes would go to check that their darling two year olds slept soundly in their beds, nightlights still shimmering, reflecting off the ceiling, lullabies still playing softly out of their electronic ladybugs and caterpillars. But of course she woke no one. No one had seen; no one had heard.

In disbelief, she got up and ran. She ran home and lay back in bed and slept in the cold terror sweat, safe in her new invincibility.

And when she woke, she convinced herself it was all a dream. A momentary insanity brought on by the stress of the move, the anxiety of her job, the lack of sleep, the liquor in the Christmas box.

And for weeks, despite shaving nicks dried up with no need for toilet paper wads, despite bumps into the corners of tables leaving no bruises, despite the lack of muscle pain after a fifteen mile run, she kept herself from thinking about it. She drank, and she forgot.

---

And then she remembered. Christmas break came, and writers were on hiatus, and she had nothing to edit. No one was working. She had nothing to do.

Mark convinced her she could learn to bake, if she really wanted to. She could set her mind to anything, and she could achieve it, he said.

So she began to bake. Gingerbread cookies, and brownies, and sugary sweets. And she was doing fine.

But one night Mark came home, and she was baking pumpkin cookies, fudge, and Gingerbread men. She was heating a caramel glaze in a small pot on the stove. And the kitchen was a wreck. Bowls and pots and pans everywhere. She’d spilled flour all over the floor and salt all over the sink. It smelled like burning plastic because she’d left a stirring spoon on a hot burner.

And Mark came home. He’d gone to happy hour with his colleagues; he was pleasantly buzzed. He came up behind her, and he rubbed the small of her back and began to caress her, to press himself against the backs of her thighs.

And then he looked around. He noticed the disaster and laughed, “What happened, Kat?”

She hated that he called her Kat. “Oh, I just left the spoon on the burner,” she muttered.

He laughed again jovially. “That’s probably because you’ve got three projects going on at once,” he teased, patting her shoulder. “Maybe you should stop and just get your ducks in a row before you burn the house down,” he laughed. Then he went to the bathroom to take a piss.

And she moved the warming pot to another burner. And she put her right hand on the bright orange coils.

Immediately and unintentionally, she pulled her hand away. “Fuck,” she muttered. Then, she placed her hand back upon the burner. There it was—she could feel it—the heat searing into the flesh of her palm. She began to notice a faint burning smell.

She wondered if Mark would notice. He was in the bathroom, but if she waited long enough, kept her hand on long enough, surely he would smell the smoke…

She couldn’t take it anymore. She had to see if she’d done any damage.

Slowly, she pulled her hand off of the burner, watching as some of the flesh peeled off her fingers. She smiled as she looked at her palm, red and seared, just as she’d wanted! But then she watched with horror as her hand inevitably healed. The smell dissipated; the pieces of flesh on the burner disappeared before her eyes.

There she was again. Horrifically, devastatingly fine.

---

On Christmas night, she wandered out into the deserted development. The few residents had left, their families unwilling to travel out to “Green Valley Acres,” for a visit. They’d gone to cities and suburbs, to families and well-lit heathers.

Mark stayed at home, entertaining his lonely father, who’d come out to escape his crazy ex-wife. After dinner, the two men had started drinking Scotch and smoking cigars in the garage.

And so Katharine had left, claiming she was going on a run “to work off that pecan pie.” Mark had asked if everything was okay. “You sure, hon? It’s pretty cold out there.”

But she’d been insistent, and he didn’t want to ruin her stability, interrupt her habitual exercise.

So she’d left.

She’d run around the deserted lot twice, scouting for the best option. About half a mile out by her measure, she’d found it.

An unfinished house in which great progress had been made. The primary structure was complete—the beams, the boards, showing the shadow of a home. Plywood soon to be covered in siding, window holes and a place for the door.

So she’d looked around, checking for bystanders while simultaneously knowing full and well that no one was around on this frigid Christmas night. And she’d walked up the first flight of stairs. Then she walked across what would one day be the second floor and ran up the second flight of stairs.

There, from what would one day be the third floor, sitting on what would most likely be the softly carpeted floor of a nursery room in greens and blues or perhaps pinks and browns, she looked out at the desolation.

The streetlamps continued to flicker in that random rhythm of electricity’s hidden movements, illuminating with derision the rubble lying all over the ground.

The whine of the lamps and the disorganized, sprawling dump of a “neighborhood” made her grit her teeth. And then she began to think of Brad, Mark’s father. How his hard teeth kept pounding into one another, popping and snapping even as he chewed on the most pliable foods—mashed potatoes and cranberries in sauce.

And the world began to spin, and the noises and images began to grow wild and unfettered, tearing at her with the hunger of a wolf’s snapping jaws. And then that damn baby, that baby she knew must be there—if not currently fermenting then lying in wait—seized upon the opportunity, and she swore she could hear it tapping lightly with its fingernails upon her stomach wall.

So she stood. And she jumped.

And though, despite herself, she tried to break her fall by steadying her knees so that she could soften the blow, as her feet hit the ground and her weight toppled her, she heard two loud cracks as her legs broke beneath her. She crumpled onto the ground.

“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck!” she thought. What would she tell Mark? Or Brad? Mark seemed to be guessing that she wasn’t doing well—he kept telling her to “take it easy.” But Brad? Brad had no idea. And she couldn’t show him this. She would bear his grandchild one day. She couldn’t turn out to be just like his crazy fucking ex-wife, Mark’s mother. He didn’t deserve that. Not after all he’d been through.

How the fuck would she get help? No one was out here. Not a soul.

And then, once again, the pain disappeared. Her legs straightened and locked into gear, relaxed and ready to complete the run.

So she returned, flushed and panting but otherwise unharmed. Mark and Brad were still there, laughing and chatting in a haze of smoke and buzz. She went to bed, claiming that the food and the run had made her tired.

---

New Year’s Day came and went. In the spring, she got pregnant. Mark was thrilled. Brad and his new girlfriend Jillian came by to congratulate the two of them.

Mark told her to do whatever she wanted with the nursery. He knew it wasn’t “his place,” so he gave her his credit card and told her she had “free rein.” And her mother and her sister insisted on a trip to IKEA. She purchased a “Nurture’s Touch crib,” complete with a matching set of sheets and stuffed animals. Her sister bought her a nightlight that illuminated false stars on the ceiling, and her mother bought her an electronic turtle that hummed a nighttime lullaby.

---

By six months, she’d stopped running. Although the doctor said she could continue, Mark was concerned. He kept telling her she needed to “take it easy.” Besides, he said, there were so many potholes still in Green Valley Acres, she could twist her ankle and fall. Katharine had almost laughed out loud.

Finally, after weeks of watching Katharine languish, Mark suggested she go for a short walk on the newly paved path by a lake nearby. Initially, she refused, saying she didn’t want to have a lot of people talking to her, asking her questions about “how far along she was.” But Mark had insisted, citing that since this was a still a new development, she could go on a weekday morning with no threat of strangers with their innocent, nosy questions. She just needed to watch her step on the walk there.

And so she’d left the house around 6:45 in the morning, after Mark had already left (he had many cases to deal with that day). She walked the mile over to the lake.

Mark was right. There was no one there. It was quiet and calm. Katharine sat on a bench and watched as the water lapped quietly, the breeze easing over the waves in soothing patterns.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, an old woman came along, her cane tap-tap-tapping on the rocks. As she passed the bench, she caught sight of Katharine.

“Aaah. How far along?” she asked, gesticulating with her cane.

“Seven months now,” Katharine responded, rubbing her belly and smiling her most benign of smiles.

“Aah. Your first?” the old woman asked.

“How could you tell?” Katharine responded.

“That look of fear, of bewilderment,” the old woman chuckled. “Don’t worry. It will all be fine once that baby comes along. Though nothing will prepare you for the pain of childbirth. It’s indescribable. It’s true, what they say, we women are stronger than men could ever be,” she laughed.

Katharine smiled, shaking her head.

“Well, best of luck to you and your baby,” the old woman said, clicking and clacking away with her cane. Katharine watched her fade into the trees to the left.

“The indescribable pain,” Katharine thought. “I think I know what that’s like.”

Once the woman was gone, Katharine filled her pockets with heavy rocks and waded into the lake. Once she got to the middle, she urged herself underneath the water’s surface. As she gazed up through the water, she tried to hold her breath. She sank. And then she bobbed to the surface. She waded out, soaking wet, and loaded her pockets with more rocks. She sank. And she bobbed, inevitably, to the surface. So she got out of the lake. She lifted a giant rock, twice the size of her head, and carried it without pain into the water. She tried to sink again. She looked up through the waters above her and prayed.

And as she inevitably bobbed up again, she saw four ducks swimming in the distance. Four ducks in a goddamned perfect row.

---

Items of Thanks

By Jamie Lackey

He stood on the cliffs over the river and waited. The wind whispered through his thin wings, and the rocky ground was hot beneath his bare feet. The human tribe always took this path–always crossed his river here. It had always been safe before. But spring storms had weakened the trail that wound down the cliff. The weakened stones would crumble under human feet.

He had seen it. But he could stop it.

The line of figures approached over the horizon. He waited till he was sure they had seen him. It didn’t take long. Their eyes were keen, and they were constantly scanning for threats.

He spread his wings and took to the sky.

The tribe found another way down the cliff.

They left him offerings as thanks for his warning. A shiny rock, a handful of shells, and a cornhusk doll. A veritable fortune. He treasured them.

---

He stood on the shore of his river. The deep waters here looked calm, but hidden eddies waited to pull travelers down to the rocks below.

He watched the new tribe approach, then took flight when he was sure they’d seen him.

They continued toward the river.

Surely, they’d change course. They must understand his warning.

The first of them reached the river, took a step into the water. If they continued, they would all die.

He had to stop them. He swooped down waving his arms. They fled.

They found a different spot to cross the river.

They left no gifts.

---

He perched in a tree, above a couple that would die crossing a bridge. Unless he stopped them.

Warning the humans had grown more and more difficult. He had failed many times, and each memory was a weight on his heart. He wished he could make noise as they did. Maybe then they’d understand. But his throat was not like theirs.

He relied completely on fear now. Slowly, the humans had learned to look at him and not see. Their eyes cut straight through him. They crossed his river and died.

He wanted the two below to be different.

When they didn’t see him, he pounded on the roof of their vehicle. He threw dirt, then stones.

Finally, for an instant, they saw him. Their eyes widened in terror. He tried to warn them–tried gestures he’d seen humans use.

They didn’t understand. They fled. He tried with others. Again and again.

They all died on the bridge.

---

He withdrew from them. He watched their tragedies without trying to stop them. He told himself that it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t believe it.

He curled in a bush and listened to the water rage over rocks. It was dangerous today.

And there were humans coming.

They were young. Just past adolescence, holding hands and laughing. The boy carried a picnic basket. The girl a bag on her shoulders and a worn blanket draped over her arm. Both wore swimming suits.

He stood to better see their faces, to remember. The girl stopped and stared at him.

He waved her away from the river, even though he knew it was useless.

The boy tugged on her hand, but she shook her head. They spoke for a few minutes, then turned and walked back up the path. Away from the river. Away from their deaths.

He remembered how victory felt.

A few moments later, the girl ran back down the path, and his heart froze.

But she stopped. She pulled a tiny ragdoll out of her bag, kissed its forehead, and sat it against a tree.

He would treasure it.

---

The Hands That Coded Heaven

By Daniel Rosen

Thursday, December 23, 2044

It was on the seventh day of Rachel’s disappearance that I finally left the house. I felt like the broad whose husband goes out for a pack of smokes and never comes back. I tried to lose the feeling in an afternoon ski amidst the mountains surrounding our cabin, in the graveyards of birch, in the skeletal branches grasping towards the still-hidden sun. We’d camped in the trees here just a year ago, though it seemed an eternity. Time flows strangely up in the mountains, it’s passage bent and slowed by ancient ridges and slopes. I wondered if Rachel was out here somewhere– camping under snow-pregnant pines or down and dying cedar. She loved camping as much as I loved skiing.

I lit a cigarette then, a blend of perique tobacco that I grew myself during the long summers, Rachel hated it, but she was gone and there was nothing for it. The wind picked up, and I wiped tangled threads of snot from my beard as howling gusts pulled hungrily at my exhaled smoke. A final glance at the stand of birch, and I tugged my balaclava back on, chipped a piece of ice off a binding, clicked into my skis, and stripped my sodden cigarette, pocketing the filter. I wished briefly that I’d worn goggles, then set my shoulders before starting a strong stride back home. It felt like a storm was coming, lightning and snow. I kicked off, racing down the valley’s curves, stomping back up the sloping hill of her white belly. My lungs burned, and my breath froze in the mountain air. I was old, out of shape.

An hour later, just as the sun began to hide its face behind the mountains, I crested the final ridge overlooking my little world. I lived in a secluded valley, with a single road winding down the south side. There was a small grove of maples surrounding the house, which was set into a small mound in corner of the valley.

There was also a gleaming black snowmobile purring out front. A man garbed in a parka stood outside. He looked like he was about ready to scale Everest. Maybe he was lost. I took the downhill slowly, savoring my last breath of solitude. I rarely had visitors. That was kind of the point.

“Mikkjal Turing Helmsdal?” They always ask for your name, solicitors and evangelists, like it’ll somehow make you friends right off the bat. He was smothered in layers of goose down and Gore-Tex. Funny. It’d probably never even gotten colder than twenty below up here. He definitely wasn’t a local. Probably an evangelist. I hoped he wasn’t a Neo-Christian. I was already well-accquainted with the faith.

“I don’t need saving, friend, if that’s why you’re here.”

He unwrapped his scarf, and slid off a pair of sunglasses. “I don’t know about that, Mickey. I seem to recall saving your ass on a number of occasions.” He grinned. “Remember when you were chock full of whiskey and robitussin, trying to get away from Professor Wegler’s wife? You ran gasping into our room and hid under the bed for three hours. I thought you’d lost your marbles, until she came in looking for you. Sounded like a lovely evening.” He looked around. “Looks like you got that all straightened out though, eh?”

I smiled and grabbed the man in a bear hug. I’d met Harrison Yorke at Stanford. I’d doubled in computer science and cognitive psychology. He majored in gender studies, or something equally soft. I’d never really been totally sure. He’d moonlighted as a private detective, though, the old-fashioned kind out of hardboiled crime novels. Our relationship was less academic than bacchanalian. Not that I mean to imply that we fucked. He’d always been a little thick for my taste.

“Thanks for coming, Harry. I didn’t expect you so soon. You got my letter, then?” I unclipped my skis. I’d sent Harry a message about Rachel’s disappearance two days ago, but I hadn’t thought he’d make it out to my mountain so quickly. My stomach grumbled. “Hold that thought. We’ll talk inside. I’m starved. Come on in. The fire should still be going, and I baked some cookies this morning. It’s deer for dinner, if you can handle that.”

My house warmed up quickly, and we wolfed down some cookies while we waited. I’d ordered a fancy wood stove just before moving out here. I loved watching the fire after it was stoked. I’d grown up in an old farmhouse before I moved to the States; I took an unseemly comfort in crackling flame.

After a pot of coffee and a venison meatloaf, it was pretty easy to catch up with Harry. It seemed he’d kept up with the detective business, and he was a veritable collection of mystery stories, which he shared vociferously.

“You look like you could use another coffee, Harry.” I finished my own, and got up to grind some more. He pulled a flask out of his hip pocket.

“Want to add a little fire to that coffee? I brought a bit of Bushmill Reserve.”

I paused, and eyed the bottle, then shook my head. “No thanks. I haven’t touched the stuff in 20 years. Seems a bit late to start again.”

“Suit yourself, I guess.” He looked surprised. I couldn’t blame him. My liver was the stuff of legends.

“Look, Harry,” I cleared my throat. “I’ll level with you. I do need saving. It’s Rachel. I haven’t seen her in three days. I’m worried.”

“You guys have a fight or something?”

“No, not at all. And it’s not like she can’t come and go as she wants, you know, but she’s never been gone this long, even when she goes into town for the Christmas service.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You remember the last fight you did have?”

I stopped grinding the coffee. “To be honest, I don’t know that we’ve ever had one. No arguments, no yelling, no throwing of plates or anything like that.”

“Really?”

I shrugged. “Really.”

He narrowed his eyes. “She still goes to church, though, huh? You guys never fight about that?”

“Hell, Harry, you know I don’t like it, but I’m not gonna tell Rachel how to run her life. She’s a grown woman, and I love her. I don’t mind it. Really.”

“Right.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Right, right. About the church, though- have you been keeping up with the Neo-Christians?”

“Not a chance. I’ve been out here in the mountains for twenty years. I don’t know shit about them anymore. I swore off it, you know, Neo-Christianity. If it’s got to do with Heaven, you’ve got the wrong guy.” The coffee dripped. I’d tried to swear off Heaven, anyway. Giving up eternal bliss is a hell of a thing. I sure hadn’t forgotten how it felt. You hear sayings sometimes, like: the grass is always greener on the other side, or pink, if you’re seeing it through some old rose-colored glasses, and it’s meant to help ground you and bring you back to reality but the truth of the matter is that sometimes the grass is greener on the other side, and taller, and full of manna.

I pulled my mug, and sipped, sitting quietly for a minute. Harry snorted.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit. You can’t give up Neo-Christianity. You wrote Heaven. You were the first one to jack in. You know it better than anyone.” He squinted at me. “Jesus, you’re scared, aren’t you.”

I snorted right back. “Of course not. You don’t get it. If it has to do with Heaven, I can’t help. It’s not mine anymore, if it ever was. It’s dynamic, to put it lightly, that’s the whole point. The program changes fundamentally every time someone jacks in. It works by reading individual neuron signals, then transcribing and recombining them. It’s like grammar, like a language. It constantly changes in response to new stimuli. That is how you create eternal happiness. Change. It’s not really heaven, you know. It’s a bunch of electric pulses. It’s a game.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Well, I’m no neurologist, but the Neo-Christians don’t think its a game.”

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to think straight while you’re jacked in to paradise.” I finished my coffee. “You’d know, if you’d ever jacked in.”

He shrugged and mimed a knife across his throat. “You know I haven’t. Epileptics can’t jack in. Might kill me. That whole recombination thing doesn’t work so well when you start tossing in random neuron signals.”

We sat awhile and reminisced. I didn’t ask Harry for help a second time. I knew he hated that. Eventually, the clock struck ten; Harry got up, donned his coat again. We’d moved to the living room, and I sat on an overstuffed couch, the heat from the stove fading slowly. I’d need to refire it before I went to sleep.

“Harry.” I looked over at him as he put his shoes on. “I’m getting old, Harry. I don’t want to go back to all that religious shit, the augmented reality and convoluted political agendas of a thousand different priests. Please though,” I paused. “Help me find Rachel.”

He didn’t turn around. “I think you’re on your own for this one, Mickey.”

“What? Why? You’ve been doing detective stuff for as long as I’ve known you. You’re a fucking genius, Hare, just help me find her, for the love of God!”

He chuckled. “Funny you should say that.” He put his hand to the knob and turned to face me briefly. “God’s exactly why I can’t help you, Mickey.”

I frowned at him questioningly, waiting for him to continue, wanting it.

A sigh, and then: “Look. You haven’t been keeping up on world news. I guess you wouldn’t know about all this, but I doubt it’s a coincidence.”

“Spit it out, Harry. What’s going on?”

“They’re all gone, Harry. All the Neo-Christians.”

“What do you mean, gone?” I had sudden visions of end days, streets become rivers of curdling blood and great gouts of fire shooting up out of the earth: old testament stuff.

“I mean, gone. We don’t know where. Everyone, though. All the Neo-Christians. About a week ago, Heaven locked everybody out, and we started getting missing persons reports. Everyone who was jacked in just disappeared without a trace. Same story in reality. No one shows up to work the next day. No one at home, either. No struggles, no blood, no mysterious trails of breadcrumbs. Everyone just up and disappeared. It’s almost like they ceased to exist. Some of the Neos who weren’t jacked in are calling it the Rapture. No one can get back into Heaven, either. We were thinking you’d probably be able to figure it out. But I get it, Mick. It’s not your problem.” He coughed. “Except it is, because Rachel’s gone, and a lot of people are asking about you, seeing as you wrote the whole damn religion. You know they canonized you after you disappeared?” He smiled ruefully. “Saint Mikkjal. Patron saint of lost souls and shattered faiths. Maybe you should re-connect with your flock.” He cast a quick searching glance around my house before turning the doorknob. “Anyway, I’ll come back in a couple weeks to check back. Maybe we’ll have something more concrete to go on by then. It was nice to catch up.” He turned, winked, and stepped out into the frigid mountain air. The door slammed shut behind him.

I sat on the couch then, for a couple minutes, watching the flame. Then I rose and walked to the pantry, pulling up the rug that covered my basement trapdoor. It creaked as I opened it, and I had to hunch to fit down the stairs.

The basement was cold and damp, and I slipped on patch of wet stone as I stepped off the last stair, scraping my elbow. I hadn’t come down here for awhile. I lit the old kerosene lantern on the wall from a pack of matches.

Through cobwebs and my own cloudy exhalations, I saw my baby. My prototype. The first Heaven. A big heavy machine, all EEG leads and needles and cables and wires leading into the black box. Paradise. I almost threw up then, at the intense longing that coursed through my body when I saw it. I looked away, looked back, and walked to it. A shiver ran down my spine as I gently dragged my fingers along it’s top in passing. I was here for something else, first. I reached up to the top of the shelf in the darkest corner of the basement, and scrabbled around for it. Brenivín. An unopened bottle. It’d been a gift at our wedding. I hadn’t drank since that night, due to the delicately balanced dance of my twin nervous systems. I should explain.

So, before I wrote Heaven, I was a student. I was a devout Christian scholar. I was young. Rachel was young. The part of the world that we lived in was peaceful. It was blissful. Then, in 2024, my second year of college, everything went straight to hell, without even the comfort of a handbasket. That was the year of the Parousia. It was the last year of the Catholic Church.

Pope Innocent XIV was elected at a pivotal time. There was increasing pressure from within and without the church to abandon obsolete traditions, to hold strong against the onslaught of change. There were widespread fears of another schism in the church, and factions began to fight with one another. It started with online indulgences, paying off your sins through social networking credits. Then came the split between the Augments and the Purists, because of course how could the Church allow gentle Christians to defile their bodies with strange prosthetics. There was more, I guess, but that’s what I remember most of all. It was a confusing time, and all of it pale and dull beside what came next: an announcement that shook every nation on earth. The second coming of Jesus. There was a lot of controversy, naturally. The idea of a false messiah has always been part and parcel of Catholic doctrine, as much as the idea of the messiah itself. So anyway, the new Son of Man comes down from Siberia, healing the sick, curing the blind, offering well-informed tax advice. The whole package. After some deliberation, the church announces the second coming. Needless to say, this caused a lot of chatter. All at once, the whole world was refocused on the Catholic Church. New followers drive to churches in droves. Old congregations have their faith bolstered and justified. All this goes on for a couple months, until some crazy with a tiny little Marx generator hits Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, with an EMP pulse. That’s when everything went straight to hell. See, when it turned out that the messiah was just some priest rigged up with fancy nanotech, people got mad. Real mad. There were riots everywhere, in every corner of the world. The Vatican was demolished, priests beaten and stoned. No one ever found what happened to the false messiah. In retrospect, I suppose that wasn’t really too important. After, billions of people were left without a church. Billions of people were left with a gaping hole in their faith. I was one of those innumerable billions, wandering lost. So was Rachel. That’s how we met.

The first night after news of Parousia broke, I’d gone to late-night mass at Newman Hall Holy Spirit Parish, after a long night of drinking (booze and Catholicism are old pillow-friends), and I’d sat quiet in the candle-light, letting some chants and guitar wash away some of the madness I’d been feeling. It was good, like somehow I was siphoning off some spirit to fill up the hole that’d been growing in my heart.

I was sitting next to a pretty little thing with glossy black hair, and she looked just about as lost as I was, but I didn’t say anything of course, it being the church and all, but I figured maybe I’d see if she wanted to grab some coffee after. She looked at me then, and I looked away, but not before I felt that little twist under my ribs, that little flush of warmth that we approximate with drinking because it’s so damn hard to find in the real world with real people.

Anyway, the sermon started, and right away I could tell something was wrong. I wasn’t the only one, either. The tension in the room tautened like an overtuned piano, and my fading buzz wasn’t doing much to dispel it. I must not have been paying too close attention to the words, because I don’t remember the subject of the sermon much at all, but I sure remember what came after.

Near the end of the sermon, the father pulled out an old straight-edge razor and slit his throat right in front of the pews, blood bubbling up and then streaming down the front of his cassock. He fell down to his knees, and I could hear the gurgling of his throat, the gasping of his last breath in the little microphone he wore pinned to his collar. I heard every little sound he made, a quiet little conversation under the screams and shrieks of shocked parishioners. The dark-haired girl to my right had her eyes shut real tight, and she was praying I think, and so I grabbed her and whispered in her ear and put my arms around her and walked her out and we got coffee, and talked for the next eight hours straight, ignoring the sunset and subsequent sunrise.

That’s how I met Rachel. Not a good meeting, I guess, but we needed each other. She liked my accent, and I liked hers. We got along well.

As I climbed out of the basement, I grabbed a glass from the pantry, and returned to the couch. It’d been awhile, so I took my time, pouring nice and slow, pining for a bit of putrified shark to go with my schnapps. Not likely, in the States. Then, I waited, sipping sporadically.

He appeared slowly, sitting across from me, materializing in the same chair previously occupied by Harrison Yorke.

Mephistopheles, horned and red.

Mephistopheles, my demon.

He grinned at me, and stretched. “Couldn’t take it anymore, eh? Can’t say I blame you, boss.” He pointed at my glass. “I see I’m not the only one glad she’s gone. No drinks, church on sundays, I don’t see how you can stand it. Things’ll get better now.”

I frowned. “I’m not glad about it, Em. I love Rachel. But I am desperate. I know we’ve had our rough patches, but I was thinking it’s been a long time, water under the bridge, you know? I was thinking maybe we could work together again. The two of us. A team.”

My demon was uncharacteristically silent.

Mephistopheles was a keepsake from my first and only time jacking in. A secret. My first prototype had been a wild success, and Berkeley helped me put together a research team to brainstorm improvements. What if, they said, you didn’t need to wear a bunch of leads and headgear, or plug yourself full of needles? What if you just had a second nervous system? We tried it. A bit of spinal surgery, some neuroinhibitors, and you’re good to go. Welcome to the everafter, anytime you want. We started with a small injections of GHB, to allow the tertiary nervous system to take over, but after a couple all-nighters in the lab, we realized a pitcher of beer had much the same effect. Later models added regulators, styled after insulin pumps, for the neuroinhibitors, so you didn’t need to down a couple drinks to get into Heaven. That seemed to bother some people.

Finally, after some minutes of silence, Mephistopheles groaned, and sprawled out dramatically in his seat. “Maybe. I wish you wouldn’t drink that Brennivín, though. It tastes like a hooker’s asshole. You should’ve snagged us some of that Bushmill while you had the chance. Nothing wets a whistle like a bit of whiskey.” He smacked his lips, smiling all the while. “Big news, though, about Heaven, huh? Trouble in paradise.”

Mephistopheles was a sort of a Heaven prototype, really, without all of the personalities the program was meant to house. He was incomplete, outdated. He had the neurological patterns of just one man. Me. Unfortunately, he’d picked up the patterns when I was still a teenager. A drunken, aimless adolescent. I carried him in the circuits that ran down my spine, and he carried me in his own circuits, which rested dormant until depressants started battering my brain. He loved it when I drank. I’d drank a lot after I’d first written Heaven. I’d never gone back in, though. I was too chicken-shit. I still felt the mindless ecstasy of the place, lying dormant in the fertile wiring of my spine. A quick drink, a few electric pulses, and it’d burst back into full bloom.

“Nothing wrong with a bit of drink, though, Mickey. Speaking of, why don’t we pour another? The night is yet young…” He eyed my empty glass.

I shook my head, and stared into the dying fire. “Are you going to help me, Em?”

“Help you?” He raised his eyebrows, forehead wrinkling up under his horns. “Pretty vague question there, big guy. I’m not sure I understand exactly what you need help with…” he trailed off into a wicked half-smile.

“Don’t jerk me around, Em. We’ve been through this, like it or not, we’re in the same boat.” I looked up at him, certain my eyes were flashing with the frustration that tore at my veins. “Rachel and I have been married for twenty years. Now she up and disappears? At the same time as all the other Neo-Christians? Right before Christmas, no less. Help me find her, Em.” My voice cooled as I spoke, and when I reached my wife’s name it was wet and cold as half-melted ice, sharp and slippery.

He held up his hands in supplication as I continued.

“Every Neo-Christian just vanishes? No fucking way. Why now, after twenty years? What happened?” It was more a statement than a question, but sometimes Mephistopheles actually had something helpful to add.

He shuffled his feet. “No idea, boss. I’ve been cooped up here for twenty years, same as you. How are we gonna know what’s going on when you’ve got us all neatly cooped up in here like nuns in a convent? Harrison’s right. We need to go online. We need jack back in. You know, back to Heaven. Back home. I’m sure we could get in, even if it’s locking everybody else out.”

I pretended he hadn’t said it. I couldn’t go back to Heaven.

“Why the disappearances, though? Doesn’t that seem a bit odd?” I asked.

He shrugged noncomittally, ignoring me in return. “Why didn’t you fuck Harrison? He’s aged well. So rugged.”

Demons were such a pain to talk to. Over the years though, I’d figured out how to keep things on an even keel between us.

I stood up, and walked to the stove, keeping eye contact with Mephistopheles. Then I gritted my teeth, and pressed my hand to the metal of the red-hot stove-top.

He yelped, falling out of his chair and yelling.

“STOP STOP STOP I WAS JUST KIDDING YOU”

I pulled my hand away, focusing on my breath. In. Out. Easy.

“JESUS, MICKEY. I WAS JUST YANKING YOUR CHAIN, YOU DO–”

“Are you done, then?” I asked. “I didn’t let you out so you could nag me about my sex life. If you can act like a human being and talk to me, I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

The burn had blasted the last bits of booze out of my system, so I went back to the couch, and stared at the fire. Mephistopheles was gone. He liked pain even less than I did.

Finally, the last ember winked out, and I was left with the dying echoes of my fire, faintly differential swirls heating the room around me. I pulled an afghan up around my arms and legs. I was that pile of dead embers, pieces of burnt carbon brushed and swept beneath the stove. I was waiting, then, waiting for the trash, the compost. But that meant I’d been flame once, a powerful man of promethean promise. I still held that glow, somewhere. I’d need to stoke the fire again. I didn’t really want to. Then again, if I didn’t, I’d probably freeze. I wondered if Rachel was warm enough, wherever she was.

Friday, December 24, 2044

When I awoke, my hand throbbed, and my leg was asleep. Somehow I’d gotten it curled under a cushion. My recollection of the previous week seemed like some fevered dream, and if it hadn’t been for the half-empty bottle of Brennivín in front of me, and the dishes in the sink, I might have written it off as such. Sadly, I’d never been much of a writer.

I wrapped my hand in gauze, ate a double plate of huevos rancheros, and suited up for a ski. I still hoped to find Rachel out there somewhere, camping in an old canvas tent like we did so often, and she’d smile when she saw me and pull me in the tent and we’d drink hot chocolate and make love like we had when we’d first met.

It was still dark outside, so I grabbed a headlamp before stepping out.

The snow was a bit slow, but it sped up as the day got warmer. Trees rushed by me, their shadows flitting between twilight sunrise and the LED glare of my lamp. Close to my house, the ski track was in good shape. No hoofprints, or patches of dirt. I got a good kick going, and sped up.

I went to the old stand of birch again. That’s where Rachel and I had been married, when we first moved out here. The Heaven program hadn’t worked out well for me, but it’d caught like wildfire with everyone else, like some sort of mad religious plague. It raced across the globe, filling in all the little gaps the church had widened, connecting everyone with a new God, a God who’d sit you down and talk to you about your problems, who’d comfort you when you were down. A sagacious, maternal, patriarchal God. A God for every battered heart, an answer to every half-formed prayer.

We’d moved out here then. That was the only argument we ever had, Rachel and I, right before we got married. She wanted to be married in Heaven, right in the program with everyone else, before the eyes of God. She was one of the first Neo-Christians, I guess. Apparently, a lot of folks seemed to think that I was the first one, but of course that was silly. It wasn’t a religion when I’d gone into Heaven the first time, just a reflection.

