Issue #245 • Feb. 15, 2018

Special Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 4

“Penitents,” by Rich Larson

“Red Dreams,” by R. Z. Held

“The Last Human Child,” by Milo James Fowler

“Such Were the Faces of the Living Creatures,” by Josh Pearce

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

PENITENTS

by Rich Larson

         Mara is tying her hair back again, raking it into a topknot that tugs at her scalp. She’s been redoing it over and over, trying to calm herself, but her fingers are still shaking. She hopes her companion hasn’t noticed.

         They’ve been lying in wait for a half hour, hunkered down in this crack in the basalt, under a sky that looks like a gaping black chasm. Mara has hardly ever been topside. Hardly ever leaves the habs. And she has never been out here in Slagland, where orbital bombardment left nothing behind but fused glass and cooled lava. The emptiness is terrifying, and she can’t help but imagine radiation seeping into her body, rotting her bones.

         But she’ll do anything to get Io back—including hiring a half-savage scavenger. Mara sneaks another glance at the girl splayed out beside her. She has no hair to tie back; her head is shaved down to stubble. Circular gears are tattooed up the sides of her face, capping her sharp cheekbones, cobalt blue on sunless skin. Her clothes seem to be layers of grimy plastics, and when she walks it’s with a limp and occasional spasm.

         She says her name is Scout, which is not a name. Mara knows someone like Scout would never be allowed inside her family’s hab or any other. Maybe that’s why Scout requested Mara’s chip as payment—maybe she thinks they’ll let her into a hab if she has a chip to scan. But having a chip is only part of it.

         Mara watches while Scout checks their equipment: two silvery cloaks meant to hide them from airborne sensors, a small canister with wires sticking out one end, and powered cutters.

         Mara knows what those are for, and looking at them makes her sick.

         “You breathe real loudly,” Scout says, not looking up.

         “Sorry,” Mara says, by reflex. She doesn’t say that it’s harder to breathe out here, that the air is thin and tastes like burnt metal in her mouth. She bought a filter mask for this specific reason, kept it hidden under her bed for a whole week. It’s still there. She only realized she’d forgotten it when she was halfway to the meeting point and it was too late to double back.

         “You’ve never seen them before, have you?” Scout asks.

         Mara shakes her head.

         Scout looks at her, lips curled, sucking at the inside of her cheek. “You’re not going to like it,” she says flatly. She holds up one of the camfoil cloaks. “Take this one. Not as many holes.”

         Mara takes it and pulls it on over her clothes. The material crackles, makes her arm hairs stand on end. It’s too big for her by half.

         “The important thing is don’t freeze up,” Scout says. “Keep moving, and keep following me.”

         “I’ll be fine,” Mara says, how she used to always insist to her parents, only half-believing it.

         Scout’s mouth curls again, that expression Mara isn’t sure how to read, isn’t sure if it’s a smile or a sneer. “They’re here,” she says. “Look.”

         Mara doesn’t know where to look, but then all of a sudden there’s an enormous black cube filling up the sky above them. No thunderclap, no sound at all, it just appears. A tremor runs through her whole body, and nausea hits her gut. Her ears are keening, her face is aching. There’s a rough staticky tongue licking her spinal column top to bottom.

         The cube is like nothing she’s ever seen, an enormous black box composed of a thousand shifting slivers breaking and melding, rippling, almost liquid. Blinking red sensors swarm around its edges like flies. She can’t tell how close it is—one second it seems right on top of them, the next a mile away. Vertigo swamps her, and she retches.

         “There, there,” Scout mutters.

         Mara suspects sarcasm, but she’s too dizzy to be sure.

         As she watches, an enormous oily black bubble forms on the underside of the cube, like water beading at the end of a nozzle, then falls. It splashes apart on the slag, revealing its cargo. Mara takes a sharp breath. It’s an old man, scarecrow-skinny, naked, with skin so pale it almost glows against the pebbly black rock.

         But instead of a head, or perhaps enveloping it, there’s spiny black machinery, with a red sensor pulsing right where the old man’s face should be.

         Mara squeezes her eyes shut for a second, fighting nausea. She knows it’s real, but it feels like a nightmare. When she opens her eyes, the old man is staggering to his feet. The liquid black remnants of his bubble pool together and climb up his naked body, then further, spiraling up into the sky as a single knarry tendril that hooks into the bottom of the cube.

         The other end latches to the old man’s machine-mask, jerking him fully upright like a marionette, and Mara can’t hide her flinch.

         “Now you’re not breathing at all,” Scout says in her ear. “Find a happy medium. Between the huffing-puffing and the not-breathing.”

         Mara makes herself take a breath of the charred metal air as the other bubbles start to fall. They splash down one after another, bursting apart; the passengers wobble upright, and their cables wind skyward to connect them to the cube. There are dozens and dozens of them, and Mara searches for Io’s body. Her jutting ribs, her short thick legs. She wants to see her so badly, and at the same time she dreads it.

         By the time the black rain stops falling, there are nearly fifty men and women and children shivering on the basalt. Then the cube moves, sliding soundlessly forward, sending a ripple through the black forest of tendrils, and all of them start to march.

         Mara turns to Scout, trying to share the anguish, but Scout’s face is expressionless. She asks her question anyway, chopping the words out of a shaky breath:

         “Why would they do this to us?”

         Scout runs a pensive finger down her tattoos. “They might be bored,” she says. “You ready?”

         Mara swallows. She’s never felt less ready for anything. She wants to be back in the habs, back in the safe white cocoon of her family’s house.

         But Io is marching.

         “Ready,” Mara says. “Yes.”

* * *

         Scout leads the way out of the trench, camfoil cloak flapping behind her, and the hab girl follows good and close, keeping pace how she promised she could. Her name is Myra. Or Meera. Or something like that.

         Scout is more concerned with her promised payment, the access chip nestled in the hab girl’s blue-veined wrist. A small fortune on the black market, and it can’t be taken by force. Hab folk are clever that way. Their bodies are all wired up with electricity that can fry the skin off your fingers if you touch them when they’re agitated. She already got a little burst of it when she brushed the hab girl’s elbow on accident.

         So she has to do the job, first. She’d have preferred to leave her client underground—less factors, less fuck-ups—but she doesn’t trust herself to spot the right walker, since hab folk aren’t so much for tattoos or scars or looking interesting in general. Myra’s along for identification purposes.

         “Start looking,” Scout orders. “But keep your head down as much as you can.”

         The hab girl gives a grim-mouthed nod. They’re coming up on the walkers from the rear, and as they pass into the shadow of the cube the tug gets stronger. Oh, the tug. It’s like tiptoeing a fucking precipice whenever she gets near the thing. But she has to stay focused.

         The walkers are slow. Partly because they’re barefoot, no boots or even gelwrap to protect them from the rock. Scout sees smashed toenails, flesh bruised blue and swollen underneath. Gooey red abrasions. Puffy ankles, pus-lined cuts. And the stink is awful. They’ve been pissing on themselves as they go, sweating sharp and sour.

         Despite all that, every walker moves with the same plodding sleepwalking gait, never favoring their twisted ankles or pausing to clean a cut. Scout throws a glance back, to make sure the hab girl is still following. Her face is red and agitated but her eyes are dry, which is a good sign.

         “I haven’t seen her yet,” the hab girl mutters. “At least. I don’t think I have. They all sort of... walk the same.”

         “They do, yeah.” Scout casts an eye up at the sensor swarm. So far, so good: none of them seem to have noticed the cloaked interlopers. “They march all the way across the Slagland,” she adds on a whim, feeling oddly proud of the fact. “And all the way back.”

         They’re in the thick of it now, weaving between bodies flecked with grime and gore. So many more of them than there were the first time she saw the cube. Scout recognizes a few by their skins and silhouettes.

         “Left, left, left-right-left,” she chants softly. “How would you really get around like that? Stepping three in a row with the left, I mean. Makes no fucking sense at all.”

         No reply from the hab girl, who is stumbling along behind her, head on a swivel, green eyes winched wide. She looks a bit dazed. Hopefully she’ll be sharp enough to recognize their target.

         One of the sensors finally detaches itself from the others and drifts down toward them.

         “Don’t move,” Scout hisses, dropping to her haunches. A walker trips over her; his tendril yanks him back to his feet with a sound of popping cartilage, and he circles around her. Scout makes herself as small as she can under the camfoil and is satisfied to see that the hab girl is doing the same thing beside her.

         The sensor, an angular black shard around a glowing red optic, buzzes back and forth overtop of them for a moment. Then it’s gone, back to the cube, and Scout motions for them to move again. Her heart pounds happily in her chest. This is a game she’s played before, but it has an extra objective this time around, a new ending she’s never tried.

         It only takes them a moment to catch up to the walkers again, slip back into their midst. They comb through them in columns, up and down, up and down. Scout finds herself envying their smooth dreamy walk: so unlike hers, which is all slouch and twitch. But she doesn’t envy the heavy vantablack masks clamped over their heads.

         Behind her, Meera says something too quiet and choked up to hear.

         “What’s that?” Scout asks, but she already knows from the way the hab girl is stopped and staring.

         “That’s her,” she whispers. “That’s Io.”

* * *

         Mara has seen Io naked before, when they were little children and they bathed together, and later when they were older and made a solemn agreement to show each other their breasts, but this time, for the first time, she feels a hot sick wave of shame.

         Io’s skin, so beautiful only a week ago, is pitted with tiny scars from wind-hurled debris; grime is worked deep into her creases. The edge of her ribcage and the jut of her hipbone both look sharp enough to cut.

         And where her face should be, where her fiery eyes and smile should be, there’s a metallic mass of spars and planes.

         “You sure?” Scout says, darting a quick circle around Io, eyeing the cable that stretches up into the sky and shivers slightly as Io walks.

         Mara nods, not trusting her voice.

         She and Scout fall into step alongside her thralled friend, and it feels unreal. For a moment Mara imagines they are walking through the hydrogardens in her family’s hab, but Io would never be able to walk so silently. She always had something to be overjoyed or over-furious about.

         “I’m going to fire up the cutters,” Scout says. “You’re going to hold her still.”

         Mara feels panic bubbling up from the bottom of her, eating away at her muscle. It would be better if her and Io’s roles were reversed, if Io were here to save her instead. Io would be quicker and stronger and more determined and less afraid. But also, in a tiny cold corner of her mind, Mara isn’t sure Io would come.

         She buries that thought deep.

         “Here we go,” Scout says.

         The cutters come to life with a shriek and a shower of sparks, one of which sizzles onto Io’s moving foot. Mara flinches. Io doesn’t. The cutters buck and vibrate in Scout’s grip. Mara remembers how Scout twitches sometimes, and she imagines the cutters accidentally shearing through Io’s flesh, lopping off her arms and leaving cauterized stumps.

         She dives down onto the basalt and wraps herself around Io’s legs. Normal Io would laugh, if Mara did something like that. Laugh and ask what in the hell she was doing. This Io just stumbles forward and falls without making a sound.

         The black cable stretches taut, and Scout lunges with the cutters. It’s loud, horribly loud; the metal teeth grind and scream against the cable. Mara screams too, for the pain flaring through her eardrums and jaw and for fear. Scout’s knee ends up jammed against the side of her face. Mara clamps even tighter around Io’s legs; the smell of scorched hair and skin fills her nose. She feels her heart slamming hard in her chest. The walkers are passing all around them.

         Scout grunts something she can’t hear, and when Mara looks up at her, she sees the red sensor swarm descending, weaving through the forest of cables. The cable that matters, Io’s cable, is barely a thread now, writhing between the cutters’ blades. Mara watches Scout wrestle with it, willing her on, they’re close, so close...

         The last shred of Io’s cable snaps, and Mara feels a jolt run through her friend’s entire body. Then Io is limp, dead weight in her arms, and Mara tries to pull the camfoil up to cover both of them from the approaching sensors. The black shards are sprouting arms now, claw-tipped, extending. One of them reaches Scout and she turns the cutters on it, slicing it in half, but then two more drop from behind her and wrest the tool out of her hands.

         Mara has Io’s slack body crushed against her; there’s no way she can run. A sensor swoops down and grips at her cloak, peeling it off. She seizes the hem with her free hand, trying to tug it back. A straggler lurches into her from behind and she loses her grip on both the cloak and Io’s waist. The silvery camfoil ripples into the air, but in that instant Mara sees Scout brandish her last piece of equipment, the strange stubby tube.

         The air seems to thicken, and all of a sudden the sensors freeze in midair. Scout gives a ragged shout of triumph and grabs her cutters back, fumbling them into her bag. She seizes Io under one arm, Mara takes the other, and they all three haul upright. Mara realizes it’s not only the sensors that have frozen: the walkers have stopped. The cube has stopped. For an instant she wonders if time itself has stopped.

         “Pulse bomb,” Scout says. “It gets under their skin a bit.” She takes a look at Io. “She your girlfriend, then?”

         Mara chokes on a laugh. “What?” She hardly cares. She’s on the edge of mania, full of giddy adrenaline. Nothing makes sense, but Io is free.

         Then the walkers press in from all sides, flailing their emaciated arms, reaching with bony fingers. Mara doesn’t have the breath to scream, but Scout gives a shout of alarm. She ducks her head and together they bully through the crowd, dragging Io with them. Blows rain down from every direction, but the walkers are weak, frail. The few times they grab hold of Mara, she quickly tears free.

         The assault lasts an instant and an eternity, then it’s over: Mara and Scout collapse on the basalt with Io between them, out of the shadow of the cube, out of reach. The walkers strain at their cables for only a moment before they turn back around.

         “That’s new,” Scout pants. “Never seen them do that.”

         Mara watches, slowly getting her lungs back, as the cube starts to move away. The men and women and children start to march again.

* * *

         Scout, like always, is almost sorry to see the cube go. She feels the tug like a little hook behind her belly button until the cube and the walkers are almost over the horizon. She’s leading the hab girl and her friend, whose name is Io—easier to remember, like the two letters, I and O—in the opposite direction, toward a derelict downtube. She can touch Io without any hab-folk electricity scorching her, either because Io’s unconscious or because the cube turned it off somehow.

         Scout can’t take them straight back to the Nexus, obviously. First they have to get the mask off Io’s head—Myra is real insistent on that point—and Scout needs to get her payment. So she’s taking them down into a little tunnel where she used to sleep sometimes when she was younger. Myra can’t even wrap her head around the idea.

         “Is it shielded?” she keeps asking. “Is there air? Clean air?”

         Of course, she’s more worried about Io. Scout can tell by how she won’t take her eyes off her. It makes her like the hab girl a little more, and makes her wonder what Io looks like under the black machinery.

         Scout winches the tunnel hatch open a crack and tosses a rock through, to make sure it hasn’t been taken over in her absence. No surprised swearing or scurrying sounds, just a dull clang. Good sign. She opens it the rest of the way and leads them in, switching on her torch. The interior is more cramped than she remembers it, but of course she was smaller then, and only one person, not three. The nest of insulation she built is still intact. The air vent in the ceiling is still whispering away.

         “Lovely little place,” she says, once they get Io laid out with her head cushioned. “Yeah?”

         The hab girl gives a vague nod. “You live here? In the tunnels?”

         “Not here,” Scout says. “I live in the shanty blocks deeper east from here. Tubetown.” She doesn’t like the hab girl’s pained look. “You hab folk live in the tunnels, too, you know. Except inside those pretty bubbles with those pretty lasers that slice the head off you if you’re not careful. If you get too close.”

         The hab girl flushes. “I went to Tubetown once,” she says. “You know. On an excursion.”

         “Fuck you,” Scout says, mostly just to see if Myra can flush any redder—she can.

         “Sorry.”

         “You’re very good at being sorry,” Scout admits. She decides to let her off easy, even if she is a rich stupid hab girl. It’s been a long day for someone who’s never even seen Slagland before. “Let’s get the mask off, now,” she says.

* * *

         They flip Io onto her stomach, then Scout turns the cutters to what she assures is the lowest possible setting and sets to work. Mara crouches as close as she can, watching the buzzing teeth nibble their way through smooth black metal.

