Issue #199 • May 12, 2016

“Cloud Dweller,” by E. Catherine Tobler

“They Said the Desert,” by A.T. Greenblatt

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

CLOUD DWELLER

by E. Catherine Tobler

         “Saw you out there.”

         At the familiar contralto voice of Grand Duchess Maria Romanov, who was neither a duchess nor a Romanov, Vasily Agranovsky lifted his gaze from his triangles of cold buttered toast and sat a little straighter. In the St. Cloud Hotel’s bustling Starlite Dining Room, the duchess joined him at the table uninvited. Her loose kaftan, embroidered with gold and ivory, combined with her imposing circumference to swallow the chair on which she perched. She appeared a fluffed owl upon a branch, not the reigning fat lady of Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade.

         “Out where, Your Grace?” Vasily knew quite well where he had spent his morning but asked because he had not noticed Maria while on his walk and perhaps she was mistaken in who she had seen.

         “The gorge.”

         She was not mistaken, and he regretted having taken a room at the hotel, such that others might become familiar with his schedule. But the St. Cloud Hotel was vastly interesting to him, the building having been moved brick by brick from its original location forty-one years prior. Townsfolk said it was filled to the brim with ghosts, that sometimes people vanished when they turned corners, that the hotel had been moved incomplete and carried with it the people of another time and place. Vasily wanted to stay beneath the very roof he would later walk off of. He wanted to walk without wires and disappear.

         He picked up a slice of his cold toast, regarding the partially blackened triangle before biting its corner off. He walked to Colorado’s Royal Gorge in the mornings because no one was there, and because the sky lines were more visible to him then. In the rising or setting sun, the innumerable lines that crisscrossed the vast space glowed like webbing. Town officials had plans to bridge the gorge, and Vasily laughed at the notion; the space was surely too large to bridge by any normal means.

         He chewed his cold toast. Maria watched him all the while, and he waited for her to say more, to lay the trap she wished him to fall into. But Vasily Agranovsky would never fall so easily; he was well-accustomed to walking upon high wires without a pole or umbrella to balance himself.

         Maria greeted the waitress who approached—a woman whose own daughter had vanished in the hotel’s halls—and submitted her breakfast order, the nature of which surprised Vasily. Perhaps it should not have, given that the hotel was providing rooms and meals as part of the entertainment contract between circus and city. The circus never lacked for interesting foods upon the train, but it was something of a treat to sit in a dining room and give an order to a server; to see them vanish and later return with china plates bearing one’s food. But where one might have thought Maria would order sides of fat-beribboned bacon and two dozen eggs, it was fresh fruit she requested. Being late summer, they brought her four peaches, startlingly sweet in Vasily’s mouth when she bade him have one.

         “Crates of these have been taken to Beth,” Maria murmured as she took her pocket knife to one globe, slicing paper-thin pieces of the sweetness from the stone in its center. “But the gorge.” She pointed at Vasily with the knife, peach juice brightening its sharp edge. “I saw you, walking the sky. Who knows you do this?”

         Again, Vasily said nothing. He wondered if Beth could make her customary marmalade with peaches, but he did not ask Maria. He watched the juice run along the knife’s edge, gather in a drop, and plummet to the tablecloth. A pale orange drop of rain against the white.

         “No one, I see.”

         He couldn’t deny her conclusion—no one knew, and he hoped no one ever would.

         Wherever he traveled, Vasily saw vast networks of lines—across the ground, stretching into the sky. It was the sky-bound lines that pulled at him most, that beckoned him to try his feet upon them. He had always strung ropes and wires to climb, between poles, trees, and buildings, but the lines that he had not strung—lines that existed of their own accord—were a challenge he never expected. In the Colorado west, he had found a place he had never imagined before, a deep stony gorge within the world, a gorge that held a river and a rail for the train but also held countless lines to walk.

         Vasily had learned that no one else could see these lines. The first time he had asked about them, he had appeared such a fool they’d thought him mad—so he was careful in a way most people would never have to be.

         “What do you think you saw, Your Grace?” Vasily asked, around the wad of cold toast in his cheek. He reached for his coffee, also cold, and forced himself to swallow both.

         Maria sliced another crescent of peach and curled it into her mouth. “You walked without wire, Vasily. You walked in the sky. Foolish man.”

         Vasily leaned into his chair, the wood creaking beneath him as though it meant to give way. With a practiced laugh, he discarded the rest of his toast triangle and brushed his hand over the linen napkin covering his lean lap. “This morning,” he said, “I was determining where to place the guylines for the weekend’s roof walk, if I mean to use them at all.” This was absolute truth, though it had happened after his jaunt to the gorge. “Perhaps you saw someone else.” He allowed his brow to crease with a frown, to appear concerned. “Someone local? Someone who should speak to Jackson about employment—someone who could unseat me from my own?”

         This idea was not as frightening as it had once been. His path to Jackson’s circus had not been a straight one; Vasily had always believed that his future rested within the realm of Olympians. His family had long joked of the way he would walk upon every ledge he encountered, rather than the steady, true ground. But the war had taken his family and his Olympic dreams. Fleeing the pogroms that consumed the only world he had known—running on distant ledges undreamed of—had given him a new sense of balance entirely.

         “You don’t wish anyone to know?” Maria asked. The question was tentative, more softly spoken than anything she had said before. It was almost not a question. Her fingers stilled upon the peach she held, the cut into its sweet belly much like the gorge outside the city. Edged with color, running black at its heart.

         “There is nothing to know, Your Grace,” Vasily said. He discarded his napkin across his now-empty plate—in the course of their conversation, he had eaten every scrap of toast, no matter how cold or blackened, and had swallowed every drop of coffee, for to leave any such luxury behind remained outlandish to him.

         Maria graciously did not question him as he stood from the table. He supposed that she, more so than others within the troupe, might understand his inclination toward silence and secrets. She kept her own company and rarely sought that of others, and Vasily only registered this as he took leave of her. She had sought him out. Maria had joined him of her own accord—and what vast distance had she bridged to do so? Regret was a close friend, and it flooded him as he stepped into the dusty street outside the St. Cloud Hotel to once again survey the rooflines. He did not see the precise ledges, only the stretches of emptiness from one ledge to the next. Emptinesses a man could vanish into.

* * *

         He should not have returned so soon, but he could not resist going.

         Sunset turned the land to liquescent gold, the valley a momentary basin that would empty when the sun rolled below the jagged edge of the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Where the dark gorge split the ground, Vasily saw not the yawning black mouth untouched by sunset but the thousand strands of silver that traversed the opening and caught the day’s remaining sunlight. A spider’s web finely wrought by a keen-eyed jeweler, the strands were innumerable, but Vasily knew how to see the strongest among them, those that led with certainty from the edge of one world and perhaps into the next.

         He had never been a poet—he thought the war had carved out whatever sentiment remained within his heart—but here, at the edge of the world, something tugged at him. Something held its hand out and bade him come. Vasily placed his slippered foot against the strongest line and walked. Beneath his foot, the line hummed. It was like nothing he had experienced through the lines he had strung, a distinct vibration beneath his foot. Rope and wire had never sung for him, but these lines sent a small song through his entire being. He knew that if anyone was to see him, they would think he was walking unsupported through the sunset air. Maria had said so herself. Even so, his feet were unable to refuse the invitation.

         With each step, he grew certain that he felt beneath him the steps of another, the pressure of a foot rolling from ball to heel and back. He did not look down in an effort to determine if there was another set of feet braced against his own. He never looked down, for to look down was to doubt. Beyond that, the idea was impossible—the existence of another walker—for beneath him was the gorge alone, more than one thousand feet of tumbling granite split by the mighty Arkansas River. Vasily looked only ahead, so that it was his beloved Sarit he saw.