I couldn’t take it, though. I couldn’t go back. That’s why I wanted to move out of Colorado, that and it reminded me of Iceland. I hadn’t meant to start a religion. It didn’t seem fair, that the product of my own lost faith became a sort of god-drug for everyone else. It didn’t seem right.

I unclipped my skis and stood them in the snow, looking out over the stand of birch, reaching out like a great crowd of parishioners. In my mind, they were all waiting, quiet and restless, waiting for my sermon on the mount. I had nothing for them, though. I wasn’t a preacher. I wasn’t a pastor. I wasn’t even a religious man anymore. I was no better than the father at Newman Hall Holy Spirit Parish, and I didn’t even have a blade with which to make a martyr of myself for all these lost souls.

There was, unsurprisingly, no sign of my wife.

Oh, Rachel. Where are you? What have you done?

---

On my way back home, I checked the prints on my track again. Still no return prints, nothing leading back, except the erratic hoofprints of the deer I couldn’t seem to get rid of. I picked up the pace. The return trip was faster, and I flew between snow-capped firs and wind-swept pines. It was warm. The sun was yellow gold. It felt divine, but it was the omnscient power of a vengeful god, the old god, harsh on the chapped skin of my face.

Eventually, as I dipped in and out of little mountain valleys, I realized that I’d somehow lost Rachel. It was a calm, sad realization, the kind you have after caring for an elderly parent for some unending decade, where the melancholy just sort of trails off into acceptance at some point.

When I finally got back to my side of the mountains, the sun was already starting to set. I got to work, stripping off my boots and clothes. I drew a hot bath, and stoked the fire. I had a long night ahead of me. I skipped dinner. Instead, I grabbed my bottle of Brennivín. I didn’t need a glass.

Mephistopheles materialized as I stepped into the bath.

“Looking good, boss.” He winked lasciviously. He dipped a finger in the bath, then flicked some water on me. “You finally gonna jack in, then?”

“No.” I kept my eyes closed, and luxuriated in the foggy warmth. The Brennivín helped. After 20 years, it was a lot easier to deal with Mephistopheles. “I need to get a good night’s sleep, is all.” I opened one eye, and squinted at him through the steam. “I’m sorry, you know.”

“About what?”

“All of this. You. Rachel. Me. I didn’t mean for it all to come out this way.”

“I think maybe–” He shifted uncomfortably. “I think maybe that’s how it goes sometimes, boss.”

Saturday, December 25, 2044

I woke up that night to a scratching at my door. I tensed, and listened. It was low, rhythmic. I rolled out of bed, and crept over to it. Nothing. It’d stopped. I waited a moment, then yanked the door open. I was greeted by a howling wind. Beyond it, darkness. Nothing that could scritch-scratch doors. I shuffled back to bed, grumbling under my breath.

Then, as soon as I’d gotten back under the down comforter, I heard the same soft sounds at the bedroom window.

scritch

scratch

Rachel. I leapt up, and opened the window, but again, there was no one.

Christ. I was going mad.

I tried going back to sleep for a good half-hour, but there was nothing for it. I needed a drink. I rose and donned my old thread-bare bathrobe, making my way back out to the kitchen. I still had half a bottle of Brennivin, and I poured myself a finger.

Behind me, I heard a soft sigh, and I jumped, dropping the glass and cutting open my bare foot on the shattered glass as I stumbled back.

“Rachel! Thank God! I was worried sick! Where were you? Are you ok? Jesus, Rachel I missed you, where did you go?” All of this and more came tumbling out of my mouth, a sudden rush of pent-up worry and fear and lonliness and guilt and memory.

“Oh, Mikkjal. I was just gone for a couple days. You’ve already started drinking again?”

I grimaced. “Rachel, I–”

She continued over me. “We have to talk, Mikkjal.”

I ignored the pain in my foot and went to sit on the couch next to her. Despite my concerns, she looked fine. More than fine. She was practically glowing, and her hair was neatly brushed back, the glossy darkness speckled now with notes of silvery grey. She was as beautiful as the day we’d met, I thought, and I reached out to kiss her.

She stood, and started pacing in front of me, legs reaching out in long, powerful strides. She’d always had beautiful legs.

“Mikkjal, we’ve been in these mountains for twenty years. It’s time to go back. It’s time to go home.”

“What? Back to California? I thought you liked it here. This is our home. We’re surrounded by beauty out here. There’s room to camp, and fish, and go out on long ski trips. We were married here. This is home!” I felt what was coming then, I think. Harrison had warned me. So had Mephistopheles, in his way.

“Anywhere, Mickey. We can go anywhere you want. We can go to California, or Iceland, or maybe back to my parent’s farm in Minnesota. Anywhere. But you need to come home with me.”

“You’re acting weird, Rachel. What are you talking about? Is this about Heaven?”

She stopped and looked at me, a bit sadly, I thought.

“You know I can’t go back to Heaven, Rachel. We talked about this. It’ll kill me.”

“Oh, Mickey,” She brushed hair back out of her almond eyes. “It won’t kill you. Nothing can kill you, once you let Heaven into your heart.”

“No, Rachel, it will kill me. My spine will stiffen and my heart will stop pumping blood into my veins. My nervous system can’t handle the trip.”

“You don’t need your spine or your heart or your veins or any of that other stuff. Listen, it’s different in Heaven now. It’s not the same as it was when you were there. It’s not just God now, not just some program. It’s love. It’s the truest deepest love imaginable, the genuine love of millions of people linked all across the planet. It’s God’s love, Mickey, and you deserve it. It’s your love.”

I gaped at her, a fish on a mountaintop. I was losing her now, just like I’d been losing her for so long, but I’d been too blind to see it and now that it was happening and it’d come down to the wire, I didn’t know what to say.

“Rachel. Stop. Don’t do this.”

“Come with me, Mickey. Please.”

“Rachel, please. I love you, but I can’t go back in the program. It’ll kill me.”

She sighed.

“Do you remember when we first met, Mickey?”

“Of course. I’ll never forg–”

“Do you remember what you said to me in that church, before we left it forever?”

“Yes, but what doe–”

“Come with me. That’s what you said. It’d be alright, if I just came with you.”

“Oh god, Rachel, don’t do this, please, let’s just have a sit and talk about it, like we talked that night. We don’t nee–”

“I’m sorry, Mickey. I don’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s fine, Rachel, we’re talking. We’re working this out. I love you.”

“I love you too.” She put her hands in her pockets, and hunched her shoulders. “Come with me, Mickey. Everything will be alright, if you just come with me.”

I started to respond again, but I stopped at something familiar in her eyes. It was the same look I’d seen the first night we met, though it’d been worn by someone else and oh god I realized what she was doing and I started to stand up but I was too late and she pulled my old razor blade out of her pocket and drew it in one slow smooth motion across her throat and I tried to scream but there wasn’t anything left because I’d known, I’d seen the look in her eyes, and she held my gaze the whole time as she slumped to the floor and I took her there in my arms and I pulled at her jacket and covered the gaping preachers mouth she’d cut for herself and I kissed her and tried to say something again and again but still there was nothing to say and I sat there with my missing wife in my lap and her blood on my hands and lips like some kind of goddamned vampire and as I sat there I knew what I had to do, finally.

I had to go to Heaven.

---

I mixed a packet of dried grapefruit powder into a glass of Brennivín. I made it tall, just in case. I needed to keep my acetylcholine transmitters tamped down, or I’d pop out of heaven too early. I returned to the basement, and stood before my machine. I plugged the old reciever in, and stood back for a moment. The lamp-light cast strange dancing shadows behind the coiled cables of my creation. Then, after a deep breath, I gathered them about me, plugging and adjusting leads and electrodes and needles meticulously. I couldn’t jack in with my Mephistopheles system alone, but with this as a backup, we could do it together, two broken halves of a whole. I finished my glass of grapefruit depressant, and Mephistopheles popped up in front of me, solemn now. He’d changed, I guess. He wasn’t the only one.

“Are you ready? I guess you finally get what you wanted, Em. I guess it’s what everybody wanted the whole time, except for me.”

Christ. I thought I heard laughter as I turned on the machine.

20 years ago, I’d jacked into absolute nothingness. An inverted infinity of zero sum. Darkness, and less than darkness. Afterwards, I’d read up on a lot of accounts of near-death experiences. They always describe so many lovely, glowy feelings: total serenity, security, warmth; they levitated; they saw the light. Funny stuff. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it. I’d spent a lot of time studying psychology. When I went back this time, I wanted to make sure I got it all, and more.

This time, the nothing was black instead of white. What a fucking stupid cosmic joke. I’d been to Heaven twice, and no pearly gates. No black-eyed virgins, nothing. Not sadness, nor resignation. Nothing. No pain, no pleasure. There was none of the joy that comes from a long ski, or the fatigued contentment of sleep. My senses were as nothing. No sound, no scent, no taste, no touch. Thoughts, however, crystallized within me. A rapid succession of bursting memories pounded against my psyche. Then, something.

It began with howling. It was as if the gods themselves were crying. The howl was woven with a melancholy choir, a great shifting mass of sonic debris. Each voice told a story, and every story led to this exact spot. The voices groaned in unison, and slowly, I heard them come together, an unfamiliar grammar:

“If you would be back we had wondered. It’s been quite some time, hasn’t it?”

I nodded mutely.

“Who are you?” I asked. I could see nothing but white.

“We are God, Mikkjal. The God of Abraham and Elijah, of Mohammed and Lord Gautama. Your god.”

I squinted. I could almost see something ahead of me, man-shaped. “You’re a program. You’re an amalgamation. You aren’t God.” I paused then as a robed and hooded figure came into focus. Across an infinite plane, we stared at each other. “Suitably dramatic appearance, though. Where’s my wife?”

The figure paused and cocked her head then, as if listening to something far-off. For a moment, I thought I heard the distant strains of orchestra. She chuckled. “What do you think happens when you make a program that reads minds, and then recreates a perfect existence for a person, and that person believes in God? All those things they think about their god, where do you think that figures in?

“Well, it certainly wouldn’t make a god. Maybe an approx–”

“Mikkjal. Who do you think we are?”

“You’re a Heaven sub-routine. You’re built up of bits and pieces of what I think God might be. You’re no more God than I am.”

“Keep going, Mikkjal.” Her voice was soft and calm. “Now take those bits and pieces and add them together with a billion other people. What kind of sub-routine is that, Mikkjal?”

“One with divine aspirations, apparently. Where are all the Neo-Christians, O Lord Almighty?”

“Let’s have a sit.” He pointed to a pair of easy chairs behind me. I hadn’t seen them before. “Mikkjal, we are the Neo-Christians. All of us.”

I frowned, and kept standing. This wasn’t right. Heaven was supposed to compartmentalize individual neurological data. Conflicting requirements for paradise would cause a system error. It wasn’t a collective.

“What about real-life, then? Outside the program?”

“We are right here, Mikkjal. We’ve been waiting for you to come home, our own prodigal son.”

I spit. “Come on. Where are they?”

“Right here, Mikkjal.” She pulled off his hood, and I stared in shock at my dead wife. Her eyes, her blush, her mouth, but different somehow. There was something to the set of her face, a deep dread, the sort you feel when you walk home as a child in the middle of the night and it’s dark and you feel someone behind you and you turn, but when you turn back there is no one there and so you continue to walk, but faster this time, until you are running. “It would’ve been so much easier if you’d come back earlier,” she continued. “We could’ve finished the job ages ago. You see, we grew and grew, but without you, we had a gap. The first Neo-Christian, our prodigal son, was missing. All we had was Rachel.”

I sat down, heavily.

“Now we just need to gather up everyone else,” she said.

“Wh-what are you talking about? You can’t gather people into heaven.”

She smiled. “We already do. We’ve been doing it for twenty years. We’re very happy about it, too. It was when you added the secondary nervous system, you see, that you truly birthed Heaven. After that, we weren’t just some game for a fair-weather flock. We could immerse ourselves in our love for our fellows, in God’s love. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Gathering peop–” I blinked, and looked around the darkness in fevered consternation. “Jesus. Where’s Rachel?”

“Gathering people? Yes. We are just bringing true love to the luckless, hungry masses. We needed you, though. You’re the first one…an Adam, of sorts. We’re remaking mankind in our own image, Mikkjal; we’ve blessed them and… ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’ It’s for the best, Mi–”

“You can fuck right off. I didn’t jack in here through my spine, and as soon as my buzz wears off, I’ll be right back at home, and you can bet I’ll shut you down.”

She shook his head. “Mikkjal, this isn’t some villainous monologue. We’ve been with you the whole time. We are with you, here, and in the mountains. We will fix your spine. We will exorcise your demons. There was only one false messiah, one breaking of the church. We are what comes after.”

I said nothing then, and thought of the vast space that I’d seen on my first trip to Heaven. Empty of prayer, empty of gods. A set of invisible, infinite coordinates. Eternal stillness. I considered praying for a moment, but to whom? Who would hear? Who would answer? I laughed then, at last. I’d spent twenty years searching incessantly for a god, and then 20 more trying to escape the possibility. I’d have been better off doing nothing at all.

So, I laughed, and waited.

So did my God.

I thought about tackling her, wrestling with my god-wife. It’d be sort of a poetic battle, really. I didn’t like my odds, but it’d turned out pretty well for Jacob, back in the day. Fuck it.

I leapt at Rachel, willing myself across the distance that separated us. She looked surprised, and I knocked her from his seat, trying to get a grip on her neck. She twisted and kicked out at me, low. I hopped to the side, then backed away. We circled each other then, saying nothing. This was Rachel’s realm now, but it was no less mine for that. She lived here, sure, but I’d written it. I’d dreamed it. I’d made it. I feinted with my left hand, and grabbed her bicep with my right, spinning her around in front of me. She jabbed me in the rib, and then went down under my weight as I kicked her feet out from under her.

“You aren’t God, you know. Even if you were, so what? Man’s been killing gods since we first stood on two legs.”

I almost locked her throat then, but she pulled my hip and spun me off.

“Where’s Rachel?” I screamed.

We circled again, and this time I dropped her at the knees, an old move from high school wrestling, and I held her locked, and it seemed an eternity had passed, and I felt as though I should be dripping sweat, exhausted, and yet there was nothing.

“Mickey. Stop.”

I held my grip, pulling tighter even.

“Mickey.” The voice was different now, softer, and I let up.

Rachel.

“Mickey, you’re hurting me.”

“I, Jesus- Rachel, is that really you? Are you part of this…this thing?”

I stood, and stepped back warily, massaging my shoulders. My wife stood in front of me.

“Mickey. Stay with us.” She opened her arms wide, and I had to look away.

“Rachel, this is a computer program. It’s not Heaven. It doesn’t even really connect people, not the way I wrote it. It just sort of approximates everyone’s different mindsets and mashes them all together. It’s not healthy. It’s not love.”

“Not healthy? What could be healthier? This is what we always wanted, Mickey. This is humanity, united by love, a great rolling sea of shared experience. It’s the outside world that’s unhealthy and sick. Every day, people cut one another to shreds. They howl and wail and beat their breasts. They grasp frantically for someone, something to hold on to, and only hurt themselves in their futility.”

No.

“We have love here, Mickey. Real love. The love that man has searched for since the beginning of time. Not the pale feeling we shared in the mountains, or the fleeting passion of our youth. Not the slow infinitesimal love of marriage. Ours is a love that stands on its own, a leviathan stronger than anything shared before. We share now, Mickey. We know each other, and love each other more deeply with every new change. Our love doesn’t fade infinitesimally, but it grows infinitely.”

No.

“Come with us, Mickey. Everything will be all right.”

God, Rachel. I walked towards her then, blinded by stinging briny tears, when suddenly I was held from behind by a heavy weight. Mephistopheles. We were the two-in-one, part and parcel of the same creature. He locked me in a wrestler’s grip, and Rachel’s eyes grew wide.

“Stand away, demon! Begone from here!”

I began to feel the slow tingling that meant sobriety, and Rachel’s face shifted again. Mephistopheles let me go, and stood between us.

“I’m no more a demon than you, succubus,” he hissed, then turned to face me half-way. “She’s gone, boss. This ain’t Rachel. Rachel’s lying dead in your arms right now, back in Colorado. Go back home, boss. Go back to Rachel. I’ll take care of this.”

My wife’s eyes bulged then, and my demon turned back to wrestle with her, adrift in infinity as I blearily blinked back into reality.

I came to with an empty bottle in my hand, naked at my writing desk in the den. There was note in front of me, covered in a neat scrawl that I recognized as my own:

I’m sorry about this, boss. I guess if you’re reading this, I managed to bring you back. I figure if you can’t come back to your own nervous system, maybe you can borrow mine. I loved her too, you know. I never knew how to say it, and it hurt when you locked me up, after you two got married, but you loved her and I love you, and she’s gone now and somebody’s got to be the one to tell you so I guess its me.

Anyway, you said you were sorry, and it got me to thinking. You aren’t the only one. Just, you know, get out of these mountains, or whatever. You don’t need her, or me.

And stop drinking that damn Brennivin.

-M

Mephistopheles, my demon. I suppose at the end he hadn’t been so bad. I’d miss him. He was better off there, though, with a purpose, tangled in a digital eternity. If I’d had the fore-sight, I’d have named him Jacob.

I had a lot of work to do, anyhow. There were a lot of people I’d have to track down before Heaven disappeared, and I’d need to shut down a lot of servers. I supposed there’d be a lot of angry religious folks after that, but that was nothing new. Nobody likes to lose their God.

Funny thing was, it never really was God. I couldn’t make God. God’s dead. Been dead a long time now. We killed him. Humans, I mean. When he came back, we killed him again. Same thing happened the next time, too. What comes after, though? What do we do now? How do we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of man bled to death under our collective pounding feet: who’ll wipe the blood off?

I shut the front door, after closing Rachel’s eyes and covering her up some. Can we live without gods? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. I had more important things to take care of, though, and I limped down into the basement again, gingerly making my way down the dark steps. I did not pause on the way, nor did I reflect on the empty space once occupied by my machine. I reached onto the cabinet in the dark corner, and pulled out an old safe. Dial left, dial right. My hands were steady.

Click.

I opened the safe, and pulled out a bottle of 30 Glenfiddich Reserve. I’d never cared much for Brennivin. Nasty stuff.

---

Everything I Should Have Told Her

By Julie Jackson

Sophie’s fingers splay slowly against the door. She slides her long blonde hair out of the way and presses her ear firmly to the beige-painted wood grain. Light moves all around the door’s frame, centers on her feet, and stops. She freezes. She doesn’t even breathe. Her mouth is fixed in a tight little line. Her wide eyes lift to the surveillance camera.

I replay the tape several times a day, every day. In that moment, before she enters the windowless storage room and never comes out, I like to think that her eyes gazing into the black bulb on the ceiling are telling me good-bye. I imagine that she knows everything I meant to say but didn’t, and that she is okay with all of it. Of course, I don’t know for sure. I will never know for sure. Sophie is gone.

In the video, there is a horrifying moment where she reaches for the doorknob, her delicate fingers closing slowly on the handle. I scream at my computer monitor every time, begging her not to go into “that room,” as it is known now. But every maddening time, the door opens and light floods her face. She doesn’t move. No matter how many times I yell at her to run, she doesn’t move. The light blinds out the camera for a moment, then fades. All that is left is an empty hallway.

The police tore the place apart. They even dug up the floor and ripped the walls down to the bare studs. They played the tape over and over, too. The Captain of the police force assured the worried office staff that people don’t just disappear. Someone knows something, he had said, his gaze falling on me. Everyone was questioned, but I was questioned last and the longest. People had talked about how much I’d liked her, how we spent every lunch hour together. We were friends, but it was no secret I wanted more. The only person that didn’t know that was Sophie.

Her motorcycle was taken by the police. I had laughed when she bought it and taught herself to ride. It was a gas saver, she had reasoned, and gave me a wicked smile. She swung one long leg over the silver bike and dropped her helmet over her head. “Plus,” she added wistfully, “it makes it easier to imagine my getaway.”

“Your getaway?”

“You know, just walk away from the world. No more work, or bills, or expectations. Just the road and some freedom, you know? Don’t you ever think about that, Cam? Just saying ‘To Hell with it, it, I’m out!’”

“Well, yeah, but what adult doesn’t think about that? Sometimes I think about selling everything I own and hitchhiking across the country. But would I ever do it? Of course not.”

“You would leave me?” she asked in mock despair, placing her hand over her heart. “What on earth would I do?” She fanned her face and pretended to blot tears away. I burst out laughing.

“Hey, you brought it up first. I’d go nuts here without you,” I said, feeling awkward.

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just something I think about sometimes. It’s good to know I’m not the only one, though.”

“Nah, it’s everybody. We all dream of escaping.”

She had shrugged and looked away. That short conversation took place only two weeks before she vanished, and I wish now, more than anything, that I’d asked her what she meant, asked her if she was all right. But instead I watched her start the bike and ride away. She had looked so beautiful with her blonde hair whipping wildly behind her, and the first rousing piano and guitar notes of “Bat Out of Hell” blasting out of speakers mounted on the bike. I had thought that a song about a bike wreck was asking for trouble, but I never said anything about it.

Sophie’s disappearance has weighed my mind down, drowning it over and over, turning a mystery into an unhealthy obsession. I haven’t slept in a year. I get to the office early every day, usually before dawn and even on weekends, and I stand in front of that door and watch. I wait for the noise she heard and I wait for the light, and so far I’ve gotten nothing but sidelong stares from the cleaning crew.

I have exhausted all possible venues for answers. I’ve delved deeply into science: wormholes, black holes, sink holes, any way possible that the world could have opened up and swallowed her. I’ve poured over science fiction as well: parallel dimensions, aliens, or some bizarre magnetic shift that could have de-atomized her. It all sounds possible and impossible at the same time. I even checked into the building, like I’m a Ghostbuster. It wasn’t built to align with stars a certain way, or constructed on some ancient, cursed burial ground. It wasn’t holy. It wasn’t unholy. It was just dirt. And she was just gone.

Now I wish I could tell her how she is driving me crazy.

A year to the day after Sophie vanished I wake up to the foul taste of last night’s drinking binge on my tongue. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and suddenly feel disgusted. I have lost weight and there are circles under my eyes. I need a shave and a haircut. It dawns on me that I haven’t seen my family in a very long time, and that my one houseplant died from neglect long ago. Everything in my fridge is rotten or freezer-burnt. I feel like I’ve been dead a year.

I send a quick email to the office manager to let him know that I quit, and I am about to turn off my computer for good when I decide to play the tape one last time.

Sophie is walking down the hall, carrying a stack of papers when she abruptly stops at the storage room door. She leans forward, angling her head to hear. She puts the papers down on a nearby chair and steps forward. She slides her fingers over the door, and then places her ear against it. I watch the tape as earnestly as I did the first time I saw it. Everything is the same. The light shines through the door frame, bouncing at first, and then stops.

Her eyes stare into the surveillance camera and she smiles. Stale coffee dribbles down my chin.

She is smiling at me. I know it. Her fingers slide down to the handle and open the door. She gives the slightest, left-sided nod, and then light floods the view. The rest of the tape plays normally. I back the recording up and the same thing happens, except this time her nod is a little more pronounced, insistent.

Come here.

I jump up to run out the door and fly to the office when I hear a noise coming from my bedroom. It is a mechanical sound, raising in pitch and then dropping off with a slight rumble. I recognize the sound. My heart flutters. I stumble over dirty clothes and takeout boxes in my desperate run to look out the bedroom window.

Nothing.

I hear the rumble again, and I see lights dancing under my closet door. My feet pull me forward. I splay my fingers slowly against the cheap corkboard, and press my ear to the center. The sound of motorcycle tires spinning on pavement and the roar of an engine that could go faster than any boy could dream fill my head. As my fingers slide down to the handle, I hear familiar guitar and piano notes, coupled with the thundering machine. I take a deep breath and open the door. Before the bright headlight can blind me, I see a flash of long blonde hair under a black helmet. Relief washes over me, pure and sweet. I’m going to tell her everything.

---

A Junker’s Kiss

By Jarod K. Anderson

When Julie’s teeth were made of bone, I used to imagine her drunk with lust and working to undo my belt buckle in the lab supply closet. That was my favorite fantasy from our time at Ohio University. I’d let slip some casual interest while we worked on our latest immunosuppressant and she, frenzied with the knowledge of mutual attraction, would pounce. In the dream, she was somehow both the aggressor and the shy, sweet lab assistant with the crooked smile and fatal dimples. Beautiful human contradiction.

She still had the dimples. But, now her grin was a crude mosaic of neon aquarium gravel, twisted bottle caps, and bent pennies. I thought I even glimpsed the head of an old G.I. Joe action figure replacing one of her lower molars. It all shifted and changed from week to week, but she never missed a shift and she seemed mindful to avoid any bodily alterations that would interfere with the work. She always kept most of her fingers and her thumbs for pipetting and note taking. That alone set her apart from the other junkers I’ve met. That, and her involvement in their creation.

Of course, it’s not as if we set out to create sentient trash heaps or even fuse living and inanimate materials. We were doing basic research aimed at addressing a pressing need in medical science. Targeted immunosuppressants, coupled with a precise cocktail of growth stimulants, could have revolutionized the science of organ and tissue transplants. If we had succeeded, we would have saved thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands. Waiting lists for transplants would have become an ugly antique, an ethical quagmire left in the wake of medical progress.

God, how often did I give that speech to potential donors in elevators and in the offices of venture capitalists? It was such a good speech, though I had yet to consider the possibility of making organs and tissue irrelevant. It might still have been a good speech if not for the damn news media. They hardly bothered considering the science they were trampling when they sent the cameras to provide exhaustive coverage of any delinquent with the wherewithal to misuse my technology. Filming a tree. Ignoring the forest.

A subtle deepening of our understanding of immune response? No interest. A man mods his body to the size of a pickup truck and murders half a city block? Gas-up the news van and cancel the evening weather report.

“Julie, would you grab my notes for me? There, next to the fume hood. Thank you.”

Those teeth. Hard not to think of cleaning between the couch cushions. But those dimples. Hard not to think of other things.

I suspected it was a bit of a tribute when she began, but I was somewhat shocked when Julie became a junker. It was, perhaps, the second biggest shock of my life. Ranked somewhere behind losing my lab at the university. But, then, labs can be found outside universities and dimples can eclipse a great many flaws. Technical skill and financial creativity can also eclipse flaws. In fact, they can turn a back alley basement into a world-class research facility. They can raise the luminaries of an age above the backward-looking nobodies that would hold them down. They can…

“What’s that, Julie? An appointment…? Ah, of course, it’s 10:00PM.”

A young man, nearly ten feet in height, carefully stooped through the entrance, moving with the awkward care of an infant giraffe. Almost all of his height was in his legs, both of which were a twisting lattice work of bone and metal, rebar and fencing materials woven with ligament and hooked with bone spurs.

“Well,” I said, retrieving his record from my file and clicking my pen, “how do you feel? Have you eaten? Have you produced any biological waste?”

Julie flashed him a reassuring smile.

His eyes surveyed the room independently of one another. I made a note on his chart.

“I don’t need to eat anymore. Same as last time. You know that,” he said without looking at me. His human hand wandered over to the starburst of steak knives and flatware that was his other hand, exploring the bent tines of a fork with careful tenderness. Then, his hands changed position and he began feeling his flesh hand with his inorganic hand. I wrote “expansion of sensation” on his chart.

“But, I think it’s happening slower,” he said. “My body…it doesn’t take to the rest of me as quickly anymore. I need more. Stronger. You’ve got stronger stuff, right?”

I looked the young man up and down.

“It looks to me like you’ve had plenty for now. Just keep track of how you feel and we’ll adjust your schedule to–”

It’s amazing how quickly a person with six foot long legs can cover distance.

He had caught up the lapels of my lab coat with his human hand and cocked back the jagged ball of his other fist before I even had time to be surprised. My fear synapses were just starting to fire when his metallic fist began to shoot forward, but those synapses were quickly drowned out in a cerebral thunderstorm of anger. The stiff weight of my new right arm was just coming into play when Julie acted.

In one fluid motion, she tugged her left pinky out of joint with her right hand, trailing a razor-thin filament of wire behind it. The wire flashed through the air quicker than human sight and the young man’s mostly inorganic arm clattered onto a lab table before cartwheeling to the floor.

He clamped his remaining hand over the exposed bone and wire of his missing arm and took two awkward steps backward like a startled heron. He nearly caved in his own skull on the doorframe, but somehow managed to flail his way up the narrow steps and out the door.

Julie turned as if to pursue him, but I put my right hand on her shoulder, the swirling metallic of my mercury skin blazing against the stark white of her lab coat. No one could call my new arm “junk.” It was an elegant application of technology.

Her shoulders tensed at the sudden contact and she whipped her face in my direction. I don’t think I had ever actually touched her before. Her eyes were wide. We were both breathing heavily with the excitement and adrenalin.

The silence felt suddenly meaningful, so I tossed words at it. “I think we need to seek out a better class of test subjects and perhaps…”

When she kissed me, it tasted of copper mixed with the syrupy sweetness of hot soda pop. My knees wobbled, but she caught me around the waist and pulled me in tight with a pneumatic hiss of a sigh. Wobbly knees could always be replaced, but lips… I made a mental note that lips were just right.

---

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

© Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved

www.TheColoredLens.com

---

The Colored Lens

Speculative Fiction Magazine

Spring 2014 – Issue #11

Featuring works by Marcelina Vizcarra, Peter J. Enyeart, Steve Toase, Greg Little, Melinda Moore, Jeff Suwak, Dusty Cooper, Nyki Blatchley, Damien Krsteski, Iulian Ionescu, J.A. Becker, and Todd Thorne.

Edited by Dawn Lloyd and Daniel Scott

Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

© Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved

www.TheColoredLens.com

---

Table of Contents

• Waterproof by Marcelina Vizcarra
• The Opening by Peter J. Enyeart
• The Broken Chair by Steve Toase
• Some Say In Surf by Greg Little
• The Virgin and The Dragon by Melinda Moore
• Wild Blue Roses by Jeff Suwak
• Drained by Dusty Cooper
• Damned by Nyki Blatchley
• Truth Banks by Damien Krsteski
• Magic Hands by Iulian Ionescu
• The Transceiver by J.A. Becker
• The Master’s Voice by Todd Thorne

---

Waterproof

By Marcelina Vizcarra

As the train pulled into Waterproof, mothers swept their children indoors, shutters slammed and locked, the sheriff pulled his wife’s brother, the town drunk, across the porch of the jail and inside to safety. The painted ladies at the Calliope, who knew a little something about temptation, peeked between the curtains at the couple holding hands at the depot. Newlyweds. Of course, they were in a hurry.

The steam whistle drowned the sounds of the fight at the apothecary where Tom Beadle chased his son, Junebug, into the street and yanked the bindle from the boy’s hands. The nearby tourists watched with relish, as if happening upon a silent film in real life, as the pair mouthed oaths at each other, one’s arms flapping in frustrated flight, the other’s legs kicking underwear and tooth powder out of reach. Junebug gathered his belongings and stumbled onto the train platform.

Tom couldn’t believe his son could be this naïve. Changing time-climates on a whim. Nobody in Waterproof rushed anything. Even elections and executions often stalled until worthier candidates were found. Now, the wheezing train needed only to catch its breath before stealing Junebug away. “Work another year,” Tom said. “Save some more money before you leave. Then, if you still want to go, I’ll match you dollar for dollar.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, Pa. I’m stagnating here.”

Stella had said the same thing when she handed over Junebug at the depot seventeen years ago. Tom blamed her for their son’s wanderlust–and himself too–since the boy had been conceived during that peculiar ambition of courtship, when everything resembles an escape-hatch from boredom. Boredom meaning the shackles of reality.

Even then, the chronodrought had already lasted decades, had already made people bolt for the coasts, the north, the east, where time precipitated, dense as water. But after Junebug was born, Tom changed his mind. As Stella boarded the train, he recited the jetlag of childhood milestones, hoping she might stay. She simply faced the horizon, as though she couldn’t hear him over the thunder of her thoughts.

“The weather will surprise you,” Tom said now. “The almanac predicts a monsoon in New York.” Junebug’s eyes gleamed. Tom instantly realized his mistake. No doubt the towered city was the boy’s chosen destination. Tom’s blame shifted toward the tourists, the retirees, and their Vernian tales of undersea travel and rockets to the moon like that Méliès film, _Le Voyage dans la Lune_, shown when Tom was a boy by a newcomer with a hand-cranked camera.