         Now that Io is safe, she is realizing, more and more, how dangerous it is to be out here. She has no idea how this world works. She has no idea if Scout is trustworthy or not—they’re only together because Scout was the first person she found, as she wandered through the Nexus, who would agree to take her to the cube.

         Mara’s family will know by now that she left the hab. They might already be searching for her, using drones and wearing safesuits. If they find her with Scout, they’ll probably think she was kidnapped.

         “How do you know so much about the cube?” she asks, to distract herself. “About the visitors.”

         Scout’s face is furrowed in concentration, illuminated orange by the smelting glow of the cutters. Mara realizes it might be best not to ask her any questions until the job is done, but Scout replies without taking her eyes off the cutters.

         “They been around,” she says. “A couple years, at least. Longer. It’s just the cube comes more frequent now.” Scout blinks. “Got a bit of sweat coming for my eye. Wick it for me, will you? But don’t shock me.”

         “Oh. Yes, okay.” Mara leans in and sees the bead of sweat trickling down from Scout’s forehead. The cutters are hot. She reaches awkwardly and thumbs the droplet away.

         “Even before, there were stories,” Scout says. “Legends, I guess. People who said they got picked up by the big black box. But those people were usually fucked up on chemicals or head damage.”

         “Our hab, we didn’t detect them until a month ago,” Mara says.

         “Because you hab folk never poke your noses out of your little bubbles.”

         Mara doesn’t try to argue that point. “They sent us something. We couldn’t understand it.”

         She remembers the panic when the first incomprehensible swings in gravity and spikes in heat were detected by machines almost too old to trust. Not long after that, re-activated surveillance cams caught an image of the cube adrift in a toxic yellow sky. People got strange ideas. Judgment. Apocalypse.

         In another hab, a band of younger members wanted to go topside to communicate with the visitors in person. Io decided to join them, even after Mara pleaded and pleaded with her not to.

         “What do they want?” Mara finally asks.

         Scout grunts, then switches the cutters off. “Ask Io, here,” she says. “She spoke to them last.” She reaches with her sooty fingers and pries the mask apart. Mara’s lungs catch. It doesn’t seem to want to leave; tiny black tendrils trail from the mask’s insides, still clinging at Io’s scalp. Her hair is greasy and knotted in clumps.

         Mara helps Scout flip Io back over, and together they gently pull the front half of the mask away. More tendrils, this time clinging to Io’s cheekbones. When Mara plucks them off they leave tiny sucker marks behind. Io’s face is pale and sickly, but it’s Io’s face, and Mara feels relief wash over her like a wave.

         It was all worth it. She’ll bring Io back to the hab, get the both of them through a radiation cleanse, and everything will go back to how it was but better. Because Io will be so grateful to her, and maybe put her head on her shoulder and cry sometimes, and need her. Mara would be alright with that.

         Io’s eyes flick open; Mara’s heart surges in her chest. Io touches her face with her grimy hands, claws at the space over her head where the cable would be. Her eyes are panicked. They leap around the tunnel and land on Mara, who is just now putting a comforting hand on her friend’s bone-and-sinew arm.

         “What did you do?” Io asks, in a horrified whisper. She jerks her arm away. “What did you do?”

         And she starts to scream.

* * *

         Eventually Io, who is beautiful under the mask but not in the way Scout imagined, wears herself out and collapses unconscious. Scout watches with mild interest as Mara—she’s sure of the name now; Io screamed it over and over, interspersed with curses—slowly shifts Io onto the insulation, turning her on her side. She is trembling. Red-faced. At the start she tried to reason with her friend, tried to soothe her, but eventually she gave up and bore the shouting and the pounding of small weak fists in silence.

         Now Mara is running her fingertip along the sucker marks that score Io’s pallid face. She looks up, hollow-eyed, and Scout isn’t quick enough to look away.

         “Your tattoos,” Mara says thickly. “You have scars under them. Right?”

         “So I do,” Scout replies, feeling a little bad now, a little sheepish. Of course, there was no way she could have known that Io would be crazy when they unhooked her. That the tug would be so much stronger than the one Scout felt, and only felt around the cube.

         “Why didn’t you tell me you used to be one of them?” Mara asks, in a way that suggests she will start crying soon.

         “Never asked, did you?” Scout gives a rueful shrug. “The big black box got me about a year ago. I figure I marched for a month. Maybe more. Tough to tell. Time’s different when you’re with the cube.”

         “I’m sorry.” Mara rubs her eyes. “Can you. Can you tell me what it was like?” Her eyes stray back to Io, who is breathing heavy and slow.

         Scout prefers not to talk about it; there’s a reason she had the marks tattooed over. People get odd around you when they find out you were a walker. But she feels sorry for Mara, who is always sorry, so she puts her chin in her hand and thinks of how to describe it.

         “When you’re up in the cube, you’re in this sort of cocoon,” she says. “It’s thick and black and warm. And you’re seeing things. Nonsense things. Like when you breathe too much fumes or take a bad hit of lucie.” She tries to recall specific images to mind. “This one I remember seeing a lot, it was like a hydrogarden. Except the plants are gigantic, and the stalks are red-brown. I mean gigantic, like, up up into the sky. And there’s a bright hot lamp up in the sky, too, and the colors are all topsy-turvy. The sky is blue.”

         Mara wraps her arms around her knees and tips her ash-blonde head back against the tunnel wall. “What else?” she whispers.

         “Little drones flying around,” Scout says. “But with odd rotors that pump up and down. Like this.” She mimics the motion, flapping her arms. “And they don’t really move like drones. They move jerky, like, skipping around in the air. And they sing.”

         Mara looks surprised, then murmurs something she doesn’t quite catch.

         Scout leans forward a bit. “Burns?”

         Mara enunciates the word this time. “Birds.”

         It’s only vaguely familiar. “Water, sometimes,” Scout continues. “I saw water. So much water it was like... You know the rock topside, with the ups and downs and slopes? Except made of water. Clean water, too. With wriggling things swimming in it.” She puts a finger to her temple and screws it back and forth. “Nonsensical shit. Pretty, though. A pretty trip.”

         “What about when it sets you down?” Mara asks in a strangled voice. “When it sets you down to march?”

         “It hurts.” Scout searches for words. She hasn’t talked much about the cube, even though she still likes to follow it sometimes, likes to see it and know it’s there. “You see how ugly it all is, compared to the cocoon dreams. You feel angry. But then as you walk, it gets better. I guess it feels like working a scab off. But more so.” She pauses, feeling slightly unbalanced. She’s said too much, and Mara is looking at her as if she’s the one who knows things, not Scout. “Like a pinch or a nice hard slap when you’re fucking,” she adds, to rejigger the power balance back and make Mara back off. “The good hurt.”

         Like clockwork, Mara’s ears dye bright bright red. It doesn’t shut her up, though. “How did you get free? I mean, who cut you loose?”

         “Nobody,” Scout says. “Just one day I’d had enough of it. So it let me go.” She’s had enough of the talking now, more than enough, and she’s ready to snap at Mara if she asks another question. But Mara doesn’t. Instead, she rolls up her sleeve, exposing her wrist.

         “You can take my chip, now,” she says wearily. “You did your part. Of the deal, I mean. You freed her.”

         Scout eyes the telltale blue glow of the subskin implant. “Could wait until we’re back in the Nexus, if you want,” she offers, surprising herself a bit. “Pick up a numbing gel. So you don’t feel it.”

         “I’d rather just get it over with.”

         “Sure,” Scout says, and retrieves the cutters, flipping out the utility nanoblade from the underside. “You have to turn off your sparkplugs, first. The defense mesh, or whatever.”

         “It’s turned off,” Mara said, sounding almost hurt. “I turned it off a while back. So I wouldn’t shock you by accident.”

         “Oh. Good.”

         Scout has Mara lay her wrist out flat on her knee, then goes in with the cutters. It’s quick: slice-slice and the chip is carved out, and then she helps Mara put disinfectant on the cut and wrap it up. Her skin is smooth and warm and gives no shocks.

         “What do you want it for?” Mara asks. “It won’t get you into the hab.” She looks embarrassed. “They scan other things, too. Your face. Your biometrics.”

         “What makes you think I want to live in a bubble?” Scout wipes the bit of blood off the chip and peers at it. “I’m going to sell the thing. They use them to make pirateware. I’m going to sell it for a half milly and be the fucking queen of Tubetown. Maybe use the money to set up a supshop.”

         She thought she would feel triumphant holding the chip in her hand, but Mara’s anxious face and Io asleep in the corner make it hard.

         She tucks the chip into her boot. “We should sleep, too,” she says. “I’m fucking tired. I’ll take you both back to your hab in the morning. Hope they won’t be too pissed about you losing your hardware.”

         Mara looks almost surprised, like she was expecting Scout to vanish as soon as she had the payment.

         “Thanks, Scout,” she says, and it sounds kind of nice hearing her name in that swanky hab-folk accent. Scout grunts, then bunches the camfoil cloak up under her head as a pillow and shuts her eyes.

* * *

         Mara is tired too, so tired she thinks that if she slips off to sleep, she might never wake up. Instead she sits beside Io and watches her breathe. The tiny cut on her own wrist seems to pulse against its bandage.

         She is thinking about the cube. About the things Scout saw in her cocoon. They weren’t nonsense—Mara is sure of that. They were visions of the old world, the way it was before the oceans calcified and burned away, before the sky was smogged dark.

         She learned about such things when she was a child. She knows that wars and contagions and famines and climate disasters decimated the population and drove the survivors underground. She knows the habs are descended from families who were wealthy and lucky enough, centuries ago, to find safety when the world collapsed around them.

         She looks down at Io’s troubled face and remembers one of the things Io screamed at her. This was our fault. This was our fault. Not theirs, ours.

         Mara unties her hair and lets her eyes flutter shut. She cradles her wrist, trying to understand why the cube would show Scout a world long gone. Trying to understand why the visitors had come at all. Her thoughts slip and slide into dreams.

         When she opens her eyes again, the tunnel is dipped in a faint red glow. Mara checks on Io. Still sleeping, chest rising and falling. Scout is still snoring. She realizes the glow is coming from the corner, from the discarded half of the mask they cut away from Io’s face.

         Mara hesitates for a moment, then shuffles upright. She crawls over to the angular black shard. Its red sensor has flared back to life, and one of the tiny black tendrils is waving back and forth. Mara has the sudden impression that it can see her. She grips the broken mask with both hands and lifts it up to her face, surprised by how light it is. The inside is impossibly dark.

         What did Io see these last six days? What changed her? Mara takes a last glance at her friend, then puts her face into the mask’s black void.

         She sees nothing. Feels foolish. Then the forgotten tendril snakes its way up to her temple and—

         A beautiful whirlwind of images. The rolling oceans, a massive fish, no, a whale, leaping out of the water, tail thrashing, spray sparkling in the sunlight. The tall forests, the ancient trees teeming with brightly-colored birds and gleaming insects.

         She sees life everywhere, and she is not the only observer. As she drifts bodiless over lush green hills and rocky crags, over rushing rivers and waterfalls, the cube is drifting along with her through wide blue sky.

         But it isn’t colored black. It shimmers and reflects the light, almost translucent. Mara can feel minds inside it; with sudden certainty she knows there are one hundred and seventeen of them. Simpler minds than hers, more elegant, made of reverberating crystal instead of flesh and salt and sparks. Machine minds with one insistent drive: spreading life. She can feel their joy at every new creature they see, especially at the smooth-skinned bipeds beginning to roam the grasslands.

         Outside the mask, Mara’s hands start to tremble. She knows what’s coming next.

         Inside the mask, she sees the cube depart, sailing through starry space, searching out new worlds where conditions can be optimized, where life can be seeded. They are gone for a thousand years. Ten thousand. But they do not forget the small blue planet.

         They return to a wasteland. Mara feels their simple joy stripped away and replaced by thick dark grief. She feels their stark calculus, a near-consensus of one hundred and sixteen crystalline minds: this world is beyond saving. She feels their slow-building fury.

         Mara yanks the mask away from her face. The tendril slucks free with a pop; a warm drop of blood flicks and splatters against the back of her hand. She realizes it had begun to burrow into her skin.

         “It wasn’t our fault,” she whispers. “It was the ones before us. It wasn’t us.”

         But even as she says it, she knows it was people like her. People like her in the pretty bubbles. That’s why Scout could leave the cube behind so much easier than Io. It wasn’t people like Scout who made the world collapse.

         She stares at the red sensor and it stares back, unforgiving. Then she crawls back to where Io is sleeping and curls up beside her. She squeezes her eyes shut.

         She understands, now. The visitors are punishing them. They want them to march across the slag, across the ruins, across everything they destroyed.

* * *

         “Your friend left.”

         Mara jerks awake. Scout is crouching by the tunnel entrance, putting her things in her rucksack. Mara’s heart thrums in her throat. She stares at the space Io’s sleeping body should have been occupying.

         “Where?” she asks.

         Scout doesn’t meet her eye. “It’s no good,” she says. “She’s got the tug. Stronger than I ever had it.”

         Mara doesn’t reply. She stumbles to the entrance, past Scout, and seizes the ladder with trembling hands. She hauls herself up the rungs as fast as she can, ignoring the sway and creak. When she gets to the top, she can see Io limping into the distance. Beyond her, Mara sees the drifting black shape of the cube.

         Io has her arms outstretched as she hobbles along, and Mara can hear her shouts half-swallowed by the emptiness. And now in her own belly, she can feel the tug drawing her in the same direction.

         She starts to run. Maybe because she still loves Io, maybe just because she’s come too far and endured too much to let her go again. She gasps at the thin metal air, lungs straining, arms and legs flying. The black rock is uneven and twice she stumbles. She’s still faster than barefooted Io, far faster.

         But she isn’t racing Io. She’s racing the cube, and the cube is winning. Its shadow slides towards Io like a razor across skin. Mara is panting, pushing. Every last shred of muscle in her legs is screaming. She trips on a crag in the basalt and splits her knee, shreds her palms.

         No time to stop. She scrabbles back upright and reaches Io just as the cube’s shadow envelops them both. Her friend’s face is streaked with tears.

         “It was our fault,” Io is babbling. “Our fault. Our fault.”

         Mara tries to drag her away, but Io goes limp and heavy in her arms. The cube is directly overtop of them now; Mara’s spine is crackling with it, her ears are humming. The tug in her stomach is magnetic.

         She knows she should leave Io and run. She knows their guilt won’t unscar the sky or replant the forests or bring back the oceans. But maybe nothing will. Maybe the visitors are in black because they have only come to mourn.

         Then she remembers the calculus: one hundred and sixteen minds thought this world was beyond saving, but there had been one hundred and seventeen minds in total.

         If the broken mask could show her the visitors’ thoughts, maybe there was a way to show them hers. Maybe there was a way to talk to the one in one hundred and seventeen who thought there was still a chance to reverse things, if not for her and Io and Scout then for the ones who would come after them.

         Mara hopes so. She wraps her arms around Io as black rain begins to fall on her bare skin. The cold droplets become slick metal, webbing over her head, her shoulders. She closes her eyes and lets herself be lifted up into the dark.

Copyright © 2018 Rich Larson

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. His work has appeared in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, French and Italian. His debut novel, Annex, comes out from Orbit Books in July 2018, and his debut collection, Tomorrow Factory, follows in October 2018 from Talos Press. Find free fiction and support his work via patreon.com/richlarson.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

RED DREAMS

by R. Z. Held

         When Tarnish woke from her second red dream, she could deny it no longer—she had to leave, before that dreaming red became the kind of real red that drenched her hands.

         She’d filled her pack by feel in the uncertain light of mountain-blocked dawn; she’d pulled on her coat, twisting it up and around, hem slapping her calves, the motions instinctive through long practice. She slid two buttons up and in where it was fitted under the bust, such as that was; she had no illusions she was not a skinny, stringy thing.