         The ghost of his Sarit was not entirely unknown at these heights, blue eyes still simmering with affection; Vasily always brought her with him in his thoughts, though in her life she had never joined him upon the wire. She stood without moving, unaffected by the wind, her eyes on him the way his own studied the wires. As if his slim figure were the only thing visible at this height and that beyond opened a vast nothingness she could not fill.

         Quick-fingered Sarit had not seen the lobsters of the cold east nor the sunsets of the warmer west, for she had been lost long before Vasily had known these American pleasures. But her toes, curling bare against the sunlit wire as they once had into blankets still warm with sleep, were achingly familiar to him. His breath caught in his throat.

         “Sarit,” he said, and the world shifted.

         It was as though speaking her name erased the sky’s phantom lines; as if the two ghostly constructs could not occupy the same space. He was certain it was in truth the final slip of the sun behind the mountain’s sharp edge that made the sky lines vanish, for he had witnessed this before. He could no longer feel the hum beneath his feet. Though the lines were unseen, he did not fall.

         The far end of the line whipped up, into the glow of sunset overhead, to enfold Sarit. He found the idea strange, that the line was embracing her, but it pulled her through the last bits of sunset, into the gorge, into the dark.

         Beneath his feet, the unseen line moved. He pictured it as ripples in a lake, growing larger and slower from the center of the initial disturbance. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that the wires he walked upon did not move in such a fashion, that what he now felt could not be explained by ordinary means. The line should have collapsed, should not have borne his weight a second longer, but he did not fall. He tensed and looked down. This was no wire; this was a strange sky line, a thing he did not fully understand. He called himself foolish as he beheld his own feet. His mind could not believe what his body knew, that he stood upon a line, for his eyes told him the line was gone, erased with the setting of the sun. Even though it had rippled, seemingly broken from its distant anchor, he felt the line’s support, but then he glimpsed the strange wonder of the figure—another walker—balanced beneath his own feet.

         Vasily stared, and so too did the other walker. How like me he looks, Vasily thought, and for a moment he believed that another him walked upon another line in a world he did not know. Within the other’s eyes, Vasily saw that he did not understand what had happened either. The other’s mouth moved in words Vasily could not hear, and as the line wobbled again, they moved for the firm ground of the gorge’s lip together. Vasily tumbled to the ground, half expecting the other to be at his side, but there was no one else there. Was the other sprawling upon a similar stretch of ground in his own world?

         In the high clouds, the last sun of the day still played, but below the mountains, darkness was gathering. The lines that crossed the gorge appeared as little more than chalk marks in the fading light, and Vasily did not trust himself to try them again.

         The walk back to the city took him past the dust-shrouded prison yards with their rough-cut stone buildings. In the dust clouds, Vasily thought he saw figures wandering, translucent and pale. Jackson had asked that the circus be allowed to perform within the yards, but city officials had denied him, given a potential and likely overexcitement among the prisoners at the very idea of a circus.

         (But would the prisoners not glimpse the wonders between the bars of their windows, no matter where the circus assembled, Jackson had asked. He pressed, his heart set upon the prison yard, but the warden said no, sir, we cannot, for it would be unkind to perform such feats in their own yard without inviting them— Oh, but we would invite them, sirs, Jackson insisted and the warden flushed red as rooster feathers. No sir, for these are jewel thieves and bank robbers and takers of innocents— Innocence? Jackson asked with a crooked smile, and yes said the warden, they would not cater to them.)

         Still, Vasily let his mind consider each roofline, the angles, and the spaces between. The buildings framed sections of sky that had begun to fill up with pinprick stars Vasily could not name but knew all the same. By the time he reached City Hall and moved onto proper city streets, he knew exactly how he would place his wires so as to escape, were he ever imprisoned. It would be unfair to any other prisoners, and he chuckled at the idea of them leaping onto his wires in an effort to leave. The prisoners were cartoonish figures in his mind, oversized hands clawing at the wire, clownish feet pressing into the face of the fellow who dared follow behind.

         (The reality was more difficult to consider, for it pulled Vasily backward in time; took him by the shoulders and turned him around, so that he was looking—truly looking—at what had been made of his home, his family. He had fled these things, by ledge and wire, but when he turned around they were still there, skeletons in the debris, and so he did not turn around (he did not look down, oh he did not look down). He did not consider the prisoners and every single thing each had left behind. He could not.)

         Further up the river, where a groomed trail wandered, sprawled the empty lot Jackson’s circus had been given domain over. Not so far from the prison that its residents wouldn’t be able to see the curve of the Ferris wheel against the sky or the jut of striped tents behind the river’s neat line of trees. The circus train herself rested on a spur line near the river, still home to those performers who had not taken the hotel up on its offer of free lodgings.

         The circus had not officially opened—that would be kept for the glory of the weekend—but townsfolk approached the lot to watch the crews set up. Even after sunset, many assembled outside the colorful triangular bunting strung around the lot—a makeshift fence that wouldn’t keep an infant out if one really wanted in. In the warm summer evening, they sweated and pointed, speculating on the nature of the tents, listening for the roar of the rumored lions, and perhaps hoped to glimpse the sequined leotards of the trapeze artists.

         Vasily slipped onto the grounds unnoticed; he did not normally garner attention unless he was upon a wire, above all else. On the ground, he was but another man hurrying from here to there. He threaded his way through tents and crates, and above him in the sky, Agnessa flew high and sure. He envied the circus’s siren; she could reach higher than even he could, and as she now skimmed the cloud tops in the very last sunlight, he wondered if she could see the lines crisscrossing the world. He had never asked her, for fear perhaps that she would say yes. What then?

         “Vasily.”

         Silas, Lawrence, and Foster ringed a low burning fire, some holding cups of coffee, others tin plates bearing half-eaten pocket pies and bowls of steaming beans. With the workers, Jackson stood beside a rounder man Vasily did not know; he looked like Grand Duchess Maria’s matching half, and Vasily wondered if the circus was to gain a fat man. The man sported a crisp gold vest and a belt with a buckle that winked in the firelight; his boots were scuffed deeply enough that Vasily had no trouble imagining the man traveling with a cattle drive.

         “Cookie,” Jackson said to the fat man even as he extended a hand toward Vasily, “this is my sky walker, Agranovsky, I was telling you about. He can walk any line, real or imagined.”

         At the description, Vasily’s heart leaped hot into his throat. Had Maria told Jackson what she believed she had seen? Vasily could not believe she would have, yet fear convinced him otherwise. Why else would he say such a thing? Nothing in Jackson’s eyes answered the question; Jackson’s expressions were notoriously aloof for those who did not know him well, and Vasily did not. He had travelled with Jackson for years, but this had not made the men good friends.

         “Vasily, this is Cookie—he’s treating us tonight.”

         Jackson lifted his own plate, heavy with beans, cornbread, and roasted chicken that shone gold in the firelight. When Cookie pushed a loaded plate into Vasily’s hands, Vasily nodded in thanks.

         “Looks like you could use a few of these,” Cookie said. He slapped Vasily’s arm and laughed joyously, as if feeding people was what he lived for, and here, in the firelight with some of the exhausted circus crew, he had found his element. “Suppose walking the sky keeps you slender like a thread though.”

         “Needs must,” Vasily said, yet he took a generous bite of the cornbread and followed it with a heaping spoon of beans. They were spiced in a way unknown to Vasily, pricking his tongue with heat and sweet at the same time.

         “Jackson says you walk without a pole.” Cookie shook his head and bent to retrieve a battered coffee pot from the fire. He poured steaming coffee into a cup and offered it. “How is it you balance up there, in the sky?”

         Vasily took the coffee and swallowed, though the liquid was entirely too hot to drink. It burned his tongue, but he had no good answer for the cook.