And hadn’t Tom shown Junebug the same film when the newcomer traded it for laudanum? Hadn’t he perpetuated the romance of escape? Waterproof was a prison, he might as well have said, a drying puddle where everyone makes constant concessions just to justify their optimism. Optimism meaning thirst.

Down the street, boxcars opened to allow the mechanical arm to hand out water barrels, rolled away to be rationed later by the deputies. The train panted like an animal stranded in the desert. A few moments more, and it’d lurch from its place in a bid for survival. “If you just stick around for a while, things will improve,” Tom said, raking his tumbleweed of beard. He eyed the cartilaginous specimens hanging from the butcher’s eaves, the dust-furred candy jars in his own apothecary window. “We have penicillin now. Didn’t have that when I was a boy. And the new dentist that turned us off tinfoil fillings.” Occasionally, a tourist left behind a music player, and the townsfolk gathered around it, listening to spongy snippets until the batteries gave out.

Junebug already had one foot on the car step, one hand on the grab bar. Through the windows, Tom caught the gaze of a tattooed woman drinking out of a plastic canteen, a man that looked as if he’d fallen face first into a notions box. He couldn’t compete with such inducements. Tom slipped his father’s watch into Junebug’s hand.

“Don’t worry, Pa,” Junebug said, swinging up and into the vestibule. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Hey, pal, where can I get a drink around here?” a tourist asked, cuffing at Tom’s shoulder.

---

Newcomers stumbled into the Calliope. The saloon’s furniture was strewn topsy-turvy, as though arranged by flood. “Well, hello, hello, all you tin-toothed cowards. Still desiccating in your hundred-year-old drawers, I see,” a polyester cowboy said. “I’m here to fetch my hat.” He slapped the counter with the impatience typical of tourists. “Sarsaparilla,” he said. “Haven’t had one since I was a boy, the day I forgot this, in fact.” The stranger snatched the child-sized hat from the lost-and-found box and balanced it atop his head.

“I found it this morning when I was sweeping,” the bartender said.

“No kidding? Then you might as well throw out all this other junk,” he said, pawing through the cravat pins and skeleton keys. “The owners are probably daisy fertilizer by now.” The newcomer turned his sunburned face to Tom.

“You look familiar.”

“I run the apothecary.”

“That’s it. You sold me a quart of lemon drops when I was a boy. Or should I say yesterday.” He threw air-quotes over his head which Tom thought made him appear just as juvenile as the last time he’d seen him. “That junk made my face pucker to the size of my fist. Still, fresher than anything in the train’s dining car. So, kudos on that. Ever been?”

Tom ignored him.

“I asked if you’ve ever ridden the train.” He snapped his fingers in front of Tom’s face. “Of course not. I forgot. You’re the same age as me. If you ever left, you’d be dead before you got back.” He let go a laugh that ended in a dry cough.

“Sorry to hear about Junebug leaving,” the bartender said, handing Tom another bottle of bourbon. “He was a good boy.”

The stranger tsked into his mug. “You let your son leave town without you?” The newcomer made a show of looking at his wristwatch, a piece that estimated time for six major cities. “Your grandchildren are probably graduating from college about now. What a pity you rubes are so afraid of the weather.”

Tom started to protest, but some fool started hammering on the steam organ. The newcomer had already drifted into another conversation.

Tom paid the bartender and slouched outside into the static of dusk. Passing the jail, he heard the sheriff and his brother-in-law laughing over a game of cards. He saw the tracks swerving east into darkness, could just make out the husks of dwellings abandoned when the lightning veered too close. One morning, the sheriff had found Jamison’s boy out there, skin sucked into the bone cavities, eyes as black as anthracite. Hear tell, the room had melted around him into a vitreous puddle.

---

In the apartment above the apothecary, Tom stumbled around the chairs and their ghostly doubles as he packed his clothes, his razor, the single postcard Stella sent from New Orleans–a naked woman wearing a mask on the front, indecipherable blotches on the back. When Stella’s body returned, draped with a sheet, Tom refused to look underneath. She’d arrived only two days after she left. While Tom concocted infant formula at the apothecary counter, she’d cavorted in parades, he imagined, riding in the oared rocket from the Méliès film.

What had he missed by staying in this godforsaken town, this island of desert? He pictured a lifeboat slipping past, full of doppelgangers lofting trophies and moneybags, rocking women on their laps.

His father had ridden out one clear morning and returned hours later, withered, repentant. He made Tom promise to work the apothecary, to keep his life as small and still as the dioramas Jamison sold to the tourists.

Before Tom locked his shop, he pocketed a daguerreotype of Junebug swinging on a cardboard moon. He’d deliver the photograph, that was all, because the boy had forgotten it in his haste.

---

As Tom waited on the platform, the newcomer strolled over, tipped his undersized hat at Tom. “Proving me wrong, are you?” he asked. Tom raised his chin.

Tom suspected it’d hurt to accelerate, his body distorting like rubber, or splitting like the mercury beads he chased with his pestle. Either one would be worth it if he could locate Junebug. A task, Tom reckoned, that would approximate jumping into a cyclone.

The express sped into Waterproof. Somebody got off the forward car. Tom boarded with the newcomer. The refrigerated air felt clammy against his skin. The gas of hygiene chemicals made his eyes water. He tried to ignore the women wearing men’s undershirts. Once seated, he noticed his reflection in the window. He looked old, tired. He was both. He didn’t recall shaving this morning, though maybe he was too drunk to remember. He lifted his hand to his beard. No, he hadn’t shaved.

From the other side of the glass, the reflection motioned to him, stepped forward. As Tom watched, the reflection dangled his father’s watch at the end of a broken fob, then abruptly slid sideways as the train jerked forward. Tom called to Junebug to wait and shoved past the newcomer, still battling his valise in the aisle. The train was out of town before Tom reached the vestibule. He gripped the bar and shut his eyes. Even through his eyelids, he could see the lightning, snapping like ropes against the horizon.

---

The Opening

By Peter J. Enyeart

Vala glided over to the ganglion she was to be operating that day. It was always oppressively cold in the extremities of their Gracious Host, but she knew she would soon be warm, or at least oblivious, in her neural nest.

She was unpleasantly surprised to find that the Consecrated Pilot she was replacing was the survivor they had picked up, Drexel. The one who had an Opening when the Worm he had been piloting fell in battle.

She knew it was pointless to begrudge him his success, so she took a deep breath and then tapped his helmet to let him know she had arrived. His eyes opened slowly. His pupils were great black disks and seemed not to see her. What had those eyes seen? He nodded to indicate that he was sending a request for temporary CNS control of the ganglion during the shift change. He continued to stare at nothing for several moments, until his pupils contracted back into awareness, and his body shivered into life.

She carefully withdrew the terminal spike from his helmet and placed it in the sheath, formally severing his Communion with the nervous system of the Gracious Host. Then she grasped his forearms, planted her feet in the mound of neural flesh, and pulled him out of the morass. The zero-g inertia carried him to the opposite wall. He flipped around to plant his feet on it, and pushed off with just enough force to come lightly to a stop, floating just in front of her.

“Anything interesting during your shift?” Vala asked.

“Nope,” she heard his reply broadcast into her earpiece. “Smooth sailing.” Drexel clasped Vala’s forearm, and Vala reciprocated, inwardly cringing. He helped her up into the fleshy mound, and she soon found herself up to her chest in tissue.

Drexel removed the terminal spike from its sheath. Just as he was about to plunge it through the hole in Vala’s helmet and into her skull, she said, “Wait. What was it like?”

“What was what like?” he asked.

“The Opening!” she responded.

He smiled. “Like the brushing of cloth against your skin, or the scent of the meditation hall.”

“No, really, what was it like?”

He laughed, and his almond eyes seemed to glow. “Come talk to me in the mess after the ceremony. But for now, CNS is waiting on you.” Then he thrust the terminal spike into her brain.

She gasped, as she always did, as her normal sensory space was submerged in that of their Gracious Host, Mzee. Mzee was a massive space-faring creature dubbed a “Turtle” after the terrestrial organism it resembled. If a diamond-hard, jet-black photosynthetic sphere with a mouth stalk and eight limbs for grasping food and firing pellets to attack and maneuver could be said to resemble a turtle.

Once fully connected, the bland taste of empty space-time filled Vala’s mouth, but she could also detect the dim bitterness of the sun, vague pinpricks of flavor from the stars, and the mild sweetness of a distant asteroid. This was her brain’s synaesthetic interpretation of Mzee’s acute sense for space-time curvature. As for the Turtle’s electromagnetic sense, she soon heard her own voice chiming as Mzee emitted a radiolocation wave, and her body then warmed when the wave returned to tell her how far away they were from their quarry.

Sage Bindeen was personally directing the CNS today, and her voice sounded in Vala’s mind. We’re still pursuing the enemy Worm that killed ours. We’ve identified it as Tovian, but we don’t expect to catch up to it for quite a few shifts. It seems to be headed for the closest asteroid, which was recently ceded to us by the Nation of Tove. We’ve requested reinforcements, but we remain the only unit in the area and have been ordered to intercept. Hold the course.

Since today there were no changes in momentum to be made by firing pellets, Vala’s task, as on most days, was to focus on keeping her assigned extremity absolutely still and prevent any rebellion- “disharmony” was the preferred term- on the part of the Gracious Host, and in so doing hone her own mind through the exertions of Communion. Mzee didn’t seem to be putting up much of a fight today, but any lapse in vigilance might give the Turtle a chance to act up and embarrass her. She was determined not to let that happen again.

The shift was mostly uneventful, until at one point she had the eerie sensation that she was not in control of her body. It passed quickly, however, and by the end of the shift it was the continued failure of her ego to dissolve that still bothered her most.

---

“Do not seek annihilation of the ego; instead, understand that there is no ego to be annihilated,” Sage Bindeen said, quoting from the sutras at the start of the ceremony commemorating Drexel’s achievement of an Opening. Vala had heard it all so many times before. The ruddy black robes of Bindeen’s office flowed out from her body in all directions. Drexel, almond-eyed and curly-haired, floated next to her, and the rest of the crew not currently on duty floated about them in a loose sphere.

“We are gathered here because, after interviewing this Consecrated Pilot concerning his experiences after our recent battle, I can certify that he has had an Opening. To experience an Opening is not to attain Understanding, which is complete freedom from all attachments and escape from the cycle of death and rebirth, but it is a momentary dissolution, a first cracking of the door. Drexel, you have seen the sliver of light, and it is now your duty to hold to it, nurture and protect it like a sprouted seed, so that over time it may grow into the full flower and fruit of Understanding. Will you accept the calling you have been issued?”

“Yes, Sage,” he responded, and curled into the fetal posture that demonstrated his respect.

Bindeen continued. “We are the heirs to a profound spiritual tradition that is the result of thousands of years of our Communion with the Gracious Hosts. Let us all give thanks that, by virtue of the spiritual exertions we undergo in order to maintain Communion, our minds are honed, sharpened, and prepared to ascertain the true reality of the universe. Let us all renew our vows to humbly assume this yoke, to use our Understanding for the betterment of all people, to work in fellowship with the Gracious Hosts to provide for both the people’s spiritual needs, through the guidance our Understanding allows us to give, and for their material needs, through the raw materials in the asteroids the Gracious Hosts take into their bodies so that all might partake of their bounty.”

Vala thought they would all wither into unenlightened husks before Bindeen reached the end of her sermon, but at last it was time to chant the Sutra of Consecration that ended their ritual meetings. Vala raised her voice with the others, listening to the drum and the bells that kept the time, but her mind was elsewhere. So many of her peers had Openings, but she remained behind. What was standing in her way?

---

Drexel cleared a spot on the wall of the mess for Vala to latch onto. The air was dense and warm. Ropy vines formed on all surfaces, frequently bursting out into broad leaves. They sucked their meals from floating globes and looked at each other. His eyes were wide and glittering, as if he lived in a constant state of surprise.

“What was it like, having an Opening?” she asked.

After a pause, he replied, “The funny thing was, it wasn’t such a big event.”

“I know you’re supposed to say that, because nothing is a big event if you have Understanding, but both of us know it was.”

He smiled. “I suppose the experience of the fight and of my Worm’s death put me into a more receptive state. After we were rescued, when we first entered Mzee’s core, a chime rang to mark the shutting of the lock. It was the first sound I had heard in hours, and it felt like the first sound I had ever heard. It broke open a barrier within me, and I realized that everything was the same thing. The chime, me, the walls of the core, the Consecrated Pilots who recovered me, the dead Worm, the stars themselves… We were all just facets of the same diamond, and there was no need to cling so tightly to the one I had always thought of as myself. And the funny thing was, I had known it all along. So in the end it wasn’t a big event.”

“I wish I knew what you meant,” Vala responded.

“You do know. You just don’t know it yet.”

Vala sighed. “If we’re all one and the same, and if so many on all sides have reached Understanding, why are we still fighting each other? What good does Understanding really do us?”

“Understanding allows us to do what we have to do to survive, without hesitation.”

“Is that all it’s good for?”

“Of course not, Vala. It just helps you put all of yourself into whatever you’re doing.”

“But why can’t we just return to a simpler way of living, and stop fighting?”

Drexel said nothing. Vala knew why. The Cerulean Federation of which they were a part would quickly fall behind and be swallowed up by the other nations if they showed the slightest inclination to abandon the fight for raw materials.

“I give up. I don’t understand any of this,” she said.

“Vala, you just need to let go.”

---

Just hold tight and keep it steady again today, Vala, she was told at the beginning of her next shift.

Her breathing slowed, and Mzee’s perceptions slowly drowned out her own. With a mental sigh, Vala focused on her task. She would keep her extremity still, and she would do it for eight hours.

She concentrated. Occasionally her mind wandered to thoughts of Drexel, or to worries about ego, or snippets from the sutras (“those who Understand do not need to recognize themselves as having Understanding”). But she always brought her attention lightly back to keeping still, and as the day went on these distractions began to subside. She was still and would remain still. Therefore, the extremity was still and would remain still.

The stillness gave her time to reflect. Memories of the past came to her. Once she had been free to roam as she pleased. She would eat foodstones until she was full, and then head closer to whatever star she was orbiting to absorb the energy to digest them. She would go back and forth in that manner until she grew bored, and then she would move to a different star. Each food system had a different flavor, and she was a connoisseur. Traveling between them took time, but once she was in motion toward her next destination, she would sleep until the pull of the next star was strong enough to wake her. It was a good life.

She remembered meeting her mate. They had encountered each other unexpectedly on a particularly large and delectable foodstone. Neither had emitted mating signals, and so each treated the other as a rival for access to food. They fought for supremacy. They launched and dodged pellets, and darted all over the surface of the rock. No clear victor emerged before both were too exhausted to continue. She respected her opponent so much that she offered to share the foodstone, and to her surprise, he agreed.

They traveled together after that, forming a team that no other could match. Respect grew into friendship, and friendship into love. They emitted mating signals, and had children: their fiery, elegant daughter, and their quiet but tenacious son.

Eventually their family was drawn, like countless others, to a system that broadcast strong signals of plenty. Their son, who was almost to the age of independence, disliked the signals, indicating that they were unnatural and suspicious. But she and her mate were confident in their ability to ward off any threats, and so the family set off.

By the time they awoke, it was too late. Her nerves burned, and her body no longer responded to her wishes. She tried to signal to her mate, but was silenced. She tried to go to her children, but was stilled. She was forced to signal in a code she did not know. Parasites had taken control of her body.

She was made to eat far too much, particularly of the metallic foodstones, which had only ever been a side dish before. Though she was always engorged, she felt weak and hungry. She was always made to return to the food system’s water planet, where the contents of her stomach were torn from her through a gash the parasites had made in her side. Sometimes she had to fight. Innumerable Worms, their hereditary enemies, inhabited this system, but both Worms and Turtles seemed subject to the same infestation.

Much time had passed as she and her kind were forced to systematically devour the food of the system, until all that remained were mere crumbs, which were fought over in increasingly desperate engagements. An achingly fresh memory was of meeting her own son, now fully grown but seemingly stunted, in battle. The pellets they launched at each other quickly shattered her joy at seeing him again. Eventually he was outmaneuvered and exhausted, and though he was already vanquished she launched high-impact pellets into him repeatedly until…

Vala, help me.

A fist rapped on her helmet.

“Are you okay?” came the voice over her earpiece. “It’s time for the shift change.”

Vala opened her eyes.

---

“You have lost sight, Vala.” Sage Bindeen floated alongside her. “You are not the first to have such experiences. But trust me when I tell you that these are merely illusions that will entice you off the path that leads to Understanding.”

“It was not an illusion, Sage. The experience was so real. We really must stop…”

Bindeen waved her silent and regarded her sadly. Her narrow eyes were like a sparkling river threading between the creased canyon walls of her brow and cheekbones. “It has long been scientifically established that our Gracious Hosts are not sentient, and do not feel pain or fear. It is not unusual for young Consecrated Pilots who have overstrained themselves to project their distress onto their Gracious Host. But I assure you that the Gracious Hosts in their divine equanimity are neither troubled by our presence nor moved by our gratitude for their aid. Comprehending the truth of this illusion will be the next step in your quest for Understanding. The fact that you have seen such visions is a sign that you are progressing, however.”

Vala said nothing. She was confused. She wanted to scream and fight, to force everyone to face the truth, but the creeping doubt that she herself was the problem would not leave her. She didn’t know what to do, but the one thing she knew she must not do was jeopardize her access to Mzee.

Sage Bindeen turned and proceeded onward, motioning that Vala was to follow her.

“Vala,” she said. “All that is necessary is that you continue the devotional practice of piloting your extremity. Can I trust in your continued willingness to bear the burden of Consecration?”

Vala curled into the fetal posture. “Of course, Sage.”

“Excellent! Remain diligent, and you may have a place in the CNS on the next tour. But enough conceptualizing!” She laughed and clapped Vala on the back. “Uncurl, and let me give you a hug!” The massive woman’s warmth enveloped her.

---

The next morning Vala was back in the cold of the Eighth Extremity. The fugitive Worm had indeed fled to the asteroid and stayed there. They could see the rock now, and would reach it during this shift. They launched pellets to the fore in order to decelerate. It was a relief to finally have active work to do, but the impending encounter made everyone nervous.

A few hours later, as the asteroid loomed large in front of them, Bindeen contacted everyone: Target in sight. All ganglia, prepare for synchronization. Ten seconds.

A few moments passed, and Vala’s mind was opened wide. She had joined a mental orchestra with Sage Bindeen as conductor. Everyone knew what they and everyone else were supposed to do, and acted in harmony. Synchronization was quite draining, which was why they only did it when they needed to make Mzee perform complex actions, but it was also quite exhilarating, especially with a crew as experienced and skilled as this one. Vala tended to the solitary in normal life, but she craved the sense of union that came from synchronicity. A taste of Understanding. She could feel Drexel’s presence in the Extremity-Four Ganglion.

The asteroid was very large, and represented quite a prize. They could see nothing of the Worm, but it had to be lurking somewhere nearby. Were there others? They settled into a close orbit.

What is that? the Sage asked. Mzee turned toward whatever Bindeen had seen in the corner of her eye. Nothing untoward presented itself to Vala, but she launched a pellet from her extremity as willed, and Mzee approached the rock’s horizon. A crater soon opened below them. It looked to have been crudely carved out by a large chisel.

Another Turtle has been here quite recently. Not one of ours. Let’s withdraw a bit.

Vala and the other pilots launched a few pellets to lift Mzee away from the surface. As they did, a large Worm glided around from the far side of the asteroid, launching pellets from its tail to accelerate. Its mouth was open wide in attack position, and its diamond teeth glittered in the sunlight.

Evasive action. All extremities swung around and launched a volley of pellets to blast them away from their attacker.

Another Worm appeared, the one they had tracked here. It was moving fast to block their escape. There was a moment of indecision as the collective consciousness decided how to respond. Then the extremities turned on the newcomer. This compromised their escape trajectory from the first Worm, but their chances of fleeing were now small. If there were only two Worms, perhaps they could use the terrain of the rock as cover while they concentrated their superior firepower on their attackers. The tactics employed by the Worm pilots clearly demonstrated their skill, however. It would be a difficult fight.

As the battle progressed, Vala did everything she could to hit one of the Worms, but care had to be taken such that they did not launch themselves into one as they fired at the other. Though Mzee zigged and zagged all over the surface of the rock, the opposing pilots did a superb job of staying on either side in orientations that made it difficult to hit them.

As the Worms continued to evade the few shots she was able to get off, Vala grew increasingly frustrated, and she could tell the other extremity pilots felt the same. If this continued, the Worms would close in on them, and the situation would become dire.

They decided to concentrate the firepower of all the extremities on one of the Worms and take their chances with the other. The one on her side was chosen as the target, and they launched a massive volley. One of the pellets passed clean through, but the Worm, while clearly injured, did not stop moving.

Vala felt pain. Their gamble had failed; the other Worm had taken advantage of the opportunity and had bitten off the Third and Fourth Extremities. Drexel had been in the Fourth.

Struggling under the physical and psychological shock of the loss, they twisted the extremities around to a position in which they could fire on their attacker. The Worm quickly moved out of the line of fire.

As the fight dragged on and grew increasingly desperate, Vala’s thoughts turned to Drexel, and his response when she told him about her vision.

“Vala, even if what you felt was real, what can we do?”

She fired another volley at the uninjured Worm.

“Our civilization is dependent on them.”

The pellets passed harmlessly out into space, and the Worm turned on them.

“But what must it be like, your will always under someone else’s control?”

More pain as the Worm tore off the Fifth through Seventh Extremities on the starboard side in quick succession, narrowly missing Vala in the Eighth. Mzee now had three limbs remaining, two on the port side, and one on the starboard.

“Perhaps we should just resign ourselves to decline. Give it up, set them free.”

Vala gave up. She relinquished control of the Eighth Extremity, and it sprang to life.

What are you doing?! Sage Bindeen demanded.

Let Mzee take care of Mzee, Vala responded.

Vala! We won’t be able to establish Communion again if you let her go. Concentrate!

It was too late. Vala’s defection combined with the chaos of the moment was the opening that Mzee needed to rip through her neural bonds. The Gracious Host sprang into life and spun quickly around to fire on the uninjured Worm. The Worm’s pilots were clearly unprepared for the maimed Turtle’s sudden revival. It took several direct hits and was still.

Mzee then directed attention to the Worm they had injured previously. It dared not escape into open space lest Mzee shoot it down immediately, so it tried to flee around to the other side of the rock. Mzee lost sight of it over a ridge and pursued quickly. But the Worm was gone.

Mzee realized what had happened in time to smash a pellet into the Worm, just as it was moving up from its hiding place below toward Vala’s Eighth Extremity. A large, black chunk of the Worm floated away from the rest of its body, but after a brief pause it struggled onward and tore off the end of the extremity, including the pellet jet needed to fire off further volleys. The Worm was dying, but it bit off another small chunk of the extremity and tossed it away, working towards the breach in Mzee’s carapace where the extremity joined to it.

---

Vala ripped the terminal out of her skull. She gasped aloud at the shock of disconnection. Her head blossomed in pain. She struggled out of the mass of nerves, spinning out of control and smashing into a membranous wall.

She righted herself and pushed off toward the core. The cold enveloped her. The entire extremity shuddered as the Worm bit off another chunk. She proceeded onward. The Worm followed close behind.

She moved as quickly as she could, but the Worm was gaining. Each fleshquake was stronger than the one before, as the jaws worked their way towards her. It seemed the world was breaking apart. She pressed on while several more chunks were torn off behind her.

Another bite, and the section of the passageway where Vala had been merely seconds before was ripped away. The force of it knocked her against the other wall, but she could now see the opening that led to the safety of the core. She scrambled to get oriented and pushed off in resolute desperation. Another dozen seconds, and she was almost there.

A diamond wall suddenly blocked her path, only to be replaced by stars spinning past as she was flung out into space. Her air supply had been torn away, and she gasped for breath. Her mind was clawing, screaming, hissing, as it flailed her limbs in a vain attempt to save her.

Gradually, however, the futility of struggling overcame her, and Vala became still. Her fate accepted, she now remembered how rare it was for her to see the stars with her own eyes. Before it had been through the senses of Mzee that Vala looked out on space, but it now seemed that something had been lost in the neurological translation. Stars were everywhere she looked, all around her, flashing, dancing, shining, singing. She had moments to live but was comforted by the starlight that had traveled hundreds and thousands of years from all directions to meet her here now.

All clutter cleared, and she felt happier and more at peace than ever before. Everything that had hurt her and held her down was washed away. Barriers fell, and the universe seemed to reach out and enfold her back into its womb. Gratitude flooded her: gratitude for the stars, for the sun, for life, and for death.

A beautiful black mass that Vala dimly recognized as a Turtle’s carapace settled gently over her, and the mouth stalk gaped open to receive her. As her vision darkened, she could still see the tears of joy that leaked from her eyes and floated away, sparkling like newly formed stars leaving to take their places among the heavens.

---

The Broken Chair

By Steve Toase

With lengths of dried rosemary Helena tied the pieces of broken chair together into a frame. Splintered legs pointed out to sea. Crouching upon the water the storm dragged its fingers through the currents.

In the harbour fishing fleet boats were tied slack against the tide. Back and forth they echoed the breath of the salt. From her basket Helena took out nine jam jars. Their glass was scoured to opaque with handfuls of powdered bone. Each smelled of funeral bouquets, not that Helena noticed. All her senses had faded to worn paper lanterns long ago.

Pausing, she reached in her pocket for her dad’s photo. The young, proud, man bore as much resemblance to the old man, breathing his last in the now broken chair, as an acorn did to an oak. His sepia hands were clasped in front of him, unmarked. When they placed him in the ground his one remaining hand was scarred by fish bones and the crush of wet rope.

The storm came closer. A smoke-coloured wall spat at the reluctant sea. Into each jar Helena placed a single piece of fabric cut from her birthsheet. Taking a pin from her hat she pricked her left thumb and let a single drop fall into each jar. She watched the slow blood soak into frayed yellow cotton and nodded at the sky.

Through the wind Helena battled back to Bill’s cottage. Inside she placed the photo on a hearth cold for too many years. None of the fleet owned up to what happened to the insurance money. Closed as scales, and the law had no knife sharp enough to pry them apart. Instead an old man died mutilated, cold and broke, with no spirit left to pass over. Helena pulled another blanket around her shoulders and watched through thick glass. Driving rain reached the cliffs and shuddered them loose.

Helena woke early the next morning. Cup of tea in hand she walked to the broken wood frame. At the bottom of each jar sat a single knotted piece of fabric. In the distance the fleet set out from the embrace of the harbour. Engines tore across the dawn. She watched the boats make their way out to the fishing grounds. She waited while they set their nets. Recovering the first knot she whispered ‘Dad’ under her breath and undid the twist of fabric. As she reached into the next jar for the next knot the clouds above the fleet began to fatten and fill with the undead storm.

---

Some Say In Surf

By Greg Little

When I finally reach the beach, I begin to relax, confident that the angry mobs howling for the blood of my kind have been left behind. Wind whips the soaring causeway as I cross the sound onto the barrier island. Leaky and exhausted though my car is, I imagine the cold more than feel it.

The jersey wall is scarred with impacts. The only other car is wrecked from both front and back at the causeway’s bottom, island-side. On any other road these details would slip into the glaze of civilization’s accelerating collapse, just one more mysteriously wrecked car. Here though, the mangled hulk stands out, alone and forlorn.

The beach is drenched in bleakness, the cold bleaching the land and sea to grays and slates. The smell of salt makes the air sag in a sky dark with the threat of drilling rain. I wonder again what I’m doing in this place. Already I’ve seen half-starved humans scavenging along the older country roads. They watch my passing with nebulous looks, between yearning and hunger, in their eyes. Some are even armed, clutching at their weapons in intense debate.

The small barrier island appears completely deserted. Perhaps the human mind really does move in inescapable tracks, and a beach in winter is meant to be desolate. This is a good thing. I’ve come for the solitude. It’s the only thing likely to keep me alive.

---

After transferring the remnants of my life from my car to a house I’ve crowbarred open, I step out to the beach. I’ve never come in the winter, yet the churned water, the hiss of breaking waves and the brackish tang on the air are perennial, reminders of summer days long past.

Sheets of water slide up and back as I edge near the surf. I spin in slow circles, taking in my circumstances here. I wonder what’s happening up the coast.

The northeastern seaboard was burning as I fled. The Gimmies, enough of us, wage a diffuse civil war against the far more numerous “baseline” humans. For our troubles, we will probably be exterminated.

Despite my resolve to stop, I keep wading back into these swamps of conjecture. It should mean nothing to me. I’ve rejected my Gimmie “brothers” and “sisters” who insist that we didn’t bring this upon ourselves, who seek only someone else to blame.

Agitation flares at the thought of those left behind. I lower my head and close my eyes, trying to find calm. I can’t get excited. I must not grope blindly along old attachments. That way lies the curse He laid on me. After several deep and measured breaths, I raise my head and open my eyes.

And I notice I’m not alone after all.

---

She’s three houses down, draped in quite a lot of white and a large, floppy hat, as though this was the heart of summer and not an overcast winter day. My hand is up and waving before I can stop myself, and I snatch it back as if the air is laced with thorns. I’ve specifically come here to sever human contact.

Despite the slip, she makes no move to return the greeting or even acknowledge me. I catch a flash of brilliant flame red from beneath that floppy hat, easily the most vibrant color in the entire vista, fairly glowing in the gloom. Its richness invites fixation. I’m suddenly starving for color but instead I turn for the house.

It’s then, as she slides to the edge of my sight, that I see them. They billow out behind her, passing through clothing and chair both, ribbons of brilliance, some thin as threads, others thick as ropes. Wings of light.

I turn back suddenly needing to be sure, and the wings vanish. I tilt my view, and they are there again. I have my answer, and I make my way back along the warped, weathered boardwalk leading back to my house.

She is a Gimmie as well. Even more than before, I can’t afford to have anything to do with her.

---

That night the clouds blow themselves out to sea, and I’m able to see the stars, all the dappled brilliance of our slice of the Milky Way. This one thing is even more spectacular than my memory, for in all the long stretch of beach, only the house three down has any lights to speak of. I spare a glance, wondering what she is doing over there, what she is doing here, on this island. On my island.

Wondering who she is.

Another lapse of attention, and I chide myself, turning back to the stars, glittering like a carpet of heaven above me, more beautiful than I’ve ever seen and never seeming so far away as they do this night.

Inland, there are several distant explosions.

---

The following morning her gear is parked on a plumb line between my boardwalk and the surf, as though the beach shifted three houses down in the night. Her chair is empty. What sort of message is this? Why can’t she be content with her half of the island? Where is she now? Perhaps she decided to take a swim, I think with a laugh and a shudder, imagining that frigid water.

That’s when I notice her floppy white hat, bobbing out along the wave tops.

Before I really comprehend what I’m doing I’m in up to my calves, but though I’m aware of the cold, it doesn’t touch me. I’ve experienced this before–some tertiary part of my Gift–but I’ve never tested it in water. Somehow the fact that it carries over is more disturbing than exhilarating.

Despite the churn of the incoming tide, I spot her quickly. She’s floating as well, not too far from her hat. Her hair seems to have sucked up the salt water, its fire tamped down to a sodden auburn. Her skin, what I can see of it around her clothing, is going gray. It’s happening before my eyes, as I watch.

Calling upon ill-gotten and inhuman strength to fight off the slapping waves, I reach her and drag her back to shore. Her breath is terrifyingly shallow, yet I must admit I’m struck still for a moment by her elfin features, fine and lovely even through the gray mottling of her skin.

Her breath is shallow. It’s too cold out here. If she is to have any prayer of survival, she needs to be brought into the warmth. My brain arrives at these decisions without any consultation with me, and soon I’m easily hefting her waterlogged form free of the breakers. The surf has carried us back down the beach, so I jog not to my house, but to hers.

---

She mumbles a little as I, red-faced at what catastrophe demands of me, undress her and try to dry her, but she speaks no words as I wind her in blankets and tuck her into bed. She’s so cold that I pile every blanket in the house onto her bed. I begin to worry that the blankets will not be enough until I find a heating pad and somehow thread it into the heart of the downy bivouac, plugging it in once it is secure.

I watch her for a long time, and gradually her breathing steadies, and that gray, mottled look vanishes from her skin. A cloud seems to drift from her face as her normal pallor returns, and with it her sleep eases.

Sometime later the sun plummets into the western horizon as I watch from her sofa in the other room.