         Packing, dressing, as if for yet another day with her partner Sol on the mail run, from Vanquish up the Freighter Canyon to Caribou and the other gold mining towns—the familiarity should have been soothing. Grounding. But she was stalling, and she knew it.

         Not that knowing was any aid in ceasing to stall. Tarnish—which was technically short for but mostly less stupid for for Tarnation—searched for a next preparatory task to break into her hesitation and found none. To one side was the banked fire, and beyond it the impassive bank of the hill that vouchsafed no light for her and Sol even though the canyon-cupped stripe of sky overhead softened with the day’s beginning. The river to the other side and below them shushed to itself, not too high in summer.

         It was for Sol’s safety that Tarnish must leave. Sol—short for Soliloquy, everyone said because her mama had visited the Holy Book of Words when she was carrying and read it on that day’s open page—was still a sleeping lump, more rounded than the skyline of mountains looming over them both, but no more yielding. Sol could pull the mail cart on the roads alone, but she couldn’t drag it from road to rails or back. They had three more switches until they reached the head of the canyon. Better Sol be forced to turn back now, find a new partner in Vanquish and live because of it; better the mail arrive late than not at all.

         Sol didn’t groan, or stretch, or anything like that. One minute she was sleeping, the next she was pushing to her feet, ambling a little ways off to piss. She didn’t bother to duck behind a rock or even turn her back, but then, that was Sol. Life had weathered the caring about other people’s opinions right out of her.

         The light was better now, picking out Sol’s orange hair. It suddenly seemed vitally important to Tarnish to use its true color word and not call it red. Not red like blood. Sol’s sunburns were real red, though, even on skin wrinkled and seamed from sunburns previous. Everyone said those who looked like her had ruled here, once upon a time, though they made a play of not using the words of rulers. Tarnish didn’t hold it against Sol, though. She didn’t try to act regal, now this land had no rulers, nor truly any real owners, and most of Sol’s line had died out.

         Sol returned, stopped, showing only in that pause in her routine acknowledgment that Tarnish had broken her own. “Why are you up so early?” Perhaps it was a night’s disuse that made her voice harsh, or perhaps it only seemed harsh as it broke the voiceless calm of the night world, which didn’t need words the way people did.

         “I have the red dreams,” Tarnish said. “I have to leave, before I hurt you.”

         She wished she hadn’t said it, given it the power of putting it into true words. She couldn’t conceive of hurting Sol, and yet she couldn’t refrain from doing so, not if what everyone said about the red dreams was true. She hugged herself, tight, tight. No tears, no puking; she was no child, and she knew what needed to be done. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, so she would make sure she couldn’t.

         Sol considered her. “No.” She turned aside, went to clang about amongst the pots and pans, preparing to make tea. The clanging stopped for a moment, then she picked up the kettle and headed for the scree slope down to the river.

         Now, Tarnish told herself. She needed to leave now. She’d as much as said goodbye to Sol, and there was nothing to keep her. But that “no” had cut off her momentum, already weak and wavering as it was. Did Sol disbelieve that Tarnish had the red dreams at all? Tarnish dearly wished she could manage such a feat of disbelief herself.

         Trembling overtook her, presaging more than tears, Tarnish suspected, likely wild sobs if she gave them freedom. She crouched down, hands to her face, and did not allow them free. Everyone knew what happened with the red dreams, ever since the broadsheets had first written of the man near Spoken. The man who’d gone outside to do the chores on his farm and instead set his hands upon an axe.

         And then had laid about with that axe, opening wounds upon every creature he could catch, first their cow, then their goats and the dogs—but not the cats, for they hid, and the chickens fluttered away, so he turned to unsuspecting prey in the house. His old father, and a cousin, with her wife, and their farm hand. Not to kill, no, to set the red blood free, it seemed, for it was so splashed about when others tiptoed in after, and no cut was deep enough to kill alone.

         The broadsheets had found the right words for it, powerful words, for Tarnish remembered each of them and could see every detail of that little cabin and the death inside in her mind. No, she would not puke. “It’s not enough!” that man had called, as he slashed at this own feet, his own legs, until the neighbor put an end to it all with a shotgun. There had been other victims of the red dreams after, others who sliced to find the red blood that was not enough and who were ended sooner, the kinder path. But the man outside Spoken, he was the only one who’d left behind one who’d heard tell of his dreams. His wife, their little boy, had been visiting her family, and she told the broadsheets he’d had the dreams for days before.

         Red dreams of monsters, made of great red gears and gnashing teeth.

         Sol struggled back up the slope with the full kettle. In her other hand, she held an odd bit of broken tech, green with a meaningless map of dull metal lines. She considered it as she would have on any other day, apparently finding nothing of value to set it apart from all the other useless tech scattered like dust in the corners of the world, and tossed it aside. It must have been of no more use to those who made it, either, if tech had indeed turned invisible as some people said. But if that had been so, that kind of tech had long since decayed into dust, becoming part of the soil like the bones of its makers.

         Tarnish straightened and clenched her hands. She could not let Sol steal her resolve. “Did you not hear me? You’re in danger, the longer I stay.” She would forge upward into the trees of the canyon’s peaks, lose herself where there was no one’s blood to harm except her own. Maybe if she didn’t keep any weapons, she’d last longer. Or maybe shorter, if a critter found her and she couldn’t defend herself.

         Sol sighed. “I heard you.” She did not let Tarnish move her from the morning routine now, kettle set aside, fire prodded back to life.

         “You should go back. There are no road switches, and you can get someone else to finish the run with you.” And why should the thought of someone taking her place tangle up further words, or even find space in her mind against the greater fear of the red dreams? Maybe because being replaced felt more real. Tarnish had worked to prove herself on this run. Worked hard, was saving up, had her simple dreams, those being the aspirational kind, not the tricks played by a sleeping mind. Do her job, get paid, save up for a new bike. A bike of a fantastical, nearly-but-not-entirely-impossible variety—one that no one had ever owned before her.

         Maybe it was a failure in her imagination, that she could see that bike but not Sol’s blood on her hands, same as it was a failure in her that she hadn’t left yet. She looked at her hands here, now, in the dawning light, and found them as brown and familiar as ever. Empty, and she felt no wish to change that. She should have a day, at least, until that changed. Maybe two?

         Sol snorted. “A veritable martyr, aren’t you?” She crouched by the fire and bent her head over the tea.

         Anger rose up in Tarnish now, banishing fear. She was trying to do the right thing. “What do you think I’m supposed to do, then?”

         Sol rose, making no effort made to keep Tarnish in her sight, nor any to turn her back either. She peeled away the tarp covering the mail cart, starting from the small corner Tarnish had left adrift in extracting some small supply of food to take with her. “What makes a dream red? I’ve always wondered. How does one even know?”

         Tarnish could have given her every detail, a surfeit of details, drowning her in their exquisite precision. Both times, nearly the same. Everything in the dream town had looked so damn dirty, like a dust storm of soil redder than had ever existed before had blown through. The boardwalks and the stores and the shacks and the bikes and the carts, all of them buried in a rusty layer. A single horse, like she’d only ever seen in pictures, had clopped down the street, a sculpture of metal arcs that nevertheless moved like a living creature. No, Tarnish realized now. If it was a horse, those arcs must have been horseshoes, formed scale-like into three dimensions. It had paused and looked back over its shoulder at her. Straight at her. It had had no eyes, but it had been just as red as everything else.

         But Sol would not be impressed by such, Tarnish knew that. Perhaps others should hear it, since no accounts of dreams had survived after that of the man from Spoken. But then, who would miss Tarnish, to prompt the broadsheets to investigate, to print such an account? Sol would miss her, she supposed, in a purely practical way, but she was no one who would ever bother to speak to broadsheet writers.

         “I just know they’re red,” she said, finally. The words made her think, though. Everyone always figured the red dreams were about blood, given what people did afterward, but Tarnish wondered now. When you meant blood, you said blood. The man from Spoken had said red.

         But that didn’t matter. Tarnish was leaving. She would convince Sol—convince herself?—of that and be on her way.

         Sol waved her words away. She took her can of salmon and settled back to sit cross-legged on her blankets beside the fire. “So they were red. Why do you have to sacrifice yourself, again?”

         Tarnish remained standing, though the extra height didn’t seem to make Sol listen to her any better. She supposed she was too skinny to be impressive, but Sol was all bones too. “So when I start looking for blood—”

         “And you’re sure that’s going to happen? You ever know someone who got the red dreams? Or know someone who knew someone? Or are you just going by the stories of one man from Spoken and the trader’s niece’s boss, like everyone else?” Sol waited for a response that Tarnish, stubborn, didn’t give her. “You feeling a hankering for blood this very instant?”

         Tarnish glared at her. “I will. Everyone knows—”

         “Ha.” Sol looked pleased. “You always did listen to ‘everyone’ overmuch. Comes of not having enough family, I’d guess.”

         Somewhere in trying to figure out what the hell Sol meant, Tarnish lost track of her anger. Family? Why did her lack of that matter now? She folded down to sit, so she could curl around the fear and maybe keep it packed a little closer. Really, it only made her stomach roil worse, taking her closer to puking. “I could have a whole army of siblings down south,” she said, to be contrary.

         Sol checked the tea, then squinted up at the strengthening blue of the sky. They might be sweating today, in the direct light. “Not when you dig in, here in the north, and keep volunteering for the mail run all the way up the Canyon, you don’t. A family’s constant well-intentioned advice is what teaches you to ignore ‘everyone’ and fight for your own way sometimes.” Her eyes bored into Tarnish’s. “You going to fight the red dreams, girl?”

         Tarnish looked at her empty hands. It wasn’t like she’d picked up a knife while she was distracted. She didn’t—all right, she’d admit it, she didn’t want to be alone yet. Or ever, but her life thus far had certainly proved that certain things you didn’t get a choice on.

         And Sol wasn’t scared.

         “I’ll come along on the mail run,” Tarnish said, “as far as I can, if you’ll promise to...” Tarnish knew how this sequence went. She was supposed to ask Sol to finish her quick and clean. But maybe that was her limit. She could conceive of striking off alone, she could just manage that—the thought, not the action, apparently—but she couldn’t even hold in her mind the thought of asking to be killed. She swallowed to try to gather up a few more words. “Not let me hurt you.”

         “Goes without saying.” Sol rummaged in her pack for her brush. “If we want a hot breakfast you’re going to need to get some more wood. I’ll take first shift pulling the cart.”

* * *

         Tarnish started to feel it in the trail’s first switch, which came late in the day. The road smacked up against a fall of boulders, so she went first to break the switchbacking trail down to the rails on the next terrace below. This route had travelers enough, but those kinds of trails always washed out in each storm. They took their packs off the cart first, lowered those down, then Sol passed the bikes to Tarnish, one and two, her hands on the back wheel and Tarnish’s on the front for a moment, then the connection broken.

         The mountain shadows eased longer, leaving the two of them in shade that would be unbroken now until night, as they did the same to the mail cart, braced hard so it didn’t slip from them and roll all the way down into the river. Sol and Tarnish had never lost one together that way, but most others on the route had, at least once. When they successfully reached the rails, it was time to switch the cart’s wheels. Sol held the first one on and Tarnish tightened the nuts. One done, and she set the wrench down while Sol settled the second.

         Tarnish didn’t like that, though. She needed her hand around something tightly, to hold in the fear. Something solid and heavy, metallic.

         She froze in her crouch, hand fanned above the wrench, then shoved herself away until her back crunched into the bushes clinging precariously to the slope they’d just climbed down. Something heavy to swing, until the blood burst free, was that it?

         “Fight it,” Sol said. Her wide-brimmed hat, though it had no direct sunlight to let it throw deep shadow, still obscured her face, made her expression seem harder, perhaps simply through the difficulty of reading it.

         “Easy for you to say,” Tarnish shot back. She clutched at the bushes, prickles printing but not breaking her skin. That wasn’t enough, though. She felt like the slope was disappearing beneath her feet, tumbling down into the river, and she had nothing to hang on to.

         She ran. Back the way they’d come, between the rails, though eventually she’d meet the rockfall on the rails that had made the road serve as the first part of the trail rather than the rails. She didn’t remember how far it was, but for now, she ran. In running, she didn’t feel so much like she needed to hang on.

         After she didn’t know how long, she settled into a thumping sort of jog. It made her think of the clopping of the horse in the dream. In the red dream.

         Sol had said she was supposed to fight the red dreams. And Sol had said she shouldn’t listen to what anyone said. Tarnish stumbled to a stop, folded into a crouch and then a seat, with exhausted jerkiness. The remains of a concrete wall struggled to hold back the slope here, and she leaned against it in turn. She laughed at Sol’s contradiction, and tears slipped out too.

         All right. What did she want? To not die. To not kill anyone. What did she know? The red in the dreams wasn’t blood. That seemed like a seed of hope, if nothing else. The single account of the dreams had not mentioned horseshoes, either. Tarnish touched the rusty crossing of bars within the crumbling wall and dragged her fingertips along one as she might have the flank of a horse made of metal.

         Shiny metal bloomed out and out from her touch and the red rust disappeared. Her heart sped and it felt good. Not from fear, but... satisfaction? Tarnish sought the right word like in a prayer and it came to her. Euphoria.

         She jerked her hand back, but the next instant she wanted more. She needed more, that little bit hadn’t been enough.

         She said it out loud, before she realized what she was doing. There’s not enough. That’s what those with the red dreams said. Well, wasn’t she next to all the rust anyone could ever want? She reached out to the rail just beyond her knees. She pressed her hand to it and closed her eyes. Her heart pounded, pumping euphoria down to the very tips of her fingers, the very ends of her hair. She reached farther without moving, like her senses followed the shine down the rail, down and down, reaching and reaching.

         It seemed everyone had been wrong after all, and Tarnish’s own dreams had told her more than anyone else ever could. She should have paid attention to that from the first.

         Red dreams? Rust dreams.

* * *

         Tarnish found Sol again as the last of summer’s long twilight fled. She’d set up camp early, where Tarnish had left her. Her bike was already hitched to the cart ready for the morning. She probably could have made some more distance, but she’d have had to leave Tarnish’s bike behind.

         “It’s tech.” Some euphoria lingered still, making Tarnish’s voice high and fast. “There really was invisible tech, and it still exists, lost where we can’t see it, like some people say—” She laughed. “Like my own experience tells me there is.”

         She knelt before Sol, wanting to see her face light up with understanding like Tarnish felt lit up inside now.

         “It wants rust. Miles of rust, apparently. Most people wouldn’t be anywhere near that much. And when the tech can’t find enough...” Tarnish groped for an understanding she felt, but didn’t have the right words for yet. “I suppose it takes blood because it looks like rust when it dries.”

         “Hemoglobin,” Sol said, and Tarnish stilled her breath to better hear the new word for the first time. From the Holy Book, she supposed. “Iron.” Sol rubbed her calloused thumb along the shiny surface of the rail near her. Amazement seeped into her expression.

         In that expression was also the final and complete death of Tarnish’s euphoria. The fire had raised up a flush across Sol’s cheeks, and Tarnish suddenly thought of how easily Sol’s pale skin showed it. Like the blood was nearer, skin thinner.

         She more than thought she didn’t want to have such questions appear in her mind, however. She felt it down to her feet and up to the crown of her head and every place between that the rust had filled with euphoria, but not filled enough. Not even with the length of two rails.

         Not enough.

         Now Sol frowned, a twitch of muscles in the brow, pointing down to where the flush of blood arched over the bridge of her nose. “Tarnish?”

         “Your blood, it’s so—” Tarnish couldn’t find a word. She doubted she could even with the whole Holy Book of Words before her now. So... ‘ever-present’? So ‘intrusive’? Surely one would wish blood to intrude quite strenuously upon the crannies of one’s body, brook no delays in carrying out the heart’s work.

         “Tarnish.” A snap in Sol’s voice. “Go find some more wordless rust, if you that’s what you need to fight it.”

         Fight it, as if Tarnish had been surrendering to it so far. She’d fought it, she’d discovered the rust, and the longing hadn’t left her, had it? It had just burrowed and wiggled deeper, below her words, like some kind of infection.