         Sarit had asked him once how he did it. How he walked where no man should reasonably walk when the earth was vast and solid, and when Vasily had been unable to explain, Sarit had walked away in anger, believing she did not merit an answer. Vasily had tried all day but had failed to explain himself at all. I simply do had not sat well with her, but the next day as twilight stole the sun away, he had approached Sarit on their balcony, watching her add another layer to the sunset that took form in oils upon her canvas. This, he said, this is how I walk the sky; the way you create something from nothing upon this canvas. Sarit frowned, but for only a breath; she seemed to know then that it was something a person either knew or did not. It was a thing within the bones, and it might be taught, but it could not be entirely known to anyone who did not already know.

         “How is it you make these beans of heaven and hell in the same mouthful?” Vasily asked with his burned tongue.

         The cook’s brow creased with a frown, as if he meant to say he didn’t understand, but then he laughed again and everyone around the fire joined in, as if Vasily had explained the mysteries of the world entire and not dodged a question he had no other way of answering. Cookie settled the coffee pot back into the fire.

         “Fair enough. Just like that there johnnycake, I learned from my momma, but I cannot make it the way she did, no matter how I may try. My hands are not her own, may she rest in peace.”

         Every man dipped his head in a moment of silence, Vasily slow to follow. In the quiet broken only by the crack of logs in flame, Vasily thought of his own mother. Standing skeleton-thin in the wreck of their home, rotten fabric held in her bony hands. Vasily looked and upon the fabric was a six-pointed star, burning at the edges. The star seared his mother’s own flesh, into her bones, and Vasily startled at her shriek, dropping his plate into the fire.

         “There, there, just the canyon maggot.”

         Before Vasily could ask Cookie what he meant, a sound he had not registered rose around them again, a low moan that sounded like the earth was being pried open to unleash a horde of fresh dead. Vasily shuddered, and it was as though he stood on a boat’s deck and not the solid ground; everything pitched, the ground threatening to fall out from under them.

         “It’s just talk, the sheep in the gorge.” Cookie flung a hand in that direction, Jackson watching him with sharp eyes all the while. “Having been out there, I say it’s only the wind, rattlin’ all the rock. Better than all them local myths about fire birds cracklin’ the air. Here. Give over.” He gestured for the plates the men had eaten empty, and stacked them together before tossing them into a basin.

         Having dumped his plate into the fire, Vasily held only the still too-hot coffee. The metal cup was growing hot in its handle, and he set it onto the log Foster occupied; Foster never seemed to mind metal, quick with coins and silverwear alike. Foster didn’t pay much attention to him now, and for that Vasily was grateful; he didn’t want a reason to linger. He thanked Cookie for the meal, however abbreviated, and nodded to Jackson, pretending to not notice the way Jackson was looking at him. There was a new interest in his eyes, a thing Vasily hadn’t seen before, and as he moved through the circus lot, he wondered what it meant.

         He didn’t see Maria as he crossed the lot; she wasn’t at the train and he didn’t find her at the hotel. Vasily lingered in his own open doorway, but neither did any ghosts whisper down the hotel’s hall. He closed the door to the room he had been given and went to the window, opening it to look not on the night but on the emptiness that reached from the hotel roof to the edge of the building across the road.

         The “canyon maggot” sounded again—a sound Vasily could not ascribe to the wind or sheep. It pulled at something inside of him, called to mind the eyes of the other walker he had seen at the gorge. When the moan rolled through the night, the faint lines that traced the world flickered. As if someone had blown on a small flame, they wavered, and only recovered when the moan ceased—when the night grew still as it ever had been. Deeper in the unmoving night, coyotes began to howl.

* * *

         Stringing wire was not the work Vasily loved best, but he trusted it to no other. He often allowed Silas and Lawrence, who rigged the circus’s many tents, to help him—they understood wires and cloth and the necessary tension between both, but today he worked alone, in the hours before the sun had even risen. The street was perfectly empty, the air cool, and Vasily climbed the fire escape to the roof in relative silence. Late summer, and the birds were slow to wake.

         He did not mind the quiet, even his slippers hushed against each metal rung as he climbed. At the roof’s edge, he pulled himself up and over, to eye the arrow he’d shot. People generally did not believe it, which only added to the magic of the work: a wire strong enough to hold a man, shot with a bow and arrow, tension controlled with a reel just as you might a fishing line? Vasily believed it. He secured the wire in full and looked down its strong length spooling from this roof back toward the St. Cloud Hotel.

         The St. Cloud appeared a chalk outline, gray and ghostly even as the rising sunlight touched it. The normally red bricks were washed to ash, refusing to solidify. The hotel looked much the way the ephemeral lines in the air did to Vasily; half-real. Within the ghostly walls moved even more ghostly figures, including that of a young girl. She skipped a rope down a long hallway.

         The lack of birdsong. The softness of every step he had taken up the fire escape.

         Crouched on the roof, Vasily didn’t know where his wire had anchored. The roof felt solid enough, but he didn’t look down, for fear that his wire wouldn’t exist at all. Instead, he only reached for his wire, where it should have been and mercifully felt it there. The wire was cool in the morning air yet as solid as he had ever known it. But the roof—

         A brief glance down showed him no roof, and Vasily reeled. The wire was seemingly the only real thing, and he moved onto it, abandoning the there-not-there roof for the wire’s surety. It held him as it always had, but the further along it that he walked, he discovered it did not give with his weight or the wind. This line was solid in ways his own never were, and only when the sun rose high enough above the craggy horizon to spark against it did Vasily realize exactly upon what he walked. A silver line, like those of the gorge, a line not lain by human hands.

         He could not explain it and did not stop to try. He walked, eyes on the St. Cloud Hotel ashen and not red. His throat tightened, and every hair on his arms stood at attention. He did not understand what he had done. Then up from the street came the call—his name in Jackson’s mouth.

         Vasily still did not look down. He stopped walking, though, which drew another gasp from the street. If he were upon one of the sky-bound lines, he knew exactly what Jackson would see beneath his feet: nothing. A man walking on the summer air itself as the sun rose to color the day.

         The St. Cloud Hotel regained its color the closer Vasily came to it, a teabag sucking up water. He worried the sky line would snap beneath him but felt again the press of other feet beneath his own. He did not look, clenching teeth together in the effort to keep his eyes forward, on the wavering façade of the hotel. By the time Vasily reached the roof, it was the color he remembered: red and flushed with life, and he trembled as though he had taken his first wire walk.

         “Vasily!” Jackson hurried across the roof, arms flailing in excitement.

         Vasily looked from Jackson, over his own shoulder—do not look back do not—and saw what he did not want to see, that he had anchored his wire into a normal, everyday building, within what he was coming to think of as this world, not that world. But the building was overlaid with the ghost chalk lines of another building. Beside the sky line paralleling his own wire, he saw the other walker. The other walker watched him, and Vasily’s heart pounded like it meant to burst out of him.

         “Tell me how.”

         Jackson’s bent hand curled into Vasily’s arm, turning his attention from the walker to himself. But looking at Jackson was no better—the man had an expression Vasily could not help but understand now: pure, unfiltered joy. Vasily shook his head, hoping his expression was as unreadable as Jackson’s usually was.

         “The wire,” Vasily said.

         “There was no wire,” Jackson said. “You walked the air.”

         Jackson moved to the wire Vasily had strung that very morning. Vasily looked, knowing that this was easily explained. His wire ran nearly atop the sky line.

         “Do you see?” Vasily walked on legs that had grown steady once more and joined Jackson at the wire. He curled a hand around his high wire and encouraged Jackson to do the same. “It is only wire.”

         Jackson took the wire into his hand, stiff fingers closing around it. He weighed it for a long while, eyes traveling its length and back again. “Could have sworn... From the street, it looked like...” He didn’t finish either thought, releasing the wire to step back.

         Vasily looked again to the opposite roof, where the other wire walker still stood. Watching. Vasily could almost believe him a ghost, a thing separate from this world (the real world, Vasily insisted), until the other began to speak. Vasily could not hear anything he said but watched the other’s mouth moving—from normal spoken words, to shouts as the walker’s frustration increased.