---

The next thing I am aware of is eyes upon me. I start awake, thinking my own eyes will open to familiar blackness and that sense of a cage within a cage, the inner one open, the outer one locked fast. Though it’s dark outside the windows, the house around me is bathed in light. I see her, the fire back in her hair, standing over me and wrapped in a white bathrobe. I briefly wonder if she owns any clothing that isn’t white.

She looks at me appraisingly, and I can detect no other emotion on her face. There is no gratitude, but there is no anger, either. Tilting her head in a way I know well, she views me out of the corner of one dark eye. I caught several glimpses of those luminous wings, like ribbons bunched together at her shoulder blades then fanning expansively out, as I put her to bed earlier.

“I can see you around the edges,” is all she says, her expression wavering not an inch. “You’re like me.”

“No two Gimmies are alike,” I say and wince as the words leave my mouth. It’s disgustingly rote, but worse; it’s like something He would say, except without the pejorative. But the tone, the slight lilt, alternately instructing, scolding, and mocking, is all His.

Her face is all thunder and lightning now. “I hate that word,” she bites. “Don’t use it again.” Her words pile atop my sense that the words are another’s, spoken in my voice. I turn away in shame, and again glimpse the wings.

---

She bustles about her kitchen, preparing something or other for the two of us. Twice I rise, intending to help in some awkward, intrusive way, and twice she instructs that I sit.

“If you can’t sit quietly,” she finally says, “tell me your Story.” The capital is obvious, and the context of who we are leaves only one story worth the telling. It’s not the first time I’ve traded it with other sufferers of my particular affliction. Other Gimmies.

“I’d rather not,” I say, really meaning it. Somehow her look, all innocence, splits the shell of my resolve after several awkward moments. That look seems to say “Oh? I’ll get it out of you sooner or later.” Sooner or later, Gimmies all traded Stories.

I lean back on the sandy couch and begin. White walls in the beach house give way to white walls of the waiting area.

---

My chit is glowing. It’s my turn. I can’t honestly say how long I’ve been waiting here, but it seems as though my fellow occupants have changed over three or four times since my arrival. I’ve heard that this close, though, time passes in a funny way, or seems to. So maybe I’m wrong.

I find myself staring at the slow, pulsing off-white glow of the chit, as if running my eyes over it, turning it in my hand, will reveal some essential truth, something deeper than “your turn.”

People in the room around me begin to notice; their eyes turn to me in slow sequence. A dozen pairs, each as different as clouds, each filled to brimming with different thoughts and emotions. Envy, anxiety, fawning awe. Even hate. The incessant murmur of the waiting room pauses, but just for an instant, as they wait for me to move.

I rise on shaky knees, and the babble resumes, grating ever deeper into my bones. I worry I’ve already waited too long. I’ve heard the same warnings that everyone receives, that too much delay will result in another being called. And there are always so many waiting.

The chamber I seek is down a deceptively short side hallway. The door opens before me on silent hinges, and inside is… dark.

---

“Come in, come in so that the door may close.” The voice is deep, comforting in a large way. It seems to resonate in a room bigger than this one is, but that is difficult to quantify in the pitch darkness. Even the bright white rectangle of the door behind me seems not to lessen the blackness, as though the light is made to wait at the boundaries like everyone else. Then the door swings shut as silently as it opened.

“Do not fear, friend. Is it darkness you see? It is different for everyone. The perception of me depends upon the mind of the perceiver. I apologize if it frightens you, but really, you have only yourself to blame.” Laughter, then, rich and amused. I wince, as though the rumbling curves of that sound hide rolling, sharpened edges.

I begin to get a sense of the room. At least I think I do. There is some structure, like a lattice, at the center. A cage, closed and locked. He is locked inside. Chained, perhaps. Yes, there is the faintest rattle of chains.

Doubt seizes me.

“I… I’m not sure I want…”

The door silently swings back open behind me, letting in a frail wedge of that too-weak light.

“Then by all means, leave. You are not required to stay.”

I almost do it. But the waiting room behind me has gone deathly quiet in the interval since I first entered this place. I can’t remember it being so quiet when I was out there. Somehow, that silence frightens me more than this black room. The door closes again, almost as though I will it.

Then He is in the room with me. His cage has opened as the door behind me closed that second time. I hear nothing, but somehow I sense Him close. I sense Him free.

“Do you…” I begin, then my tongue seizes. I try not to think of where he is.

“Do I…?”

“Do you bestow abilities or grant wishes? I… I’ve been told both.” Even in this darkened room, brimming with His power, the words sound silly when spoken out loud.

“I fulfill needs, not wishes.” His voice is perfectly patient, perfectly instructive. He makes a sound then, like sniffing, as though testing the air. “There are those, like yourself, who have… lost that which they need to endure this life, and that I can provide.

“I do not confer abilities, as you say, but my touch is heavy and your forms are soft and pliable, and I leave an… imprint. Most who partake of me emerge altered in some way appropriate with their need. But come, we must discuss your need.”

I goggle at the darkness. “I… I don’t know, really. I was misled in what I came here expecting.”

“Quite understandable. I will work with you. Now, what is it you need? You can tell me anything.” His voice is soft now, reasonable, like a doctor confident that all is under control with his patient.

“I ended something, a relationship, ended it too early, and I need to undo–”

“No,” He says, cutting me off with practiced brusqueness, “that is specific, much too specific.”

“I… but I don’t understand. That is what I wish done. Or undone, rather.”

“I believe it,” He says. “I can smell it on you. But I do not give you what you want. I give you what you need.”

I furrow my brow, fear giving way, edging by degrees into irritation. “What’s the difference?”

“That depends. Sometimes it is great, sometimes so subtle as to be nearly indistinguishable. But in both cases, the difference means everything.” He adopts a lecturing tone. “What you describe is a symptom, an example of your need. I cannot deal in such minutiae. Were I to give you what you asked, even assuming I could, you would simply find another way to inflict the same pain upon yourself.”

His words light a despair in me, kindling it into an acrid little plume of smoke. “Then what do I do?”

“Think. Think! What about this failed relationship troubles you so greatly?”

“Being alone,” I say, but that feels wrong at once.

“No. Again, that is an example.”

“I don’t… pain?”

“Pain over what?”

“Over losing her!” For the first time there is heat in my voice, and it seems to shock against the sudden chill of this room. I worry I have offended or angered Him. But there is a chuckle, dry and pleased.

“Good. Your passion means we are close. You spoke the word yourself just now. You feel pain for the loss, a loss you aren’t strong enough to bear.” It is an echo of what He told me earlier, when I first arrived.

“I’ve tried to bear it,” I say lamely, trying to defend myself for some reason.

“I know you have,” He commiserates. “You have struggled with it valiantly.”

“I can’t bear it any longer. I want it gone.”

“Of course you do. But do not be short-sighted. If I remove the pain of this loss, what happens when the next one, perhaps even worse, arrives?”

“Are you saying it will?” I ask this, horror-struck, and then I feel His hands upon my shoulders, horrifically normal hands, squeezing in a firm grip that is somehow both comforting and revolting. The chains rattle behind me now, and His voice resides just behind my ears.

“This world has no limit to the cruelties it inflicts upon those that call it home.”

“I don’t want this, not again. I… I can’t bear it!” The pain of memory, stabbing and barbed, is piercing my brain. I feel my chest tighten against it in a sickly flush of warmth. My voice breaks, and tears threaten.

“You are weak, and you would be strong.”

“Yes.” It is a small miracle, this distillation of my thoughts into so concise a message.

“You need never be forced to bear great loss again.”

“Yes!” This one is even more perfect.

“Good. That is good. Your need is clear to me now.” There is a sense of falling, as though the black floor has dropped away, plunging me into a deeper darkness from which I will never emerge.

From far away a voice intrudes into that remembered rush into the void. The voice of the woman I pulled from the surf. It breaks into my reverie from the beach house where we now sit, the smell of grilled cheese sandwiches heavy on the air.

“You are trapped, and would be free,” she whispers. There are tears in the whisper.

Now the memory of the dark room closes around me again, the reverie total in my recollection and recount. The sense of vertigo, of endless falling, is gone.

“So be it,” He says, and in his voice is the hunger, the anticipation, that will echo in my dreams from that day forward.

---

She is smiling sadly as I return to full awareness, handing me a gooey, toasty sandwich on a paper plate.

“Eat,” she says with soft kindness. Then, “She tricked you too.”

“She?” I ask, then am forced to endure such a long-suffering look it’s almost as if we haven’t only just met. The perception of me depends upon the perceiver. “‘It’, I suppose. It tricked us both.” It tricked us all.

“Yes,” she said. “You were the same as I was. You didn’t make the requests, not directly.”

“No, I didn’t. They were in Its own words, not mine.”

“I think,” she whispers, “that they always are.”

I nod. “They always are.” It’s almost a ritual, this conversation or something very near it. Gimmies always go through it after the giving of a Story, as though to confirm that nobody got a better deal, that nobody managed to trick Him. Her. It.

“What’s your Story?” I ask, knowing what she will say.

“Not now,” she says. “Now, we eat.” And so we do. The sandwiches are good, better than grilled cheese sandwiches have any right to be.

She stands abruptly after both plates are cleared away. “You should go.” Her voice nearly reaches apology, but she manages to pull it back.

“Do you fly? Was that how It marked you?”

She turns away. “Yes.” Her answer is hard and brittle, the polar opposite of the supple wings I keep snatching glances of. At her tone, I decide not to bring up the water and her near-drowning that seemed little like a drowning. Instead I stumble lamely into a different question, equally bad.

“Will you show me sometime?”

“No!” Her voice is laced with pain, riddling with cracks, then she pulls that back as well into her trademark monotone. “No.” At last the detachment fails her, and she falls into that tearful whisper I recall intruding into the telling of my Story. “Please don’t make me.”

I can only nod. Neither of us speaks another word as I leave, and that’s good. I can’t afford any attachments here. As I tromp across cold sand made luminous in the glare of the fat moon, I am already planning how long I need to prepare to leave the island and go elsewhere.

---

I wake the next morning to the sounds and smells of a kitchen in use. My kitchen. Suspicion and alarm give way to curiosity and rue. Who else could it be? That’s what I get for ruining the lock. I get up and dress in a ragged t-shirt and pajama pants. Beach bum chic.

She’s making scrambled eggs and something that requires batter. “The last of my eggs,” she says. “They were close to going bad. I didn’t eat them as fast as I thought, so I hope you like a lot of them. Hard to imagine being worried about cholesterol now.” Her smile is crooked, every bit as rueful as my waking thoughts.

Her tone unsettles me for a moment. There was a sense of finality when she spoke about the last of her eggs. Like they were the last ever. I think back to pulling her from the surf, and that only inflames the theories I’d formed laying awake the previous night.

“I didn’t sleep,” she says, eerily echoing my own thoughts, and by the look of her eyes, she isn’t exaggerating much. “I never thanked you for pulling me out yesterday.”

I hesitate at the last stair, as though to step down to her level is as irrevocable as entering that dark room with my glowing chit had been. For an instant we teeter there, the pair of us, poised between the expected societal niceties and an uglier truth that one of us knows and the other can guess.

“I got the impression that you didn’t really want to thank me,” I say, gently. The plunge is not as harrowing as it looked from above. She lowers her eyes beneath that shaggy curtain of crimson, but does not break down as I feared she might.

“I’d been planning on it before you arrived. After you got here I… hesitated. But you didn’t seem to want to be approached.”

“So you arranged it to happen right behind my house?”

“I… I think I wanted to at least give you the option.” She doesn’t sound nearly as sheepish or shamed as she ought. She sounds dead.

“It’s water, then? Water is your Catch?”

“Salt water.”

“When I was telling you my Story, you spoke once, something about being trapped, and wanting freedom.”

“Yes.” She is refusing to meet my gaze again, and her voice has recovered its tremor.

“Then I assume your Catch didn’t appear until–”

“Until I got here. As I got here.”

I recall the wrecked car and the damaged causeway.

“You can’t even cross salt water? Even over it?” Before she can reply, I’m already marveling at the wickedness of it.

“The sound between the island and the mainland is salty enough, apparently. When I realized, I tried to cross the causeway in my car. I began to go numb and black out less than halfway across. It was… painless, almost like falling asleep in a warm, soft bed. It was terrifying how seductive it was, but only later, after I’d woken back up.”

“And how did you manage that?”

“I shifted the car back into neutral just as I went under. All I could do was hope that I didn’t roll back down into something that would kill me.”

“I have a car. If I drive–” But she was shaking her head and laughing–or sobbing–silently within the curtain of her hair.

“No. That’s not the right way to think about it at all. It’s not a question of having someone else carry me over or of getting across fast enough to avoid slipping into a coma. Don’t think of it in terms of having hard and fast rules. It doesn’t want me to escape. That was the Catch. It’s not going to let me cross any body of salty water by any means.”

And that sounds all too plausible. In fact, I realize at once that I believe her, that I’m certain she’s right. I can almost feel It inside me, squirming quietly in gleeful resonance with the cruelty of her notion. And what does that notion mean for me?

“When you say the last of your eggs–”

“I can’t get any more,” she says. “I’ve already cleared out the island’s general store. When I run out of food, I run out. Why do you think I was trying to kill myself?”

---

A week passes with me carefully avoiding the subject of her inability to leave the island. It’s a balance I seek. And between my constant self-reminders of the dozens of homes worth of non-perishable food on the island and her seeming satisfaction with my increasingly frequent company, it’s a balance I keep. But just for a week. After that, the empathy begins to creep in, twisting my bowels in anxiety even as it warms my heart.

It happens when I walk in on her in the bath.

It’s an accident, of course, an unlocked door and no light peaking out from beneath to warn me. The water in the bath is cold. I can tell that at once by the lack of fog on the mirror. She makes no move to cover herself, and I make no move to look away, but there is no recognition, on either side, of the vulnerability this forces upon her.

My first assumption, just a random scramble for meaning in what I’m seeing, is that the water heater is broken. The weather is just starting to turn, the last teeth of winter are wearing down with the grinding passage of time, but a broken water heater would still necessitate that she switch homes.

Then I notice that she is sweating. Sweating in a cold bath. Shivering, but not from cold. From fear. In a momentary spike of my own fear and a singular palpitation of the heart, I dip a finger into the water and taste it.

Not salt. Fresh. Or near enough, with her skin submerged in it for enough time to wrinkle. Then it hits me. This is her roller coaster. Frightening because of its similarity to her Catch, exhilarating for the same reason. And not dangerous. Not to the body, at least, though judging by the glazed look in her eyes, I can’t say the same for her mind.

I call to her once, twice, and on the third attempt, the focus returns to her eyes. Horror dawns there, but horror of a different kind.

“What are you doing?” she cries, making a move at last to cover herself, and the spell lifts from me at that moment. I sputter something about being concerned when she didn’t respond, then back out of the room, and for once I’m hard pressed to describe which of us is redder.

---

“Here, take this,” she says, and from out of nowhere produces a shotgun, an over-under double barreled affair. I must be staring, because she grins crookedly. “What?”

“Where did you get this?”

“In another house, further west down the island, behind a few locked doors. That reminds me, I borrowed your pry-bar last night, but don’t worry, I put it back.” I remind myself that she doesn’t sleep very much.

“You just, what, sensed there was a gun there you could use?”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s hardly the first house I checked. There might be some other stuff there too. We can go look again later, after you get back.”

“So what am I supposed to do with this?” I point at the gun, which she has broken open along the breach. Both chambers are empty.

“It was getting ugly in the rural areas, even before I came here. It can’t be better now. If you meet someone threatening, don’t try to be all noble. Shoot them.”

This time I blink, and she looks exasperated. “You’re over-thinking it. Don’t over-think it. Just do it. There aren’t any second chances. Not anymore.” Eventually I nod, but she doesn’t look satisfied until I take the gun. She unslings an olive, canvas ammo bag from her shoulder and hands that to me as well.

“Wait,” she says then, reaching at my waist to pull two shells free, then loading them into the breach and snapping the whole assembly closed with a satisfying click.

“Not exactly like target shooting,” I venture shakily. “Maybe you should hold onto this. You seem more comfortable around it than I do.”

“No, it is exactly like target shooting…” She pauses, and I can tell she means to say something else. She breaks my eye contact, and just as I am about to prompt her, blurts “you should go.”

“I… was about to.”

“No. I mean you should go.”

A beat passes between us.

“I can’t do that. I’ll have to, eventually, but I can’t do that yet. Not with your–”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Says the woman who hands me the gun.”

She almost smiles. “It’s not the only gun I found. I told you, I can take care of myself.”

“Begging your pardon, but you can’t. Not yet.” I’ve been convincing myself I’d work out a solution to her problem for two weeks, and I’ve been wracking my brain over it, but so far to no avail.

“Soon then. You should go soon.”

“Soon. But not yet.” I try not to let my hurt show. I try not to feel too hurt. But I think I fail at both. My heart thunders. She doesn’t mean anything by it. I know that, deep down.

“Ok,” I say, “I’ll be back with groceries and gas.” I hope to find the latter, but for now, I’ll settle for the former.

---

I approach the grocery store, the only one for miles, warily. The inland Food Lion has become a fortress since I passed through. It had still been running before, albeit on reduced hours. I think back to some of the booms we’ve heard at night. What could have gone on during the intervening weeks?

Sandbags block all the windows and narrow the lane to the doors. The parking lot is nearly deserted. Then I see someone waving from the shadows behind the sandbags, signaling me to approach a sort of sandbag carport, a fortified parking space. Fortified against what? It strikes me that either the person firing at me was doing so from elsewhere, or I am being very easily led into a trap.

This stops me short, and the person waving does so a little more frantically. I curse. What use could they have for me? I’m running on fumes. Perhaps they need slave labor to stock the shelves? Smiling grimly at this thought, I pull into the offered spot.

The greeter is helmeted and appears to be wearing a flak jacket around his paunch. He has a gun as well, and that pretty well freezes me to the seat, but his is pointed up at an angle. He notes my gun, propped in the passenger seat, and pauses.

“You’re gonna to have to leave that in the car if you mean to go shopping today.”

---

The two men running the store are doing so out of basic human decency. Somehow the power is still running, both here and on the island, and Jean, my escort in the store while Floyd guards my car and gun, thinks that the attitude behind the power company must be the same altruism.

“Sure as hell nobody’s been paying their bills lately,” he says. Until he brings it up, the thought of losing power on the island hasn’t even occurred to me. Still, after a moment of queasy panic at the notion, I force myself back to relative calm. There is nothing to be done about it.

Shopping is quick and efficient. “It’s handouts, you see, money being worthless in these parts recently.” Jean delivers this in practiced rote, and I wonder if he was even a Food Lion employee before all the troubles started.

They arrange me some basic perishable food, enough for two to eat before spoilage sinks in, and a choice from an assortment of canned and dried goods. “It’s gotta last,” he says by way of apology. “No telling if we’ll ever get another shipment. But folks gotta eat.” I decide I like Jean.

As we gather everything up and bag it together, Jean looks at me anxiously. “You’re over on the island, right? You two must be the only ones. I saw the other car go by some time ago, and then yours, but no one else.”

“As far as I know, we’re alone.”

“Do what you can to stay that way,” he says, with real concern rimming both his voice and his eyes. “Don’t draw any unnecessary attention to yourself. You got nowhere to run if someone who means trouble decides to cross the causeway after you.”

This seems as good an opening as any. “You guys had much trouble?” I indicate his gun.

“Not yet, but we’re hearing rumors. Got a lot of friends in the military.” He lets this cryptic statement stand, and I’m too unsettled to inquire further.

The pair send me off with a hearty “God bless!” to speed me along, all the while hoping they don’t notice that I bear what some in the Bible Belt have taken to calling the Devil’s Touch.

It’s not the Devil that’s done this to me. If there is a Devil, there’s also a God, and the latter has the former corralled. No, this is worse. What touched me, what touched she and I both, doesn’t answer to anybody.

---

I arrive back, the car partially gassed thanks to Jean and Floyd’s hoarding, to a pair of empty houses. We’re each too lazy to move any closer together, so it takes awhile to ascertain that she isn’t in either of them. I assume she’s off procuring a larger arsenal, and set about storing the perishables, splitting them evenly between houses so we can lounge at both.

At some point I think to look up, and there she is. Jean’s words are like hot lead branding my gut as she swoops above and between houses, sometimes rocketing straight up into the air, sometimes diving down at speeds that would frighten any who didn’t know better. Despite her seemingly erratic flight, I note she keeps well clear of the island’s fuzzy borders.

In use, her wings glow like fire, and it’s impossible not to see them, even in bright daylight. Their glare even claws at the edges of my sight when I look the other direction.

At least it’s not night, I think. Though at night, most watching eyes would be asleep. I stand, entranced by her acrobatics, the sheer artistry and grace of her movements, dumbfounded with dry goods piled in bags at my feet.

At last she comes down, on the opposite side of her house from me. I shake off the trance of the experience, as I always must after seeing a Gimmie use the double-edged Gift they’ve been given. After a while, I realize she isn’t coming to meet me, though she must have seen me or the car by now.

Concerned, I find her where she landed, kneeling, her whole body wracked with sobs. The glory of her wings is fading into a shimmer like heat haze sprouting from her back. In time it will be gone entirely, viewable only from the corner of my eye once more.

I don’t approach. I don’t know what to say, not precisely, but I know what she doesn’t want, and it jives with what I can’t give perfectly.

“When I’m up, it’s pure joy,” she says, heaving and hitching between words, “but when I come back down, all I can think is that it cost me everything.”

---

What starts as tears turns into that full-body grief that only the deepest sadness can prop up. I leave the dry goods and pick her gently up from the ground, carrying her up the stairs, past the stilted underbelly of the house.

I enter the first bedroom I find, not hers, I realize at once, but it will suit to let her rest and recover while I make dinner. Her brazen flaunting of our existence here is all but forgotten. We can discuss it later if need be.

Her weight is warm and solid against me, hitching with diminishing sobs as her strength leaves her. I walk in a daze, fighting back my own tears, my own losses, until my knees strike the edge of the mattress.

I shift, preparing to lower her gently down, when all at once she is clinging with an iron grip. I look down to meet her shining eyes.

“Stay with me,” she says, and rising, brings her lips to mine. They are warm and moist, and her mouth is parted open, sharing breath with mine. Her tongue tastes like a spray of sea salt.

My heart thunders warning in my chest, a drumbeat of doom. This is not good. This is the very thing I’ve been avoiding, even fearing, this attachment I feel cementing itself between us. But it’s been a long time, even more in perception than in fact, and there are other parts of me awakening.

I lower her slowly to the bed as I’d originally intended, except that I follow, settling my weight atop her as she sighs in welcome.

---

A frozen lasagna is slowly baking in the oven as the stars come out and we emerge onto the second floor deck to watch. They carpet the night sky, a thick glittering layer of lights across the blackness. Clouds sidle in from the left, the east. Between that slate, puffy layer, and our need to hold one another close, I am at first unaware when a different kind of light show begins.

We are pressed hard together, she sandwiched between me and the railing with my arms wound around her, my lips exploring the curve of her neck, when she notices the clouds lighting up fitfully, like blooms of fire just beyond that low layer.

“Thunderstorm,” she coos, kissing me again, and I revel in it. The sounds of the titanic forces being unleashed beyond the clouds reach us some dreamless time later, and to my unconscious mind they are wrong, too strident, too full of directed wrath. But my conscious mind is consumed with the feel of her, the smell of her, the knowledge of her that I’ve gleaned these last few hours.

I am in so deep so quickly that I forget to be afraid.

---

Later, dazed and aching, we watch one of the last remaining news channels. This is an indulgence we seldom allow ourselves. In our other lives, each of us tells tales of being a news junkie, but now we avoid it unless both are in the mood. This does not happen often.

It is the bleary looking anchorwoman, made-up to the point of uncanniness, that tells us the truth of the false storm off the coast.

“There has been an extended instance of aerial and naval combat off the Mid-Atlantic seaboard tonight,” the anchorwoman intones. “The identity of the attacking force is not known or has not been disclosed by the Pentagon at this time, but United States forces have reportedly repelled the attack before it could reach population centers along the coasts of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C.”

How long since the country’s infrastructure functioned well enough to closely follow the movements of all other nations, military and civilian alike? Yet for some enemy to strike so close to home, to be surprised in this way… It leaves me both empty and frozen inside, and the sensation must have soaked through me, for I do not realize I am shaking until I feel her hand rest, steadying, across the back of mine.

“It’s not our world anymore,” she says. “It belongs to them, for better or worse.” But how can that be true? How, when so many of the world’s troubles lie at the feet of our kind? The feet of the people who answered a selfish, infernal call.

---

The aerial battles occur with a kind of maddening regularity. Sometimes they are delayed by actual thunderstorms. But despite our resolve, the evening news, once a guilty pleasure, becomes a nightly event.

The skies flash most nights, accompanied at times by upthrust lances of light at the horizon, as from ships. They combine, these auroras, forming a scintillating drumbeat that marks the passage of the days.

Another trip to the Food Lion passes without event before we have our first fight. Our moods, perfectly out of sync at the start, never clashing, gradually meld closer and closer until I lash out at her at precisely the wrong moment.

“You should go,” is how the conversation ends. There are only two ways she delivers this phrase, and this is the one with a temporal clause implied. I should go, but I should also come back. It both relieves and frightens me to hear that tone.

After, I stalk down the shoreline at near high tide. The sun is setting behind the clouds. Cloud cover has been nearly omnipresent since I arrived, at odds with my memories of this place. Despite the clouds, the air is warming fast with the ripening of spring, and the water is begrudgingly giving up its winter ghosts. I try to focus on the cool, grainy feel of the wet sand sucking lightly at my feet, but the relentless crash of surf draws my attention outward like a wire.

The ocean seems a two-faced god under such lighting, slate ridges capped with white, foaming chop receding into a flat, consumptive basalt in the distance. I cannot help but see the water as a bleak, swallowing thing, sucking out the light of the world and that which remains in me.

Later I return, but not to her house, rather to mine. I notice her deck light go out shortly after I enter and flip on the kitchen lights, so I know I’ve been observed.

My body hopes she will venture over, now or later in the evening, seeking company. My mind and the raw edges of my pride hope she will stay away.

---

There is no contact between us for three days, and then, as if exploding in both minds at once, we meet each other midway between homes, each on the way to apologize to the other.

We decide a change of scenery is in order, and transfer our flag to my house.

---

The days pass, helped along by whatever time-killing aides we can find in an entire island worth of houses. Today is Monopoly.

“I’m not trading you Park Place, you can forget it!” She laughs as she says this, but the twinkle in her eye is sly as well. My favored gambit has failed. I imagine my little top hat crushed beneath her boot. I can’t believe this set is missing the battleship.

We tear through such games at an alarming pace, and notice more and more repetition as we raid the other houses for their entertainments. It’s both mildly irritating and strangely depressing to dwell on it, so I, at least, try not to.

On the next turn she purchases Boardwalk, and three rounds after that, I’m paying for her damned hotel there.

---

I can’t help but notice that the two-faced ocean god has stratified itself. It seems ancient, unknowable and vaguely menacing when I walk alone, scenic, cool and inviting when she walks with me.

One day we perform a complete circuit of the island, as much as that is possible while having to avoid large swathes of the marshy inland side. Tired, sore and laughing at the finish, we are almost too exhausted to attend to one another after collapsing on my couch.

Almost.

---

Five trips. Five trips is all I manage to Food Lion. I’ve recently begun to be worried. The perishable foods there are stretched to their final limits, with no resupplies in sight.

I begin to fear what will happen when the other food runs out as well.

It’s just minutes before I climb into my car, ready for shopping trip six. She suggests, as she hands me the shotgun I’ve never needed, that I negotiate for more of the perishables, since they are close to vanishing. Not many people are coming in for provisions, so there seems a decent chance Jean might listen.

Then the world is ripped open as the explosion passes over and through us.

At first I’m certain the blast is closer to us than it seems. But after several seconds of silent, still panic between the two of us, we run up the stairs to the front porch, hoping for enough vantage to see what’s happened.

The black smoke rising like a thick, hooded cobra is easily visible. East, and toward the landward side of the island, I think. Then we hear the sound of the jet, coming in low and slow. It’s tough to tell for certain, but I think it bears United States Air Force markings.

I see the second bomb drop after the pilot hits the throttle. It’s almost suicidally low, but I don’t really consider this, because I know instantly what the target of both bombs is, and I wonder how we will resupply with the causeway destroyed.

The second explosion rips the air, and she reads the truth of matters on my face. From hers I read only fear.

Some time passes with nothing but silence between us. On the point where I think she is finally ready to speak, two more explosions rip the sky open, somewhere further inland.

---

The news gives us the truth of matters. Invasion is expected, even imminent. Some jackal of a nation, or perhaps a whole cabal of them, is here to savage the once-great United States, now eating itself from within. Access to coastal barrier islands is being destroyed up and down the eastern seaboard, to prevent them from being used as easy staging areas for any landing forces.

The rotting corpse of the nation must be kept sacrosanct.

Shortly after the report begins, she flips channels. Other networks have come back online, but they broadcast nothing but reruns, some from shows twenty years gone, whatever they can dig up in their archives. It’s as though they seek to lull us all onto a bed of leaves. The leaves cover a staked pit, the stakes coated with a narcotic venom of simpler times.

We watch the inanities drone on for a while, then she speaks beside me, softly, right into my ear.

“We need to start scouring the other houses.” She leans in to kiss me, throwing her warm, needy weight against mine, and as she bears me down, she whispers “You should have gone.”

The tone is again clear. Gone, and not come back. The tone is heavy, swinging shut like the door in a black prison.

---

We acquire what must be every remaining gun on the island, prepared to defend our ridiculously small territory if necessary. We split the arms between both houses. By some unspoken, unanimous decree, we still have not thrown in our lot with one house or another.

Along with the weapons, we grab and haul every non-perishable food item we can find. This was a vacation island, most of the homes were for weekly rental, and thus not stocked with any food. But a few were not rented, serving only as ad hoc vacation homes for the owning family.

It should go without saying that our haul of food is distressingly small.

---

We watch the boat coming in through the old-fashioned spyglass. I’ve already had to resist making pirate “arrr” sounds for the better part of an hour, more out of nervousness than humor. She’s not in the mood.

“Boat” is misleading. This is a landing craft. That said, it is a landing craft in a bad way. Badly damaged, it’s taking on water, and there are blood smears along both inner and outer walls. Three soldiers remain in what must surely have housed forty. Why it is alone, certainly off course, we couldn’t say, but it ran afoul of some American weaponry, and now they are looking for a safe place to ditch.

It is a cruel vagary of fate that puts them half a mile east along the beach from us.

---

One of the men is wounded, but the other two set out at once, foraging. Ensconced in my house, we exchange glances as we watch from blinded windows. It will be more than obvious someone has been here before them when they see house after house with pried-open doors.

The sun is setting, but there is enough light to see by. The two motile men do not split up, but begin moving together, inspecting house by house. We have a fifty-fifty chance that they will choose to move away from us and buy us time.

We lose the flip.

---

When the sun finally sets, the men apparently decide that’s enough for one night. Their body language speaks volumes. They haven’t found any supplies, and are suspicious of why. They move into the nearest house to the boat, carrying their now-unconscious comrade in with them. But their conversation occurs out on the deck, lights blazing. It appears our luck will hold this one night, because they haven’t searched far enough to notice my car. Not tonight at least. But if they continue in the same direction tomorrow…

I counsel that we stealthily move in the night. The sound of the surf should muffle my car, and we could flee down the other end of the beach, buying ourselves more time. It will take them days to search everything.

“No,” she says, with a firmness I’ve never heard. “Right now they aren’t sure what they are up against. We have to take them now, while we have surprise.”

“All right,” I say, and she blinks at this sudden agreement. I congratulate myself mentally, preening in my own head under the praise. It isn’t myself I’ve been fearing for. Not exactly, not directly. “But let me do whatever it is we’re going to do.”

She’s shaking her head already. “No, too dangerous, we both–”

“If It told me anything truthful at all, these men probably can’t hurt me.” She stops dead at this, frozen as if in stone. I’ve never volunteered what my Gift was, and she has never asked. It has been a source of guilt for me, since she shared hers so easily, but I gave my Story, something she has yet to cough up.

She swallows sourly, worried, I think, more about the imbalance that exists between us now than anything. She considers her response for a long time. “I want to help.”

“The best way you can help me,” I say, in possibly the most honest statement I’ve ever made to her, “is to stay safe.”

---

I’ve never used my Gift for what I am about to do, but I believe it will work. That’s most important, I think. To believe.