         It brought back the anger, it brought back the despair, and all Tarnish could think of was to turn and stumble off, sweeping along the trail for the abandoned metal of mail runners and travelers previous. Her toe came down upon the half-seen arc of a can, salmon by the size, and she lifted it. She couldn’t see it turn to shine beneath her fingers, with little light to reflect, but she felt the relief, just a puff, like a door to a stove-warmed cabin opened on one who stood huddled in the snow before it, and just as quickly shut again.

         But then, perhaps the longing would grow less hungry in the way of a stomach adapting to a parent’s new poverty, or the strength to fight would grow stronger in the way of a worked muscle. Perhaps.

* * *

         In such a truce, nearly a week passed. Tarnish could not have called herself less hungry, but neither had past travelers become neater, nor had those who’d built the cracking concrete and rails all along the trail ceased that building. Sol gathered decaying cans into a sack because Tarnish could not pick them up herself and leave them worth the saving, and Tarnish kept such distance from Sol as she could and still be carrying the same mail and sleeping in the same camp for safety. Whatever safety meant for Tarnish now.

         This morning, the land could not precisely be said to flatten, not with mountains still on the horizons and foothills closer, but they had more room to breathe. Given the space of the plain, the rails diverged one way, the road another. Their pedaled path followed the road, cracked and crazed but not buckled here, without the numerous great roots and one greater earthquake that had generally worked upon pavement in the Canyon and south.

         They were close to Caribou, close enough Tarnish could no longer see her way clear to put off this particular argument any longer. “I don’t think I should go into town.” She’d had long enough to consider it from all angles, long evenings when sleep eluded her even after hard days’ traveling, but she doubted that would count for much with Sol.

         “Instead, you’ll do what?” Sol asked. “Camp on the outskirts alone, with the critters and the thieves? Absolutely not.”

         “If I was to hurt anyone—” Tarnish tried to be just as exclusive of argument but missed the trick of it somehow.

         “Keep your metal close.” Sol shrugged.

         “And if someone was to touch me and get infected—”

         “Stand and deliver!” A stranger stepped out of the trees, shotgun trained on them. Both of them braked instantly, though Sol had to feather her speed down over a meter or so beyond Tarnish to avoid jackknifing the cart. A strip along the road, maintained well in the past and less so now, still ran more to brush than trees, but Tarnish noticed now that the brush had been supplemented with snapped branches, rendering it better cover for someone to crouch and wait completely unseen.

         Bandits were not so common as shouting broadsheet headlines painted them, but Tarnish had dealt with enough in her time with Sol that routine gave her a firm foundation to hold to even as her heart pounded. She knocked down her bike’s kickstand with a toe and stood off in one smooth movement.

         This bandit, proclaiming her cliché, clearly fancied herself some kind of Bandit King. In truth, she was far too worn for the part; the only color her shirt boasted was that of sweat mixed with dirt over months.

         Tarnish had her role in these encounters, as Sol had hers, so Tarnish stepped cautiously closer to the bandit as Sol drew their own shotgun from the cart with a quick, efficient movement. Tarnish held her hands wide and empty. Might as well make the gesture of trust when they had only the one gun and no other choice. “Hello, stranger. We’re the mail run, not supplies. But we know you’re probably hungry. We could share a meal. There’s no need to start trouble, one against two.” Desperation drove thieves often enough in these parts, but the question was whether it was desperation strong enough to disregard simple odds.

         Or if it was not desperation at all.

         Routine’s foundation shifted under Tarnish as skidding wheels sounded behind her. She sidestepped, making herself a point in a triangle to see both the bandit and her gun and this new variable without turning her head.

         Two more bandits braced their bikes, blocking any retreat down the road. Modded bikes, metal sheets welded to the front in a wide “V” to provide cover from bullets, but still rideable. One boasted a notch for a shotgun’s barrel, which was very quickly dropped down into it.

         Panic clawed at Tarnish’s throat, cutting short her pretty speeches. She managed to turn her hands down, appealing to the first woman. Calm, calm, no trouble. Trouble made people bleed, and Tarnish could just imagine the first bandit’s blood spurting with heart-propelled strength from a slash across her throat...

         She wanted to close her eyes to banish the image, but she couldn’t while they were all in danger. She was breathing too fast, couldn’t get the air she needed. Lightheadedness washed over her and brought her back from the brink, oddly enough. To feel lightheaded, that was familiar enough. It trumped the rust-longing, put it back in proper proportion. She’d cleaned a can not so long ago, she wasn’t desperate yet.

         “Why would you want to hit the wordless mail on the way into the mining town?” Sol’s sardonic tone brought Tarnish the rest of the way back. “It’s not like the families at home are mailing carefully saved nuggets of debt to their miners. A fire made of the paper from the letters would barely keep the critters back for a few minutes tonight. Holy Words, you guys are shitty bandits.”

         “My friend does have a point, however inauspiciously phrased,” Tarnish said. Deep breath. Keep everyone talking. “You won’t want the letters...”

         “We’ll take everything you’ve got,” the leader said. She had the Bandit King’s stance down at least, uncaring wielded with dramatic flair, where Sol wore hers like an old jacket that had very nearly become part of her own skin. “Now.”

         That last word was not for them, apparently. With a crash from either side, more bandits stepped onto the road. Tarnish meant to count how badly they were now the ones outnumbered, but she couldn’t look every direction at once, and then a gun went off. Her focus narrowed to only that way without conscious decision.

         Sol swept their gun that way too and chased the blast back with a second, better aimed. In the still breath of reaction after a burst of chaos, Sol’s target sprawled back and still, the mess of his face splashed with red.

         Too late, Tarnish remembered the leader had a gun as well. She dodged by instinct, even while she turned, as the leader reversed her gun and swung the butt at her temple. Not enough shells for that many weapons; perhaps she and Sol should have guessed at that. Tarnish wouldn’t have staked her life on the bandits not deciding to hand out one each, however.

         “If he’s the only one with ammo, the odds just rather lurched out of your favor.” Sol lofted her voice to reach all the bandits.

         Tarnish couldn’t see where Sol was aiming and if she had a good shot, but for now there was no blast. “The rest of us can still walk away from this,” she said. She kept her eyes tight to the leader, poised to differentiate between blow and feint with the shotgun’s butt in time to react appropriately. “Are letters worth two people dead? Three?”

         The leader smiled at her, sharp and small. “Get them!” she called. Another blast, but farther back, maybe from the bikes. Tarnish didn’t feel it on her skin, and that was all she had time for, because the leader had closed with her.

         This blow, she caught the butt. Pain splashed down her arm from her palm, like fire down a trail of oil. She let that clamp her fingers even tighter, and she hung on. Second hand on the wood and the leader grunted, wrestling against her angle and strength. A moment and she’d find her own angle, or remember to kick, but Tarnish didn’t give her that time. She knew how to win this kind of fight, whether it was a bandit with a shotgun or one of the neighborhood children trying to steal her bag.

         Stop pulling, and swing. Swing the object, swing the person hanging on, right up until they remembered to let go, or else overcame your strength to reverse the trick. Tarnish didn’t know how their strengths were matched, but she still had the advantage, perhaps won in the transition from talking to violence.

         One direction, Tarnish got only a stumble out of the bandit, a foot leaving the ground. Back the other way, and the bandit thought to let go but at the wrong part of the arc, and she almost went down, stumble, again, and waver. Easy now for Tarnish to shift up her grip and bring the butt to bear for herself. Slam, to the chin, and the bandit was down.

         No time to catch her breath though. Sol had a standoff with those on the modded bikes, and someone else was crashing away through the brush, taking the smarter path, with the leader now down. Was that everyone? Tarnish stepped to the leader, but her body lay too bonelessly. Stunned, she’d lie still, yes, but some quality to this stillness warned Tarnish even before she caught the dark wetness soaking into the grass around the leader’s head.

         At the source of that wetness she found a rock, one corner visible between head and ground. A rock slicked garish red against its whitish background, when Tarnish knelt, transferred the gun to her off-hand, and rolled the woman up with a grip on her shoulder. The rock was not even so sharp, just curved up with ridges between three or four planes. Not sharp, but hard.

         “She’s dead!” That might turn the fight for the rest, so the last of Tarnish’s instincts trailed off into the words. Then all sense washed away under a flash-flood rush of seeing the blood. Smelling it. Somewhere, Sol might still need her help, but here, here was the blood.

         She touched the rock, brought up her fingertips with thin dots over the pads. In no way enough. She thrust her hand beneath the wound, to catch what dripped around the new concavity there.

         Not enough. Like trying to chase starvation by drinking from a stream shocking with the cold carried from the peaks of the mountains. Hunger lessened by distraction, not satiation.

         Tarnish let the bandit fall with a thud and lifted her smeared hand. Closer to her face, the smell grew even more distracting. Blood tasted metallic, would that taste satisfy—

         A grip under her opposite arm jerked her up. “Tarnation, by the Holy Words, listen to me!”

         The gun was still in Tarnish’s hand as she came up, easy enough to swing when standing. To slam into what startled her, defend herself. She swung, to no slam. Sol had jerked aside. Sol. Sol had spoken to her—been speaking to her before, with no answer?—and now she was back on her heels from one avoidance, no time for another if Tarnish was fast enough.

         But why would Tarnish want to attack Sol, her friend?

         Tarnish straightened her arm, let her fingers relax in their grip, freed the gun to make its own thud in the scrubby grass. The blood on her other hand was drying fast. Didn’t smell quite so strong.

         “The last bandits fled, so you can go wash your wordless hands,” Sol said, voice devoid of intonation. A cautious, rocked step into range, then she pushed Tarnish. In the direction of the river, Tarnish realized, beyond the trees. Yes. Water. Wash.

         Tarnish almost stumbled right in, shaking as she was by the time she arrived, though this tributary was safer for such an eventuality than the Freighter River itself. The water was nearly as cold as in her thoughts about hunger. When her hands’ ache had changed from deep to too sharp to bear, she finally cupped them together and brought up a mouthful. Her cuffs, having wicked up all they could hold, weighed at her wrists and dripped with steady plinks, nearly lost in the general rush of noise.

         Sol was all right. Tarnish hadn’t hurt her. Tarnish wrung her cuffs as best she could, tightening each into a twist, though perhaps she should have removed her whole coat to do it properly. Shouldn’t she have wanted to hurt Sol, for her blood?

         Steps to the side, approaching. Tarnish heard them this time, turning without Sol needing to touch or to speak. Sol seemed to see it in her, too, and laughed. Nervous laugh. Tarnish would never have thought to hear such from Sol. “I knew you had it in you to control it.”

         This time, Tarnish did not check Sol’s expression, lest she find fear in it. “No.” She stood, looked at her hands. No congealed brown even beneath the nails. She felt the truth in her mind, but she built up her words one after another to share it, like a prayer to cement that truth. “Everyone’s opinion, everyone’s advice that I listened overmuch to—” Her time to laugh, careful. “It’s meant for anyone. No one in particular. Everyone. But no fever takes everyone the same. No grief, no love. I suppose in this I’m less the same as anyone than I thought.”

         Tarnish had thought those were the right words, but she couldn’t find understanding in Sol’s face. She realized she was looking at that face, despite her intentions, only after she had done it and found only a frown. That was a rightness to cling to. Sol never showed fear.

         “We should gather up their things.” Tarnish nodded in the direction of the bandit leader. Even shitty bandits would have items of use to save before burning. “I should do her, in case a body can hold and transfer this kind of infection.” Thinking of such, she remembered with a shock Sol had touched her—but only through fabric. Tarnish brushed fingertips where she remembered that touch under her arm, reassuring herself with the lines of rough weave.

         Sol shook her head. “So the red dreams took you differently than the people in the broadsheets.” Her voice lifted, almost, almost a question.

         Tarnish spread her hands wide, looking at the palms this time. Still clean. “The blood, it’s a... distraction. It pulls at my mind, but it’s not about violence, it’s about obsession. I think I’d rather stare at it than free it. I didn’t need to fight the red dreams, I needed to know them. Know myself and how they took me.”

         Sol brought her chin down, once. Sorted. Tarnish almost smiled with the relief of it. “I ‘spose I’m big enough to allow if I tell you not to take advice, you should discount mine too. What now?”

         Tarnish had thought that was evident—she’d even voiced it, and Sol usually did not need such a step. She started back for the dead bandits.

         Sol fell in beside her. “I meant, what happens when we reach Caribou, Tarnation?” The name was a such a weight, it tangled up Tarnish’s first words and made her reconsider a second set, a third. She wondered that Sol trusted her to plan, not simply react instinctively, under the weight of the red dreams. But so Sol clearly did, and that trust wrapped Tarnish up warm.

         “I don’t think I should go back to delivering the mail after this run.” Tarnish looked ahead unseeingly into the trees between them and the road, and then as an exercise decided to see. That one a sapling, that one odd in its root-climbing shape over a fallen log that was no more. “I have to track down any others. If I can find them in time—I can’t let them just assume the violence. Maybe they can find their own way around it.” She caught one side of her lip in her teeth. “I have some money in the bank in Vanquish...” Not much, for a long search. Who knew how far the red dreams had spread? Perhaps other victims might live longer in far places, coming into their confusion away from people and their assumptions.

         At the bandit leader, Sol bent for the gun the woman would need no longer, nor would Tarnish want. “We’ll hire you out along the way, to clean people’s bikes and such, maybe. A little ‘patented oil’ and the rust shines clean off.”

         Tarnish crouched over the dead woman’s feet, used the motions of freeing her boots to consider whether she should speak to what Sol might want to avoid. “We?”

         No answer. And truly, what gain to Sol, for following someone still perhaps a little dangerous in weak moments, in search of those who were definitely dangerous? After Sol, the realization was growing steadily in Tarnish, had already done so much to keep her alive.

         Tarnish tied the bootlaces together, looped them over her palm, and closed her fingers over to hold the not-quite-true balance of the boots on either side in alignment. A step, and she held them out to Sol. She had nothing real to offer, but perhaps these could be the stand-in for her impulse. For now.

         Sol straightened and pointed, the gun’s butt an extension of her hand, making a line to Tarnish’s feet. “You’ll need those. I’ve seen the way your right sole is lifting off at the heel.”

         “But I want to repay—”

         “Friendship’s not about accounting.” Sol must have seen some sort of shock in Tarnish, at such a word used with such ease. Her expression eased, the lightening as good as a smile. “If you can stand one more piece of advice... Someone ever thinks to tell you something of yourself, turn the words back on them, see how they fit. Can’t have much of a family—anymore—digging in, here in the north, and forever running the mail all the way up the Canyon.”

         Since they were not accounting, Tarnish accepted that tact admission—that gift—without a reply. Instead, she knelt to exchange her boots there, on the scrubby grass.

         Sol nodded once when Tarnish had finished, strode for their cart. “Now. We have to hurry if we’re going to burn them and still make Caribou before dark.”

         Tarnish surprised herself with the lift of her smile as she followed. The smile, she’d assumed she wouldn’t feel again, and the belonging, she’d not quite thought to feel at all. She’d take it, without accounting, and consider lucky to be one of her personal words.

Copyright © 2018 R. Z. Held

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

R. Z. Held writes speculative fiction and currently hangs out most in the subgenres of space opera and weird western. Her Silver series of urban fantasy novels was published under the name Rhiannon Held. She lives in Seattle, where she works as an archaeologist for an environmental compliance firm. At work, she mostly uses her degree for copy-editing technical reports; in writing, she uses it for cultural world-building; in public, she’ll probably use it to check the mold seams on the wine bottle at dinner.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE LAST HUMAN CHILD

by Milo James Fowler

         Dahlia loved Brawnstone as much as she hated him.

         He protected her. Provided for her. Cared for her like she was a glass flower.

         But it was her fault all those people had died.

         Creatures. Whatever they were. Like Brawnstone, they were difficult to classify. Spliced, the humans called them. One had the shaggy golden face of a lion and the body of a large muscular man. Arsalean was his name, chief among the Elders.