         “Hmm,” Jackson said. “Might not matter?” Jackson asked.

         Vasily turned to look at him, knowing Jackson could not see the man just as he could not see the other lines in the sky.

         “People watch from the street, Agranovsky, not the sky. If they cannot see your wire from below...” Jackson nodded, having gone silent. Then, he gently patted Vasily’s arm and headed off the roof.

         Vasily looked again to the other walker; he was still shouting, holding onto the wire and giving it a good shake. Vasily’s hand rested yet on his own wire, and he felt the arrival of the ripple. It was so astonishing that he released the wire as if it were on fire and had to look at his hand to be sure the wire’s myriad strands had not been seared into his flesh.

         He staggered back from it, trying to dislodge the motion of it from his memory—impossible, he thought, that the other walker should be able to move his line, his own line—but what he could not shake was the word that traveled within the ripple—like a telegraph down a distant line. Help, it said. Help.

* * *

         “Saw you out there.”

         Grand Duchess Maria Romanov, neither a duchess nor a Romanov, looked up from her plate laden with bacon, mountain oysters, biscuits, and steaming black beans. Vasily noted the dollop of cream melting its way into the beans and the way butter gleamed its way across the biscuits. She was not eating any of the things anyone in the room thought she should have been eating. He offered her the peach he had brought, warm from his palm.

         “Out where, Your Grace?” she asked, words edged in amusement.

         Vasily smiled to think she remembered the way he called her that, and he sank onto the chair beside her own. She took the peach he offered, her cheeks mirroring its own sunrise colors.

         Maria looked every inch a duchess today, mahogany hair coiled into an elaborate crown atop her head, laden with paste jewels fashioned into birds and fish. Her kaftan was blue silk—Sarit’s eyes, remembered—edged in gold braid and ribbon that weaved its way into birds and fish, branches of tree and coral, rendering Maria into the world entire, sky and sea both, round and glowing as the sun reached through the dining room’s windows. Vasily felt quite like a shadow, in his black leotard and slippers.

         “The prison yard.”

         She sat a little straighter at that, withdrawing her knife to cut into the peach. Juice sluiced down its blade once more, dripping into her biscuit butter.

         Vasily had left his hotel room early (and were the halls strangely cold, pricking with winter’s chill, or had he imagined it?), meaning to check his wires. The day of the circus’s grand opening had arrived, but upon the hotel’s roof, he was faced again with the other walker on the other roof, who shouted the instant he saw Vasily. Had the man been standing there all night? The idea was a swift barb in Vasily’s gut.

         Vasily had turned from his well-anchored wire and instead looked down the street to where he’d caught sight of bright Maria in the distance. Maria wrapped in burgeoning orange silk and dancing barefoot outside the prison fences. Vasily imagined prisoners pressed to barred windows to watch her. Smiles creasing faces that had almost otherwise forgotten how to smile.

         “Who knows you do that?” he asked. He asked it the way she had asked him about the gorge—kindly, not accusing—and her blush deepened. The other morning, she had likely seen him walking toward the gorge while she danced outside the fences. “No one, I see.”

         She cut a slice of peach free and offered it to Vasily. He took it, his fingers slipping wetly against her own. The peach was sweet in his mouth, but not as sweet as Maria’s own laugh.

         “The prisoners surely know,” she said, “but you, Vasily... Are you trying to tell me something, sky walker?” She knifed another sliver of peach into her mouth and watched him, her hazel eyes calm and unjudging.

         “There is a place I need to go,” Vasily said. The words came almost before he could consider them, and he knew them for truth. Whatever the other walker represented, it was possible that no other person in this world could see him. If Vasily refused to see and did not acknowledge the other’s desperation, what would that mean?

         “And yet?”

         Vasily cupped his hands in his lap. “It is a place I have not been, Your Grace,” he said. “It is a place where... Well, I cannot say, not having been, but I suspect there are spirits—ghosts.” And what if his own Sarit should await beyond the wire’s edge?

         Maria offered him another peach slice and took one more for herself as well. “Have you been to see Beth?” she asked. “She has turned these peaches into an unbelievable jam—I did not think it possible, and yet there is nothing she cannot capture the heart of.”

         Vasily made to stand, irrationally upset that Maria would speak to him of Beth’s talents as he strove to unload his own worries. What did Maria mean, by changing the subject—but as he sat back down, he realized she had not. Beth’s talent lay in capturing moments that could not otherwise be caught; she could preserve something that would otherwise be lost—the smallest memory from a person’s life could be contained within one of her many jars, just as she would preserve a peach, an orange. A sliver of a day. The whole of a year. A whole world?

         If Vasily were the only one able to see the other walker and his world, might not the same be true of him? He, perhaps, had the ability to capture that world. He had only walk as he had always walked, with courage and conviction, across the lines, wherever they might lead. He exhaled and sagged against the chair, watching Maria, ever calm as she sliced pieces of peach for them both. Vasily ate and did not question what was to come—he knew the line would be there, and knew it would hold him.

         As the crowds gathered in the streets for the grand opening parade and wire walking, Vasily stood upon the St. Cloud Hotel’s roof and did not see the other walker. But neither did he see the sky lines of the world, not with the sun shining straight down upon them. He moved off the roof, onto his wire, and the peace that always came over him came yet again; it had been thus from the first time he had stepped upon a narrow ledge—he had known his place, and it had known him in return.

         His world narrowed: there was only the wire, a taut black branch running beneath Vasily’s slippered feet in a flawless straight line. It stretched endless, and Vasily believed he might walk to the very edge of the cracked and crumbling Colorado earth this way. At the edge of the world, as precise as an edge of paper, there would be an anchor, rusted and ancient, around which the unneeded wire coiled, at last serpentine. Over the earth’s edge, a vast nothingness.

         Vasily could not picture the world beyond that exact edge, for the future was not a thing he imagined—not now and not then. The wire ran ever into what would come, but the wire also crossed over the present, stretching vast emptinesses that were in need of crossing before he could ever hope to reach anything beyond. He slid one foot along it, extending the small blot of himself against the afternoon sky; he opened his hands to the wide, cloudless blue and balanced between past and future, ground and firmament.

         In the sky, the world below dwindled and hushed. The eager crowd was no concern, faces turned upward as flowers to sun to observe his journey from building edge to building edge. Up here, it was the wind that held court, moving the wire with a whisper. The wire questioned the wind, then compensated, tremors rolling down its length. The wire listened, so Vasily in turn listened. Bent his knee as it gave; dipped one leg down, balancing with arms spread. If there was a gasp below, he did not hear; he listened for the wire again and it sang, bearing up and onward.

         At this height, Vasily could pretend the world was a painting, though he never looked down at its brushstrokes. Looking down only welcomed bad luck, only drew a person into the past instead of across the present. The wire was ever the wire, and he trusted in its conversation with the wind, moving as it moved.

         The reappearance of the other walker, however, startled him and his balance. Behind the walker, Sarit, tall and true against the sky. Vasily spread his hands, seeking the center point of himself once more, but the other walker approached him—seeming to walk toward him, upon Vasily’s own wire!

         “Stay,” Vasily bade him, lifting a hand.

         And the walker? Stayed.

         Vasily exhaled. He could not feel the other’s weight upon his wire, only the wind, but he did become aware of the crowd below, of the murmurs that rose when his balance on the wire shifted. Beneath him, between wire and street, Agnessa stretched her ruby-black wings across the sky, serving as a distraction meant to take the crowd’s attention from him, should he be close to falling.

         He was not close to falling—Vasily had never fallen from any wire or rope he placed his feet to—so he skipped, toward the walker and Sarit but also the end of the wire. For brief breaths, he was as airborne as Agnessa, above the wire and moving ever forward, and when the crowd caught sight of him again, they roared in approval.