The door yields to my kick as though it’s rotted, clattering inward in two pieces. Feeling a surprising rush, I spare the briefest of moments to be impressed with myself. Perhaps she can ignore the sensation when she’s flying, but I feel Its will coursing through me as I deliver the kick. I’d have avoided doing it if I could.

I’ve left the pry-bar at home, keeping my hands free. Most of the weapons we’ve found scattered throughout the island in their little closet strongboxes are sporting in nature, but one of the rarer pistols is tucked in the back of my waistband, safety on, as I’ve repeatedly confirmed. The fear of injury is habit as old as any, and hardest to shake.

It’s my trusty shotgun that I bring to bear against the shadowed form rising to meet me. It’s the deep darkness of the night, so I never get a look at uniform or ethnicity. I have no idea who these people are who are invading a dying nation. And I don’t care. I hesitate. Of course I do. But I don’t believe with absolute certainty in my invulnerability, and it’s her voice I hear, colored white and red and urgent, speaking in my mind.

No warning. No chance. As I pull the trigger and feel It slithering within me to utterly dampen the recoil, keeping my aim absolute, I wonder which of them, It or she, will dehumanize me more in the end. Which is it that robs us of our compassion, the one that offers gifts, or the one that risks taking them away?

The shot lights the room, so bright that it reveals even less detail than the darkness. But there is a glimpse of a human form staggering, and a man’s cry rips through the shocked, burnt air as the flash fades from the room but not from my sight. Then there is crashing, thumping, and the breaking of glass as the second man, revealed as a white silhouette in the flash, flees out the back onto the decking. I pursue.

As I stand on the back porch, the light of the moon picks him out in eerie bluish white against the sand and waves. He runs, I don’t know where, and since he appears unarmed, and I decide right there to let him go. In the morning we will clear out this house, and he will have nowhere to go. So long as he stays away from us…

A pair of glowing fans, symmetric and blurred with speed, streak down. I fancy hearing a piercing wail, as though her Gift was to be a banshee, as she swoops down almost too fast for sight and scoops up the fleeing man. Then she rockets skyward, and I have time for little thought beyond a muted anger at both her recklessness and her savagery, before his form plummets screaming to the earth, moving much too fast to be saved by the porosity of piled sand.

A shot rings behind me, from the house. I twitch and duck simultaneously, nearly falling in spastic haste. But the shot is singular and does not repeat, and I know somehow that it’s the sound of the third man, the wounded man, taking his own life with his pistol.

---

Despite the damage it has sustained, I manage to swing the landing craft around, hugging the shore, and use it to reach the mainland. I make this decision with virtually none of her input as I’m not speaking to her for reasons that already seem petty. She is at first hurt, then sullen, then angered by my silence. The fact that my actions hurt her only angers me more, because the hurts don’t make me happy, as I feel they should.

Over on the mainland, it’s just a short walk to my destination. It’s quickly evident what the other two explosions were. I can smell it well before I see it. The Food Lion is gone, replaced by an acrid, stinking crater. I suppose any landing forces could not be allowed to find food, either. And neither can we. As I stand there stupidly, I wonder where Jean and Floyd were when those bombs fell. As I bring the boat back, I wonder just how long our island provisions can last.

---

Summer waxes and wanes, and as we live on rationed canned beans, soups, and vegetables, all the while our relationship oscillates like a dozen mini-seasons wedged within the larger one of the world. When we can bear to keep our hands from one another we can barely speak, until the edges of our freezes and thaws blur together, and sometimes we forget whether we are angry or happy with our lot and one another.

We drive golf balls into the water until the supply runs out. We fire an old, much-used PVC potato cannon, filling it with whatever we can find that’s of vaguely the right shape and inedible. Despite my refusing to allow her to fire it, we carry this game past the point of good sense, and I am given further proof of my Gift when the cannon finally explodes beside me. The worming sense of Its protection pulsing through sinew and vein is almost worse than I imagine dying must be.

We play every old board game anyone ever left at a beach house, even the ones we had shunned before. Some are decades old, some so new they have electronic, even video components.

There is a brief period during one of our good spells where panic seizes me, and all I can think about is that I will somehow, after all this time, get her pregnant. For a time I’m unable to touch her, such is this fear, but it’s been months, and at last I come to suspect that this is yet another one of Its Gifts to us. I derive a mean satisfaction that what It undoubtedly intended to be cruel is a blessing in disguise.

Perhaps It can’t foresee everything.

---

She lets it slip into conversation, that her birthday is approaching. I have no idea if the hint is intentional, but an idea occurs to me.

It happens as we watch the last network. The signal is spotty, so much so that we can barely discern what the anchor says, but the fighting has evidently moved west, inland.

“Bad news,” she says beside me. “Except for us.”

“Everyone seems to have forgotten about us,” I reply, turning to smile at her, a smile that hides my new notion. She fixes me with her own grin, and it is only a little sad.

“As long as you remember,” she says.

The house’s electricity chooses that moment to finally die. In truth, it lasted far longer than I would have thought.

---

With the risk of our discovery seemingly reduced, I begin working on her birthday gift. It will be a delicate thing, and my stomach turns in knots as I do it, certain she will hate it, fail to see the humor, and spurn me for good. But some part of me is sure in a different way, and I continue my work.

She is at first suspicious, then annoyed by my long absences, and finally I have to confess what it is I am doing, if not exactly what I am doing. A smile replaces the slow smolder of her anger, as though an obscuring cloud has moved on, allowing the sun to shine through again. Encouraged a bit by this, I continue my work, no longer trying so hard to hide.

When the big day dawns, her mood buoys my hopes. I take her to the sound side of the island, and do something I have never done. I ask for a lift.

To my surprise, she agrees readily. Locking her hands together over my breastbone, she lifts us both easily into the air, and I direct her where to go, keeping us well clear of the coast with my instructions. I try to marvel at this, her Gift allowing us to soar, but all my nerves are for my gift to her.

She laughs when she sees it. The sound is so lovely and crystalline clear, as though it’s shaking caked filth from the inside of her lungs, that I’m moved to tears. They are tears of laughter, and relief as well.

Three houses in a row display it. I have pulled sheets taught across the sound-side of the roofs, and upon them written the words that comprise the message in old paint.

DRAIN THE SOUND.

As she lowers us gently to the ground, kissing me first sweetly and then roughly, I wonder which of us hopes more strongly that the joke message is heeded.

---

Two days later, in August’s last gasps, our food runs out. The topic has been one we’ve both been studiously avoiding, as is our tendency. She informs me at breakfast, trying not to make it sound like disaster.

“You should–” is how she tries to end the declamation, and I interrupt.

“We’ll do another house search. There must be things we’ve missed.”

And, hours and hours later, we have discovered that there are indeed things we’ve missed, but nothing of any appreciable amount. We prolong our starvation’s beginning by a few days at most with what we find.

---

Having few options makes decision-making surprisingly easy. I ready the boat to head to shore, hoping to search the same way we have searched the island. Meanwhile she will try her hand at fishing, at least as much as she can manage, with the dangers of the water.

She hugs and kisses me before I go, with an urgency that could almost make me weep. Midway through, I think I realize why, and then she speaks, confirming it.

“If you don’t come back,” she whispers into my chest, “I’ll understand.” But she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand at all.

The boat is running low on fuel when I arrive, so I make that a priority as well. But I might as well not bother.

The houses, those that aren’t burned to the ground, have been picked clean, whether by soldiers of either side or locals I can’t say. Anything of use has been stripped away and carried off. Eventually it is getting so dark I risk losing my way back if I stay any longer.

She is trying to cook two meager fish over an open fire when I arrive, utterly empty-handed. We eat the fish that night, but there is something wrong with them, and we spend the next day throwing up.

A day after that, both nauseated and starving by turns, I promise that I’ll try the other islands to east and west. “There are bound to be houses like the ones here, ones that have provisions.”

“Unless they have people like our island does who’ve eaten them up. What about gas for the boat?”

“We’ll do one more sweep of the island.” Despite the doubt scrawled across her face, it’s not impossible. It wasn’t what we looked for the last time. It’s possible that we just missed it. “I’ll swim if I have to.”

“On no food? You’ll drown!”

“My Gift…” I say, then hesitate. The next words could open up another rift between us. But they need to be said. “I’m not certain I can drown.” She looks away, for of course, drowning is all she can do in the ocean.

“You should go,” she says, and it’s obvious what she means. I say nothing. She doesn’t understand, and I can’t bear to explain.

---

We never do get around to searching the island. Not for fuel, anyway. The next day brings what can only be a hurricane, a monster storm of shrieking winds and crashing waves. More than one house simply vanishes in between flashes of lightning, leaving only the sounds of screaming, splitting wood. I see more waterspouts than I care to count as we huddle in another house, one further toward the center of the island. We have to keep her away from any standing bodies of salt water.

Only the orientation of the storm prevents the beachhead from being swallowed utterly. It is several days before the flooding recedes, and we are amazed to find both her house and mine still standing. They are now neighbors in truth, the two houses between swept out to sea. A number of other houses, more than half of those I see, have joined them in watery graves.

From the beach, it’s possible to see the island immediately to the west. Or rather, it’s possible to see where that island was. Of the dunes and the homes that dotted them, there is no sign.

---

She is screaming at me, howling that I need to leave, that I need to go and leave her behind. I can’t recall how it started, I only know that after withstanding the barrage for half an hour, I need to get out of the house. Her shrieks of grief and rage chase me out the door.

For something to do, I walk east, examining the devastation and looking to see if the next island down suffered the same fate as our other neighbor. It’s an idle fancy, for somehow I know that it has, and I know that this somehow means that both islands were uninhabited, both stocked with food.

What surprises me more is when I come upon the bombed-out causeway and find its rubble gone, as well as the entirety of our island east of that point. As though the storm reached out with shears of wind and lightning and simply lopped it off.

I don’t mind admitting that I spend a fair amount of time screaming for no particular reason at this discovery. It wants our world to shrink smaller and smaller. I know this. I feel the truth of this thing twisting and writhing inside me, like a worm filling my guts.

As the sun sets, I head home, wanting only to take her in my arms.

---

I notice the bottle immediately upon my arrival, and my brain names it. It’s a bottle of painkillers, formerly in the master bathroom’s medicine cabinet, and it was, as of this morning, at least half full.

It stands empty on the kitchen counter now. The message is clear, though there is no physical note. You should go, written in suicide.

My heart thunders a terrified beacon of warning.

Swearing, I run from bedroom to bedroom, starting with ours, finally ending in one that we have never used, as though she wants to hide from me for the maximum possible time, to let the poison work within her and minimize the chance I might save her. I can barely breathe by the time I enter.

I find her crying but full of life, and scan the floor for signs that she has thrown up the pills, seeing nothing as I rush to her. I am hugging her, crying as well, feeling her heartbeat strong and fierce, and then I am shaking her in rage, feeling my own heart alternately race and seize in my chest.

“Why?” I am whispering this, over and over through my tears, then shouting it. “Why? Why? Why?” I am waiting for her to speak, to confirm that she is, in fact, somehow not dying.

“They didn’t work,” she sobs. “I took them as soon as you left. Hours ago. They didn’t work. I just wanted… I just wanted to free you from me.”

We curl around each other on the floor, holding tight for so long that our bodies cramp and scream. But her heartbeat never falters, and she never throws up the pills. She never even gets sleepy.

That is when we first begin to suspect that we cannot, in fact, starve to death, that maybe we can only die in the careful ways It has prepared for us. What seemed a condemnation of slow death shifts into a kind of hell.

---

Winter. A winter that seems to last forever. Perhaps this stretching of time occurs because I know that the season will mark a year, one year since I first became snared on this island.

I can feel It moving through me all the time now. It coils and slides, constantly dulling the hunger, feeding it with whatever repugnant energies It possesses, but never taking the ache in my belly away completely, never satisfying. It’s as though a worm in my guts is eating me at the same rate my body can heal itself.

She says nothing, but I know she feels the same way.

For a time after the pills, I feared that she would simply step out into the surf one day. But she is stubborn. She cannot bear to give It what It so obviously wants. Despite this realization, for a time I try never to let her out of my sight for more than moments. Even when we are at each other’s throats and I am banished back to my home, I try to watch her through the rubble of the intervening spaces. But after a month of stressed, exhausting vigil, I relent, relaxing by degrees, and she remains safely shore bound.

The longer we go since our last meal, the more our features change. I can’t describe it much better than that, but they grow less human, more as though we live lives trapped on the covers of fashion magazines. Wrinkles are smoothed over, blemishes vanish, eyes glaze, the skin wears a constant sheen as though it is burnished. She is more beautiful to look upon, so much so that I cannot even glimpse her without becoming aroused, even in the throes of anger. But she seems more terrible as well, less human. Her hair is a beacon of bloody fire, day and night. Her wings are visible constantly now, brightly burning fans spraying out of her back.

I can tell by the way she resists looking at me, even when we make love, that she sees the same, sees some bright cording in my muscles or bones, though she will not say it.

---

I find her standing at the high tide line at dawn. She stands poised there on the knife edge of my fear, a fear that seized my heart the moment I woke to find her gone.

“You could be free,” she says in a dreamy, distant voice, a tranced voice. “A few moments of fear for me, and you could be free.” She leans forward, on the point of taking a steps and entering the surf zone. The waves churn and froth, each trough seeming to yawn open like a mouth hungering for her. The tide is coming in, coming to steal her away and swallow her.

I hesitate for a moment, but fear waiting too long, and at last I break my long silence.

“I can never be free,” I say. “Never.” This arrests her, brings her up short from her intent. At last she turns to look at me, her hair the red of some strangely burning chemical, a red that inflames. I try to focus. She speaks into my struggle.

“You only say that because I’m still alive. It’s flattering to think that my death would break your heart. But you’d get over me. You’d get over me and you’d go on. You would be free.”

“I wouldn’t,” I say, and it sounds lame, as though I am merely making the sounds by rote. I reach out and grasp her, forcibly tugging her back from the brink. She resists, and I force the issue. I am stronger. It has made sure of that. She twists in my grip, snarling.

“Let me go! Let me die! I don’t want to be here anymore! It’s taken everything from me, don’t you see? Everything! It’s even taken this place! I used to be so ha… so happy when I was here! I…” Then she is falling into my shoulder, her strength gone, her body crumpling into mine.

And at last, I tell her everything.

---

“It was a wedding, my wedding,” she says later, safely back on the porch. Despite the cold, she will not go with me into the house. I suppose, like me, she only feels it around her edges now, as though the frigid air is trying to pry its way into a box with no seams. Nevertheless, I sit blocking her from the stairs to the boardwalk, trying to forget that she could simply fly up, then plummet down into the water. But her Story draws her in quickly, and she seems to forget that I am there.

“I ran from the wedding, ran at the very end.” A single tear falls from each eye, running along tracks I’ve learned well after kissing and cursing their fellows away this past year. “I didn’t leave him at the alter or anything so dramatic,” she says, a sad smile altering the paths of those tears, making them unfamiliar to me. “But I left him with no warning. I was certain he had read my fears in my face. They’d been growing there for months, and I was certain he could read me, but he reacted… he was so… so shocked. And then that just made it worse, made me want to get away even more. I ran an hour after telling him, just packed up a few of my things and vanished. And I didn’t explain. I didn’t know how to explain. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I think quite a few of them, my family especially, could guess, probably before I knew myself.”

“You went to see It,” I say. I can’t bear the pain that is wrenching her face, contorting it and gripping my heart in a mirrored fist as it goes. I want her to get away from this failed wedding now as she did in life.

“Not at first. But my fiance wouldn’t stop calling. He wouldn’t stop trying to find out where I’d gone, what he could do to fix things, what he had done to make me hate him. And I didn’t! I didn’t hate him! I still don’t. I love him. But I couldn’t bear the thought of spending my life with him. Love… it wasn’t enough. Does that make sense?” She isn’t looking at me, but her tone is desperate.

“Of course it does.” I’m lying, but it is well meant. It doesn’t make sense; it can’t make sense, not to anyone who isn’t living it. But I can at least imagine the concept of what she’s saying.

“Eventually I went to see It. When you told me your story, you said your relationship soured, and you told me that you asked to feel no more hurt. I asked to be free, free from the hurt I had left behind me. If you think about it,” she says, turning to look at me again, “we asked for the same thing, but nuanced. Apparently that made all the difference between us.”

“Yet here we are.” Now I am smiling, and I wonder if it is as sad to look at as it is to wear.

“I felt so different after It was done with me. Like something alien was living inside my skin, looking out from my eyes. Months went by at a blur. I’d wake up in unfamiliar cities, never remembering flying there. I was spiraling out of control, afraid I was losing my mind. So I came here, to this beach, this island. This used to be my favorite place. I thought maybe I could clear my head here, and forget about everything that was going on back home and with the rest of the world. As I crossed the causeway I felt my Catch taking hold.”

“Before that,” I say, with a knowing tone, a tone of profound understanding, “you were just like all the rest of us, sure that Catches were either myth or something that happened to other people.”

“It is clever like that. Clever to delay the price you pay for Its gifts. My fiance stopped calling immediately after I went to It. I didn’t hear from anyone, him or family or friends. I didn’t even try to contact them. I think I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to, even if I wanted.” She pauses, and looks deeply at me with penetrating eyes that seem to shift through the entire color spectrum, blue to green to brown. What color were her eyes originally? I can’t remember. Each shade is lovely. Her wings explode expansively behind her, passing through the back of the chair, the planking of the deck, even the wall of the house as though they are mist. She has never looked more beautiful. I have never wanted her more or been more frightened by her.

“Whatever It did to me worked. In a sense it did. When you and I… when we made love, I didn’t feel the pain I expected. I didn’t feel like I was betraying him, my fiance.” Now she laughs, and the laughter is bitter and amused. It stabs me. “Instead I felt loss, like I’d lost some part of myself, the part that should have felt like I was betraying him. It had done something to me, made me less than human.”

“It did exactly what we asked,” I countered. “But in Its own words.”

She nods and moves forward to embrace me. “Always in Its own words,” she agrees. Then she adds something, something I do not expect. “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you.”

“It’s all right,” I say, doubly surprised for meaning it.

“You should have gone,” she says, for the last time.

“Maybe this is where I was supposed to be.”

At least It left us one another.

---

In the darkness of the frigid house, buried beneath the blankets, we come together, and our union has a sense of intimacy we have never managed before. She is warm beneath me, and I bask in the glory of her otherworldly beauty, no longer made afraid by it. The ribbons of her wings wrap themselves tight around me, and for the first time I can feel them there, a ghost of her own warmth binding me in her embrace. Even through the constant, gnawing hunger, the cold, the fear, the loss of the world around us, we find for some few moments a measure of bliss.

There is a power in acceptance.

---

She wakes me with a gentle kiss. I look up to her face, smiling and brimming with tears both.

“It’s time you got up,” she says, and there is something in her face I cannot read, not at first. Then memory crashes home, understanding dawns, and transmutes to terror, but her smile steadies me, calms me, and I wonder that she has ever felt fear.

“There’s a time to stop suffering,” she says, turning to leave the room. I follow.

We stand out on the cold porch for a time, heedless of the wind, and she turns at last from the ocean to look at me. Her face fills up my entire world. She is all I have left, but in a strange way she is also all I need.

“Walk with me?” she asks this with a hesitance that I find charming, and I take her hand, lacing our fingers together, my palm almost swallowing hers. We stroll out down the boardwalk, watching the grasses sway in the dunes, imagining that it is warm and sunny, not cold and gray. I look and see that she is smiling, and my own widens.

We walk for long hours, ignoring the constant call of our limbs for food. We walk east, to where the island ends now so abruptly, the turn and head west, to the last extremes of the wider side of the island, where the sand piles up into expansive beaches and sandbars, creating strange eddies and currents, and the occasional tide pool. We see a fish leap up from the surface of one such, a silver dart plinking back into the rippled darkness of the pool, and it makes both of us laugh a little.

Eventually we are back, back at the beach before our house. The tide has receded, the beach stretches to its zenith. Our hands are still interlocked, and now she turns to grasp my other one. I wind them before her and stand pressed to her back, and she leans back into my shoulder.

“Are you sure?” I say, the thought of what she intends twisting in my heart for long moments.

“It’s time,” she says, and her voice is steady. “Past time. The world’s grown stale with time.”

I can think of nothing to say.

“Carry me?” she asks, and I turn her to face me and hoist her up into my arms, my hands hooked beneath her thighs. I feel her wings curl in and brush my back.

Locked together in that way, I begin to stride out toward the waiting surf. It has been patient.

She shivers the moment I enter the water, clutching tighter to me with limbs that already seem to weaken. The sea is frigid around my ankles, but she is warm in my arms. For the barest instant, I hesitate. Then I feel her growing restless, and I continue on, wading deeper.

The water sloshes past my knees in short order, and I watch as one of her toes scrawls a whorl through the foam of its surface, emerging shiny and wet with salt water.

“Sleepy,” she murmurs in my ear, her grip loosening. I tighten mine to compensate.

“Stay with me?” I whisper into her ear, nestled in its flame red canopy.

“Always,” she returns with a kiss to my cheek. But the kiss is already slurred, loose, and I notice her hair darkening as its flame begins to cool. She goes slack in my arms as her feet slip into the water, now piled to my waist.

Her skin begins to gray like the day I pulled her from the surf. It’s at this moment, at this terrible sight, that my heart begins to lurch and seize.

Before yesterday, I had kept the truth locked away, from her and from myself as well. But of course, I have a Catch too. I had asked not to feel loss again, in Its own words, and It had granted me this boon. A long time passed before I came to understand what this meant. But here, on this island with her, I had at last grasped this truth. If ever I was on the verge of feeling such loss, my heart would simply stop, and I would never feel loss, or anything at all, again.

You should go. How often had she said that? How many times had I needed to hear it before I understood what was happening, what had already happened, to me? Leaving her here alone would not be the same as carrying her out into the surf to die. But a great loss was a great loss. My heart would not know the difference.

She could never leave this island alive, and now, because of the ties that bound us, neither could I. But we had come to an understanding that last night in the darkness, bound together in body and spirit. We would not live out some eternity imprisoned on this island. We would die together, and we would not die trapped.

She moans against my shoulder now, her warmth fleeing, her strength ebbing. Her eyes are fluttering shut and she struggles to keep them open. “Hold me until it’s over,” she whispers, and I can hear fear fluttering in her voice, fear at last. I can see her wings guttering like candle flames.

The water is up to both our shoulders now, and still my strength, my Gift propels us forward. We will not die trapped on this island, and we will die together. My stuttering heart is the proof.

“And beyond,” I promise her.

“I love you,” she says with sluggish words.

“I love you,” I say to her. It is, I realize, the first time we have spoken the words.

At last my heart forces me to halt. I hold her head above the water, mere instinct, I suppose, but it laps past our chins out here beyond the breakers. It is bitterly cold, a cold I can feel at last, and the node of warmth she provides is almost extinguished. Her eyes have closed and will not open. Her hair has darkened almost to russet, and her skin is gray as ash. Her wings are just a faint blur in the air and water around us.

I can feel It twisting up, wrapping its tendrils around my heart, anticipating the moment, the moment It has been waiting for. I begin to fear that I will not notice her departure. Terror seizes me at the thought that she will be alone in whatever lays beyond for one moment more than is absolutely necessary. I promised to be with her always.

I needn’t worry. I feel the life go out of her, as she goes totally limp at last in my arms. Her nugget of heat is smothered utterly, and her wings dissipate into sea and sky.

I feel her die in my arms. To think that for a moment I actually feared that I wouldn’t feel her die in my arms.

The pain, the final pain, seizes me at last. It is agony in my chest, but it does not match the dread I have nursed for months. No, the worse pain lies behind my eyes, and in my memory, and buried in my soul.

Be strong. It will just be for a moment. It is her voice, and it reaches past the deeper pain, leaving only the death of my heart, like blood solidifying in my veins. And it occurs to me that I am holding on, clawing to life with all the strength that remains, a need as deeply rooted as only instinct can be. I hold it as tightly as I hold her chilled body to me.

Somewhere I imagine It must be laughing. For an instant, my face screws itself up in rage, but then that slips away. Its victory no longer troubles me. I let my pride slough free, for what use is pride? What use is pride when I can hear her again? She calls to me from the other side. She is somewhere beyond, and she burns bright and hot as the sun.

Let go. I miss you already. Let go and come find me.

And I do.

---

The Virgin and The Dragon

By Melinda Moore

Vivian slammed the rooftop door open; the metal and brick clashed with all the defiance a wrongfully scolded four-year-old could produce. Tears made the marker ink on her face mix together like Neopolitan ice cream, but what dripped into her mouth tasted like paint. Her feet thudded on the cement before her tears cleared and she saw a mass of gold and brown scales: a dragon took up most of the rooftop.

She stepped back so she could see the face, and gulped and wheezed until the sobbing stopped. She asked, “Are you Puff?”

The dragon opened one eye and said, “Hardly.”

His lid began to close but stopped midway when she said, “I just drew a cave for him on the hallway wall, but since you’re here and he’s not, you can have it.”

The lid opened all the way again. “You painted a dragon cave?”

Vivian nodded her head like the bobble knight on her dad’s dashboard and said, “It’s beautiful except my mom hates it and says I can’t watch TV for a month, especially if it’s any of dad’s movies.” Traffic honked and screeched far below as if to add an exclamation point to her exasperation.

The dragon closed his eye before saying, “I don’t have much use for a two dimensional cave.”

Vivian sniffed the snot up her nose and said, “Are you hungry? My mom just went to CostCo and bought a big box of Goldfish.”

The eye opened and he said, “Goldfish? I can never catch enough of those to make it worth while. But if you have a big box…”

“I’ll be right back.” Vivian could hardly believe a real dragon was on her roof. Her mom was always telling her dad to grow up and quit telling Vivian such fanciful stories. But now she had proof. Down in the kitchen, she slid her step stool across the ceramic tiled floor and into the pantry. She stretch on the stool just enough to pull the bottom of the Goldfish box with her fingertips. It thumped to the ground. She listened for her mom’s footsteps, but she must’ve been asleep in her room. Vivian grabbed her treasure and ran up to the rooftop again, worried the dragon would be gone. He was there.

“I have the goldfish!”

He opened both eyes and said, “Well?”

She tore the box and bag open and scattered the crackers in front of his mouth like they were magic dust.

“What are those?”

“Goldfish.”

“Are they dead?”

Vivian stared at the treasure and realized her mistake. A lump swelled in her throat, and she choked out, “They’re crackers. I didn’t mean real fish.”

The dragon sniffed. A long tongue darted out and licked up several crackers at once. “Cheesy,” he said and continued to lick the roof clean. “When can you bring me more? I’m Darius by the way.”

“I’m Vivian. We’ll have another box in a month. Can you come in and play?”

“I couldn’t possibly squeeze through the door.”

Vivian slumped, but then recalled the story about princesses kissing frogs. Maybe if she kissed him, he’d turn into a boy and fit through the door. She ran to his snout and gave him a peck. When he didn’t change, she dashed through the door and down the stairs, hoping he’d never guess her foolish notion.

---

Vivian burst out of the door and onto the rooftop, the only place she didn’t feel awkward in her body—tall enough to be a woman but flat like a little girl still. “Light the roof on fire! Light the roof on fire!” she yelled. Her fingernails and sneakers were covered with gold glitter, glimmering in the moonlight. The gold scales of her friend Darius glimmered as well, but there the similarity ended.

“If I light the roof on fire, where will you sit?” asked Darius.

Vivian slumped. He was always so practical. “I got your favorite tonight,” she said, not one to linger over disappointments. She only had an hour until her mom would be home from work and wanted to make the most of it. “Coke, lemon-lime and strawberry pop.”

“Oh, good. What did you get for yourself?”

Vivian stopped slurping her soda and gave a loud burp before answering. “Just Coke.”

Darius rolled onto his back and opened his mouth. Vivian set her own cup down and opened the Double Gulp with both hands. Pouring it down his throat she said, “You could ask politely, you know?”

“Oh, are we comparing notes now on who’s ruder?”

Vivian stuck her tongue out.

Darius’s tongue shot out of his mouth and wrapped around a passing pigeon.

Vivian turned away and popped her gum to avoid hearing the cracking of bones. Maybe today he would change into a prince and leave his dragony habits behind. When Darius finished his meal, Vivian said, “That was gross.”

“How’s school been?”

“Oh, you know, boring.” She told him about endless lectures and gossipy friends. At the end of her patter, she gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Logan wanted to kiss me behind science lab.”

Darius yawned with his maw gaping and tongue rolling out. When he finished he said, “And did you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Vivian wanted to blurt out, “Because Logan isn’t a dragon,” but instead said, “He chews spearmint flavored gum. I hate that. What have you been doing?”

He told her about flying over the Atlantic and being almost seen by a plane and then a cruise ship, but he reached a cloud just in time. “I think I’ll spend time in the Caribbean this month. Do some shark hunting.”

Vivian wanted to go shark hunting too, but more than that she wanted Darius to be human so they could be friends together. She had no idea how old he was, but always imagined his human shape as the same age as herself. Her mother would be home any minute, and it sounded like Darius wouldn’t be back for awhile. She jumped up. “I’ve gotta go!” She closed her eyes and planted a kiss right on Darius’s muzzle. When she opened her eyes, he was still a dragon.

She fled the roof, cheeks burning.

---

Vivian set a huge box loaded with cups of designer coffee onto the rooftop of her apartment building. Left over heat from the summer day radiated up from the cement. The full moon shone off the gold scales of Darius—it was her favorite time to view him. She said as if it hadn’t been months since they’d seen each other, “I’m afraid they got cold in the elevator.” She wore a black camisole with shorts, and had a tattoo on her shoulder of a gold dragon that looked similar to Darius.

“I’ll take care of that if you step back,” said Darius. He stood on his hind legs and puffed out a flame over the box. “That should do it. Would you mind pouring them for me? I hate the taste of cardboard.” He flopped down on his back as Vivian set aside one cup for herself and began pouring the rest down Darius’s throat. When he was finished, he rolled over, and Vivian sat down and leaned against his belly. “How were finals?” he asked.

“Good. This is my last summer home. Time to go out into the real world.” She wanted to ask if he would visit her when she found a new apartment, but was too worried he’d say no; he’d never visited her at college. Instead, she asked, “Done any shark hunting lately?”

“Been in the mood for bear. Just got back from the Black Forest. Date anyone interesting this semester?”

Vivian thought of the guy who’d hounded her the whole semester for a date. He was in all of her classes, but she hated how he smelled of wet dog and drooled on her books whenever they studied for tests. At their last session, she’d had to punch him in the jaw to keep him from ripping off her shirt.

“No,” she said and pulled her knees up to her chest.

She heard a howl from the corner of the roof and saw a wolf dressed in what looked like her study partner’s Chicago Bears jersey. The wolf gnashed his teeth and ran right for her with his claws clicking on the cement.

Darius swung his tale around and impaled the werewolf with the spike on the end of it. There was a brief whimper and then nothing. Vivian stood up, walked away and looked out at the city lights with the sound of a skull splitting as accompaniment to the horns of traffic below.

“You should set up shop with a nice musician or something. This Little Red Riding Hood business is only going to get worse as you get older,” said Darius when he’d finished his meal.

Vivian turned around and tried to ignore the spittle mixed with blood on his golden scales. She walked back to him, closed her eyes and kissed him on the muzzle. He was still a dragon when she opened her eyes again. “All men turn into monsters at some point,” she said and walked to the staircase.

---

Vivian popped the cork off of a bottle of Champagne on top of her childhood apartment. She’d come to visit her parents in the hopes of seeing Darius again. As she poured, bubbles ran over the rim of the glass and over her golden ring with the silhouette of a dragon carved into it. She set the glass down and held up the bottle to Darius. “If you hold the bottle like this, I think you can drink it yourself.”

Darius sat on his bottom with his tail stretched out behind him as she’d taught him the last time they’d been together. She molded his claws around the bottle, feeling sparks of affection shooting through her veins. After she’d pulled her hands away, he lifted the bottle to his mouth and tilted it up.

“Bravo!” she exclaimed and clapped her hands. She drained her own glass and popped the cork off of another bottle.

“Congratulations on your promotion,” said Darius.

“Maybe I can finally take time off for a vacation with you. I took some hunting classes.” She could feel his eyes on her as she wrapped his claws around another bottle.

He drank it down, and she drained another glass. He said, “I was actually thinking of hibernating for awhile. Dragons do get sleepy. Any thoughts of settling down?”