         Now as dead as the rest of them, thanks to her.

         Brawnstone had taken her from her own people. Tasked with her capture and delivery to his masters, he had broken into the human compound like it was made of chalk. Smashed right through the wall, a stone monster breaking through reinforced concrete. Chunks of the stuff hit the floor, and dust enshrouded his features as he stomped toward her cot.

         He had taken her away in her nightgown, tucking her under the enormous trench coat he wore, shielding her from the toxic rain.

         It had not been a rescue.

         The Elders had planned a feast in her honor. For Dahlia, the last human child. They intended to feed her, then feast on her, broadcasting her grisly dismemberment to every human compound scattered throughout the sectors. Her death would mark the end of their future. Their hopes would be crushed.

         Instead, the humans saw a small-boned girl kill the twelve Spliced Elders and all of their Spliced guards with her bare hands—and whatever weapons she laid those hands upon. There would have been great rejoicing among her audience that night.

         But their cheers died in their throats. For young Dahlia’s rampage had not ended with the spliced ones’ demise.

         Brawnstone did not intervene. He could have, and she would not have been able to stand against him. Brawnstone was no creature of flesh but of earth. A hybrid of mythical creatures: part troll, part ogre. Designed by the Council wizards to serve the Elders without question. Yet he did not stop her, did not interfere with what she had been programmed to do: eliminate the Elders.

         The human squad sent to reclaim her after her task was done had wanted to destroy Brawnstone. He was Spliced, after all. One of the enemy. But she would not let them hurt him. She did not completely understand why.

         He had kidnapped her. He was a monster. Yet he had been kind to her.

         Much to their alarm, she turned on the squad sent to collect her. The humans from her compound, those who had trained her, tested her, made her their killing machine. A merciless berserker in the guise of a ten-year-old girl.

         She slaughtered them all.

         So Dahlia the human child and Brawnstone the trollgre were now on the run. From their own people and each other’s.

         The humans wanted to reclaim Dahlia and adjust her programming. Something in her little head had snapped, undoubtedly caused by all the blood she had spilled. They never should have expected so much from her. They would have to fix her.

         They also wanted to blast Brawnstone into dust—as did the Spliced.

         Of course his people blamed him for the Council’s demise, for bringing the girl to the Elders in the first place. It mattered little that he had been ordered to do so. The Spliced hierarchy lay in shambles, and there was only the trollgre to blame.

         Their plans for Dahlia remained. They had not forsaken their desire to destroy the child and all that she stood for.

         Toxic rain, engineered by the Council wizards, targeted human DNA. It burned their flesh and kept them from breeding and increasing their population. As they could no longer reproduce, their days as a species were numbered. But Dahlia gave them hope that where there was one child, there could be another. And perhaps another. Somewhere deep in the Wild, untouched by the rain.

* * *

         The humans wore gas masks and hooded trench coats, pelted by the rain that fizzed and bubbled across their shoulders like acid mucus before oozing down their backs. Muzzled children strained ahead on leather leashes, creaking as they twitched this way and that.

         Only they weren’t children, not really. Young Spliced offspring, stolen from their families and forced to sniff out a trail becoming more difficult to follow by the hour.

         “This is pointless.” Captain Reginald signaled the squad to halt, raising a clenched fist clad in a form-fitting glove. His voice was muffled by the mask but loud enough for all five of his soldiers to hear. “They can’t smell anything in this mess.”

         “Not sure about that, sir,” said Eyan, his lieutenant. She stood erect, statuesque, surveying the children as they shifted uneasily in the mud. “They’ve got better noses for it than we do.”

         “Don’t let their dog-faces fool you. Even the best tracker wouldn’t be able to follow what we’re looking for. Not in this downpour.”

         “What do you suggest, then?”

         “We make camp.” He pointed out a cave thirty meters off to the right. It would have been the entrance to an underground recharging station for electric vehicles in the Old World. The ruins of the building above were now choked with lush jungle foliage and thick creeping vines that dangled into the cavern’s mouth. “Wait for things to clear up.”

         Eyan nodded, beckoning to the squad to head toward that substructure. Their captain followed as she led the way.

         Her heart ached for the Spliced on those leashes, treated like animals. Perhaps not even so well. These little ones were mere slaves. Gifted creatures, able to track better than anyone else, treated as tools. Not living things.

         Fed only to keep them useful. Clothed and sheltered only to keep them alive. Never spoken to as people.

         She could not allow herself to get close to them. If she did, then it would hurt too much when they were pushed beyond their limits and expired. That was the reason she told herself, anyway.

         The truth? They frightened her. With their powerful senses, they might be able to see past her carefully manufactured facade that fooled the humans. The young Spliced might be able to recognize her for what she was.

         One of them.

* * *

         Without the wizards’ elixir, Brawnstone the trollgre would crumble to pieces. Already, the surface of his massive frame cracked like desert hardpan, paining him to move even in the slightest. Too long had he gone without the magical cure.

         A genius way for the Elders to ensure loyalty from their devoted slaves. Keep them coming back for the stuff. Keep them from straying too far.

         Dahlia looked up at him with a frown. It could have been a look of concern. Or, just as likely, an angry expression. She had begun distancing herself from him, sitting meters away when they ate. Close enough to the fire that it glinted in her eyes; far enough for her small frame to be cloaked in shadows.

         He knew the burden she bore. She carried the memories of what she had done, and there was nothing he could do to help with that. For a child to have committed such atrocities, there was sure to be permanent damage. In her spirit, her soul.

         All he could do was continue to protect her. Feed her. Shelter her. Provide for her needs. And keep far ahead of the human hunters and Spliced trackers on their trail by delving ever deeper into the Wild. A trollgre could sense such things, attuned as he was to the vibrations of the earth and those that moved across it. With any luck, their journey would continue unimpeded by their pursuers.

         She needed to be among her own kind again. But not ones like those who had programmed her. No, she needed to live with a peaceful group of survivors, a human community left untainted by the rebels, untouched by the Spliced. Perhaps somewhere out in the wilderness, there might be people with no connectivity. Off the grid. Humans who had not seen the broadcast of Dahlia’s feast.

         Did such people exist? Unlikely. But Brawnstone aimed to find them...someday. The child did not belong to him, as much as he cared for her. She could not live the rest of her life with him. His days were numbered, while hers stretched out before her as promising as a golden sunrise. For now, though, the two of them belonged together. He liked to think she was safer with him by her side. At times he even believed it to be true.

         “I’m tired of rabbit.” She spat out what she had been chewing and tossed the rest of her meat into the fire. “Isn’t there anything else out here?”

         “Edible? Yes.” Brawnstone’s voice rumbled in the echoing confines of the cave. It had belonged to an animal long ago, before the Uprising. A bear, perhaps. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Safe to eat? No.”

         “Why not?” she challenged.

         He lifted the remains of his rabbit, a bloody mess in the palm of his hand.

         “These creatures are different from most. Some would say they have evolved.” He paused, studying her expression, wondering if he had used the right word. Her frown did not look like one of confusion. “They do not forage among the plants above, tainted by toxic rain. They eat roots and worms and drink from underground springs. They are smarter.”

         “Not smart enough.” She nodded toward the meat in his hand.

         “They will learn not to make their burrows so shallow.” Eventually. After he had crushed the earth to find a few more. To feed himself and young Dahlia.

         Before meeting her, he had never eaten. The Elders’ elixir, that special chemical compound they had engineered for their trollgre slaves, was meat and drink for him as long as he could remember. But now he found in its absence that the taste of meat served to keep his mind focused. It did nothing to heal his cracking hide, but at least his insides did not tremble like frail branches under his weight.

         His inner self had yet to crack.

         “I can’t eat anymore. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

         “Very well.” He finished off the carcass with one bite, crushing flesh and bones alike before swallowing the dead creature whole. “What will you eat then?”

         “Not hungry.”

         “You must eat, Dahlia.”

         “I said I’m not hungry!” She wrapped herself in her scrawny arms and fought a shiver.

         “Are you cold?” He gestured toward the fire he had built for her. “Come closer, warm yourself.”

         “I’m not cold.”

         “You look it.”

         “Why do you care?” she spat. “You think you owe me? Is that it? They were going to blow you to pieces, and I stopped them.” She trembled, either from a chill or at the memory. “Are you a killer too? Is that why you’re fine with this? You think we’re two of a kind.”

         “We are both being hunted.”

         “I killed the Elders. And those humans who raised me. I killed all of them.” She shook her head, staring into the flickering light. “I deserve to be hunted. They should kill me for what I did.”

         “They will not have the chance.”

         “There you go again!” She leapt to her feet with a scowl. “Always trying to protect me. Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t deserve your protection? That I don’t even want it?”

         His turn to frown. Confused by her outburst. “What are you saying, Dahlia?”

         “When the rain stops, we split up. You go your way, and I go mine.”

         His giant head pivoted side to side. “You do not know the Wild. There are things worse than humans or spliced ones to contend with here. Dangers—”

         “I can take care of myself.”

         He could not argue with that. “Get some rest. In the morning, we will talk about it.”

         “I’m done talking.” She turned her back on him, the firelight straining to touch her frail shoulders and the filthy nightgown she wore. It had been a pristine white the night he had taken her. Not bloodstained. Not dirty.

         His fault, all that had befallen her. If he had not obeyed the Elders, if he had not stolen her from her bed, then none of this would have happened. She would not be bearing this burden too heavy for anyone’s shoulders. She would still be clean.

         Was that why he insisted on protecting her?

         “You will need this.” He reached out with one hand, his long arm crossing the distance between them.

         She half-turned to find his black trench coat extended toward her. Blinking, she took it from him and swallowed back some sort of emotion. She wrapped herself in it tentatively, enveloping her. It would protect her from the rain, and it would drag behind her, confusing her tracks. She would be safe.

         “Thank you,” she said. Almost too quiet to be heard.

* * *

         Eyan watched as Parsons bedded down the spliced children. That’s what he should have been doing, as one would a pack of valued animals. Feed them. Get them to lie down. Make sure they were comfortable for the night, despite the rain. Check their tethers to ensure they would not run away. Take off their muzzles.

         But Parsons did none of these things. He barked curses at them, threatened them, kicked them to the ground when they talked back to him. When they talked at all. They were hungry and exhausted and frightened, far from home. Far from their parents, from anyone who loved them.

         “Get down and stay down,” he shouted at them.

         “Please—some food,” one croaked, her throat dry without water.

         She received Parsons’s boot in the face for her efforts. Thankfully, the muzzle protected her nose from being shattered. She fell back with a sharp cry.

         Parsons. Holy men from the ancient past. But this man had nothing in common with them, unless they too were brutes with more muscle than brains and necks wide enough to swallow their bald, scarred heads.

         He scowled at Eyan. “What’re you looking at?”

         She hadn’t realized she was staring. “They will not track well for us if they are starving. Or if they are dead.”

         “Then we’ll get us some more.”

         He spat at the girl who had asked for something to eat, and she flinched, raising an arm to catch the spray. The others clustered around her on the ground, six of them in total.

         “We were lucky to have caught this brood.” Eyan shook her head. “They won’t stray far from their homes here. Not in the Wild.”

         “You know this how? Because you spent so much time among their kind?” He glared at her as he encroached upon her breathing space, close enough to share a good whiff of his reek. Proof the masks were useless against the rain’s fertility-killing fumes, but humans needed their safety measures. They found security in ritual. “Careful now.” He grinned at her, exposing gaps where a few teeth had once lived. “We might think you’ve gone native.”

         Captain Reginald’s footsteps echoed across the filthy concrete at the mouth of the cave. He glanced outside at the tracker children huddled together under the thunderous night sky.

         “Are they fed?” Reginald’s voice echoed. Firelight at his back cast his tall, muscular build into silhouette.

         Parsons faced the captain. “Eyan’s taking care of it, sir.” He strode past her, his boots kicking up mud in his wake.

         “Half a ration each, no more,” Reginald said, turning back into the cave with Parsons at his side.

         Eyan ground her teeth. The last thing she wanted was to approach these children, to be close enough for them to smell her. The gas mask and hooded coat she wore would make no difference. They would see right through it. They would know. And if it meant keeping out from under Parsons’ boot for even an hour’s respite, they would tell. Redirect his wrath onto Eyan instead.

         Or not. Perhaps she had more to offer them than a break from Parsons’ abuse.

         Fishing deep in the pockets of her coat, she retrieved three ration bars. Her boots sloshed through the mud as she approached the children.

         “Hungry?” Her voice was quiet beneath the rainfall, but they heard her well enough. They perked up, eyes focused on her hands. “Here.” She broke the bars in two and passed out each half-ration.

         The children stuttered forward to snatch the pieces from her hands. Then back they went, keeping out of arm’s reach. Ready to scurry if it looked like she would kick them.

         Savagely they bit into the rations, stuffing them through gaps in their wire muzzles. In less time than it took her to break each bar in two, they had consumed every piece.

         “You did well today,” Eyan said, watching them watch her. Wondering what they were thinking.

         “We did not find your quarry,” one boy said. “We have failed you.”

         “That could not be helped,” she replied.

         “Will your captain really let us go if we do?” said another.

         “He won’t,” said the girl Parsons had booted in the face. “They will kill us when we are no longer useful.”

         The others sucked in their breath, aghast at her impudence. Had she learned nothing?

         Eyan did not kick the child. Instead she dropped into a squat, her movements so fast and unexpected that the five others scurried backward in fear. Only the brave girl did not move, staring into the bug-like face of Eyan’s mask.

         “What is your name?” Eyan said.

         The girl frowned. “Why are you different?”

         Eyan clenched her jaw. Here it was. Exposed, at last.

         “You don’t hurt us. You don’t call us names. You treat us like...” The girl shook her head. “Like people.”

         “Because you are people. Human, Spliced, it makes no difference. We are all people, just different sorts.”

         “Even Dahlia?” The girl’s snout twitched behind the muzzle. “A person would not do what she did.”

         Unsurprising, that word of the atrocity had spread far throughout the realm.

         “That’s because she’s a robot,” said one of the boys. “Human wizards programmed her to murder the Elders. She’s their trained assassin.”

         “All the human wizards are dead, you idiot,” said another boy. “The Elders saw to that a long time ago.”

         “Is that true?” said the girl. Her gaze had yet to leave Eyan. “Did your people program her?”

         “I’m not sure what was done to Dahlia,” Eyan lied. “But she is a girl, just like you.”

         The other children scoffed. The girl did not.

         “She is human and you are Spliced, but you are both people,” Eyan said.

         “Then why are we tracking her like an animal?”

         Eyan folded her arms. “You tell me.”

         The girl’s frown rumpled her canine forehead. “My people say she should be executed for what she did to the Council. Your people probably want to reprogram her. Or punish her.”

         My people, Eyan mused. Do I have a people anymore? Or had she played both sides too long to belong to either one? Chief Elder Arsalean, her master, was dead. She no longer reported to him all that she learned while wearing this human facade. She was no longer a double agent. Merely a ronin, doing what she had to in order to survive.

         “You do not smell like them...” The girl wrinkled her snout.

         “That is because I bathe.” Eyan got to her feet in a single fluid movement and backed away.

         “Is it true that your kind made us?”

         Eyan was glad the mask hid her surprise. The impertinence of youth, bouncing from one non-sequitur to the next.

         “You created us for your amusement and put us in zoos. Right?”

         Eyan dipped her head. “Long ago, yes.”

         “Our genes were spliced. Animal DNA combined with that of...”

         “Criminals,” one of the boys spat. “Our great-grandparents were humans from prisons.”

         “We... cannot always be proud of our past,” Eyan said.

         “Bet you’ve been regretting it for a while now,” said the boy, and the other children chuckled.

         Not the girl. She narrowed her gaze up at Eyan. “Why do they hate us?”

         They. Not you.

         Eyan half-turned toward the human squad in the cave. “Perhaps we fear you,” she said quietly, so only the girl could hear.