         At the far end of the wire, the other walker moved again. Toward Vasily, though Vasily had bade him stay. And now, Vasily did feel the weight of him upon the wire—impossible, his mind told him, but the wire dipped, the walker slipped—his own feet unaccustomed to this wire, strung in a world not his own, and Vasily lunged toward him.

         In the afternoon sky, clouds obscured the sun, and in the new shafts of light, Vasily saw more of the sky-bound lines. He saw more of the world than he ever had, and he moved through it as he had only imagined before. It wasn’t the turning of a corner he had dreamed of, so much as it was discovering a new compass point he could navigate toward. He reached for this point and moved as a bird might, gliding through the shafted light until the other man came into sharp relief. Vasily saw the terror in the eyes, heard the scream through parted lips, and though he did not believe he could touch ghosts felt the man’s hand notching into his own. Vasily was jolted out of time, reaching beyond the realm of any clock to save the man before any on the ground had blinked.

         Vasily pulled the man with him, as agile as any trapeze artist might, bounding from thin sky-bound line to thick, aiming for the chalk-line roof he knew was not in his own world. His own world had withdrawn; he felt it retreat and knew himself to be elsewhere, a city eclipsed by the one that overlay it like a coat of snow. He pulled the other walker up all the sky-bound lines until they fell onto a roof, cold and clouded in dust.

         The other man was as thin as Vasily, shaking as he looked at his own hand. Vasily looked too, saw no mark but wondered that they had been able to touch.

         “It has been ages,” the man whispered.

         “Forty-one years,” Vasily guessed. “Since the hotel was moved?”

         He pushed himself up, to survey the world beyond the line of the roof. In this ghost world, all was fogged in dust and cloud, the sunlight refusing or unable to penetrate the layers. The trees were stunted here, held within eternal autumn and winter. Most had shed their finery, though some desiccated leaves yet remained. They did not tremble, for there was no wind to stir the clouded air; everything waited.

         “Come,” the man told Vasily.

         Vasily followed where the other led, down through the building’s hollowed guts via a staircase that creaked and shuddered with their passage. It was like walking the bones of some great creature, chancing a collapse at every turn. Once on the ground, the world felt no more steady; the street was thin as pastry, crackling and brown.

         They walked in silence, Vasily aware of others as they went. The people were somehow removed—not as whole as the man he followed—perhaps in yet another fragmented reality. Vasily tried to touch the arm of a passing woman but she shied away, shivering as if cold. He could not say what this world was—that of the living or the dead. Perhaps it was some in-between place, a place none should ever know.

         “Here.”

         The man brought Vasily to the edge of the gorge. In this world, the gorge was filled with clouds of soot and flame, so thick that Vasily saw no river nor railroad below. The sky-bound lines crossed the canyon still; they did not glow but were as blackened burns across the gorge and sky. Soot plumed into the air and ribbons of fire after it, hot wind whipping Vasily’s cheeks. His eyes watered, and it was then in the gorge below he saw—

         Was that a mouth? And this creature, Cookie’s canyon maggot? It was no sheep nor breath of angry wind but a towering bird made of cinder and flame. It was unlike anything Vasily had seen, as wide as the gorge, writhing in the clouds of soot. Or was the soot its rotund body? Flames rushed from a stone-beaked mouth, setting the river to boil.

         “See there, within its grasp.”

         Vasily saw. It was small when compared to the beast, a burning, red brick caught within a wing of fire. A red brick like those of St. Cloud Hotel.

         “The hotel was taken incomplete,” Vasily whispered. The rumors had been true? He did not look at the man beside him but found himself studying the sky-bound lines that crossed the gorge. They appeared solid, despite the monster in their midst.

         “We can walk these lines together. Reclaim your world’s stone. Free one city from the shroud of the other.”

         Vasily recalled the press of the other’s feet beneath his own every other time he had tried to walk the sky-bound lines. Was it possible, that together they could repair the damage? He remembered, too, that they had fallen.

         “Did we not fall?” he whispered.

         But even though he asked the question, he did not hesitate. The need to walk the lines was greater than the idea that he might fall. So what if he fell? He knew the lines as well as he knew those within his own palm. There was surely no other reason he had come into this world. You simply do, he heard Sarit say from somewhere far away.

         The gorge beckoned, the lines of the sky spreading like a map into the clouds, and so he walked. He put foot to line, and though the lines shuddered with every motion of the canyon’s fiery bird below, Vasily’s feet were steady and true as they had always been.

         He and the other walked toward the bird, circling the monster to approach from opposite rims of gorge. Vasily did not look down. He expected Sarit on his line, but she did not appear. Perhaps it was the nature of this world, perhaps it was something else, but Vasily did not consider it. He walked toward only what he could see, the brick spinning in an updraft of flame. He had no idea how he might claim the brick but again refused to question it. You simply do. He walked.

         And when close enough, reached for the brick.

         It burned cold in his hands, ghostly, ghastly, and he wanted to drop it, but from the other end of the line, the other walker balanced him. The bird, trapped between both worlds, could not claim anything entire. From within the brick, a thousand tiny lines writhed, and within each of the lines, Vasily felt the hum of a ghostly life. Two worlds, imperfectly bound, the fire bird trapped in the in-between, sucking lives from each when it could.

         Through the heat mirage, Vasily saw the other’s hands upon the brick, and together they pulled until it broke free. Beneath them, the fire bird howled in fresh fury, and fists of soot robbed Vasily of his sight. He felt himself tumbling from the line like a weed. All around him, the world was flame and ash, and he knew neither up nor down.

         The other walker was lost to him in the furor, but Vasily held to the burning brick. When he felt a stable thread beneath his feet (for never looked down), he pushed off. He kept moving, propelling himself up through clouds that bled from eternal black into thunderstorm gray as the fire—as the maggoty bird—was silenced. Within the gray mass, Vasily tasted rain and knew air that was not singed and saw the steady mark of his own line against the sky.

         But he saw it from below for he still tumbled, and the crowd shrieked to see him falling from the clouds. Vasily released the brick, and it landed with a thud in the dirt road. Below him, the shroud of one city lifted from the other and ghosts like snow were freed from the spaces between. The warm summer afternoon became as winter, ghosts no longer trapped and crying, blowing to where they belonged.

         Vasily pushed off of a line no other could see, vaulting himself into the sky. He did not touch the ground but walked the sky as though born to it. The crowd cried again—how graceful, how marvelous, how amazing that a man could walk the sky. Jackson beamed his triumph. Cookie stared.

         Vasily walked and did not care who saw. Did not care that the higher he went, he was leaving them behind. Jackson and the train, Maria and her peaches, Beth and her countless jars. He walked and did not care, looking ahead, looking—for the first time—beyond the end of his line. It was not blackness eternal he saw beyond the precise edge of the world but Sarit against the sky, bright and shining. Quick-fingered and painting him a golden, clouded sunset. Vasily reached for the new and beckoning compass point—and walked into the sky.

Copyright © 2016 E. Catherine Tobler

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E. Catherine Tobler knows something about walking tightropes, working as both an editor and writer. Her fiction has appeared in in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including four stories set in her traveling circus universe. In June, The Kraken Sea, a novella set in this circus universe, will be available from Apex Book Company. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, www.ecatherine.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THEY SAID THE DESERT

by A.T. Greenblatt

         They said those who died in the desert wandered forever in its loneliest parts. But the Crossers said a lot of fantastical shit as they passed the bottle around the campfire, and Jade wasn’t some doe-eyed girl anymore who swallowed their mad stories whole.

         ‘Course that was before she started crossing the desert herself. That was before she saw the ghost of her dead man in the middle of it, standing under the red oak tree.

         Dominic’s ghost was easy to spot in the distance, even at a hundred strides away. He shimmered against the desert’s bleak, colorless sky, leaning against that broad and impossible tree trunk, smiling. And Jade’s first thought was Oh God, he knows.