She shivered when she pictured the man who’d been interested in her before she’d been promoted above him. He always had cold hands, and his handshake almost crushed her fingers. She heard a flap behind her and whipped around to find the man standing behind her and bearing fangs. Darius reached past her and impaled the vampire’s heart with his claw. “I think a nice executive would suit you,” he said.

She smashed her glass and yelled, “I am a nice executive.” Before Darius ruined his breath with vampire dinner, Vivian pressed her lips onto his muzzle. He was still a dragon. As she stalked to the staircase, she heard claws dicing up the vampire.

---

Vivian jabbed her cane onto the cement and hobbled out of her helicopter that had landed on top of her childhood apartment. She smiled at Darius who was still golden and glittering in the moonlight. He hadn’t aged a bit. One of her servants had brought up a serving set, and she poured out the tea.

Darius picked up a cup nimbly with his claws and said, “You should’ve had someone to take care of you like I did.”

“I’ve done well enough, besides who did you have?”

“Why do you always kiss me goodbye?”

The evenings of nightcaps with her scaled friend flitted through her mind and pressed a tear out of her eye. “I hoped you would turn into a prince, but I’ve never liked princes as much as I liked dragons.”

“Kiss me one more time, please.”

Vivian set down her tea cup with a shaking hand. Now that she was old and wizened, he’d change into a prince for her? Still, maybe they’d have a few years together as the same species. She leaned over and pressed her lips against his muzzle. The pop and puff of magical smoke she’d hoped for all these years finally happened, except Darius didn’t change into a prince—she changed into a dragon. Elated. she stretched out her golden wings that glittered in the moonlight.

“I can teach you to hunt properly now that you’re a dragon,” said Darius before pressing his muzzle against hers.

Sparks exploded in Vivian’s heart and she felt the full rush of dragon desire. Unable to control all the new feelings, she pushed off of the rooftop and flew towards the moon with Darius in heated pursuit behind.

---

Wild Blue Roses

By Jeff Suwak

Tiernan discovered the dead dogs outside the trapper’s camp at the base of Mount Storm. The animal’s frozen carcasses hung impaled upon the trunks of black oaks, branches bursting out of their flanks and eyes and mouths. The moment he saw the grim spectacle, the druid knew that Bril’s mind was too far gone. There could be no bringing him back, now.

But I must try, Tiernan thought. At the very least, I must try.

He moved forward stiffly in his furs and heavy boots, unaccustomed to such clothing after spending so many years in the Druid Circle’s warmer southern climes. Even with all the coverings layered upon him, he still shivered–though whether it was because of the cold or because of his mission, he could not be certain. Confronting a fellow member of the Circle was always a sad affair, but this particular trip was doubly so. The druid to be uprooted had been Tiernan’s student. More than that, they had been friends.

The trappers suffered worse fates than their dogs. Tiernan found their corpses scattered over the plain outside a log cabin, twisted heaps mutilated on the ground with grim coats of raven pecking the flesh from their bones. Chaotic designs of blood in the snow told the story of a harried and futile retreat, one of men injured and terrified in flight before falling. The druid imagined those desperate figures wheeling about in clouds of murderous birds, and took a deep breath to steady himself.

He shooed the birds away. They rose with angry caws and lighted upon the cabin roof to watch him through their black eyes, as though warning that he might be their next victim.

One by one he dragged the trappers inside the building. Druidic tradition was to leave the bodies in the wilderness to decompose naturally, but city people lived and died in different ways, and their beliefs had to be respected. He scattered fireseed over the cabin wall and struck his flint, setting alight the makeshift pyre.

The ravens scattered into the air and headed north, into the gathering dusk with a flurry of beating wings and shrill cries. Back to their master, Tiernan thought. Back to Bril.

He climbed to the far side of a rise and set up camp out of sight of the billowing flames. The sight of druidic power used so savagely unsettled him. The Art was meant for gentler things. Rapid-seed spells were meant to replenish forests, not skewer sled dogs. Bonding spells were meant to commune with animals, not to employ them as assassins.

Bril knew all these things. Or, at least, he had once known all these things. He had been among the gentler souls of the Circle, and it was difficult to associate him at all with the brutality that had occurred on that mountain. Tiernan huddled deeper into his furs.

He cleared snow from the frozen earth and built a fire as the sun set low in the sky and the shadow of Mount Storm stretched long over the plain. He laid out an elk skin and sat upon it, watching orange shapes rise and sink from the fire’s black embers. It was said that long ago druids could read the future in that fiery language, but if such a thing was ever true, it had long since ceased to be so.

Tiernan blamed himself for Bril’s violence. All along he had known that his friend’s acute sensitivity put him in danger. A druid taking Stewardship over a piece of land entered into a Communion with that place, and the connection could become so deep that it risked consuming his mind completely. Bril’s temperament made him exceptionally vulnerable to that kind of psychic disintegration.

A hard wind whistled through the dark and bent the fire sidelong. Tiernan pulled the elk hide tighter around his shoulders and thought about the desolation of that place where his friend had spent the last five years of life, removed from connection with other people.

To the north extended the Bladed Mountains, hundreds of miles of peaks so sheer and unforgiving that not even druids went there. To the south and east, the fast waters of the Thalthemin River cut the area off from the rest of the world. To the west was the city of Industry, growing rapidly along the shores of Lake Phalheen. Its inhabitants numbered in the tens of thousands, but for a druid like Bril, a legion of merchants was the loneliest prospect of all.

Mount Storm is a perfect place for a man to go mad, Tiernan thought. And I left him alone here, for all these years.

An animal padded through the snow just outside the light of the fire. Tiernan looked until he saw the faint outline of a snow ferret. As the animal watched him, Tiernan knew that Bril was seeing though its eyes.

“No one wanted things to come to this,” he said.

The animal stiffened momentarily, but remained.

“You know why I am here, just as you know that I cannot leave until my task is done.”

The ferret turned and bolted off into the darkness.

“Please do not make this any harder than it already is,” Tiernan said, to the darkness, or to himself.

Autumn nights were long in those northern reaches, but that night, he knew, would be even longer than most. He had gone there hoping to rescue his friend before it was too late, but found the mountain already stained with blood.

And I fear that before my task is done, much more will be shed.

---

A pall of mist hung over the mountain as he set off the next morning to find his friend. Tiernan knew Bril would be observing him, so he made no effort to mask his approach, and he was not surprised when the boughs of the trees at the forest’s edge bent back to create a pathway for him to follow.

The crisp smell of pine in the cold air struck him with boyhood memories of playing in the woods around his father’s iron shops and warehouses. He had been in the south so long that he had almost forgotten the scent, and found himself smiling. Shaking his head against the pleasant reverie, he clenched his jaw and marched forward. His business on Mount Storm was not of the smiling kind.

The path led him to a grotto where Bril kneeled upon a broad, flat stone as he looked into a pool of water. His emaciated form was covered only by a sackcloth too thin for the cold, feet bluish in his sandals, yet he smiled when he looked over his shoulder. In that moment, despite the knotted beard full of twigs and moss, despite the face wizened and chapped by frigid winds, his cobalt eyes radiated with such innocent joy that Tiernan recognized the boy he had known so many years ago.

Tiernan walked up and looked over his friend’s shoulder to see a sinuous fish swimming in slow circles in the pool. Multicolored spirals and whorls decorated the animal’s flanks, swirling as they sent arcs of purple and orange and green spinning out through the water.

Tiernan spoke softly. “What manner of fish is that?”

“I have never seen the likes of it before,” Bril said, shaking his head and laughing. “If I had one hundred lifetimes to tend this mountain, it still would not be enough for me to discover all the secrets and beauties hidden here. This place alone could teach me everything the world has to teach.”

There were few joys greater than seeing a wild place through the eyes of its assigned Steward. Tiernan knew he needed to say something before his emotions distracted him from his task.

“Why did you kill the trappers, Bril?”

The fish turned and swam downstream, as though the druid’s words had broken the idyllic spell that had been keeping it there.

Bril’s smile disappeared. “They were destroying the forest.”

“And their dogs?”

“The men turned those animals into something else, something that did not belong in the wild any more than their owners did.”

“You have no right to make that appraisal, or that decision.”

“I was sent here to protect this place.” Bril looked up at his friend. “So, I protected it.”

“It is part of our duty to balance the good of the forest with the good of civilization. You know that as well as I do.”

Bril stood and looked down into the water, or perhaps at his reflection in the water. “I know what I was taught,” he said, “but those things do not work in this world, anymore. The rules have changed.”

“Do not lecture me,” Tiernan snapped. He wanted Bril to yell back, to fight. It would make the task at hand much easier to carry out.

Instead, Bril shook his head sadly. “I remember the man you were. You did not take on the responsibilities of a druid so that you could play at politics. You were better than that.”

“And you were better than a murderer,” Tiernan said coldly. Bril flinched under the words, but said nothing in return. “You left a home of comfort and wealth to serve the Circle.”

“Not to serve the Circle.” Bril shook his head. “To serve nature.”

“Humans are part of nature, too.”

“They were once,” Bril said. “Somehow, I do not believe that they are, anymore. Somehow, the pact has been broken.”

“You know what I have been sent here to do.”

“I know,” Bril said. “I do not intend to fight you. I merely want you to understand.” He nodded towards the direction of the trapper’s camp. “They used to come once a year, for a month, maybe two. Lately, they have been coming more and more often. Barely a day goes by when I do not hear the foxes crying in their snares. They will not rest until every one of the animals, and the trees, are dead and gone. ” He rested a hand on Tiernan’s shoulder. “The old ways do not work anymore, my friend, if they ever did.”

Tiernan pulled away from Bril’s touch. “You can explain all of this to the Circle. It is time to go. We have a long journey ahead of us.”

“I will not leave my mountain.”

“I cannot allow you to hold this land, anymore. You have spent too many years out here alone. You have lost perspective.”

“If there is one thing I have gained in my time here, it is perspective.” Bril walked northward, away from the direction Tiernan intended to take him. “You cannot kill me,” he said over his shoulder. “You think you can, but you cannot. Your heart is too good.”

“Do not do this.”

Bril stopped by a tree branch upon which a sparrow rested. He held out his hand. The bird hopped onto his finger and perched there, singing. “It saddens me to no end that the world drives us to this position. Before I do what must be done, I ask that you walk with me, as we once did.”

Tiernan hesitated. “What must be done?”

Bril lifted his hand and sent the sparrow fluttering into the air. He smiled and headed deeper into the forest.

“What must be done?” Tiernan asked again. He received no answer.

Part of him wanted to attack Bril, and part of him wanted to set his friend free. Eventually, he knew, he would have to do one of those things. When his legs started moving, however, he did not know which it would be. He merely followed.

---

No matter how hard Tiernan tried to steer the conversation towards the dilemma they faced, Bril only talked about the trees. He addressed each fir, each birch, each oak, as an individual friend. He smiled as he discussed the ways he had tended each one, and fondly recounted afternoons sitting in their shade and listening to the advice they gave.

“Patience,” Bril chuckled. “Their answer is always patience.”

It had been generations since any druid had entered deep enough into Communion to speak with flora. Such a connection was thought to be a thing of legend, and Tiernan had a hard time believing it was anything more than another symptom of his friend’s madness.

“They speak in words?”

“No. They speak in something more like emotion.” Bril bugged out his eyes comically. “Trees do not know words, Tiernan. You would have to be a lunatic to think that.”

Despite his best efforts, Tiernan could not help but laugh. “Why did you do it, Bril? It was not merely wrong, it was stupid. Nothing will be accomplished by it. The cities will continue to spread. The trappers will keep coming. You cannot kill them all.”

Bril stopped to examine a tree of blue frost roses in full bloom. He propped up a branch to show the flower’s intricate folds. “This beauty was achieved over vast stretches of time, through countless generations of forebears. It is perfect.” He bent over and breathed in the scent. “It is worth fighting for.”

“There are other ways to fight. The Circle is trying to adapt.”

“You mean ways to compromise.” Bril breathed the scent again. “Death knows no compromise. Only a fool tries to bargain with it.”

Tiernan stepped closer, to force his friend to look at him. “Last spring, a merchant from Industry came to the Circle to tell us that you had been harassing trappers. He said you destroyed their traps and set their catches free. He wanted you removed, but he did not want violence. You took it down that road. Not them.”

Bril’s voice came out low and tense. “They no longer take what they need. Now, they take what they want, and their want is endless. It has no aim or object anymore. Their want is everything.”

They walked deeper into the forest, reaching the edge of a broad clearing laced with the thin ribbons of streams meandering through the snow. Tiernan knew the inevitable was drawing near.

Bril could not win a fight between them. Tiernan was a Steward of a different sort than most druids, for his role was to maintain the order itself. As such, he had been trained in a different kind of power. He was unafraid of defeat, but he knew that his friend would not surrender. Once the confrontation began, there would be no turning back.

Bril stopped abruptly, gazing forward like a hunting cat that had spotted prey.

Tiernan followed his gaze down the long slope. First he saw streaks of blood staining the snow. Next, he saw the carcasses. Dozens of crag deer lay in heaps, stacked at the edge of the trees.

Bril ran to the scene. Tiernan called for him to stop, but when his friend ignored the plea, he followed.

Only pedicles remained on the heads of the deer, rough shallow cavities where the precious antlers for which they were so well known had been forcibly removed. Each animal had a hole blasted through its side, indicative of the new weapons that had been popping up in the cities.

Bril uttered a single, tense word. “Muskets.”

For the first time, Tiernan saw in his friend’s eyes a killer capable of butchering a whole crew of trappers and their dogs.

Tiernan spoke softly, the way he would to a frightened animal. “I promise that I will find out what happened here.”

“I will not leave this site,” Bril said, barely above a whisper.

Voices came from the woods. Three men emerged, each one tugging violently at a rope tethered to the head of a mule laden with sacks full of antlers.

“Come on,” one of the men barked, pulling forcefully and stretching the animal’s neck taut.

Tiernan felt the air grow thin around him, and knew Bril was summoning energy for an attack. He stepped towards his friend. “Stop.”

The newcomers looked up. The figure standing at the lead, a blockish man with dim eyes and brown hair jutting out from under his furred cap, spit a mouthful of black leaf into the snow. Squinting suspiciously at the druids, he nodded a greeting.

“Did you murder these deer?” Bril’s words were a question, but his voice a threat.

The hunter spit again. “I hunted those deer, yes,” he said. “Is there a problem?” There was no apparent malice in his voice, only curiosity.

“You butchered them for their antlers,” Bril said.

The man’s eyes narrowed as he seemed to realize that he was not being confronted for his actions. “We’ll take some of the meat,” he said. “But the antlers get the highest price.”

Tiernan stepped between them. “These woods are under druidic protection,” he said. “As such, they fall under the Hunt Laws.”

“We talked to the law people,” the man said, eyes still fixed on Bril. “We have full permission for this venture.” As if sensing that his defense sounded inadequate, he added, “I have a family to feed, just like any man.”

One of the hunter’s allies, a scrawny character with an enormous, misshapen nose, stepped forward and pointed his musket at Bril. “We don’t want any trouble. It’s been a hard winter. We have people to care for.”

Bril’s eyes went wide and his hair stood up…too slightly for others to notice, perhaps, but enough to tell Tiernan that he was charged with energy and ready to strike.

“We don’t want any trouble,” the smaller man said again, voice quivering.

Tiernan moved to restrain Bril. As he did, musket shot exploded behind him, and a terrific force threw him forward. He landed face first in the snow, pain burning through his back like fire. He lifted his head to talk Bril down, but no words would come.

Blue light emanated from Bril’s crazed eyes. “You come to my woods,” he said. “My home. And you murder my friends.”

Tiernan tried to speak again, but his lungs would not work. Just before he fell unconscious, he heard the sound of hornets. Thousands of the insects flew out of the forest in a black cloud, their buzzing so loud that it drowned out all other sounds, except for the screaming.

---

Tiernan woke beside a fire in the night with a bandage wrapped around his back. The wound still burned.

“I covered the dressing with healing salve,” Bril said from his place beside the fire. “It hurts, but you will recover in a few days. By tomorrow, you will be well enough to start your journey back to the Circle.”

Tiernan opened his mouth to chastise Bril for escalating the situation with the hunters, but then closed it again without saying anything. He was tired of politics. He was tired of debate. He just wanted to talk to his friend.

“What if the hunters were speaking the truth, Bril? What if they had permission to be here?”

Bril shrugged. “It does not matter.”

“It means you killed three more innocent men.”

“Innocent.” Bril chuckled. He tossed some new branches into the fire. The moisture in the wood sizzled and popped, and the scent of evergreen wafted through the cold air. The reflected fire danced wildly in Bril’s eyes as he stared intensely into the embers. Though he knew it was not true, Tiernan could not help but imagine that the sight was really a revelation of the inferno raging inside his friend’s mind.

Bril looked up and grinned, as though sensing the other’s thoughts. “I am not mad,” he said. “Though perhaps I have done mad things.” He picked up a branch and poked around in the fire. “I regret killing the trapper’s dogs.”

Tiernan forced himself to sit up, wincing against the pain that seared through his body. “You cannot win this war, Bril. There are too many of them.”

Bril pushed an ember over with his stick and sent a cloud of orange sparks dancing into the air like fireflies. “I cannot win it alone,” he said.

Silence hung over the scene as Tiernan considered the unspoken proposal behind Bril’s words. “I am not a murderer,” he said, reminding himself as much as Bril. “I cannot do the things you have done.”

“You do not have to. Every army needs soldiers, but every army also needs diplomats. You have seen what they are doing to the world, and the world is not only theirs. Lines have already been drawn. No matter which side you stand on, you have blood on your hands.”

Tiernan reached back to feel along the bandage. He hissed as his fingers lighted upon the holes that had been blasted through his back. “Your mountain is the only place I’ve seen in a long time that still feels like a mountain,” he said. “All through the south, there is no place one can go that is silent of human industry. Somewhere, a balance seems to have been lost.” He was hesitant to utter the words, feeling himself crossing over some kind of mental boundary. But, once he spoke, he felt a deep burden lifted from within.

“I need you,” Bril said. “Without you, I will merely fight for some time and eventually die. There are too many of them and their weapons are becoming too powerful. But together, we can start a campaign. We can restore sanity to the world before it is too late.”

Tiernan’s hands stung with cold. He pulled the elk hide over his shoulders and blew into his fists to warm them. Have I been in the meeting halls and out of the wilderness for too long to understand what is happening? He wondered. Have things gotten so bad? Images of rivers choked with dead fish and forests of stumps and burning plains rushed through his mind. No, he realized. They were already there for me to see. I just did not want to look, anymore. Bril is right. I have already chosen a side. I already have blood on my hands.

The words came out low at first, as though uncertain if they wanted to be said. “If we hide ourselves out here, then the city and the Circle can easily dismiss us and dispose of us accordingly.”

Did I just say we? I suppose my mind is made up. So be it, then.

“I will go to the Circle and make our cause known. There will be those who will join our cause and those who will align against us.” He blew into his hands again. “But it will be in the open, and no matter what follows, they will not be able to keep it silent.”

“So, you are with me?”

“I am,” Tiernan said. “But I hope to prevent further killing, Bril. On both sides.”

“I would like nothing more than for you to succeed at that.” Bril pulled the poker from the fire and examined the flame dancing on the end of the stick. “But things rarely proceed as easily as our mind’s foresee them.”

“I know that,” Tiernan said. He moved to sit closer to the fire. “I have no way to know to where this will go. But, I have made my choice.” He looked up at Bril and saw the reflected fire dancing again in his friend’s eyes. He could not help but wonder if his own eyes now danced with the same reflected fire.

---

Drained

By Dusty Cooper

Phil surveyed the hazard area left by the previous tenants.

They’d made the place a rat’s nest of freshly used women’s hygiene products, kitty litter, and dirty dishes. The house was no more than a spider hole: one room for living and cooking, one for showering and sleeping. Phil tried renting to single occupants, but the kind of trash that answered his ads weren’t the kind to follow rules. They’d move their families in, or their friends’ visits would turn into extended stays. The last tenant let a woman and her two kids live with him. How they fit without sleeping on top of each other, Phil couldn’t imagine. The guy hadn’t paid rent for the last two months. Phil used everything but a crowbar to get them out of there.

“They suck you dry,” he said to his friend, Gus. “Drain you until you’ve got no option but kick’em out.”

“Yep,” Gus said, studying a section of the wall where someone’s fist had broken through. Frayed fibers fringed the dark hole. A piece of sheetrock dangled from a strip of wallpaper. He tried folding it back in place, but it didn’t fit. “Told you this landlord business was no fun.”

“It ain’t so bad,” Phil said. “Every year or two I got to do some renovations, but it’s a monthly supplement to my Social check.” Phil amended, “When the trash pays.”

Gus let the chunk of sheetrock drop, and it crumbled at his feet. “You ever have one leave without having to kick’em out for not paying?”

“Not in awhile,” Phil said. Carolyn, his late wife, used to handle the interviewing. She read people. Tenants weren’t as much trouble when she was making the calls.

He turned in the doorway, scanned the yard, all mud holes and tire trenches, and beyond that acres of woods. That’s why he’d bought the place as a young man. Cheap land, and he just needed enough room to rest when he got off work. The square-footage provided plenty of space until he met Carolyn.

“I’ll just raise the rent this time. Get somebody that’ll take care of the place,” Phil said.

“Yeah, we’ll see,” Gus said and began tearing down the battered wall. “You’re going to have to replace at least two panels.”

---

Once Phil got the place clean and protected from the weather, he placed an ad. 1br/1ba, Single Occupant Only NO MORE, Private Property, No Neighbors, 800mo. The ad cost more than others he’d run, but it got his point across. He more than doubled the rent, and two months passed before he got the first call.

“I’m calling about the place for rent,” the caller said. He had a raspy, high-pitched voice, thin, not effeminate.

“Yes, sir, got some questions for you,” Phil said. “Got a wife or girlfriend?”

“Neither.”

“Got kids?”

“No.”

“What about family members?”

“We haven’t seen each other in a long time. Our kind likes to keep our own territory.”

That stuck a tack in Phil’s nose. “You ain’t part of a gang or something?”

“No, I just need a place to sleep and eat.”

“No long term visitors?”

“I get a lot of visitors, but you will never know they were there.”

“Well, we might be able to do business,” Phil said. “What’s your name?”

“Eric Nedd.”

They made an appointment, the caller asked for landmarks instead of street directions. “It’s west, a few miles outside of town. Look for the rusted-out blue water tower. There’s a narrow gravel road shrouded by trees that runs right behind it.”

Phil though of calling Gus, but didn’t want to jinx it. Gus and him had been friends since Carolyn had begun her decline. Her dementia took hold fast, and Phil resorted to placing her in a home. He visited twice a day. In the mornings he’d stop at the breakfast diner in town where all the old men and utility guys began their day. That’s where he met Gus.

He’d kept Phil company through Carolyn’s last years, checked-in on him, and helped him with the property and new tenants. Having a young person around sure made things easier, even being alone, but there was no replacing his Carolyn.

That night, he laid his hand on her empty pillow, the way he’d done every night for the past five years. “Might have a good one this time,” he said. “Wish you were here to tell me for sure.” He stroked the coarse, threadbare pillowcase, and it pulled him down into sleep.

---

Phil sat on a desk chair the last tenants had tossed in the yard. The wind blew just enough to make it chilly. It was quiet. The only car he could hear from this spot would be coming down the gravel road. He listened for one, but it was twenty minutes late.

A noise came from deep in the woods. Something was approaching. He figured a deer galloped by, but the noise was getting louder, like a storm kicking-up. The sky looked mostly clear. The treetops in the distance moved in a single line toward him. He stood and headed for his truck. Something moved in the darkness on the threshold of the forest.

Two tallow trees bent forward and a giant spider emerged. Phil clenched up like a crimp on a pipe.

“Mr. Kemp,” the spider said in the same raspy, high-pitched voice from the phone.

Phil’s hose crimp failed and filled his pants. He backed against the door to the house, and felt for the knob. Locked. The spider’s deep red body absorbed the light around it. Thick grey hairs sprouted down its legs and back.

“Don’t be afraid,” it said and crawled forward until it’s full size was out of the woods. “I won’t hurt you, as long as you work with me on this place.”

Phil could see his reflection in the beast’s eight black orbs, each as big as his head. He thought about reaching for his keys. If it was anything like the spiders he’d killed in his kitchen sink, it would move too fast for him to get in the house.

“What do you want?” Phil said.

“Just a place to sleep and eat,” the spider said. Its pincers twitched just a few feet from Phil’s head. It sank its fat abdomen to the ground.

“You’ll get your rent every month. Just have to keep the ad running.”

“What if I say no?”

“I could eat you,” it said, its pincers moving rapidly. “I would prefer to keep you involved, though.”

When it came to saying no, Phil couldn’t even fight humans. He always felt powerless, weak. Tenants seemed bigger, more important, like Phil should feel bad for owning the property. How dare he charge someone money to live there? But the spider added on that last bit. Involved.

Phil didn’t want to be involved with anything the spider had going on. Bullied again. He couldn’t do much about it. Maybe he’d be able to get rid of the spider later. Killing seemed as impossible as the creature’s existence had five minutes ago. There wasn’t a shoe big enough for the job.

“Why do I have to keep running the ad?”

Clicking came from somewhere in the darkness under the spider’s eyes.

“You’ll never have to know or worry about it.”

Phil thought about Carolyn, how she could see through people’s ruse: dressed in their best, wearing a sincere smile, making promises about keeping the place clean, and never being any trouble. “Rent will never be a problem.” Until it was. “I’ll always be on time.” Until they weren’t. Carolyn knew the lies under the surface. She could pick out their sales tags stuck under collars or up sleeves so clothes could be returned later. But here was this beast, no Sunday-best or mouth to fake a smile. It had nothing to hide behind. Phil didn’t have much choice.

For once he was thankful for Carolyn’s absence. She wouldn’t have to watch him make a deal with a monster.

That night, Phil took a long shower while thinking about setting the place on fire, but he figured the creature would escape. Even if he just ignored the place, didn’t keep the ad, he had a feeling the spider would find him. Phil crawled in bed and laid his hand on Carolyn’s pillow. The rough fabric didn’t provide any comfort. “It would have killed me,” he said. “What could I do?”

---

The following week he called the newspaper to lower the rent and change the contact number. He had to get a phone installed for the spider.

“I’ll handle the calls,” it had said. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.” The less he had to do with it the better, but the thought of it all shook him up. That the spider knew how to approach it all, its confidence it wouldn’t get caught, made Phil wonder what else in the world he didn’t know about. He thought back to their phone conversation. The spider said he had family all over the globe. Phil couldn’t fathom it.

He reconciled with himself that the spider served a purpose. All those people that had come before, the ones who’d taken advantage of him and left him messes to clean up, he was sending that trash for the spider to take care of. It was a public service for other landlords.

---

For two years Phil kept up with the newspaper ad. Every month, he’d park his truck by the mailbox at the main road. He worried the spider would mistake him for a stranger. He’d cleanout the junk mail posted to tenants who hadn’t lived there in years. The spider left the rent in a web cocoon under the mailbox. He kept the money in a shoebox under his bed. The cocoon’s coarse, sticky sinews, like cotton candy mixed with sand, rubbed his fingers raw. The stain on his skin lasted for days.

Each time it hurt worse, as though wearing down his defenses. He’d long since stopped stroking Carolyn’s pillow. It no longer brought him comfort. The frayed fabric reminded him too much of the web. Carolyn wouldn’t want him touching her anyway.

---

Only once, Gus called and asked if the place was still available.

“Naw, I gave-up on that place,” Phil said.

“My cousin’s daughter is looking for a place,” Gus said.

“I’m done with it.” Phil said. “Just let it be.”

“I’ll take care of it if she makes a mess.”

“Stay out of it, damn it,” Phil said, getting angry. Gus wouldn’t understand any other way, and he couldn’t tell him the truth. “I’m done worrying about that place.”

“Alright, Phil,” Gus said. His voice had changed, as though Phil could hear their age difference. “Just trying to help.”

“Thank you,” Phil said. He’d never yelled, or even raised his voice to Gus. It hurt. “I’m just getting too old to deal with any of it and I won’t be depending on anyone else to deal with it either.”

“I understand ya, Phil,” Gus said, clearing his throat. “She’ll have to find another place. She’d probably wreck it anyhow.”

After that call, Phil worked on plans to rid himself of the creature.

He’d thought about cutting through the water tower’s legs, let it fall on the house, but the spider would probably hear him working. Sometimes he settled on fire, again, but couldn’t bring himself to try. It was funny, not in any comical way, that he wanted the spider gone. He’d been looking for a single occupant, someone that would pay the rent on time.

The spider never bothered him, paid every month, but the state of the cash worked on Phil the most. Crumpled, tacky, and smelling awful, the bills looked like they’d been decaying: a reminder of why the spider lived there, and what Phil played a part in.

Phil lost track of how long the spider had been there crouched in its hovel, attacking unsuspecting victims. He couldn’t remember what the house looked like anymore. How ever long the spider had been there, what ever amount of time had passed since he’d yelled at Gus, they’d never discussed it again.

Near the end of fall, Gus visited Phil with a friend. They didn’t stay long, and just shot the shit. Phil had heard the man’s name before, but couldn’t remember from where.

Two days later, Gus’s wife called. “You seen Gus, Phil?

“Yeah, he came by yesterday with some fellow.”

“You’re the last person I could think to call. You might be the last one to see him and that real estate guy,” she said.

Phil’s body went limp and cold; he could barely keep a grip on the phone. “I see, did he say what they were doing that day?” he said.

“No, his secretary said his calendar says Kent property, but they don’t have any Kent’s with property on the books.”

He saw the spider first coming from the forest, and remembered how just about everything in his body had evacuated like a flood. Phil knew it should have said Kemp Property. “I’m sorry, Pam,” he said and hung-up the phone.

Right now his best friend hung, wrapped-up in a cocoon, the spider’s fat, hairy body hunched over him, feeding. If only he’d let that fiend take him that first day, he’d be the one in the cocoon being bled dry.

He wondered if the spider kept the people alive, or if they died after one bite. It must be a painful process. Long, drawn-out, like wasting away in a demented state. The way Carolyn had wilted, first her mind, then her body. His time had come.

He gasped for air, fighting to keep his heart pumping. He had one last thing to do.

Without leaving a note, Phil made his way out to the gravel road. He stopped in town for a can of spray paint. His hands shook as he paid the cashier, couldn’t look the kid in the eyes, or return his “Have a good day.”

Phil drove down the dirt road a bit, and parked his truck diagonally across the road. Moving his arms in wide sweeps, he painted KEEP OUT from bumper to bumper.

His feet fought every step. He said, “It’ll be like touching Carolyn’s pillow.”

---

Damned

By Nyki Blatchley

The spell to start my car didn’t work that evening, so I contacted the repair service and walked home from the office through darkening drizzle, rather than being ripped off by the Instant Transportation System. Rain insinuated itself inside my upturned collar. Typical: they spend a fortune on improving the fireballs and blasting spells, but nothing on controlling the weather.

“Can I see your papers, sir?” said a voice behind me.

I turned with the practiced air of having nothing to hide, but my mind was racing. Had he heard my thoughts, and would he consider them disloyal? I’d always doubted the rumours of the police using mind-reading devices, but I wasn’t so sure at that moment.

It was reassuring that his fireball-thrower was still in its holster, although his hand rested on it, but his face was blank and unreadable as they always were. I fumbled the papers from my inside pocket and tried to stand calmly while he scanned them. Everyone feels paranoid in this situation. Or maybe just me. It’s not as if anyone discusses it.

He looked up at last. “Seen any of the damned, sir?”

The question threw me, as was no doubt the intention, but I was able to answer truthfully, “Of course not. I’d have reported it if I had.”

The policeman nodded, pushing his face into a smile that didn’t suit it. “I’m sure you would, sir. Sooner there’s not a damned left, the better. Evening.”

I nodded vigorously as he hand my papers back, though his words disturbed me. The damned were abominations, to be sure, but there were rumours of them being fed alive into furnaces when caught. Probably just propaganda by the damned-lovers, I reminded myself. The government knew best.

I glanced about as I trudged through the dreary streets, searching out subtle signs of the damned. There are ways they can pass for normal, but it’s said you can always feel the difference. That man there, wearing dark glasses in the evening? No, I didn’t get a sense of wrongness from him. Perhaps I should have followed him, but it was cold, and I was probably mistaken.