         “Humans do not seem afraid of anything. They do not give up, no matter what my kind does to them. They are determined to regain power over this world.” She paused, and her chin fell. “To put us in zoos again.”

         No, little one. Eyan’s eyes stung at the thought. They will kill every last one of us.

         “Would you like to sleep without that muzzle on?” Eyan kept her voice low.

         The girl did not blink. “Your captain would never allow it.”

         “He doesn’t need to know. I will rise early in the morning before the others are awake and put it back on. I have the key right here.” She patted her pocket.

         “Why are you being nice to me?” The girl pulled back. The other children crept forward, surrounding her. A united front. A valiant effort.

         “Think about it,” Eyan tossed over her shoulder, trudging through the muck toward the firelight and humans inside the concrete cave.

         One of many such caverns, where the zookeepers of old used to park their vehicles before this overgrown jungle spread everywhere, infiltrating the terrain for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. An unnatural ecosystem? Of course it was, owing its existence to the splicing of native and nonnative species. The humans had not been able to help themselves, once they learned how to act like gods. Abundant jungle vegetation now overran ruined cities and forests; pine trees and other conifers thrived even as tropical plants sprouted from the ground all around them. Somehow, the natural world had managed to reach a state of equilibrium without wars, without bloodshed; sharing the same territory without either side subjugating the other.

         Eyan watched the humans as she approached them. The dead eyes of their gas masks, staring silently into the campfire, made them each look like some unknown variety of spliced creature.

* * *

         Brawnstone did not want to let her go. It was not safe for her out there all alone. Certainly, she could defend herself; she had proven as much in the Elders’ banquet hall. Neither Spliced nor Human posed a threat to her fighting skills, her ability to maim and destroy life.

         But there were other creatures in these wild lands that she had never encountered before, apparitions that made the monsters of her experience seem tame in comparison. Things that had no names, for they defied description. Terrors they were, and they drew no distinctions between bodies of flesh, Spliced or Human.

         For them, all flesh was food.

         They left Brawnstone alone. He was a creature of the earth. Dust and stone was not the most delicious of fare. And judging from his current rate of decay without the Elders’ elixir, soon he would return to the elements from which he had been conjured to serve the Council long ago.

         From dust to dust.

         He did not know how long he had left, but he would spend the time that remained following young Dahlia at a distance. Tracking her through the sodden undergrowth, remaining far enough behind that she would not hear his lumbering footsteps, the shudder of the earth beneath his weight.

         Stealth was not his companion, but he was patient. He would follow her into the very heart of the Wild, if that was the path she chose. And if he heard anything dare to attack her, he would plunge through the jungle forest, splintering anything in his path, an unstoppable force.

         Toxic rain oozed between the cracks of his stone-like exterior, serving to accelerate his deterioration. The coat he had given Dahlia would have helped stave off the effects with its protective sealant designed by the Council wizards, but better she have it. He could live with the pain.

         The rain would have melted the flesh off her birdlike bones.

         Movement—not ahead but behind. The trackers, undoubtedly, dogged in their determination to reclaim the last human child. They had followed Brawnstone and Dahlia through the Wild for weeks now, but never had they come this close to their quarry. Perhaps now they had help.

         Brawnstone stepped among a clump of broad-leafed plants and curled himself into a shape easily mistaken for an oversized boulder. One of the rare talents a trollgre possessed: transforming himself into an immovable lump of granite.

         Tracker children strained ahead on leashes, muzzled and grunting over the sound of their creaking leather harnesses. Behind them, jogging to keep up, humans in masks and long coats followed, gripping the leashes with gloved hands. Six Spliced children in all. Six humans.

         No, only five. One of them was not what she appeared to be.

         As the others pulled ahead, she lagged behind, stopping to adjust her mask, perhaps to catch her breath. She gestured for the others to continue onward, that she would catch up. They didn’t pause in their pursuit.

         “She left you,” Eyan said once her squad was out of earshot.

         “I let her go,” Brawnstone rumbled, and the earth beneath him trembled at the sound of his voice. His frame cracked further as he resumed his natural shape, towering over the intruder.

         “You’ve looked better.” She swept her gaze across his frame.

         “You look like one of them.”

         “Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it? Blend in, survive.” She released a self-deprecating laugh. “We do what we must, things being what they are.” She turned away from him, the insectoid eyes of her mask scanning the foliage ahead. “How far away is she now?”

         “Far enough. They will not catch her.” He would not allow it.

         “Our trackers are good.”

         “They are not human.”

         “Ironic, isn’t it?”

         “How so?” the trollgre said.

         “For once, both Human and Spliced are working together toward a common end. Perhaps peace between our kinds will be possible. Someday.”

         “Not in our lifetime. No one seems to want peace these days.”

         “As far as you are aware, trollgre. How could you be expected to know of such things, residing at the very bottom of the evolutionary ladder?” She regarded him for a moment. Then her tone became serious. “I haven’t been able to locate more of the elixir.”

         “I did not ask you to.” Nor had he expected that she would.

         “The wizards,” she spat. “There is no magic in this world. Only human technology the Spliced claimed as their own and developed after eradicating the human scientists. With the Elders gone and the government in disarray, production of the elixir has ceased. Human rebels have destroyed the stores. All this to say, your days are numbered, my friend.”

         “This I know.” He lumbered forward, out of the overgrowth, following the path of the human trackers.

         Eyan followed, doubling her stride to keep abreast of him. “So what now? You protect the child until you disintegrate? Even though it is obvious she does not want your protection—or your company?”

         He ignored her questions. “What will you do, shapeshifter? Continue pretending to be one of them? Help them capture her?” Brawnstone chuckled, and it was the sound of low thunder. “Choose another path. Or it will be you who disintegrates, courtesy of my fist.”

         “Idle threats. Is that what we’ve come to?” She shook her head, disappointed. “I have my own endgame in mind. And no, it does not involve capturing Dahlia. But it will put these humans in their place.”

         “Intriguing.”

         “Care to lend a hand?”

         He halted in his tracks. Pivoted to face her. “If this is some trick, listen well—I have nothing to lose.”

         Her mask dipped as she nodded. “Understood.”

         He clenched his fists. Dust drifted to the ground as his knuckles cracked. “Then count me in.”

* * *

         Dahlia was alone, surrounded by the alien world of jungle forest. The whisper of a humid breeze, through branches. The rich smell of wet earth and leaves. The ooze of toxic rain, dripping without end. The suction and slurp of the mud clutching at her boots.

         But they weren’t hers. She’d taken them from one of the smaller spliced creatures she’d killed in the Elders’ banquet hall. After snapping its neck like a dry twig.

         She cringed at the memory and pulled Brawnstone’s coat close about her. It dragged behind like a long cloak. She pretended it did more than protect her. That it made her invisible.

         Things moved in shadows at the edge of her vision, spying on her with lidless bulbous yellow eyes. They whisked away out of sight whenever she turned to give them her full attention. Studying her. Planning an attack? She struggled to count how many, but she knew they outnumbered her.

         That did not matter. She had been outnumbered before.

         Confidently she strode through the realm of these silent observers. If they wished her harm, there was little she could do about it until they decided to reveal themselves. And their intent.

         Where was she going? Not in circles, she hoped. She kept the rising sun on her right as she forged deeper into the Wild. Far from the city ruins, where the Elders had ruled with an iron fist. Far from the compound where she had been trained by human rebels, destined to be their ultimate soldier.

         What did she hope to find out here? Spliced who did not hate humans? Such did not exist in the world. Humans, then—but unlike those who had raised her. She was done with being a puppet. She had her own mind, as she had proved to Brawnstone by setting off alone.

         He had been good to her. But she would not remain in his company merely to appease his guilt. She needed time alone to find out who she really was.

         A human girl, perhaps the last of her kind—if she was to believe what she had been told. A killer—that could not be denied. But now that she had performed the duty for which she was programmed, perhaps she would never feel the compulsion to kill again. Defending herself was one thing, but she would not commit murder. No more of that.

         A reptilian shape with leathery wings swooped over her head and she ducked, feet slipping in the mud. The thing screeched at her as it passed, lashing out with a sharp talon that whipped across her cheek. She cried out and raised a hand inside Brawnstone’s coat to defend herself.

         The hood had a gash in it now. The palm of her hand came away from her face with blood on it. Too much for a small incision. She stuck out her tongue and found the coppery taste dribbling down her cheek.

         The flying brutes converged upon her then. She could not tell how many. She could only feel their attack, strong arms and legs striking her, claws tearing at her borrowed coat. Screeching manically as they grabbed at her.

         If not for the rain, she would have thrown off the coat and had at them. Grab one by the leg to swing like a club against the others. They looked like their DNA had been spliced from that of a monkey’s, an iguana’s, and a bat’s. Bulging yellow eyes that refused to blink. Fangs that grinned in a gruesome mockery of delight.

         She could not fight, given the circumstances, and there was no shelter, not there in the middle of the jungle forest. So she ran as fast as she could, across the slippery mud and through the broad-leafed overgrowth, slapping at the creatures when they struck, using the torn coat as a barrier between them. She reached for a fallen branch to use as a weapon, but the rain on it burned her fingers and she jerked back her hand with a yelp.

         The electric sound of a charged prod sizzled behind her. She spun around and lost her footing, plunging to the ground.

         “Don’t be afraid,” the stranger said. Human, but the youngest she had ever seen. Closer to adulthood than she was, he stood over her in an aura of flickering light. It was as though a protective dome enshrouded him from the top of his head to his feet, made entirely of energy. It covered her too, now. “They can’t touch you.”

         The vile creatures swept past his head and lashed out at the energy shield. Charged sparks flew on contact, and the monsters screeched in dismay, angrily wheeling away. High up into the trees they went to glare down at their prey and the one who dared to interfere with their hunt.

         “Here,” the stranger said, reaching to help her up with a hand the color of hot cocoa.

         “What are they?” She took his hand, her flesh exposed. But the toxic rain did not penetrate the energy shield, merely evaporating into mist on contact.

         “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen chiropters before.” He laughed, but it was a good-natured sound. His eyes were bright and genuine. “What are you doing out here?”

         “What are you doing out here?” she said.

         “Noticed some movement beyond the perimeter on our proximity scanner.” He shrugged. “Looked like somebody might be a little lost. Not the best place for it, considering the locals.” He glanced up into the trees. “Thought I’d check things out.”

         “Where do you live?”

         “Here.”

         “So do I.” She crossed her arms.

         He laughed again. “No, you don’t. If I had to guess, I’d say you are far from home.”

         She dropped back the generous hood of Brawnstone’s coat, and it hung halfway down her back. She pulled the coat tight around her.

         “What’s your name?” she said.

         “Marcus.” Another smile.

         “And what is... this?” She gestured toward the sparkling aura around them.

         “Electrostatic shielding. An energy field generated by this thing.” He tapped a flat metal device attached to his belt, next to a sheathed hunting knife. He wore simple woven clothes, not the camouflaged uniforms of her compound. “Needs to be recharged every few hours, so I hope you don’t plan on standing out here long. You got someplace to go?”

         “Look at me.” She narrowed her gaze at him. “Have you seen me before?”

         “Nope. Can’t say I have.”

         “Don’t you watch broadcasts from the city?”

         “No signal. The energy fields interfere with it.” He shrugged. “Why? You famous or something?”

         She looked up through the shield at the yellow eyes in the trees. So many of them. They would have killed her had Marcus not intervened.

         “How many are in your compound?”

         He frowned at that. “Well, we’ve got what you might call a village half a kilometer due north. No more than thatched huts, really, but the generators keep us well protected.” He watched her carefully. “Were you with the rebels?”

         “What do you know of them?”

         “Not much. People fighting back, trying to take what the Spliced took from us all those years ago. Out here, we don’t get involved with that stuff. Just live each day the best we can, you know? Not always easy, people being the way we are, but we try to make our own peace.”

         It sounded wonderful. “Can you show me?” she said.

         He scratched at his chin. “We’re not too keen on welcoming outsiders, but seeing how you’re all by yourself... I doubt we’d turn you away. That is, unless you were followed—”

         Without warning, the creatures above fled from their perches, flapping their great leather wings in a startling burst of motion. On the ground, small spliced canines in muzzles burst from the jungle with vicious growls to surround Dahlia and Marcus. The humans on the other end of their leashes stepped out of the overgrowth, wearing hooded coats like Brawnstone’s. Gas masks covered their faces, hiding their features, making them all look alike.

         Dahlia threw down her coat and grabbed Marcus’s knife from its sheath before he knew what was happening. Gripping it at the ready, blade angled toward the ground, she stood in front of him in a protective posture. As long as she didn’t stray more than half a meter from him and his shield, the rain could not touch her.

         “Yeah, I’d say she was followed.” A large masked man swaggered forward, chuckling. “How old are you, boy?”

         Marcus said nothing.

         “The reason I ask... is standing right in front of you. Allow me to introduce Dahlia, the last human child. Or so we thought.” The man halted just outside the glow of the electrostatic barrier. “Time to come home, kid.”

         “I don’t know you,” she said.

         “The name’s Parsons, and I’ve come to rescue you. How’s that?”

         “Don’t need rescuing,” she said, glancing at the young canines. They stared at her in mute fascination now. Had they never seen a human girl before?

         “We’re taking you back, just the same. Need to fix your wiring. Don’t you remember killing your own kind?” He chuckled again, and it wasn’t a nice sound. “Yeah, you’ve got a screw loose, kiddo.”

         He reached for her then, his hand passing through the shield as if it wasn’t there. She stabbed his wrist with the blade, cutting through glove and flesh to bone, and he jerked back, howling foul language. The other humans glanced at each other. The young spliced ones grinned.

         “Why didn’t the shield stop him?” Dahlia asked Marcus.

         “The energy protects us against the rain and anything with Spliced DNA,” he said quietly.

         “But our kind can pass through?”

         He nodded. “Are you really their last human child?”

         “That’s what they tell me,” she said.

         “What happened to the others?”

         She didn’t know.

         “You’re going to make this interesting,” Parsons said, reaching into a pocket of his coat and producing a gun. He pointed it at her. “Go on,” he said to Marcus. “Get out of here. This doesn’t concern you.”

         Marcus didn’t move.

         “Stand down, Parsons,” said one of the humans.

         “She wants to play rough, Captain,” Parsons said. He tucked his bleeding wound into his pocket.

         “Can you blame her? After what we put her through?” Captain gestured for the canines to clear a path, and they did, their eyes never leaving Dahlia. “We have been searching for you, child. You are very special to us. We need to make sure you are all right.”

         “She looks fine to me,” said another human who strode up behind Captain. Dahlia recognized her voice: the shapeshifter Brawnstone knew.

         Parsons cursed. “Stay back, Eyan.”

         Eyan reached into her pockets and withdrew what looked like standard rations. After all the dead rabbit Dahlia had consumed over the past weeks, those tasteless bars looked delicious. The young canines encircled her as she broke the rations in half and distributed them among the Spliced.

         “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Parsons snarled.

         Dahlia noticed Eyan slip something else to one of the small Spliced—a silver key.

         “They have served us well,” Eyan said, standing between Parsons and the canines as they gobbled down their food. “They should be rewarded.”

         “They should be put down. Abominations is what they are.” Parsons faced Captain. “We don’t need them anymore, sir. It’s a waste of resources to keep them around.”

         “We could let them go,” Eyan said.

         Captain hesitated. With the masks, it was impossible to see any of their expressions, what was going on behind their eyes.

         “It’s not the way of things,” Captain said. He glanced at the young spliced ones. “Look at them. Their eyes so full of hate. They will grow up to be our enemies.”

         “No one can see the future, sir,” Eyan insisted, turning her back to the Spliced. Parsons stood beside her, both of them blocking Captain’s view.

         “Are they—?” Marcus whispered into Dahlia’s ear.

         She shook her head at him, and he stopped talking. They watched as, unseen by the masked humans, the young Spliced passed the small key to one another and unfastened first their muzzles, then their harnesses, with barely a sound, eyes fixed on their captors as they worked.