         She stopped walking—a dangerous thing to do in the desert—but even the hazy outline of Dominic was enough to halt her feet and catch the breath in her throat. Behind her, Billy pawed the ground nervously and nudged her shoulder as the dust began to swirl around their ankles.

         Her second thought was Idiot, he’s just an illusion.

         So, Jade gritted her teeth, pulled her boots out of the dust that was already swallowing their motionless feet, and with a firm grip on Billy’s reins, moved forward again.

         If the desert wanted to stop her from reaching the other side, it was going to have to do better than that.

         This wasn’t the type of desert where the sun hammered down on you, cooking you rosy until you were the right shade of dead. Here, the sun just didn’t give enough of a damn to bother. There was no rocks or coarse sand on the ground, no dunes or cacti either. Just the fine, sinking gray dust and the bland horizon that stretched out forever.

         This place was a desert in the truest sense of the word, and here it was your imagination that got you killed.

         She crossed the long gap between them, and the ghost waited for her. Grinning. His whole body was dark and murky, like a shadow in the shade, except for his teeth. Those were bone white.

         “I don’t have time for this shit, Dominic,” Jade said, as she picked her way carefully around the tangled roots of the oak. A tree like this shouldn’t have been able to grow so large, much less thrive in such a desperate place. A tree like this shouldn’t have been here at all.

         Sort of like her.

         But here it was, and here she was, and she had deliveries to make and a whole town on the other side of this wasteland that was waiting for her to make them. Jade nudged Billy towards the small miserable pond nestled between the roots of the tree. She squatted on her haunches next to her horse. Pulled out her pocket watch. Paused it. All while the ghost just stared and grinned and grinned.

         “Stupid illusion. Go away,” Jade hissed. She didn’t need to be haunted right now. She had enough to worry about, like dust wolves and pissing off the desert. She’d been walking for a day and a night straight, and she was only halfway across.

         The ghost shook his head and stretched out a smoky hand towards her, the outline of his fingers reaching across the stale water. Wanting.

         Jade stumbled back, half-tripping over roots, half-drawing the pistol from her belt. They said that those who died in the desert become like it. Mean and vengeful. In life, her man had been neither of those things. But who knew what sort of creature his ghost had become?

         The ghost pulled back his hand slightly, the grin slipping from his face, his black-pit eyes rounding with surprise. He did not try reach out again. Instead, he pointed to Billy.

         Jade replied by aiming her pistol.

         There were power cells strapped high on Billy’s back and they were destined for a little town called Edge on the fringe of the desert. Edge needed them to survive, just like its sister town, Border, on the other side of this wasteland needed the returning grain. That alone made this trek across the desert worth the crazy risks.

         But it wasn’t the cargo that Dominic was pointing at. His sights were set on one saddlebag in particular. The damning one. The one with the instructions and drawings on how to make those power cells. Something only the craftspeople of Border knew how to do. If delivered, it would destroy the Crossers’ livelihood and more. But if delivered, one day, no one would have to die trying to cross the desert.

         ‘Course, she shouldn’t be surprised that her ghost knew about those drawings, should she?

         “This isn’t your choice,” said Jade. “You’re dead.” She and Dominic glared at each other over the stale pond, as if they were arguing over a simple thing like dirty dishes, like they used to when Dominic was a man of flesh and blood. A pang of grief and longing welled up unexpectedly in Jade’s chest, but she pushed it down, away. Focused on keeping her pistol steady instead.

         As usual, it was Dominic who gave in first. He dropped his accusing finger and sighed, his whole silhouette sagging a bit.

         Well, he doesn’t seem dangerous, she thought. But neither had the desert when she used to stand on its threshold, in Border, looking for her man on the horizon. Jade lowered her gun and gathered up Billy’s reins again.

         “This isn’t your choice anymore,” she repeated, but in a whisper, as she started her pocket watch again and began walking away from the impossible oak tree.

         ‘Cause she was a Crosser now, not him. And she had made this trek across the desert a hundred times. With luck, she’d make it a hundred more and come through alive and sane. But what haunted her every mile, every footfall, was what to do with those power cell blueprints. She wasn’t sure if giving them to a few eager craftsmen in Edge was the right choice. She wasn’t sure if it was her choice to make at all, being that she was a Crosser by circumstance, not by blood.

         Jade stole a glance backward and was startled to see Dominic trailing a few paces behind. He pointed to himself, then to Jade, then to the path ahead. Let me come with you, his eyes pleaded.

         “No, I don’t want you here,” she said, making sure each word was a razor. Then, she fixed her eyes on the horizon and swore never to look back.

         The ghost followed anyway.

* * *

         They said that the desert was once so narrow you could leap over it. Back then, anyone could travel from Edge to Border in one soaring step.

         This was another favorite story the Crossers liked to tell over a fire and a bottle. And there was always a bottle of the best stuff waiting for them at the towns on either side of the desert. Perks of the job. She’d heard all of their tall tales when Dominic was alive, sitting at the campfire with his scrawny arms wrapped around her broad shoulders, back when he was a Crosser and she wasn’t. And she had clung to every word.

         Since then, she’d discovered most of their stories were just mirages, dreams, and folktales. But slowly, she was learning which ones weren’t.

         Her dead man kept pace behind them, dogging her like her worries, while she and Billy walked and walked. If she looked to her right or left and squinted, she could sometimes see vague outlines of other impossible landmarks: towering windmills, grand smokestacks, and things she didn’t have names for rising up out of the gray dust. She wondered if they were real or imagined, but if she thought about it too long, her head began to ache. If she stopped moving forward and paused to whisper a few soft words to Billy or to secure the precious cargo on his back, they began to sink into the ground.

         “Why are you following me?” she asked Dominic over her shoulder, for the tenth or maybe the twentieth time.

         Desert journeys were traveled alone because they were like walking a tightrope made of razor wire. You had to keep your feet nimble and your head empty. You needed to keep your dreams and fears to yourself. Carts, wagons, and traveling troupes always got mired in the dust because anything more than a person and a horse carried too much baggage for the desert to ignore.

         The ghost walking behind her was damn burdensome.

         What are you going to do? his eyes asked every time she looked back. Jade answered by scowling and kept on walking.

         The desert hated change, so night fell slowly. The sky was a bruised, beaten color when Dominic ran a few paces ahead of her and stopped. Dust billowed around his dark feet, and in the dimness, he looked more solid than before. He pointed at the saddlebag with the instructions again and then drew a question mark in the air.

         “Quit it,” Jade said, not breaking stride, too tired to argue with a dead man. “I’m the one who should be asking the questions, ‘cept there’s nothing for you to say.”

         The ghost backed up and grinned, hands around his throat, miming soundless words with mock surprise as if he had just lost his voice. Every line of his body was bent in jest, and his eyes laughed at his own joke.

         “Oh shut up.”

         But she couldn’t stop the corner of her mouth from quirking upwards. Hell, the desert was getting to her if she was falling for his sense of humor again.

         Jade picked up her pace.

         It was completely dark when they reached the lost galleon. A monstrous boat that didn’t come with a history or explanation. It was as old as the Crossers’ stories and too large for the dust to swallow. That didn’t stop the dust from trying though, as it swirled and flung itself against the great hollow belly of the ship.

         It was a good place to stop for a few hours, and Jade paused her trusty pocket watch. Time was an easy thing to loose sight of in the desert and the pocket watch kept her straight, counting the minutes she’d walked, reminding her that she was only a day away from Edge now. Billy munched on a few miserable patches of grass growing around the hull where the ground hadn’t sunk, as she unsaddled him and rubbed him down. Gave him some proper food.

         Jade meant to eat a bit herself as she stepped through the large hole some Crosser had thoughtfully cut into the side of the ship, but her eyelids were so damn heavy. And tonight, like every night in the desert, would be nearly sleepless. The dust wolves were always hunting and dreams had a nasty habit of solidifying in this wasteland.