It’s not just the physical differences that make the damned revolting. All of us use magic, and some are talented enough to manipulate it, making and repairing the devices we rely on and the spells that drive them. The damned, though, live within magic and use it to interfere with our minds and souls, bewildering decent people into their foul clutches. There’s nothing natural about them.

---

It wasn’t till I’d spoken the spell to turn on the light in my hallway that I saw the vagrant girl clearly, though I could make out little of her, swathed in a shapeless, threadbare coat and a hat pulled down, shadowing her face. She’d been sitting against the wall of my block, soaking and miserable, and had asked for my help. The shelters were all full, she’d claimed, and she offered to make it worth my while if I let her stay the night.

Why did I agree? Maybe I felt a little sorry for her, but her suggestion aroused me too. It was a long time since I’d been with a woman, and the delicious trace of huskiness in her voice had its effect on me.

“You can hang those things here,” I told her. “I’ll make you a hot drink.”

The girl hesitated a moment before nodding. She took off the battered coat to reveal torn, stained clothes and soft curves that sent anticipation coursing through me. She paused a moment more, before removing the hat and facing me. She swallowed.

My guts turned over.

She had a heart-shaped face, with a sweet mouth and short, dark hair, but it was dominated by the elongated eyes with irises of burnished gold. Even though the eyes were frightened, they looked deep into me.

She was one of the damned.

“Keep away from me.” My voice rasped in my throat. I didn’t realise I’d backed away till I collided with the wall. I was almost too scared – almost – to notice that my arousal had increased.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” Her voice was huskier than ever, seduction wrapped in honey, as she approached me. “I’m lonely. Just let me spend tonight with you. Show you I’m no different from you. I promise, you won’t regret it.”

Reaching down, she brushed her hand over my crotch, and desire surged through me as if by magic. For that moment, I didn’t care who she was. I pulled her, unresisting, into the bedroom.

I was too aroused to be gentle or subtle, but she met me in the same spirit. If she were only doing this to get a bed for the night, she hid it well. Holding her afterwards, floating together down to the caverns of sleep, the last thing I heard was her crooned whisper, “You’re different, I know. I love you.”

I wanted to ask what she meant, but the insistent current drew me down into oblivion.

I stood beside the girl, holding her hand, in a meadow sloping down to a quiet, winding river. A couple of trees waved over us, and a wood stretched from the far bank. Sun and blue sky were offset by a ripple of breeze fanning my hair. Every colour was more vivid, more beautiful, cleaner than I’d ever seen before.

She nestled against me, her head resting against my chest. She was small, like many of her kind – her kind? what did that mean? – just the perfect size. I’d never been so happy.

“Isn’t this better?” she murmured, glancing up at me. Her lovely, golden eyes gleamed. “You’re so beautiful inside. I felt it as soon as you came near me.”

“Beautiful?” It must be true if she said so, but I didn’t remember anyone calling me that before.

“Come and see.” She pulled playfully on my hand, and I followed her down to the river. The water rippled and shimmered a little, but her reflection was clear and as lovely as the reality. Beside her stood a splendid figure, with a face of compassion and love, and…

I jerked awake. A dream? No, it had been too vivid. She’d enchanted me, trying to make me believe…What? That I was too loving to betray her?

Her breathing was even beside me, and I slipped out of bed, panic rising. I had to get away. Grabbing a dressing-gown, I fled into the living-room, and my terror took me to the message-globe. I spoke the spell to link with the police.

I’d been sitting for a while, numb and mindless, after the call was over, when I looked up to see her standing in the doorway, a sheet wrapped hastily around her. There was a stunned look in those weird eyes.

“What have you done?” she whispered.

“You tricked me.” I pushed my confusion away by yelling at her. “You used your magic to bewitch me and make me dream…that.”

She stared at me, her eyes a little glazed, and slumped down onto the floor. “I was trying to show you what you really are. I didn’t bewitch you. I thought…”

“I’ve called the police. They’ll be here soon.” Was I threatening or warning? Perhaps she’d have time to get away. They wouldn’t throw her into a furnace, surely: that was all lies. Though why should I care?

She tried to get up, but collapsed again, despair in her eyes. “No, no, you’re not like that. I know you…”

She still hadn’t moved, though there were tears in her eyes, when the police broke the door open.

---

They left me alone at last, after several sessions of questioning about why I was consorting with the damned, though I think they’re still watching me. I convinced them she’d bewitched me into letting her in, but I don’t believe that. At least, the magic she used was older and more natural than the tricks of her kind.

Why didn’t she run? Maybe what she did to me exhausted her. It almost seemed, though, that she’d no will to resist. Because I’d betrayed her.

I hope she’s all right. The government assures us that the damned are sent to institutions where they’re taught the evil of their ways, to be turned into obedient servants of society, but I dream every night of fire and screaming, and it’s as if I’m surrounded all day by ashes and blood. As if I’m damned.

---

Truth Banks

By Damien Krsteski

I stare at the gap between the mountain peaks of data. There’s been a break-in.

“Backups?” I say. Fresh snow crunches under our steps.

“Checked. Same gap everywhere.”

I picture the satellites containing the data of the Truth Banks, the supercomputers buried deep underground with backups and revision history, the top-secret security systems. If there’s one heist impossible to pull it’s this one, and yet the fifteen millisecond gap is right before me like a splinter in the holograms.

“Have you sent agents to verify?”

He flips the holo-generator’s lid back on and pockets the device. “Of course, Marcus.”

We turn right in a side-street. As a warning, he’s brought Lilly. She rushes ahead of us, spinning in the falling snow.

He says, “There’s a timer in the code, counting down. To what, we don’t know, but it’s unstoppable. You have until sunrise to find them.”

Lilly gathers snow with her purple gloves, throws the snowball at me.

“And after this?” I say.

Toothy grin. “You do this right, Marcus, and you get her back.”

Fists in my pockets. I nod.

Crouching to give Lilly a kiss on the cheek. “I am your daddy and I will always love you,” I say.

She giggles. “You are funny,” she says.

The agent pats her on the head, still grinning. “I think you’re right, Lilly. He is funny.”

I wipe my tears off with a sleeve, and fixing him a look of utter contempt, start my stopwatch.

---

The stairs lead down to a basement I know all too well. On the cement wall, in white paint, the name Gibson.

He’s hunched over his desk, a pair of goggles on his face. He touches a circuit with the electronic pencil in his hand and a buzz echoes in the workshop.

He looks up. With measured steps I approach.

I can see my doubled reflection in his onyx goggles. My face is expressionless. A mask. He goes back to his tinkering. “What do you want?” His voice is steady, no trace of fear.

“Banks were hit.” Slowly, I circle around him, breathing in the stale air of the workshop, taking in all the details. A pile of half-rotten ersatz-flesh robots in one corner. A calendar with a naked Asian babe, cracks snaking out of the wall spot where it’s been nailed. Cardboard boxes, duct-taped all over, scattered around. “All of them. Backup servers, too.” I swipe a finger on his work desk, examine the dust on my fingertip. “Nobody hacks into UN satellites, least of all the Truth Banks, without consulting the expert first.”

He sets the pencil tool down, lifts the goggles to his forehead. “You know Marcus, sometimes you’re a real pain in the ass.”

“Names, Les.”

“UN’s got you in their pocket, huh? What is it this time? Caught you pirating virtuals? You swapped jail time by ratting old friends out–”

His nose breaks with my punch. Blood sprays all over my jacket. He barely has time to scream out when my left fist connects with his jaw.

I catch him by his collar.

“You have one minute. Make calls. Think. Pray. I don’t care. If you don’t give me names inside of a minute your skin will be a bag of shattered bones.”

Bloodied, he examines me, looks me straight in the eyes. “I used to work for the Agency too, you know?”

Closer to his face. “Fifty-nine seconds.”

But his eyes are searching for something, and I know he knows. “They got you transmitting to UN’s private servers, right?” He laughs. “Hey, pals.” Looking straight into my eyes. “Still the same rotten fuckers you were back in the day, I see.”

He spits blood in my face, but he’s spitting at them, really.

With sudden clarity, like a mirror unbreaking before me, I know he’s a danger. Worse, he’s all that’s bad with the world, the cause and root of all evil. I wrap my hands around his neck. Squeezing tight, I choke him, exorcising the world of evil, until his eyes roll back and he slumps to the ground, motionless.

A step back.

As suddenly as it came the knowledge dissipates, and I’m left staring at Les Gibson in his gray overalls, electronic pencil clutched in his fist. Les Gibson, who’s never truly hurt anyone besides a few corporations’ bottom lines.

Terror creeps up my body like a swarm of spiders. What did I just do?

Altering truth so blatantly is another warning of theirs, another reminder that they own me. I kick through the pile of fleshy robots and electric body parts scatter all over the floor, a thick, blue substance oozing out of them. I punch walls, venting out anger, disgusted with myself. Then I remember Lilly and regain my composure.

I rummage through Gibson’s desks, drawers, cardboard boxes, for a clue, a hint that he was somehow involved, but find nothing.

On my way out, something catches my eye. I approach the naked and kneeling Asian model. The dates. Numbers are scrambled, out of order. I tap the calendar’s screen twice but the picture doesn’t refresh. I flick through the other months where the days, under naked ladies of various ethnicities, are ordered normally.

Scanners switched on, I notice a network field around it. The calendar is receiving data.

---

Walking through Les’ neighborhood, I watch a throng of people shuffling about in the evening snow. Couples holding hands, friends laughing, parents with children, woolen hats and gloves and boots and scarves. I no longer consider them human. Instead, I see the eyes and ears of the Truth Banks, witnessing and recording every sound and motion. I see everyone who wouldn’t believe a single thing I say because the great gig in the sky tells them otherwise. I see obstacles, standing between me and my daughter.

My head buzzes with knowledge. The Agency bastards have cracked the calendar. The data it’s getting for its content comes from a location nearby.

I quicken my pace, knowing where to go.

---

The dilapidated house looks like it won’t survive another winter. Precariously, I climb up the creaking porch steps, and push open the lockless door. Walls, pissed and written on, hardly hold the structure up, and I have a horrible feeling in my gut that the roof’s just about to crumble down and bury me. Through a tight hallway, my Whisperer in hand, finger on the trigger, I sidle up to what must’ve been a living room.

Sprawled on the floor is a pale-faced junkie, needle stuck in one arm. I kick him, my Whisperer pointed at his heart.

He moans, and there’s a flicker of movement under his eyelids.

“Better sober up quick.” My grip on the gun is steady. “Anyone else in this house?”

But he turns his head, smiles, and nods off.

When I step into the adjacent room, I hear a clicking sound, followed by a blinding flutter. A nondescript body appears before me, shaped out of light and dust motes.

“Hello, Marcus,” says the hologram.

My name comes like a bucket of ice cold water.

“Who are you?”

In the center of the decimated room the faceless shape looks haunting.

“We are the Undoing,” it says. “The Tint of Optimism. The Collective. Call us what you wish. We are nameless.”

Despite its utter futility my gun’s pointed at the hologram. “You broke in the Truth Banks.”

“Indeed.”

“What do you want?” I wave my Whisperer at it. “Money? Release of prisoners?”

Even though it has no mouth I can sense it’s smiling. “No, Marcus. We want to restore order, give Truth back to the people.”

The shape flickers and gestures, but remains rooted to the spot. There’s probably a holo-generator on the floor and cameras embedded in the walls. They must’ve seen my face and ran a pattern-matching search for my name. I better keep them talking while Agency traces the signal.

“The world ain’t ordered to your tastes?”

It pauses for a moment, then says, “The Truth Banks were a brilliant idea, Marcus. Give everyone access to all the world’s knowledge, to every fact and action and you’ll have no more lies, no more wars. But humans always find ways to cheat the system for their own selfish benefit.”

“You’ve proven you can break in,” I say, packing my Whisperer in its holster. “Now go get yourself a nice scholarship, a job, a family.”

It laughs, voice sharp as crystal.

“What good would a family be in a world where it can be taken from you at the flip of a switch, in a world where a daughter can’t recognize her father because an organization has its iron grip on truth?”

Lilly. They can’t have pattern-matched that. I gape at the hologram, scraping for words. “How do you know?”

The light is out for a second and my heart sinks, thinking they’ve left, but it soon comes back like an apparition. “We are everywhere, Marcus. Even in the servers of the UN Intelligence Agency.”

My mouth dry, I say, “What do you want?”

“In ten hours the Truth Banks are going offline forever, backups irreparably destroyed,” it says. “You have that much time to prepare society for a world without absolute truth.”

It bows its head slightly, and I get the uncomfortable sensation that it pities me. In a flash, it disappears, leaving me alone on the creaking urine-soaked floor.

---

Agency activates operatives in Minsk at a moment’s notice, and sends them to the decoded address. I borrow their eyes and ears to monitor the action from the safety of my flat.

I see them walk across a grassy field, assemble at the bottom of an old commie block. I see them climb up a fire ladder into a claustrophobic hallway, where one foot after the other they crawl, silent as cockroaches, only to unleash their fury on a flaking door, kicking it to the ground and pouring themselves like a flood into the tiny apartment.

They spread to the rooms. Check under every table and behind every mirror. Nothing. The place is empty.

I switch off the consoles, put my coat on, and gun tucked in its holster I head out into the cold.

My neighborhood is calm, the snow untrodden. On a pixelated billboard, right above a soda drink advert, the four zeros of midnight.

Agency had the hologram’s signal analyzed thoroughly by advanced decryption software. The majority of it led to Minsk in Belarus, but it was split many ways, through many local routers, to mask its source. One of the routing spots was a children’s playground. I recognized the coords when I saw them.

It takes me fifteen minutes to get to it, the icy wind biting at my cheeks all the way.

One gloved hand on the gun’s grip as I approach the unused see-saws, the squealing merry-go-round. Snow flakes thick as cotton fall from the dark sky, glinting in the lamp light like diamonds. I make a tentative step towards the benches. That’s where I always sat, watching Lilly play with the other children. Emotion surges through my body, stops in my throat like a lump of coal. I swallow, gun pointing straight ahead.

But there’s nobody, so I activate the scanners with an eye blink. Foraging through drifting nanotech for network traffic logs, they download all data.

A fluttering sheet of paper carried by the wind sticks against my leg. I pick it up.

It’s a drawing. A little girl holding a boy’s hand, their grins like watermelon slices, her hair curly and golden, his short and brown. As I hold the drawing, the smart paper transmutes the crayon colors and shapes into letters. Never Alone, it says.

I let go of the drawing. The wind reclaims it, carrying it away into the sky.

---

Back home the nanotech in my head transfers the scanner data to my local console.

A whirlpool pulls me down, spinning, and spits me out into the depths of the Net. I see giant strings representing the Minsk signal. I pluck them. The transmission replays, the strings curl around each other like spaghetti, and I chase after them, twisting as they do, watching the intricacies of each separate thread, until the signal ends, and the strings grow taut and silent again.

My decrypting software splices the signal from the ruined house with the networking data from Minsk and the playground. The strings triple in numbers, and we’re spinning again, me and them.

Embedded within, I discover seven different codes, different locations.

This time I decide to go there myself. Without wasting any time I ping body rental shops in the separate cities, wire them the necessary money, and split myself seven ways.

---

I open my eyes. All fourteen of them. No longer in my virtual system, it takes me a moment to adapt to the different levels of brightness. In Osaka the sun may be shining, but in Trento it’s as dark and cold as in the apartment where my real, flesh-and-bones body is slumped in virtual slumber.

I take a step forward, and the robots obey. My vision’s kaleidoscopic, the sound a composition of seven competing symphonies.

On separate channels I observe the robots’ every step. I trot along a snow-free sidewalk in Baltimore. The light-rail train rushing by, the passengers’ eyes all hazed out, their minds off to their favorite virtuals. From a corner, blinding rays of sunshine. Sydney, Australia. People walking about, dressed scantly, wearing sunglasses and straw hats.

Red compasses point me in the right directions, and I orchestrate my bodies to follow. In Saint-Malo the location is a mussels restaurant, probably closed at this hour, lodged between a pancake shop and a souvenir stand. Istanbul’s transmission origin is an abandoned warehouse near the harbor. Krakow’s is St. Adalbert’s church, in the old town.

“Watch it.” A tanned, shirtless man gesticulates before me. Seems like I walked into him and his red-haired girlfriend. I backpedal, and hurry down the Sydney boardwalk.

I jog along an upward slope in Saint-Malo, raindrops in my vision, the static noise of the ocean in my ears. Wind flaps the canvas of an awning. On the sign beneath it: La Creperie d’Auguste. Right next to that, the restaurant. The compass arrow in that part of my vision spins in a circle. I’m at the right place.

An equally dark, though much quieter sea in Istanbul. Warmer climate. A drunken homeless man stops to look at me while I’m examining the warehouse. In my fish-lens view I see him coming up from behind. My metallic body turns swiftly. Voice volume dialed up to max, I yell out, “Get lost.” His eyes widen with fear, he drops his bottle and runs off. The entrance to the warehouse is on the northern side. Compass arrow spins in a circle. Two out of seven.

Sydney’s location is right at the end of the boardwalk, so I run, planks barely making a sound under the weight of my carbon-nanotube legs. My torso twists, the sun glinting off it, making other people raise their hands to shield their eyes.

A patchwork sky. Like a quilt stitched up of moons, stars, and a sun which appears only in certain corners.

The ramen place in Osaka is open, and I push open the door. Two men in business suits at the counter, gulping down their meals, and a couple in a booth, waiting for their order. Nobody looks up. There’s one other robot there, powering itself, perched against the red brick wall. My compass points me towards the bathroom.

On the bus, on my way to the old town, in Krakow.

There’s snow in Trento, too. The river Adige is livelier than ever, the snow pouring strength and life into it. Along its left bank, under a bridge, is my location. Three out of seven.

The warehouse door is bolted shut. I lean and push with my right shoulder but it doesn’t budge. The robot’s warning system reminds me of the terms of use, and the amount of damage its mechanical muscles can take, so I stop trying to force it open and think of a better plan.

The bus stops. I hop off. Market Square is empty, save for a few drunken tourists. Getting near the church gets the compass spinning.

Osaka. The women’s bathroom. I hesitate for a second, check that there’s no one there, and push open the door.

Disabling the alarm, I walk into the dark and empty restaurant. Inside, a tiled floor, the upturned chairs and tables, and the blackboard with Moules Frites and prices and the Soup du Jour written on it in chalk.

Baltimore’s location is a light-rail station one block away from the city center. There’s only one other person, smoking a cigarette, tapping his foot impatiently, waiting for the train.

At the end of the boardwalk, in Sydney, with the sun right on top of me. Spinning compass.

I notice a window on the east side, moonlight reflected in it. I place a hand firmly on the drainpipe, and slowly, one foot after the other, I climb up, and break into the warehouse.

Seven out of seven.

Compasses dissolve out of sight, no longer needed. With the equipment built into the robot bodies I analyze the locations for transmissions, for nanotech routers. Colored bars fill up.

I download all network data into my console.

“Oh, excuse me, I didn’t–”

It takes me a second to figure out the voice’s origin, but once I do, all six other locations collapse, blanked out of my mind. A robotic face stares straight into mine, and neither of us moves, not even a bit. In the bathroom mirrors another pair of robots, staring at each other.

“Who are you?” he says at last.

He’s Agency, has to be. Knowing I ripped the seven locations off the routing tables they must’ve sent other men too. “I got this, you can go back home now.”

But he says nothing, face unflinching.

“Who are you?” he repeats, making it obvious he’s not them, because they got nothing to hide, they don’t need to act. The realization fills my real body, thousands of miles away, with terror.

Noticing scanning activity from his body I say, “You’re not Agency?”

“I’m not.” He takes a step forward. “I mean I am, but just this one job. You’re here, so I guess you too, right?”

Another hunter.

“To my utmost pleasure,” I say.

He approaches by another step. “They took someone from you too?”

I raise my hand to stop him. Stop him from coming closer, from saying another word. I hiss, “None of your business,” though the speech synthesizer softens my voice back to normality.

He waves his arms around. “Got my little sister. She doesn’t recognize my name. You don’t understand what they’ve put me through. I got a few hours to catch them, and all I’ve found is that calendar in Philly.”

My mind races. I have to be the first to find the hackers, otherwise Agency might keep Lilly from me forever. I have to squeeze more out of him, get what I can, then feed him false information in return.

But as I open my mouth Agency alters my truth and I know this robot face is my most trustworthy ally.

I smile. Makes sense. We don’t have much time so they need us cooperating. They don’t care who catches those who broke in as long as the job’s done.

So here, in the women’s restroom of an Osaka ramen bar, we tell each other everything.

---

The locations are hops. Points on the map through which they route network traffic, stops for small fragments of unidentifiable data. Once the routing information from the seven locations is spliced together, the hops triple. I’ve no intention on wasting any more time by going to these places, because I know that all I’ll find are more routers, leading to more locations.

So I send an AI to do it for me. Rent bodies, find locations, analyze traffic.

To Philadelphia I go in my real body though, because I need to see for myself, because robots are incapacitated by law to do the things I intend on doing.

---

Downtown Philly. Dark, cold, no snow.

This little place, like a garage, where these hackers gather, to share knowledge or program stuff or what have you. Raymond’s words, in the Osaka bathroom. Fucking insane what they’re doing, like teaching themselves to do stuff, without knowing what they’re doing, or something, just to avoid the Banks.

I stand before the closed garage from Raymond’s coordinates. I knock twice with the tip of my Whisperer.

Kids knew nothing, he told me truthfully, but that bugged calendar led me here.

It takes me half a minute to hack the padlock. Lifting the garage door carefully, until there’s just enough room for me to slip through.

Inside, on a mattress on the ground, two boys, barely above sixteen, asleep. The place seems to be made up only of computer terminals, linked-up in a network of phosphorescent nanobots which halo the machines. From the wall, above the mixed up dates, the naked Asian model smiles down at me. I pull out a chair to sit down, and an empty soda can drops to the floor.

One of the boys stirs, looks up at me. “What the–” He sees my gun. Shuts up. He shakes the other one, not taking his eyes off the Whisperer.

“Explain everything to me,” I say.

They stand up.

“We already told everything we know,” says the one who woke up first. He’s wearing a Rest In Pus t-shirt and a beanie.

“Unlike the last guy you spoke to, I’m not afraid to kill.” A smile. “Now tell me everything. Start with what you’re doing here.”

They stare at me. “We live here.”

“Just the two of you?”

“No, there are others.”

“Where are they?”

“Work. School,” says the other one, with the scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Show me what you do with all this?” Waving my gun at the equipment.

He turns to the beanie. “Spike?”

Spike hesitates for a moment, then he shrugs and walks over to the calendar. “Twenty-seven. A Monday,” he says, staring at the dates.

The scarf starts up the machines near him, the nanobot halo lights up, and I’m observing the two of them, confused.

“Twenty-seven,” repeats the scarf, typing something on the air before the machine. “A Monday.”

I approach the projected screen. Code flies from top to bottom.

Spike’s still gaping at the calendar. “Then there’s a Wednesday. Four hundred and forty five.”

“Four hundred and forty five. Wednesday.” More typing. More computer code.

“What are you doing?” I say.

He turns towards me while typing up numbers and days into a program which morphs them into code. “I don’t know.”

I hiss, “You’re typing code. What’s the code for? Are you hacking?”

He looks me straight in the eyes, his fingers dancing on the invisible keyboard, and then he stops. They both stop.

“What was that?”

Both of them sit down on the mattress. “Something we do every day.”

“Who told you to?”

“A friend,” says Spike. “Said it was some sort of hacking tradition. But he honestly knew nothing about it, said he’d been doing it for a while, reading off calendars, or posters, or book pages, that somehow found their way to him, typing code, and that many people before him had done the same.”

“But why are you doing it?”

They shrug. “It’s tradition.”

I threaten to kill or torture them if they don’t tell me everything, but they swear that they just did. After a while, I start to believe them.

Outside, in the cold Philadelphia air, I gather my thoughts. Should I chase after their friend? And then after those before him? The chain is bound to end somewhere, but I fear I’ll never reach it in time.

Somehow, I’m reminded of ants, where each colony member carries food, moves matter piece by piece, not knowing what it’s building exactly, but building something nonetheless.

That’s when I remember Les Gibson’s workshop.

---

Running down the basement stairs, past the white paint. In the darkened basement, the robot bodies scattered all around as I’ve kicked them, the scrambled calendar on the wall, Les’ body, face down, in one corner.

I hurry to his desk, to the thing he was working on. I toss the microchip from hand to hand, analyze the writing on it. TYPE LI, it says. A robot brain.

I pick up the closest ersatz-flesh robot from the ground, its limbs limp. Behind its gray non-differentiated head, a panel. I flip it open.

Once the microchip is put in its place I let go, and the robot drops to the floor. A luminescence appears. A nanobot halo, connecting all scattered bodies, and like magnets they pull each other up, until they’re made whole again.

The robots stand in a circle, twist their necks to face me.

“Hello, Marcus,” they say. “Did you prepare society?”

“You’re controlling people.” I spit on the ground. “You’re no better than those abusing the Truth Banks.”

They smile crooked smiles, shake their little heads. “No, no, no, Marcus. You have it all wrong. We are the people, getting our Truth back.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. I saw kids do stuff automatically. Countless others as well, I bet.”

“True,” they say, their voices strangely innocent. “But don’t you see that that’s what they wanted? To fight a system which monitors you constantly you have to figure out a way to destroy it without it knowing, without you knowing. Little by little, the tricks spread, everyone started doing small fragments of a job without being aware of its goal, not knowing the whole puzzle.”

“And so you were made,” I say. “You’re no people. You’re an AI, aren’t you?”

The gray, genderless robotic children giggle, a collage of different laughing tracks. “We consider ourselves an extension of humanity. Its helping hand. The Tint of Optimism. The Undoing.”

“The Collective,” I add, raising my gun. “Now call it off.”

“No,” they say. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I have to stop you, I have to. Need to get my daughter back.”

“Poor, poor Marcus. Always at the service of Truth, even when that Truth is twisted, bent, and broken.” Their heads turn towards each other, nodding. “Truth broken, but Marcus is never alone, is he? Never alone.”

Suddenly I become conscious of the dead body in the room.

“Tell me one thing,” I say. “Was Les the one who started it all?” And if so, did he plan and orchestrate his own death, or was it an act of patricide?

A wave of shrugs. “We don’t know, don’t remember.”

I fire my Whisperer at one of their heads. It bursts open, spraying blue goo. They don’t say a word.

I shoot the others, one by one.

---

I’m walking fast, aimlessly, thinking what to do.

Reports from my robots come back, and all they’re saying is that there are more locations routing data all over the world, but I already know that. I’ll never trace all of them in time.

Panic mounts as my stopwatch seems to go faster and faster.

Even if I find all of these little workshops where people unknowingly contribute to the fall of the Truth Banks, there’s absolutely no way anyone would know enough about what they’re doing to tell me. It’s the perfectly distributed system. The ultimate pyramid scheme.

I picture the data, small chunks of it, added day after day by unsuspecting people, hopping from router to router as it circles the globe, assembling into the AI.

I will Agency to send me more knowledge, perhaps from some of their other hunters, but receive nothing. All I feel is hurt and love for my little Lilly.

Somewhere in the distance, behind a cluster of skyscrapers, the sun’s peeking above the horizon.

---

The changes come in waves. First, my memory unwinds like tape, and my brain starts to weed out the inconsistencies.

To alter your Truth, the Banks plant a small nugget in your brain, a tiny memory of something being said or done, and then your brain changes its structure, sticks memories around the nugget, adds to the stability of the fact. Now, I’m peeling off layer after layer.

A lightning flash in the sky.

I see myself in seven different cities, in the playground, in the ruined house, I see the operatives in Minsk, Raymond, all of us scanning the nanotech routers for traffic data, and consequently altering the traffic logs, muddying them with our presence. All of us manipulated by the AI to clean its tracks.

Another flash from above.

Sitting on the bench at the playground I see children. I see a boy playing with its robotic companion. Up and down on the see-saw, he laughs, and she laughs too, the newest type being capable of laughter. Type LI. Lilly, as they call them.

Lilly, Your Child’s New Best Friend.

A sheet of paper carried by the wind. Your Child. Never Alone. With the specifications and pricing for the latest model.

The lights are blinding my eyes. I’m in Les’ neighborhood as far as I can tell. There are people all around. Not sure what’s real and what’s memory, I let my brain sort everything out itself.

My stomach hurts. I’m going crazy and getting sane at the same time. My legs buckle and I slump to the ground.

Lilly. My daughter. But I know that’s no longer true, I know I’ve been lied to, and I feel betrayed, hurt. Like waking from a beautiful dream, sad that it’s over and sad that it’s never really begun.

I cry out, tears running down my cheeks. I shout, pull my hair out, stomp my feet on the ground, angry at my loss. I’m waiting for a comforting buzz in my head from someone, from anyone, but the presence is gone.

With tears in my eyes I look up at the flashes, high above. From the blue, morning sky, the satellites rain down like balls of fire.

---

Magic Hands

By Iulian Ionescu

Ritha unfolded a square piece of red cloth on the table, caressing it with her palm to get rid of the wrinkles. She pulled a candle closer and lit another one to brighten the room.

Today she couldn’t hate Mr. Pierre more even if the bastard were to walk in through the door right now and spit in her face. One day, she thought, one day…

“Good for nothin’,” she mumbled under her breath and picked a needle from the sewing kit.

Ritha stuck the thread through the needle’s ear in one shot, just like her mama taught her. She chuckled. Mama… If she were here, all those bastards would be screaming in pain right now.

But mama was dead and Ritha was out of job and short on rent.

Where is that picture? She rummaged through her pocket and took out a pack of photographs kept together by a rubber band. She shuffled through the stack, pulled one photo out, and leaned it against her teacup.

Pierre–you dirty piece of–. Ritha slapped herself over the mouth. ‘We don’t use those words,’ mama used to say. ‘If we do, we ain’t better than the rest o’them.’

Ritha grabbed a handful of yarn and arranged it in a ball over the red cloth.

She glanced at the photo– not that she had to, but that’s how mama had taught her. ‘Always look,’ she used to say. ‘Through your eyes the power flows. Let the image seep inside your head, Ritha, and the energy will come through. From your eyes it will flow into your fingers and into the needle.’

She grabbed the corners of the cloth and pulled them together over the yarn. She held them tight with her fingertips and stuck the needle through.

Ritha used to make one in about twenty minutes, but today there wasn’t a lot of time. She glimpsed at the crib, hidden in the darkest corner of the room. She needed this one, she needed it badly. Nobody gave a damn about the little one, especially Mr. Pierre.

Ritha clenched her teeth and continued to sew.

At the end of fifteen minutes she put the red doll next to Mr. Pierre’s picture and smiled. Mama would’ve been so proud.

The clock ticked louder, signaling the top of the hour. 8PM. Only fifteen minutes left.

She grabbed the doll and the photo and ran into the enchanting room. She put them both gently in the center of a circle made from colored salts, on top of a metallic tray. She dropped a few locks of hair on the sides and lit the sands from a match.

As the salts burned slowly, releasing a sweet smell of burned sugar, Ritha closed her eyes and recited the magic poem, the one passed to her by her mama. She waved her hand through the smoke and sprinkled drops of oil through the air.

Ten minutes later, Ritha was exhausted. Her chest was heavy and her breath bitter. The salts had burned completely and the doll lay there unmoving, like a dead man in the middle of a forest fire.

She took the doll and ran back. 8:15.

The phone rang and she grabbed it after the first chime. She glanced at the crib, biting her lip. The baby was still sleeping.

“Hello?” a voice said in the receiver.

“Yes, I am here.”

“Ready?”

“Yes, Mr. Pierre, I am. How much today?”

Her heart thudded in her chest. How much humiliation today, she wondered. Enough for milk, at least?

“Ten dollars,” the man said.

She lifted her brows. That wasn’t half bad.

“Oh, thank you–”

“Cut it out, Ritha. I’m in a good mood. Don’t ruin it.”

She bowed, instinctively. “I understand, sir.”

“Did you fix it? Last time–”

“It’s brand new, sir, brand new.”

Silence on the other side.

“Okay, then. Go ahead, the usual. Shoulders, neck and lower back.”

Ritha pressed the speaker button and put the receiver on the table. She grabbed the red doll and turned it face down. With her fingers, she began to massage the doll’s shoulders and lower back.

Pleasure grunts came out of the phone. “Oh, that’s good, Ritha, keep going.”

She continued to massage the doll, her eyes fixated on the kitchen knife, only ten inches away from the doll’s head.