         “For now, our priority is Dahlia,” Captain said. He faced her, his hands out to his sides. “You need not fear us, child. Please. Put the knife away. We must take you back to the city. There is much to be done.”

         “I’m not going back,” Dahlia said. “You can try to take me, but I will fight. I’m good at it now.”

         Captain hesitated. “That you are...”

         “What the—!” Parsons fired his weapon once, then twice more, jerking around in circles as the young canines leapt at him snarling with fangs flashing, dodging the tranq darts he sent their way.

         The rest of the squad hung back, unwilling to risk having their coats torn by the Spliced. They drew their guns but didn’t seem to know where to point them.

         Eyan peeled off her mask to reveal a stoic face that shone like liquid metal. She shed her coat and gloves as well, exposing a body of the same quicksilver substance, rippling and undulating as she moved lightning-quick to disarm Parsons and the other humans, crushing the weapons like plastic toys.

         Then she faced Parsons.

         “I’d run,” she said.

         He stared at her in horror before taking off at full tilt, the canines chasing him and the other humans into the jungle forest.

         The only human who remained was Captain, and he stood like he had been turned to stone, his head pivoting between Dahlia and Eyan.

         “You’re... one of them,” he managed. “All this time. A Spliced spy.”

         He went for his gun, holstered under his coat, but she was too fast. A whip of shimmering liquid snatched the weapon from his hand as soon as he had it in his grip. She caught it in one hand and aimed the muzzle at him. Then she let her aim drift away.

         “You should go see about Parsons. I told the children to be as unkind to him as he’s been to them. They seemed to like the idea.” She paused. “Or I could tranq you. Your choice.”

         Cursing under his breath about this not being the end of things between them, Captain strode away with all the dignity he could muster, disappearing into the overgrowth. Eyan watched him go, waiting to face Dahlia until after a sound like thunder reverberated the ground at their feet, followed by hoarse screams.

         “That would be your trollgre,” Eyan said. “He volunteered to chase them out of the Wild.”

         “Brawnstone?” Dahlia lowered the knife. “He’s working with you?”

         “We had a common goal today.” She narrowed her gaze at Marcus. “Speak, human. Do you mean this girl any harm?”

         “No, no I don’t,” he stammered, amazed by the sight of her mirrored skin. “I only just met her—”

         “Do you know who she is? What she is?”

         “The-uh, the last human child?”

         “That’s right. And you’re going to protect her. Got it?”

         “Yes.” He bobbed his head up and down, eyes unblinking.

         “I’ll be watching,” Eyan said, “to make sure that you do.”

         “And... Brawnstone?” Dahlia said. Hopeful.

         Eyan smiled. “He might be, too.”

* * *

         The mighty trollgre stood outside the window to her new bedroom. This was not a compound made of concrete and steel. The buildings here were made of wood and thatch, protected by a dome of electrostatic shielding. A barrier he could not penetrate or else his entire body would burst into a cloud of dust.

         Apparently there lived among these humans one of their last great wizards. She had given Brawnstone his own generator, his own shield that would protect him from the toxic rain. His hide was still deteriorating, little by little, but perhaps this would buy him a bit more time.

         “I wish you could come inside,” Dahlia said, leaning on the windowsill and watching him with a frown. Of concern, perhaps. A bandage stuck to her face where she had been sliced by a flying demon. Would there be a scar?

         “I am too bulky,” he said. “There would be no room.”

         “I’m sorry I... ran off.”

         “It is good that you did.” He nodded. “You found this place. These seem to be good people.” Close to two dozen, and three of the women were pregnant. A good sign. Miraculous.

         “Others might find it. Bad people.”

         He shook his head. “We will not allow it.”

         “You and Eyan?”

         “We have nowhere else to go.” They both were ronin now, and they were dying. Brawnstone without the Elders’ elixir, Eyan without the disposable skinsuits they had designed to hold her essence. Like him, she was a mythical creature. A shapeshifter without a container, it took all her efforts to keep from spilling out across the ground. “We will keep those who would wish you harm out of the Wild.”

         She nodded, looking sleepy all of a sudden. She had a warm bed inside. And the good food a growing child needed. Not just rabbit.

         “Goodnight, Brawnstone,” she said. “See you in the morning.” Then, more alert, she stared at him with a focused intensity. “I love you.”

         The trollgre felt warmth stir within his chest. A peculiar feeling.

         “Goodnight, Dahlia,” he said as she turned away from the window.

         Brawnstone curled himself into a massive boulder to sit outside the hut of the only human he had ever loved, where he would remain as long as she allowed it.

Copyright © 2018 Milo James Fowler

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Milo James Fowler is a teacher by day and a speculative fictioneer by night. When he’s not grading papers, he’s imagining what the world might be like in a dozen alternate realities. So far, his short fiction has appeared in more than one-hundred fifty publications, including AE SciFi, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction, Future Affairs Administration, Nature, and Shimmer. Find his novels, novellas, and short story collections wherever books are sold, and visit him online at www.milojamesfowler.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

SUCH WERE THE FACES OF THE LIVING CREATURES

by Josh Pearce

         There are parts around here where the mercury hot springs absorb a goodly amount of background radiation and, being metal and all, ‘vaporate straight away into the air. Those places make for some mighty toxic microcosmic weather systems, hot metallic rain falling all on you.

         The fallout in the dry areas has no rivers or cricks to pool into so it concentrates in the very alkaline sodium crystal groundwater of the hills, just under the surface, ‘til a trickle of some rain washes away the topsoils and reveals the color below. That’s how these painted lady hills got their name, as whored up as Easter Eggs.

         The Three Sisters is a favorite tavern of mine, so that’s what I took to calling my children even though there are four of them and some of them mighta been boys. There is you there, that other child, and the one who likes the spiky club. You there is milky-white and bone-and-skin thin, just like her momma, and always tryin’ to get skinnier. Oh yeah, there’s that other one, too. I’m always forgetting about him or her.

         “My littlest ‘un is dying. Got the scabs.”

         “Which scabs?” says Fat Boy. “Red scabs, black scabs, shingle scabs, or oozing scabs?”

         Fat Boy’s claim in this life is that he’s got what he says is a camel but is really a horse with a lump in its spine that’ll kill it soon. I remember as hard as I can and say, “She got the disintegration scabs, little bits and pieces of her on the floor in the morning.” Been trading her teeth for tobacco, the good hydroponic kind, not the Mad Hatter cigarettes that pull up trace elements by the roots.

         “So how much you asking?” says Fat Boy.

         “Twelve dollars, and she’s all yours.”

         I gotta wait a few minutes as Fat Boy calculates what the recyclers are paying these days, and then says, “Sold. Bring her around.” But then, when I do, he looks at her and says, “That’s not your littlest.”

         “Sure it is.”

         “No, Cy, this one’s at least eight years old. Your youngest is a little cherub still with all the baby fat on it.” He reaches out to pinch this sister but she squirms away, shedding thick dandruff flakes of skin.

         “Oh yeah?” I look at her again and say, “Oh yeah. Well, shit.”

         “I can’t get nothing for something like that. She’s not worth anything.”

         The Mormon locusts are screaming and swirling in a giant whirlwind and I say to the child, “Go on and catch some bugs for lunch. Twenty or thirty, if you can.” She nods and brushes the strings of her hair out of her face and scampers away. Soon as she’s gone I hiss to Fat Boy, “Well what am I supposed to do with her now?”

         He shrugs and says, “Find a medicine man, ‘chacho.” We don’t have one in this town, but I figger that Judge Tom is most likely to know a thing like that.

         “No shitting. You don’t say,” I say. “A man with three eyes?” That’d be a queer ‘un.

         “Most likely the eye is vestigial, like tails we’re born with,” says Judge Tom. “An evolutionary throwback to an earlier form of man brought on by our proclivity for mutatin’.”

         A whole race of three-eyed men! But Judge Tom describes their land and I recognize it cuz it’s through the worst of the badlands, even worse than the Painted Ladies, a place where no one I know has ever come out of, where no one I know remembers anyone coming out of, and no one remembers anyone who remembers anyone coming out of. So when I tell the child’s mother, ‘course she says no. “Hell y’all not going anywhere near that place.”

         “Look, Devorah, I know it’s a dangerous place for a little ‘un, but she either rots here or she returns to the dust trying to scrape by out there, and that’s the right kind of legacy I want to teach my daughters.”

         The child is outside, with a nail-headed Louisville Slugger, methodically pounding on something too small to be seen from here, probably a scrub lobster for dinner, ‘cause the little fucker just won’t stop eating. “I couldn’t care a fart about the child,” says Devorah, “but you got summa the only viable sperm in town, and these two babies you gimmen me aren’t going to be passing on any kinda legacy, not with those wilted genitals of theirs.”

         Two childs? Oh right. I’d almost missed that other one there, hiding in the corner, because even my good eye isn’t all that good anymore these days. The sick sister comes in with a brace of scrub lobster, good-sized ones ‘bout as big as jackrabbit hares, holding them by the stingers, keeping well away from their foreclaws. “I’m taking the kid, we’re finding a medicine man. You want to try for another child, you just wait ‘til I get back. Or don’t. Makes little difference to me.”

         She looks at me angry and says, “And I bet you ‘xpect to stay here for supper, don’t you, before you run off to do what you want?”

         But I say no and, “Come on, child,” leaving Devorah with the lobsters. Chances are, mood she’s in, she’d feed me those poison sacs along with the meat just to keep me from getting away. Me’n the one with the spiky club pack our things; she takes only her spiky club, I get a bottle of seed from the icebox and my mater baster, lock the other bottles in Judge Tom’s vault in case Devorah tries to get sneaky in my absence. Make sure I’ve got my repeater and the whiz-bang, shells for both, everything loaded up in a shopping cart with four good wheels. I weigh saying goodbye to my other two wives, but they’re both older than Devorah and got a kid each, and they don’t need to be concerned with this business.

         “What’s your name, anyway?” She’s helping me push the cart because the scars on my left side keep me from steering it in a straight line.

         She shrugs and shakes her head.

         “All right, then, what’s your momma call you?”

         “Little animal, mostly.”

         We can hardly see where we’re going at first, with the lights of the town blocked by the Painted Ladies. “That’s no good for a name. What would you want to be called, if you could pick yourself a name? Go on, any name at all.” Another shrug. The path is a little clearer now with the heavy isotopes glowing in the dark. “I’ll call you Annie, yeah? That’s a little like animal.”

         “No. I don’t like that name.”

         “No? Well tough shit, you had your chance.” The junk train is one of the slowest forms of transportation ever accidentally invented by man, but it doesn’t cost you nothing. When I spot it, it’s a good mile’n a half long and wending its way through soapstone. I push my shopping cart close to the rails ‘til the magnets pick up and attach us to the tail end of the train, then settle in to enjoy the ride. Somewhere ahead of us, sight unseen, is a great big locomotive that is putting out a positively wasteful amount of electrical energy. The electromagnetic properties of this here locomotive attract most everything metal that falls by the trackside—derelict cars, tanker trucks, oil drums, whatnot—and string them out behind it. At the end of its round trip, the dumb robotic engine will bring back to its owners quite a haul.

         Then Annie shakes my shoulder and says, “Wake up!” in a real scared-like voice even though I insist I wasn’t asleep, I was looking up at the sky, wondering if the moon is brighter because it, too, is radiated or if ‘cause the bombs blew away enough layers of the atmosphere to clear away the fuzz. But I had been staring up at it for quite a while, perhaps not saying anything for some time, too long, just long enough for the things in my head to become indistinguishable from the landscape around me, which is the only way I know how to dream.

         “What the damn hell, child?” She points at the shadows alongside the track, which are turning silver-liquid and flowing down the hillsides towards us. Standing up and looking at us. The train is only apace so that a man at a flat sprint can catch up and grab hold, which these shadows do, summa them leaping onboard from the higher slopes. I rise to my feet, unsteady in the wire basket, and rack the repeater once where they can see it clearly. Something odd about these bandits, odd about their skin, which crawls with a life of its own as they move about along the train cars, stretches of skin being pulled off in big, looping Lorentz tangles. When they come close to our end of it I don’t know if’n they got any interest or intentions in us but I fire one shot over their heads, intending to warn them off. The bullet curves off on its own magnetic track. I couldn’t hit a single thing I wanted to. The bandits, all dozen or so, face me and Annie, cornered in the caboose. I rack the repeater again, but it doesn’t hold enough to deal with all of them, even if I could afford that many cartridges in the first place.

         Up ahead, somebody does some wrenching to the first coupling and I nearly topple over as the train decelerates. The engine, freed of its heavy burden, goes screaming off alone into the night, leaving us pretty well in the dark, surrounded. More bandits come out of the hills behind us, and the ones on the train don’t seem concerned by my rifle. Their skin has stopped crawling. Its metallic, like they’re all wearing armor. The child doesn’t say anything, doesn’t whimper or cling to my arm, just hops out of the cart, stands there with the Slugger. She might just beat the scabs that way, good old grit.

         It seems destined to go down in a bad way, but then just as they step close enough to do damage, the light reflecting off their shiny bodies shows me their faces and shows them mine, and we all go rigid. The frontman pushes his face real close to mine, to take a good long look at my scarred left socket using the third eye that sits square in the middle of his forehead.

         The bandits have a caravan of trucks, carriages, anything with flatbed space to haul away the bigger pieces of the junk train. They take my repeater and Annie’s Slugger, and my knife which was one of my favorites, but miss the hidden whiz-bang. Put us in the back of one truck and take us to their village of Pueblo cliff homes far enough away from the track that it’s mid-afternoon by the time we get there. Everyone we see in the village has got the three eyes and their fleshes look metallic to some degree—some got just traceries of discoloration in their veins and capillaries, others got jewelry embedded or burned into their bodies, and the full-on priest warriors are coated neck-to-toe in silver or gold bodypaint. The smell of a smeltworks, from a rock smokestack sticking outta the ground.

         “You a railroad bull?” says one man I hadn’t seen before. He keeps his middle eye closed while he examines me. They’re watching to see if I flinch, so I take my time looking this new feller over, up-and-down. He must be head honcho, ‘cause his metal coating goes all the way up over the top of him, covering his face like a mask. His is a dull chrome, signifying something I dunno what in some kinda hierarchy I dunno which, but there are a lot of other full-body elders or chiefs behind him muttering to themselves and casting the kinda looks over at Annie that make me real uncomfortable, so I oughta get on this fella’s good side right quick.

         “Was just hitching a ride. We’re looking for a medicine man, heard there could be one out this way.”

         “Can’t nobody do anything about that eye of yours, no miracle or medicine man, not for all the scars. Can’t cure blindness.”

         “I’m not blind,” I say stiffly, though it’s near enough true to not matter. “Besides, it’s not for me, it’s for my little ‘un.”

         He looks at her two blues and says, “Can’t do nothing for her missing eye, either.”

         “Nothing wrong with her eyes, but lookit the rest of her. Falling to pieces. I’ll take anything you got that can patch her back up.”

         He says, “I’m Reverend Alloy. I had a vision last month. I saw the Father and the Son appear before us, asking which of us would feed those who were hungry, clothe those who were naked, and heal those who were sick. There are certain healings we can perform. The power of spiritual healing often will have a positive effect on the physical body.” Reverend Alloy and his deacons separate me from Annie, I say hey, it goes ignored, she’s being taken by some women up a ladder into a clay Pueblo house and the men lead me toward the smokestack. They’re holding their hands out, for payment.

         “Well you already got my gun’n my knife,” I grouse.

         “That’s pay enough to get you safe passage to our settlement,” says Alloy, “but no further down the path.” So I give them, grudgingly, half the cigarettes I bought with the child’s teeth, and they let me belowground where the smelters are. The chamber is tiny, hardly large enough for the half dozen of us and the cluster of crucibles in the center. I watch as the deacons break down my repeater and throw its metals into each smelter of matching metal, mostly steel, a little iron, trace radium from the sights. Brass cartridges into another pot. Lead into another. The wooden stock is stacked aside to be burned later.