         Inside, the old ship creaked mercilessly. The older Crossers mumbled about the things that lived in its bowels. Jade sat down only a stride or two away from the hole. She had more than enough of their stories for one day.

         The ghost of Dominic sat down beside her.

         What the hell am I doing here? she thought, rubbing a hand over her face. Dominic had the same question. He pointed at her and drew another question mark in the air.

         “Someone had to pick up your slack after you didn’t come back.”

         The ghost cringed, even though this was a lie and they both knew it. Dominic had made enough money for Jade to live comfortably for the rest of her life. Perks of the job. But she was tired, and it was an easy lie.

         Jade brought up her knees and rested her chin against them. She wondered if it was still snowing in Edge. On her last trip there, the children had built a line of snowmen a hand’s breadth away from the brim of the desert. A welcoming committee for the Crossers. It was always too warm for snow in Border, and when she tried to describe the cold, wet flakes to her nieces, they looked at her like she was crazy. Which just made her laugh. She used to think Dominic was making this shit up too.

         “What do you want?” she asked her ghost.

         The ghost drew a question mark and pointed at her again. What are you doing here?

         Jade sighed and rubbed her face again. It was a long damn list, but it would keep her awake. “There are shortages, you know.”

         ‘Course he knew, it was why he got paid so well. As had his mom before him. As had his grandpa. It was why the other Crossers kept her on even though she hadn’t been raised for this and she never had any good stories to tell around the fire. When she closed her eyes, Jade could almost see the bags of grain all lined up in a row, waiting for her in Edge to bring back across the desert. It was not nearly enough. It would never be enough.

         “There was a job opening,” she said, glaring, and the ghost winced. “And I wanted to see for myself what was so damn important on the other side of this desert.” Dominic nodded, and she could almost hear him ask. Do you know the names of everyone in Edge yet? Do you miss them when you’re back home in Border?

         Yes, god yes. She’d thought she could never forgive them—the people in the town across the desert, the reason why Dominic was dead and gone. But she was wrong. It was hard not to fall in love when Edge’s residents were always so thrilled to see her come striding out of the dust. When their freckled faces and smiles were just paler versions of her nieces and her aunts and her brothers. When Edge was just the colder and greener twin of Border. Yes, she loved them and missed them because she was a Crosser now and her heart no longer belonged to just one home.

         And yet... she missed her man more. Even after all these years. With every heartbeat, with every dream.

         “All of Border showed up when they unveiled your plaque at the shrine, you know,” she said. “You surprised us. The desert caught you too early.”

         The memory was still vibrant. The shrine, filled to the brim with the name plaques of the Crossers who never made it home. Some so old and worn you could barely make out the letters. Some too new. The red mourning flags fluttering in the wind, and everyone dressed in their nicest. All their tears and kind words and endless compassion. Their glances at the empty places at her sides. The place where if not a partner, then children should be. The place where Dominic’s long family line of Crossers ended.

         That was what had pushed her into the desert in the end. She couldn’t live around all that pity.

         “You shouldn’t have kept crossing,” she whispered to the ghost of her love. But Dominic wasn’t looking at her anymore, his gaze was fixed on something outside the ship, beyond the hole. And for a moment, he looked so alive. “Fuck the desert. Fuck Edge. We had more than enough. We had...”

         She could see it, and she knew she was dreaming: their small house, smelling of smoke and spices and sex. She saw the wicker chairs they used to sit on together and the sunlight that streamed through the windows and the dirty pile of dishes that was always there. She was dreaming all right, but she didn’t give a damn. She had missed this home most of all.

         Dominic’s eyes went wide in surprise, and he tried to shake her but his hands were as light as feathers. He glanced out through the hole again. Then, there was real, honest fear in his face.

         But Jade didn’t care. It had been ages since she had felt this stationary. She’d wanted to cross the desert as a girl, but now she wanted nothing more than to pick up her heavy work gloves she’d abandoned years ago and join her brothers in the warehouse, crafting power cells. The job she was supposed to have.

         “I should kill you for leaving,” she whispered.

         Dominic shook his head frantically, trying to move her again. Then he stopped. Slowly, he stood and wheeled around so he crouched in front of her. He placed a ghostly finger over her heart, and all of the anger and hurt and loneliness she’d held in since the day Dominic didn’t come walking back out of the desert welled up inside her. It was too much for one chest to hold.

         She hated how much she still hurt, even after all these years.

         Slowly, Jade let him guide her hand to the gun at her side and then the gun to the center of his chest, though the pressure of his fingers was like a cool breath. She clenched her teeth and drew in a short, sharp breath as she realized that her man wanted to die again.

         Please, pleaded his eyes. I owe you this much, said his translucent hands. Just get it over with, mouthed his lips.

         Hurry, said every angle of his body. Hurry.

         The gun in Jade’s hands felt warm, real, and dangerous. A small part of her knew it was pointless to shoot a ghost. The rest of her was too angry to care.

         The single resounding shot shattered the mirage. Jade opened her eyes to the desert. It was almost dawn. She was sitting in the lost galleon, and there was a dust wolf lying at her feet, a bullet in its chest. It was gasping, tongue lolling, dying. Behind it, two more of the massive beasts were rising out of the swirling dust. And they were very much alive.

         The wolves gave a low growl, Billy reared in fright, and her first shot went wide. The wolves lunged, Dominic threw his shadowy arms around her, but the next two bullets found their mark. One between each pair of monstrous eyes.

         Jade might have been a lousy Crosser, but she’d always been a good shot.

         The wolves collapsed on the ground, with a thud and a thud, only a few feet away from the ship, the dust pillowing around them. Across the desert, the gunshots echoed and echoed and echoed.

         “Holy shit,” Jade gasped.

         It took a good five minutes for her hands to stop shaking and another ten to calm Billy down and check on the power cells. All the while, Dominic never drifted more than a hand’s breadth away.

         “How do those damn dogs always manage to sneak up like that?” Jade asked him.

         The ghost shrugged.

         The desert was already swallowing the wolves’ corpses. Soon, it would be like they were never there and the next time she crossed this spot, she would wonder if she’d been attacked at all.

         “You’re still a bastard,” she said and stared across the empty land. “This can’t go on.”

         Jade looked back at her ghost. Dominic was almost solid now. Almost here. And maybe this was the stupidest decision she’d ever make. Maybe she was finally cracking. But she turned to him and said: “Walk with me.”

         Her ghost obliged.

* * *

         They said the desert was getting wider, and Jade agreed. According to her pocket watch, it took about seven minutes longer to cross than it did a year ago. Twelve minutes more than the year before that. It was like Border and Edge were two islands drifting apart, ‘cept instead of water between, there was dust, dust, and more dust.

         Jade walked quickly, or as quickly as she could. She was on the last leg of her trek, but Billy hadn’t quite forgiven her yet for what’d happened at the galleon, and the desert hadn’t forgiven her for killing its wolves or for the gunshots, whose echoes were still coming back to haunt her. Now, her boots sank to up to her ankles with every step.

         Don’t piss off the desert, they always said, it’s an angry and spiteful bastard.

         Too late now, Jade thought.

         The ghost next to her kept pace, stride after stride. Stubbornness is the only way you’ll make it across the desert, he’d told her once when they started falling hard for each other. Stubbornness, and a reason to make it to the other side alive.

         And still, the desert had killed him. But Jade’s stubbornness had always outmatched his, so they pressed on.

         When she was only a few hours away from Edge, Dominic ran ahead again and pointed at the saddlebag with the documents. He matched her strides, walking backwards, his black pit eyes never leaving her face.

         “I thought you forgot about those,” she said.

         The ghost shook his head.

         “I think I’m going to deliver the blueprints,” she said. “And I’ll carry back the seeds for crops in exchange.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper and the decision filled her with relief and with terrible sadness.