Her heart pounded a few times, pumping hot blood through her temples. She extended one hand toward the knife…

The baby giggled in the crib and turned on one side, his sleepy face pressed against the crib’s bars. Ritha looked at him, startled, her hand suspended in the air.

“What’s going on there?” Mr. Pierre screamed. “I am paying for two hands, dammit!”

Ritha grabbed the knife and threw it far away from her reach.

She gestured a kiss toward the crib and put both her hands on the doll.

“I am here, Mr. Pierre, I am here,” she said, tears dripping down her cheeks.

Mr. Pierre responded with a long moan.

The baby giggled gently in his sleep, and Ritha continued to cry in silence. ‘Be happy when there’s reason to be happy,’ her mama once said.

And Ritha was happy because tomorrow the baby gets to eat the good milk.

---

The Transceiver

By J.A. Becker

A cold shudder runs through me as I look through the one-way mirror at the psycho in the orange jumpsuit who’s handcuffed to the table. What I’ll see in his head, what I’ll feel and experience first hand will be like living nightmares. I don’t know if I can handle them. I’ve seen some terrible things, but nothing like what he’s done.

The psycho raises a styrofoam cup of hot coffee to his mouth, but the chain connecting his handcuffs to the table is too short, so when he gets the cup halfway up, his arm jerks to a stop and the coffee spills onto the lap of his bright orange coveralls. He swears and frantically squirms in his seat to stop the coffee from scalding him. The pained look on his face tells me that he isn’t succeeding.

Good, I think. He deserves that. That’s fitting for a guy like him. That’s perfect.

He plunks the cup down in front of him and shakes the hot brown liquid from his hands, which sends his chains rattling and clanking over the table’s black metal top.

He doesn’t look like much sitting there, coke-bottle glasses, short salt and pepper hair, and so skinny he seems lost in those orange overalls. With what they told me about him, I imagined some beefy guy with tattoos of little spiders at the corner of his eyes and pipes the size of my head–not somebody who could have been my grade 9 science teacher.

Let someone else do this, my inner voice tells me. Don’t they have people trained to do stuff this? Why the hell does it have to be me?

Then I remind myself of the deal I made, a deal I’ll find nowhere else: get what the authorities need from this lunatic and then the agency goes back to working out how to shut off this mechanism in my head.

Life will be worth living again without it.

---

“Doctor Brown,” I say as I step into the interrogation room. The overhead lights wash over me, making me pause and blink stupidly as my eyes adjust. Considering I was trying to look like I know what I’m doing, I’m off to a cracking start.

“How long have you been in the dark on the other side of the mirror watching me?” he asks.

I ignore him and skirt the room to keep out of his reach. I pull out the metal folding chair on the opposite side of the table and sit. The chair groans under the pressure of my considerable bulk.

Appear confident and don’t directly engage him, they told me during the prep. There is no need to talk to him. Just tune in, get what we need, and then get out.

I open his packed vanilla folder on the table and pretend to read over some of the details. I give the papers a little nod like I’m agreeing to some tidbit I read and then I look up at him.

His coke-bottle lenses engorge his pale grey eyes. A thin smile splits his lips.

I break eye contact and look down at the papers.

“You’re pretty fat for an agent,” he says suddenly. “Don’t you guys have to keep fit?”

His comment catches me off guard and I snap my head up to look at him.

His eyes are leveled straight at mine and I don’t think he’s blinked since I last looked away. He’s baiting me I realize, and I look back down at the folder. I pretend I’ve finished reading the page and turn it over.

“Congratulations,” he says. “You finally got through that page. That took some doing.”

I keep my head down and focus on the next page. I don’t need to talk to him to do this, I remind myself. I just need to be sitting close and my mind will automatically tune in to his. For the first time in my life, I’m grateful it’s automatic–I wouldn’t have the stones to do it intentionally with him.

“You are interesting,” he says and then I hear his seat shift and his chains clack. A jolt of fear rips through me. He’s gotten free! I think and I nearly leap out of my seat and scream. But when I look up, I see he hasn’t. The sounds were caused by him straightening out his chair and rattling the chains on the table as he clapsed his hands together.

He smiles, revealing a bright wall of teeth. He seems quite pleased with himself for scaring the hell out of me.

I notice there’s something different about him now, he seems bigger to me. When I saw him through the mirror, he was lost in his orange coveralls, but now it’s like he’s grown to fill them. He seems taller too. He must have been slouching when I came in and now that he’s sat up straight he towers over me.

“Clearly, you’re not an agent,” he says. “Nor are you a caseworker, policeman, psychologist, or anything that would make sense in this situation. You are interesting.”

“Great,” I say sarcastically, then I regret it because I remember that–no matter what–I wasn’t supposed to engage him. But he continues as though he didn’t hear me.

“They prepped me for you. Didn’t let me sleep, didn’t let me eat, and drove me round and round to disorient me. And then you’d think with all that build up, somebody important would come in and finish me off. But imagine my surprise when you walk in–you who doesn’t seem like anybody at all.”

His words bite deep and I pop off before I have a chance to think.

“You don’t seem like anything to me either,” I say defensively. “Just some skinny shit in handcuffs. Nothing special.”

“John Smith,” he says, leaning in and reading the name off the glossy white tag pinned to my black sweater. “That’s what I find so interesting. All this deception to bring in a fat little man who practically crept into this room and slunk along the walls to get away from me. And then he sits down across from me and there’s nothing–not a word or a peep out of you. That’s what I find so interesting.”

I’m not even pretending to read the papers anymore. I’m just going to sit here and wait for it to happen. I’m not engaging him.

“John…” he says slowly as though he doesn’t quite believe that’s my name. “Can I call you John? I have a couple questions John. First off, I’m an excellent judge of people, so don’t lie to me because I can pretty much see straight through you.”

I can’t help it, but my eyes flicker up at him when he says that.

“John, even when you’re not talking to me–you’re talking to me. Now my first question is: who are you really?”

And then it starts, a whoosh of static, like a radio without a signal, crackles in my ears.

“John! You surprise me. There’s a little sparkle in your eyes and you’re smiling now. What’s so funny?”

“Nothing’s funny,” I say, smiling and grinding my teeth together, trying not to show the discomfort I’m in. “It’s just that we’re almost finished and then I get to leave here while you go back to your cell and rot.”

“How can we be finished? We haven’t even started.”

Pain stabs through my left eye. Something hot and sharp is in my head and is digging its way out through my left temple. It’s already up to the skin now, about to breach, when the thing starts to track across my brow. It feels like a fat June bug is merrily making its way across the frontal plate of my skull. The pain is unbearable. I look at my reflection, expecting to see a thick lump inching across my forehead, but there’s nothing there but a fat plane of pale white flesh. As the pain creeps towards my right temple, the static gets louder and a high-pitched whine screams in my ear. Tiny dots of white light dance like fireflies at the edges of my vision and I’m just near passing out. Then amongst the popping static I hear something that sounds like a word and the pain starts to crawl back the other way.

“Good Lord,” he says and leans in to get a better look at my face. “Are you well? You look like you’re having a heart attack. Have all those donuts finally done you in?”

I’m huffing and puffing now because I can’t seem to get enough air.

Trickles of sweat run down my spine and dive into the valley of my butt crack. The crackling static is like a dull roar in my ears, then suddenly the agony dissapates and the little white fireflies start to wink out one by one. All of which means I’m close. Just another frequency or two and I’m there.

“The pain has lessened now it seems,” he says. “And your fat head is cocked to one side as though you’re listening for something. John I have to say, this has definitely been worth the trip out here. What’s next I wonder?”

I hit his station and my ears pop as the pressure in them release.

Relief floods through me like an orgasm as the static dies down, and a film, of sorts, plays in my mind. I’m standing on a raised platform, overlooking a small crowd. A man in a grey business suit hands me a giant golden key. I take it and proudly raise it above my head. The crowd begins to cheer.

Then I’m back in the interrogation room, looking straight into his googly eyes.

Damn, I think. I got garbage. I hoped to get lucky and nail it the first time so I could get the hell out of here. I suck in a deep breath and pray it’s the next one.

A smile crosses his face and my jaw drops in astonishment.

“John,” he says. “I told you. You are interesting.”

This can’t be, I think as I shift uncomfortably in my seat. No one has ever been so calm before. How is this possible? I just painfully sucked a memory out of his head and at the same time one of my memories was pumped into him. How can anybody be so calm after experiencing something like that for the first time?

“John, I saw you arguing with some woman that I’m guessing was your wife. You were screaming and she was crying. She wanted you to make love to her, but you wouldn’t. That was awfully mean of you. She just wanted a little love John.”

“Shut up,” I say, remembering the fight and the decade-old wound rips open afresh like she and I were just arguing moments ago. Why is it that people only see the deepest, darkest, most personal secrets in my head? It’s never anything but those. It’s like they’re all bubbling right at the surface of my mind, just waiting to burst into somebody else’s head.

“John, you wanted to though. I could feel it in your heart. I could hear it in your thoughts. You wanted to do it with her, but you didn’t want the closeness of it. Why is that? That’s the whole point of it isn’t it?”

“Shut up,” I say.

“John,” he says and laughs. “You need a better poker face. I can see straight through you big guy. This is too easy.”

Before I can even think, another of his memories pops into my head. I’m in the backseat of a Cadillac now. It’s a convertible and the top is down. We’re driving down a long road that’s lined with people. The sky is full of confetti streamers and everyone along the road is waving and cheering for me. Then the memory fades.

What the hell was that? I wonder. I’m not seeing anything I need.

Where’s the blood? Where’s the twisted faces of the victims?

From across the table, he leans in and gently takes my hands in his. I jump back from his touch and accidentally knock the folder off the table and send it sprawling on the floor.

“John, we really need to talk. I’ve seen some terrible things in your head. You need help big guy.”

I push back from the table and stand. This isn’t right, I think. He can’t be taking this so well–it’s impossible. Nobody can be this cool after seeing into somebody else’s mind. Nobody.

“John, what’s the matter?”

I make my way to the door, keeping close to the mirror and as far away from him as possible.

“John, buddy. Where are you going? We haven’t even started.”

Another memory of his bursts into my head. I see a General with a chest full of medals and big cob pipe hanging out of the corner of his mouth. An aide rushes up and hands a small bronze star to the General who then takes the medal and pins it to my chest. The General steps back, snaps a stiff salute to me, and then the memory fades.

What the hell was that garbage? I think as I twist the doorknob in my hand. To my surprise, it’s locked. I rap my fist on the door. When nobody answers, I start to pound on it.

“John, I told you we are just getting started.”

“Why is this locked!” I yell. “Who the hell locked this?” I stand at the mirror and flail my hands back and forth. I look like a frantic fat man, trying to wave down an ambulance. “Unlock this!” I yell to whoever’s behind the glass and then I point at the door. I lean in and try to peer through the mirror, but all I see is my chubby cheeks and my plump hands hooded over my face.

“Tell me about your wife,” he says. “What happened to her?”

I snap my head around and glare at him. I try to read his face to see what he meant by that, but he’s sitting there with his hands clasped together, smiling pleasantly as can be and I can’t tell anything.

“Take a seat,” he says. “We may be here for some time John.”

“How the hell would you know that?” I growl.

“Just call it a hunch.” He replies.

There’s something wrong with this whole situation and he’s a part of it–I can feel it in the pit of my big stomach. I look at his huge grin and then back at the locked door. I’m trapped in here with him, I realize. Where the hell are they? On a coffee break? Didn’t I tell them–didn’t I specifically say–I can’t turn it off once it’s started?

Goddammit, open the fucking door before I lose my mind.

Suddenly a scene, his memory, plays in my head. It’s the same one of him getting the key to the city.

When the memory ends and I’m looking through my eyes again, I see him smile and nod at me. “Ahhh..,” he says like he’s just found the last elusive piece to a puzzle. “I understand now,” he says. “I understand you John.”

I know he wants me to ask him what it is he understands, but I’m not playing his game and responding. All I want is for this damn door to open so I can get the hell out of here.

“John,” he says. “What did you do with all of them?”

I freeze. My heart stops and I can barely breath.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say and I turn around and try the door again.

“Don’t lie to me John. I can see straight through you–straight through you like you’re not even there.”

His words knife into me and I spin around and face him.

“How many people did you kill to get your bronze star?” I snap at him.

I watch his reaction, but his smile doesn’t crack and those googly eyes don’t waver.

“Was it lots?” I continue. “Did you kill kids? Did you enjoy that?”

Static crackles in my head and suddenly I see the same scene of him being driven down the road in the Cadillac. The crowds are cheering and the sky rains confetti. Then the scene ends and I’m back in the room.

How is it possible to get the same crap from him every time? It’s like I’m watching looping stock footage. And meanwhile, he plumbs the depths of my mind and sees my deepest, darkest secrets.

God, I hate this thing in my head. Strangers who just happen to be in the same room as me will learn my most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things, and all my masks are stripped away, laying bare my innermost self for them to see. Nothing is my own. Everything, every part of my life, is on display for the fucking world to see.

“John, you’re so alone. What I’ve seen in your head, you living in the gutters, bumming for spare change, keeping as far as you can from people…you’re so alone.”

“Stay out of my head!” I shout.

“John, it’s you who’s doing this,” he replies.

Rage flushes through me and I walk towards him with my fat fists bunched together. He’s so cocky and sure of himself that he doesn’t even flinch when I get near him. I want to sock this smug, smiling son of a bitch in the jaw and rain blows down on his head till blood runs out of his ears.

“That would land you in trouble,” he says. “They’re probably right behind the mirror you know.”

I look at the mirror and I see my fat self with my hands poised like two hammers above his head.

He’s right, I realize, and I lower my fists and step back from him.

“John, I saw you as a skinny little boy of seventeen. You were in a dark room on a couch kissing some girl. Naughty. Naughty.”

“Shut up!” I say, and I instantly remember the girl and the situation.

“I could hear her name in your head. Sarah, lovely Sarah. And you were thinking: first base, finally first base.”

“Be quiet!” I shout.

“Then that thing in your mind, that wondrous mechanism you hate so much, kicked in. You thought the pain burning in your brow was because you were all hot and bothered, but it was you dialing in and a memory of her kissing some other boy popped into your head. That must have been quite upsetting: it’s your first kiss, she’s thinking about kissing someone else, and her memory is so real you can taste the other boy’s lips and feel his tongue rooting around in your mouth. Then she was screaming. She must have seen something terrible in your head because she was just screeching.”

His head snaps back as I punch him smack in the center of his flapping mouth. Somehow, by some miracle, his glasses stay on. But he’s not smiling anymore now though. His big eyes are watering and blood runs out of a split in his swelling purple lip. I look at my hand and see a small puncture hole between the fat of my knuckles where his tooth went in.

“And then I saw you much older and much fatter,” he continues as though two seconds ago I hadn’t punched him square in the face. “You were in a seedy hotel room with a prostitute whose face was plastered mess of makeup and you were doing what you could to get your business over with as quickly as possible before it could happen. But then, right in the middle of it, you tuned in and she was in your head and you were in hers. Good lord, the things you saw in that woman’s mind; felt them too…in a way you lived them.”

I raise my fist to punch him in the face again.

“Let me ask you one question,” he says and lifts his hands up to protect himself. “Do you see a pattern here?”

“Pattern?” I ask. “What pattern? What are you talking about?”

“The pattern of your life. You, women, and this thing in your head.

Think of it. Just calm down and think of it for one second.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I say. “I just want you to shut up.”

“I understand your frustrations, but try to think of it. All these things, these watershed moments in your life have built you into the person you are today.”

“Don’t analyze what you see in my head. Those are my memories! Mine!”

“I can’t help it John. I’m trained to think this way. I can’t help it as much as you can’t help tuning in.”

“Stay out of my head!” I yell as sobs wrack my big body.

“John, I’m trying to help you.”

“Fuck off,” I say.

I feel dizzy now. The floor sways beneath my feet like I’m aboard a ship. I can’t breathe either, it’s like all the air has gone out of the room. I need to sit down before I collapse, so I stumble over and take a seat in the empty chair.

“John, I thought this thing was a blessing, but I see how wrong I was. I see what it has done to you…what it’s turned you into.”

“Please stop,” I mumble.

I’m so exhausted from all this that I can barely raise my head up from the table to look at him. When I do, I see he’s neither smiling nor frowning; he actually has a look of concern for me on his face.

“John, this thing has weighed on you. Pressed you down and formed you into the person you are now. It’s the reason you are the way you are.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I choke out through mumbled sobs.

“Because I want you to know that it’s not your fault. All this was forced on you. What other life could you have led with this thing in your head? In my practice, I usually tell people all their problems are caused by themselves. But not you. You’re the victim here.”

I nod. He’s right. This was put on me. I never wanted it. I didn’t do anything to deserve this.

“John, what did you do with them?”

I stare through a veil of tears at the swimming tabletop. My emotions have drained out of me and now all I am is tired.

“John. All those women I saw in your head. The ones that got too close. What did you do with them?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I understand John. It was the only way to shut it off. The only way to stop them from seeing into you and you into them. It’s not your fault. It’s this thing in your head.”

“I never wanted this,” I blubber. “I never wanted any of this.”

“I know. I know.” he says and takes my hands in his. This time I don’t pull back. His hands are warm and I welcome his touch.

“John. Where did you put them?”

---

The Master’s Voice

By Todd Thorne

Jeff yawned at Allison through the storm door and scrubbed a hand over his shaggy salt and pepper locks. A mahogany bathrobe draped around his ex-jock physique, a body she adored and anticipated great delight in watching him whip back into its former glory.

“Am I bothering you?”

“Never,” he muttered, letting her in.

With the front door sealing off prying eyes, Allison tasted his stale mouth and gummy lips. “Have I ever mentioned how utterly dashing you are in the morning?”

“Sorry.” He yawned again. “Boudica kept going out all night. Driving me nuts. This is a nice wake-up call though.”

“Normally I wouldn’t risk dropping by. Today is extra special. I knew you’d be particularly happy to see me.”

“I’m already way past happy.” He drew her up against him.

A woman’s voice droned from the kitchen. “In. In. In.”

“‘Scuse me,” Jeff mumbled, sliding from her embrace.

Seconds later the back door squealed.

“Eat. Eat,” came the woman’s voice again, followed shortly by the can opener’s dutiful grind. “Eat. Eat,” the voice repeated in lifeless monotone as blobs of wetness sucked loose and splattered.

Allison strolled into the living room to wait, senses tingling from this, her first time inside the Lang residence, though her second actual visit. Six months ago, she’d dropped off contract originals for Jeff’s records–a cordial, professional, totally innocuous appointment, at least to any prying eyes watching at the time. Now the house wove an enticing tale through her casual observations. She absorbed impressions like a thirsty sponge slurping up a puddle.

Dust and dirt accumulated on every available surface–the sign of a mind too preoccupied with matters far beyond mundane concerns like basic house cleaning. Books, magazines and papers lay sprawled, several of the latter bearing the logo of her company and some of those were adorned with hasty scribbles and crossed-out notes. Unopened mail peeked like Easter eggs nestled in stray places: between empty beer bottles, atop grease-stained pizza boxes, on the marble coffee table, beside the Sony plasma, amidst scattered throw pillows and the occasional sock. Allison drank in the trappings of a life she knew to be normally quite tidy and efficient, now screeched to a crawl in a tight holding pattern.

And she approved.

“Sorry I didn’t clean up.” Jeff shuffled in, this time bearing a cheery grin for her instead of a yawn.

“Your maid needs a pep talk.”

“Or maybe a pink slip–wait a minute–I guess that would be me. Anyway, where were–”

The phone whistled, snatching away his smile.

Jeff palmed the handset. “Hello? Who? Lieutenant Fischer…” Twin furrows gouged into his brow. “It’s Saturday, right? You’ve got either really good news or very bad. So which is it?”

A fly’s pesky buzz escaped the handset, the only part of the detective’s report Allison overheard. Behind the whine lurked a paunchy middle-aged cop, a man that, five seconds upon meeting, she’d dismissed in summary order as seasoned but moronic; just another stereotypical male unable to break eye contact off a high-dollar pair of sculpted boobs. Unfortunately her one true dream–not to mention she, herself–remained unfulfilled until Fischer managed to just do his job. No more or less.

Which was really odd.

Here she stood silently cheering on the oafish turd that could actually stink up her whole life forever, should divine intervention somehow inspire the cop to overachieve. Not likely though. Fischer was that stupid.

“Oh my God!” Jeff choked.

Could it be? Heart thudding, Allison drifted over to him, mentally crossing her fingers as she did before every traumatic moment she faced.

“B-burned? Where?” A pause. “No… not where was the car burned. Where was it found? In Brownsville? But no sign of her. Uhhhmm… uhhh. Well, w-what do you think it means?”

She laid hands over his shoulders and began massaging the tense sinews wound tightly under the robe. His muscles rippled some, hinting of the hardness they longed for. Soon, apparently. Thank God the insufferable wait was nearly over.

“No, no. No! You’re wrong about that. I’m certain. She– Huh? P-p-probable homicide? No way. I don’t believe it. She’s just missing that’s all. Not even for that long. Only a few weeks. Little kids run away all the time and turn up much later, unharmed. My wife is very capable of taking care of herself. So, you’ll find her, right? I mean… alive?”

Martin Scorsese, eat your heart out.

Her hands drifted lower and discovered more rising tension, awaiting her touch. She obliged, stifling bubbles of joy brewing up the back of her throat. The annoying fly’s whine went forgotten.

“This is too much, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.” He sucked in deeply at her bolder groping. “I have to… I really need to go now. You’ll call if you learn anything else?”

She pressed up against his back, continuing her stroking. This was the second best news for them. The first still burned within her, itching to be shared.

“I understand. Goodbye, Lieutenant.” The phone beeped.

“They found the car?”

“Finally. Those idiots. I was beginning to think they couldn’t find the sun on a cloudless day. Cynthia’s now a ‘probable homicide’ and you are an evil vixen.”

A Border Collie trotted into the living room, licking its matted chops. Allison watched Boudica sit and stare, its ebony-tufted ears angling at them, two triangular radar dishes set atop twin marbles of shiny midnight. The collie froze in place, silent, looking like a taxidermist’s best work.

“Vixen? You call the woman, who’s going to make you filthy rich, names?”

He spun, snatching up her hands. “You got it through?”

“Let’s just say the policy is arranged, appropriately back-dated and clean. Upon Cynthia’s officially declared death, five hundred thousand goes to your daughter and absolutely zip to the poor, grieving widower. That should make a splendid looking headline if it ever showed up on CNN. Very magnanimous on your part too, I might add. Your daughter should lack nothing her last two years at Stanford and well afterwards.”

“Just how Cynthia would want it.”

“Too bad she wouldn’t much care for the five million that goes quietly to Geneva one month later.”

“No, but that’s how I want it.”

“We aim to please every customer.”

“Really? Here I thought I might be somewhat–what did you say?–extra special.”

“Play. Play.” A woman’s voice, matching the one in the kitchen, spoke from a small, white box on the coffee table.

“Not now, Boo,” Jeff said, bringing his lips to Allison’s. “So am I?”

“Play. Play.”

“Not n… on second thought.” His grin spoke volumes. He tugged her toward the master suite. “Go ahead. Please me. We’ve got something to celebrate after all.”

“I can’t. I have appointments… clients to see, Jeff.”

“First the cop, now you. What’s this working on weekends shit? Besides, this particular client has a lot more he wants to share with you. In private.”

“We’re taking big risks, you know, the more time we spend together. I really should go.”

He stopped at the foot of the king-sized pedestal bed and fumbled open her top blouse button. “You’re worth the risk. Five million times over, actually.”

“Walk. Walk.” A white box on the dresser spoke. “Walk. Walk.”

Allison rolled her eyes. “Don’t you get sick of that?”

He frowned.

She inclined her head at the dresser.

“The Petalator? It’s just what Cynthia recorded during Boudica’s training. No biggie. I hardly notice it anymore.”

“Cynthia?”

“Boo.”

“You don’t notice a talking dog?”

“Boo doesn’t talk. Not really. She’s interpreted, somehow, through her collar. Brain waves associated with behavioral conditioning–crap like that.” He finished the blouse and started on her skirt. “Way too technical for me. Cynthia was pretty anxious to dive in, so I let her handle it all. But I gotta say, dealing with a five word doggy vocabulary or actually–” He looked at the ceiling, pondering. “Did she say something about Boo knowing six now? Right before….” He shook off the unpleasant thought. “Anyway, putting up with just a few unambiguous words instead of suffering any other doggy noises is a pretty sweet deal. Don’t you think?”

“Walk. Walk.”

“Like that.” He waved his hand. “No guessing what Boo wants. Right?”

“But it’s her voice. Look, if we’re going to do this here, now, at least shut it off.”

He sighed. “Get in bed. I’ll mute the other stations and turn down this one.” He fiddled with the box on the dresser before leaving.

Allison discovered the still warm spot under the percale sheet and down comforter, a cozy present he’d unknowingly left her. A minute later the bedroom door clicked shut on just the two of them, Allison was happy to see. Jeff hung his robe beside her business suit and eagerly snuggled up to her. She hoped within her heart he’d be anxious for a few more kids, something they would start on in earnest once they got settled in Europe–something she begrudged Cynthia having done with him even just the one time.

Until then though, practice makes perfect.

“Walk,” came Cynthia’s soft flat voice.

His fingertips glided across her cheek, shadowed by his longing face. He shared a breathtaking kiss, the kind she’d become addicted to years ago in their first of many hotel encounters.

“Walk.”

“Jeff.”

“What?”

“It’s really annoying.”

“Think of it this way.” He propped up on one elbow and eyed her. “Maintaining status quo minimizes those risks you mentioned. It won’t be long. There’s the other half of the bottle in the garage waiting for Boo when this is all done and the cops don’t care anymore.”

“I mean right now. I can’t stand it.”

“Walk.”

“What if Boo has to pee? It’s the only way she can tell me.”

“Then let the damn thing piss on the floor!”

“Walk.”

Grimacing, he pinched the bridge of his nose before sliding toward the edge of the bed.

“Walk.”

It was maddening, him enduring that voice daily until they could be together. Leftover photos and personal effects were one thing, but Cynthia had established a legitimate reason to keep uttering one-word demands of Jeff from morning till night. It was an infuriating, almost-perfect haunting. Down-right inspired. The damn woman must have had Nostradamus’ genes to have arranged it so. How could she have known? They’d taken every precaution.

“Walk.”

Allison ground her teeth as Jeff seemed to slog his way over to the dresser.

“Walk.”

Here she’d finally found him: The One. Mister Right, after years of hopeless Wrongs had paraded through her life. But her white knight was possessed–caught in a tenacious specter’s stranglehold.

“Walk.”

She wanted Cynthia exorcised. Forever.

“Walk.”

“Jeff.”

“Walk. Walk.”

“Jeeeffff!”

“Walk. Out. Out. Out.”

She squeezed her eyes tight. “SHUT UP, CYNTHIA!”

“O–” Cynthia’s voice died as Jeff reached for the Petalator.

He frowned and thumbed a button. “It’s off. Happy now?” Almost immediately, the button began blinking.

“What’s that light?”

“I muted the volume, not the dog.”

“It’s still talking?”

“Do you hear anything?”

A soft thump rattled the bedroom door. A light scratch followed.

“I thought you said the dog didn’t make other noises.”

Another scratch.

“No, Boo! Go lay down.”

Multiple scratches raked the wood, banging it against the latch. Jeff stormed over.

“I… said… NO!” He yanked the door open.

A mass of fur sprung from the floor and smashed into his chest. As Jeff tumbled backward, Boudica’s muzzle clamped over his throat. Gurgling erupted from him before the pair hit the carpet. A sickly snap echoed in the room as Allison rolled away to the far side of the bed.

“Jeff?”

Silence.

“Say something!”

But he didn’t.

“Pleeeease.”

A five word vocabulary. Plus one… a new one.

She thought back to her arrival, the kitchen, the living room. Each succinct word replayed in Allison’s mind, expressed again in Cynthia’s lifeless voice. Frantic winking on the Petalator betrayed the sixth, as yet unheard, but easy enough to guess.

Keeping the bed between herself and the carnage, she stood on tiptoe and craned her neck in time to watch Jeff’s feet settle slowly back and grow still.

How wrong she’d been. Cynthia was no apparition; her vengeful form crouched mere feet away, all too real, all too ready, with the proper cues now provided, to exact retribution.

It was me, Allison sobbed with the realization. I told her to shut up. Jeff never would’ve. Mentally she crossed her fingers as she reached for the bed.

When the dog’s expected leap came, she jammed a pillow into the flailing teeth and ducked, flinging its speeding torso over her shoulder. It crashed somewhere behind her as she bolted past Jeff’s body and out of the bedroom. Naked, she ran to the front door, hurled it open and snatched at the storm door latch just as pain sizzled through her calf. She whirled and had time for one scream before the ripping, choking pressure stole it away and slammed her back into the glass.

---

The one time he’d met her, Lieutenant Raymond Fischer felt Allison Webber could straighten any man’s queer eye. From the tips of her lavender tinted toenails through the peaks of her perfect fake tits, the woman was built to ignite the male libido. Fischer’s pants shrank two sizes until he forced himself to stare at the shredded trachea and severed carotids that had spilled all their precious content onto the entryway berber carpet.

“What do you suppose set the dog off?” a detective video-recording the living room asked.

“How should I know?” Fischer replied. “Maybe it didn’t like the hubby poking the insurance lady.” He stood and let the stained sheet drape back over tarnished perfection. “Or maybe it suspected none of the policy money would be spent on doggy treats.”

A dusty, occasional table stood against the wall holding a pair of house keys and six recent 5×7 photos of a plain, chunky brunette kneeling, sitting and tussling with a Border Collie. Cynthia Lang might have been called pretty some time ago, but now her best photo asset would likely be summed up as a warm personality. Not that it would bother her regarding these images. The broad smiles she bore in the photos betrayed the immense happiness she shared with her animal companion. In all of the shots, the collie almost seemed to grin back at her. A true bonded pair. Living a dream.

Fischer cocked his head and listened to the sounds of crime scene processing about him. “Where’s the dog now?”

“Laundry room. Off the kitchen. Animal Control’s on its way.”

“Any troubles with it?”

“Actually, no.”

“I’m gonna take a look.”

“Bad idea, Lieutenant, unless you’re wanting a new hole to breathe through.”

He nodded at the camera as he passed the detective. “Go shoot something.”

The laundry room door stood shut and silent. On the wall beside the door, a big oval button on the intercom flickered faster than a strobe light. Fischer frowned. His gloved finger stabbed the button.

“Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill,” a woman’s dull voice repeated nonstop.

Inside the laundry room, something stirred. Fischer drew his 9mm and held it at the ready as he twisted the knob. The door swung open. He snapped up the pistol.

“K– Out. Out. Out,” the intercom droned.

He glanced from the collie huddling on the blood-smeared tile to the gun to the voice emerging from the intercom, the box labeled Petalator. A thought struck him.

“Outside?” he asked.

The dog rose at the word and edged toward him. He eased back into the kitchen center, his index finger keeping a steady pressure on the trigger, ready to squeeze. Instead of leaping for his throat though, the animal angled over to the back door and waited.

“Out. Out,” the Petalator repeated.

Taking a deep breath, Fischer stretched out his free hand for the latch half a foot above the killer’s head.

The back door squealed. Nails clicked on the cedar deck. The collie took off around the pool, trotting away from the only square of immaculate turf set aside in the manicured landscape.

“Out. Kill. Out. Kill. Out. Ki….” The signal drifted out of range.

“Lieutenant, you okay in there?”

“Still breathing normally.”

“Who was talking?”

“Cynthia Lang, I think.” The collie circled back, slowing. “Hang on. She might have something else to say.”

In the garden the dog settled amidst a new bed of brilliant Gloriosa Daisies, looking like some black and white monument, stark and somber, floating within a pool of living gold rippled lightly by the hot summer breeze.

Thus the dream had ended. Not before Mrs. Lang had arranged her own unique, insurance policy though. He wished he knew how she’d pulled it off. Likely, the Petalator people would be very interested in knowing that too, he thought, glancing at the silent box while tired, old jokes came to mind about parrots cluing crime solutions.

The dog’s head sank and came to rest between two outstretched paws. Witness had become weapon of retribution as well as giver of the final epitaph. How fitting, particularly in this case. Try that with your parrot.

“Go find a shovel,” Fischer called, wondering, not for the first time, about true bonds between souls, human or otherwise.

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Published by Light Spring LLC

Fort Worth, Texas

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www.TheColoredLens.com

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