         The outline of the ghost bristled, like a dog raising its hackles.

         “It’s going to take Edge a while to figure out how to make power cells that can last more than five minutes,” she added, quickly. “And it’s going to take Border a while to figure out how to make our ground grow crops.”

         Hell, it’s going to take many, many more trips across before we’re done, Jade thought as she trudged forward, fighting the desert for each step.

         Her ghost’s face was expressionless as he kept up his backwards pace; only his eyes betrayed his anger, his hurt. It was one thing to know everything must die eventually, it was another thing entirely to see the beginning of the end of your life’s work.

         Dominic thrust a shadowy finger at her. Why you? His dark eyes were harsh, and the tip of his finger trembled.

         Jade met his gaze and matched his fierceness. “Lots of reasons.”

         She didn’t say because the desert was getting wider and the journey harder. Or because there were fewer Crossers sitting around the campfire with every generation. Or because if what they said was true, there were a lot of damn ghosts wandering the desert.

         She didn’t say because at night, her dreams were with filled with the sounds and the colors of the shrine’s red mourning ribbons flapping in the wind and they were calling her and Jade wasn’t sure anymore if it was a nightmare or a comfort.

         What she said was: “Because if someone doesn’t do something, the desert’s going to kill us all anyway.”

         The truth fell like a stone from her lips and for a moment, they both stopped walking. Dominic lowered his finger, his whole body sagging with defeat. He’d always said he hoped he wouldn’t be alive to see the day when the Crossers had to stop, when they wouldn’t be needed anymore.

         The desert was cruel.

         “It wasn’t my idea, you know,” she said. “People in both towns asked for this.” Except she was the only one they’d asked because they knew she was the only Crosser who would consider it. When the others found out about the blueprints, she’d hoped they’d understand. But she wasn’t a fool. She knew understanding and forgiveness were not the same things.

         With a sigh, Jade freed her legs from the dust, fixed her sights on the faint point on the horizon, and moved forward. Billy and her ghost followed.

         It was only when Edge crept into view that she paused. Only then did the doubts she’d been fighting back grab hold.

         “What right do I have?” she whispered to Dominic. Who was she to ruin the livelihoods of her friends and family? How could she abandon generations of hard-won histories and traditions?

         With fumbling fingers, Jade unclipped the saddlebag with the damning papers from Billy’s back and hefted the heavy parcel in her hands. She hesitated. She could just leave it in the desert, let it disappear into the dust. Let another Crosser in another generation deal with the problem.

         The ghost of her love reached out and cupped his murky hands around hers.

         I’m sorry, said his eyes. I’m sorry, said his grasping fingers. I’m sorry, said every line of his body. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

         Jade pulled away, sharply. In life, her man knew better than to pity her.

         “For what?” she shouted. “Which part of this are you sorry for?”

         Dominic pointed, and Jade turned. Behind them, miles and miles of footprints that hadn’t been there before spread out in their wake. The path of every journey every Crosser ever made was traced out like scars in the dust, and there was not an unmarked inch of ground.

         It’s an illusion, Jade thought. It has to be. But in this wasteland, illusions got you killed. So did love and hope. She’d dared to walk with Dominic, and he had dragged the weight of his history and his hopes and his pride behind him. She saw the dust trying to swallow the footprints, but they resisted. Some memories refused to be buried. Now, the desert was completely changed.

         And the desert was pissed.

         The ground began shifting under her feet and Jade stumbled.

         “Run,” she yelled to Billy. “Shit, run!” But Billy wasn’t a stupid horse; he was already racing toward the town.

         Jade ran too. But not fast enough.

         The desert grabbed at her ankles, her wrists, her hands that were still holding the saddlebag, and it pulled her down. The dust swirled and swarmed and smothered her eyes. Coated her nostrils and throat. She could feel the desert’s anger, its desire to consume anything that wanted something and anyone who dreamed too much.

         I can’t die here, Jade thought desperately. Not this close.

         So, she pushed back. Against the dust and the desert and all the doubts that made her linger. She fought off the prying gusts and shielded her eyes. She crawled forward, winning inch by damn inch. Because she was a Crosser, and defying the desert was what she did. Through the dust clouds she could see the outline of Edge. It was so near.

         That was when she felt the saddlebag slip from her fingers.

         She groped, but the dust was vicious and blinding. The ground was relentless in trying to swallow her whole. Jade searched desperately, coughing on her curses.

         She felt his ghostly hands first, guiding her, and the rough cloth of the bag a moment later. But she didn’t ask questions, just crushed her fingers around her prize, found an inch of solid ground, and with a shout, pulled herself out of the dust. Then, Jade ran.

         The desert chased her. It nipped at her footfalls, trying to pull her back with every step.

         It almost did. But with a final push, Jade leapt over the boundary, crossing the sharp line from desert into town, from dust into green, and crashed into a melting snowman. The first lungful of Edge’s crisp, clean air startled her, as always, and so did the smell of dirt and things that grow. She was mere inches from the desert, yet there was no dust here.

         A few feet away an old woman sweeping her porch stopped mid-motion, startled. “Jade! You made it back!” she said, with a warm smile.

         “Do you see him?” asked Jade, wiping the snow from her face, “Is he still there?”

         “See who?” the woman asked.

         “My ghost!”

         The old woman—Myrtle, if Jade remembered right—gave the desert a long, appraising look. “Nope. Looks like the desert’s getting to you, darling.” Myrtle rapped her fingers against the side of her head and grinned.

         Jade turned. The desert behind her was empty and flat and calm. Not a dust mote was out of place.

         ‘Course, the desert was a bastard. But if Jade narrowed her eyes to slits, she could just make out the shadow of a man on the horizon, walking away.

         Her hand was still clutched around the saddlebag with the blueprints, and Jade finally knew what she had to do.

         Tonight, after all the power cells were distributed and she delivered the blueprints into the right hands, she’d tell a story at the campfire. It’d be about how Crossers walked with the ghosts of their past, and how their ghosts kept them straight and true in the desert. The others might understand. Or they might not.

         But it didn’t matter. The story wasn’t for them. It was for the little doe-eyed children who hung around the fire with them, listening, swallowing her stories whole. Then she’d tell them about Border and its vast workshops and the bright and quick thunderstorms that rolled up on hot summer days. She’d tell them about her nieces who were about their height.

         And when they’d ask her which of her stories were real, she’d lean in close and say “All of them.”

         For now, Jade would keep crossing the desert. ‘Cept along with the power cells and bags of grain, she’d carry blueprints and crop seeds, advice, and all the stories she could gather. ‘Cause change was coming to Edge and Border, and it was going to be hard and messy. Traditions were going to be abandoned, and one day there wouldn’t be a bottle of the best stuff waiting for them in each town. Eventually, both towns would be self-sufficient, and they’d forget why anyone would bother to walk across an infinite wasteland for them. They would forget who the desert had stolen away.

         When the Crossers were angry or disheartened, they said the desert would swallow them all eventually, past and future, but Jade knew now that wasn’t true. Try as it might, the desert couldn’t bury stubborn ghosts, and one day she and her man, with generations of Crossers behind them, would haunt the dust between their towns, silently guarding and guiding the ones they loved home.

Copyright © 2016 A.T. Greenblatt

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s well acquainted with all four seasons and known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home-brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and her work has appeared in Mothership Zeta, Escape Pod, and Daily Science Fiction, as well as other online journals. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt.

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COVER ART

“Forest,” by Geoffrey Icard

Geoffrey Icard is a French graphic artist with expertise in traditional 2D design and game creation. He has worked as a 2D and 3D artist and concept artist on numerous game development projects and now works as a freelance artist. He prefers environments but always tries to learn and push his characters because he believes environment without life is boring. He is also a gamer and takes inspiration from video games. See more about him and his artwork at geoffreyicard.blogspot.fr and his gallery on deviantArt.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.