         Despite the blower leading up the chimney, the room is blast furnace hot, and filled with fumes. Vapors of different metals rise from each crucible, and Reverend Alloy brings me close to them, to breathe deeply. The deacons chant in a language I don’t know, but that could be nearly anything ‘cause I don’t know much of any language, not even this one. Their two normal eyes are closed, but they stare at me with their third eye, all of them, chanting until my vision goes blurry and my hands start to shaking.

         “What for?!” I demand them. “You said this couldn’t heal me.”

         The Reverend says, “We must feed those who are hungry. Your spirit is thin, wasting away. You hunger and yearn for something to fill a hole within you.”

         I almost fall over from the vapors. “Get me out of here. Get me over to her.” I push through their arms, as if I could break away if they didn’t allow me, and stumble back out into the clear air. “Where is she?”

         She is being led back down the ladder, wearing a plain but spotless shift. Most probly the cleanest thing she’s ever wore in her whole life. “There she is, sir. Come with us and you can watch her be clothed.” There’s quite a gathering leading us through the little village down to the pools, these glistening pools of quicksilver. There are others, mostly children, dressed in these white clothes, holdin’ hands, skipping down the road. What are they so goddamn cheerful about, the pools are hardly more’n puddles, not much enough to splash around in.

         They’re melting some more metal near the side of the largest pool and the kids form an orderly line, Annie near the back. Reverend Alloy dips one hand into the mercury at his feet and moves down the line to bless each one by drawing a silver cross on their foreheads with his finger, high up on their heads, above their weird old mutant eyes. Then, with a few whispered words, Reverend Alloy baptizes them in the quicksilver, starting with a boy not much older’n Annie. The boy’s entire body drips silver when he comes back up, and he’d kept his third eye open throughout—it blinks liquid metal tears as he stumbles back to firm ground. “Next, come here, quickly my child, don’t dawdle.” Alloy and his deacons keep the holy assembly line moving smoothly. Annie can’t see what’s up ahead, and she looks bored, but I’m not near enough to tell her to keep her eyes closed when she goes under. The baptized kids are stacking up on the side, shivering penguin-like as the mercury floods their eyeballs and gives them first-hand visions of the saints.

         “How do any you all make it to breeding age?”

         Reverend Alloy eyes all a my scars and says, “How did you?”

         An older boy, late teens, warrior hunter muscled, approaches the dunking pools but goes instead to the bubbling pot of molten lead and takes off his shirt. His head is shorn completely bald, and the reverend ladles water over the top of it, over and over.

         “Brother Anvil is doing his Leidenfrost baptism.” The congregation murmurs its praises. The teen holds his hands up in prayer and, without further hesitation, dunks face-first into the cauldron, dipping his full head in for the briefest second. As he comes back up, the metal slides off his skin without injury or other bothering. The boy looks serene. Alloy says, “Lead is the first Leidenfrost baptism. Next he will do copper, or bronze, and if he survives that, he can take electroplating communion and become one with the metal.”

         I look at Alloy’s graying skin. “That what you done?”

         “Yes.” Lookit him, all puffy with pride. “I bear the scars. Now I eat silver, as I wait for the congregation to mine enough for my baptism in that metal.”

         “That’s an expensive faith.”

         “What earthly treasure compares to these visions of heaven? And I have had visions,” he says, looking at Annie. She is next in line at the mercury pool, watching it lap over her toes. “Of her, being immersed in gold and rising up without impurity. No one has ever been baptized in gold yet, but I believe in her. I believe she may very well be the first of the new high priests, our nino de oro, able to stand before the Elephant’s Foot in the Holy-of-Holies.”

         I look at where he is pointing, at the the cement cylinder of a half-hidden temple further down the canyon, its defunct cooling stack starting to crumble in the scabland weather. I freeze. Tense. “You actually send people into there?”

         “Used to, but no one has yet been able to survive being in the divine presence.” He licks his lips. “We’ll get her metal-plated really good, though. I believe in her.”

         Annie squawks when I nab her. I have her by my left arm, which means I can’t pick her up complete-like, so she kicks her legs to help as I drag her out of the puddle and away from the Baptists. We get a few yards out’n look back. None of them have made a move, jes waiting to see what the plan is ‘cause I’ve got my back up against the canyon wall with a large group of frowning Baptists between me and the carriages. I draw the whiz-bang from its hiding spot, tell Annie to run for the cars, and fire it.

         It’s a fat double-barreled Derringer. The first barrel shoots a tin cartridge of aluminum chaff right into the middle of the group and puffs, filling the air with tinsel. The bottom barrel fires a sparkling red flare into the metal cloud and bursts. Fuel-air bomb. The Baptists are simply gone, the blast zone ringed with fire. I wonder how well their metallic skin can protect them. Annie’s running, outrunning me cuz I just limp along, and she runs straight to the little tool shed where the Baptists’d stashed her Slugger. I point the whiz-bang at the mechanic working the motor pool and scream, “Keys!” at her until she throws ‘em and points at a truck.

         “You know how to drive this thing?” I ask the little ‘un. I’ve never driven. Together we wrest the gear lever and the whole thing lurches forward. I toss the empty whiz-bang out the window as bait, giving us just enough margin to squeeze the truck through the canyon mouth onto the open road. Annie sits backwards in her seat to watch for pursuit, but after a few miles it’s clear that we’re all alone, with only the great dunes of chat and the smell of burning sunflower oil around us. I check the tank—it’s very nearly full.

         “What’s an elephant’s foot?”

         I didn’t know she’d heard that. I say, “Corium.”

         Annie turns forward and asks, “Where we going, Pap?” but I don’t rightly know. The Baptists had us in the back of a truck on the way out here, and the road has been washed away several times, now just a fainter line against the pale ground. Later she says, “I’m real hungry. Stop so I can catch something.”

         I say, “We have to keep moving.” Several layers of her skin flutter out the window and mix with the white sands. The sun, hidden behind debris clouds, provides no help in steering. These are permanent winter deserts. Annie shivers in her thin dress. She looks up at the clouds and points out a contrail.

         “Angel wings,” she says.

         “Those ain’t angels.”

         “Mam said they are, said they brought God’s wrath with fiery swords and burned up all the wicked cities.”

         “Well your momma is a fool.” Those rocket-plane contrails cross the country, going from the coast to who-knows-where. They never come here, but the girl got one thing right—they did burn all the cities. She sleeps, wakes when the tank is half-empty, still complaining for food and I snap that I still ain’t got nothing, snappy cuz I’m hungry too.

         She points up at the sky again. “Why don’t we eat those?”

         “Cuz those are birds, and we’re on the ground, child.”

         All she says is, “Nests,” so I turn off the faint trail to follow the black birds. The truck’s balloon tires roll easily over dry gulches and into a wilting field of weeds and highflowers. “Can we eat these?” she asks.

         “Don’t ever eat anything that grows outta scablands.” Then I tell her the story of Jenny Sunflowerseed, who walked among the ruins, planting field after field to ‘quester live isotopes. Maybe she still walks these parts—there’s not much sense of history anymore. Something shows up on the horizon, a structure surrounded by a thicket of birds, and I cuss.

         “What is that thing? What are those things?”

         “Grackles and gibbets,” I say, and she looks blank at me. “What, your momma told you angel stories but never taught you that nursery rhyme? It’s a warning for travelers to stay away.” The roasting seed oil smell begins to harsh more towards burning as the diesel tank gets emptier.

         “Stay away from what?”

         I’m scanning the distance, looking for the gleam of something. “There’s a city ‘round here. We should head away from it.” The truck kicks up dust, a plume that’s probably visible for miles, and we start to see other people in the fields, sifting handfuls of chat into burlap sacks. Peasant prospectors, gathering pounds of sand in the hope of filtering out even a few specks of atomic-impact nanodiamonds. The truck gets up a low hill and I ‘spect we’re getting closer to some ground zero when I see Geiger prospectors sweeping for still-hot particles of fallout, which they can sell to keep the coast towns warm and powered. I nudge Annie. “See there? One a them glass cities.” The skyline is barely visible, transparent skeletal remains.

         “Why we gotta go around it?” She’s grown up hearing all ‘bout the big cities, but never been to the coast and never seen any inland ruins before now. “Do people still live there?”

         “Treasure hunters, mostly.” The glass city passes by, all its silica fused together from the firestorms. I see her eyes light up a little at the mention of treasure, so I tell her the legends—scavengers goin’ in finding full human skeletons turned to glass by the hellfire. The theory that somewhere, in some certain circumstance, there is one pile of bones that were compressed into diamond when the bombs went off.

         “Have you ever been in one?” Remaining pug nose pressed to the window.

         “Not in a glass city, but I useta live in Siam Angeles, on the coast, before I met yer mom and you were born.” Back when I had two eyes and four working limbs. Ripping yourself away from city life, you always leave something behind.

         When the truck finally runs out of fuel, I steer it into a little gully and hide it with brittle brush best we can. No idea where we are, or where the scabland ends. I think the faint spot in the sky is the sun, so I think that direction is west. If we ever eventually hit an ocean, least I’ll know where we are then.

         Child keeps up at first, then uses her bat for a crutch, then finally I have to pick up and carry her. I stick to the soft dust on the shoulder of the road so that’ll be easier to bury her if and once she dies in my arms.

         Almost stagger right past the mission, thinking it’s an abandoned illusion, its crumbling stucco blending in with the rocks, until someone beckons from the shadow insides. Nuns take Annie from me, give me water and some sorta sea tack that’s so hard I have to soak it first. They’ve got astronaut rations somewhere, too—I can smell the foil packs—but they aren’t sharing none. An icon of Jesusa Crucifex hangs on the wall, watching me eat. Bearded Jesusa has hair ‘bout as long as mine and the little ‘un’s, bare-breasted, wearing only a blood-stained loincloth.

         The mission’s matron comes to me and welcomes. “Your child?” she asks. The nuns have stripped away Annie’s clothes and bathe her sores with something that smells like vinegar. I nod, far as I know. Annie’s at least inherited my pandrogyny. The matron is older than any of them, but hard to tell how much with half her face covered. Some of them don’t even have their beards yet, but the matron’s looks soft.

         “Your god?” I ask.

         “Yes. We pray to the Jesusa who was pierced by the centurion’s... spear in her hymen. Thus, all the bearded maidens bear the stigmata once a month.” She points at the bloodstain. “Normally we couldn’t allow your child to stay within our walls, because he hasn’t and never will display the sign.” She leans closer to me, and smiles. “But you could, couldn’t you? So the both of you are welcome to recover here.”

         “I could, but not for a long time, Matron. You have healers? Medicines? The child’s in a bad way and I don’t think she’ll make it without some nursing.”

         The matron says, “No, we are not healers. We can cleanse—air, water, blood—but we are as helpless as you in the face of sickness.”

         “Whatcha do when you get sick? Just pray?”

         “There are healers in the scablands, just not here in the mission.”

         “Those Baptists? Not interested in poisoning my girl, thank you much.”

         She plays with her rosary of oyster pearls. “Why are you interested in your child? This is an extraordinary effort to flower a dead branch of the genetic tree.”

         The pearls tell me she has been to the coast before. She has seen what life is like in those cities, what it’s like to sink in with someone so completely that your flesh meshes together, your skins become one, your thoughts are his thoughts. And then, when you rip yourself away from him, taking as much of his genetics as you can, it can cost you half your own body. Flee the city life as fast as you can limp, naked and poor, owning nothing but a little bit of someone else’s DNA. Each vial of ersatz stem cell semen costs good money. “If I can get her healed up enough, she can get a job, work in someone’s home. Always income for a set of little fingers.”

         She weighs my reason for a moment, reads my scars. “There is another group who can help you. The cult of the Hottentotsgot. They are reformationists, but try not to hold that against them if you really want your child to live. In the morning, perhaps, you can be on your way.”

         Annie sleeps with the novices in the bunkroom, but they clean out a private cell for me, with not much more than a cot and an oil lamp that doesn’t have any oil. It gets dark fast. When the rest of the mission falls silent, my door opens and in comes the matron with a single candle. She shuts the door and disrobes slowly. “Shouldn’t,” I say.

         “I’m going to take something from you, and then I’ll give you something back.” She kneels on the end of the cot and tells me to get ready. Opens my shirt and tugs down my trousers while I fumble with my mater baster, loading it.

         “I’m married. You’re chaste.” Against my skin, hers looks clean and fresh, unmarked by the harsh winds.

         She fits the rubber bulb up between my legs and straddles my waist. “You need to decide right now if you truly want to help that child. Is the life of a child worth what you can give to me?” She lowers herself onto the baster. As she bobs up and down, I steady her hips to keep her from getting hurt on it. It’s not quite like the organic way of doing things. “Do you even love him?”

         Love? I know the book meaning of the word, but her question doesn’t trigger any feeling deep in my gut. Maybe felt it once, in a previous life, back in Siam. Remember having felt love, but can’t remember what that felt like. The matron presses her breasts against the shiny flat scars where I’d lost my left one leaving the city and my right one to an unshrinkable tumor. Her face tickles my stomach as she kisses it. I turn my face away from the candlelight. My right eye presses into the pillow so I see nothing, just feel the machine-pump work of her thighs. When she sounds ready, my inside muscles squeeze the rubber bulb and give her the dribble of clean genes she wants.

         She dresses. I lay where I am, half-naked, and ask, “What if it’s a boy?”

         The matron takes the candle. “We raise him until he’s old enough to father with some of our maidens, then we apprentice him to a traveler. Or he goes into the world to do as he pleases.”

         In the morning, she gives me something back, asking, “Can you read?”

         “Can read a map.”

         “Good.” She draws me one. “The reformationists are a day-and-a-half from here, on foot, maybe longer with the child’s pace. In the chiming pines.”

         I take it, and the dried fruit the nuns offer, and say, “How ‘bout a gun?”

         Probably too much to hope for. Still got the girl’s Louisville Slugger, dragging over the rocky ground, so’s she can supplement our rations with fresh snake meat. Camping out in the open is tough, but we make it through the next night without needing a fire, and hear the chiming pines long before we see them. These trees’ve pulled up so much trace metal from the soil that they’ve become petrified where they stand. Their brittle needles stir in the wind like bells. The wind blows through knotholes like organ pipes. “Pap,” says Annie, “am I gonna ever see a sea city?”

         Can’t see the edge of the woods behind us anymore, and the trees are almost too loud to converse over, so I pull her along tight beside me. “Well, little child, that all depends on what this Hottentotsgot can do for us.” And he better do something, ‘cause after this I’m fresh out of ideas. The map hooks us around a couple a landmarks’n then we see them, a pair of hunched figures standing at the mouth of a dark cave. Damp smell of under-earth comes breathing out of it.

         Annie clutches my hand and says, “I do not want to go in there.”

         “Come on, then. There’s nothing else we ken do.” The sentinels have boyish faces but thick scabrous bodies like beetle shells, and their arms are ‘ticulated all wrong. They watch us pass between them, making no move to help or hinder. One a ‘em chitters. The other buzzes like a bee. The dark inside of the cave takes some getting used to, but there’s light from the ceiling and when I look up I see it covered in glowworms. The rocks are sticky with silk.

         The far end of the cave is even brighter, a tall person silhouetted over there. It says, “Stop. Prepare yourself for the presence of the Hottentotsgot.”

         “What do we do?” Annie whispers.

         We don’t have to do anything. A sudden flurry in the air around us as we’re engulfed in a cloud of moths. I can hear their mouths, the munching, their wings in my ears, their legs in my nose. Child and I stay perfectly still, and when it’s over, the moths have eaten away all of our clothes and all the hair on our bodies. I blink my eyes. Even the lashes are gone. “Come closer,” says that voice, deep and thrumming in my chest.

         There are other beetle sentinels in the cave, but we’re staring at the tall creature in the middle of them, and he’s lookin’ right back with two bulging compound eyes out the side of his triangular head and three simple eyes stuck in between them. His skin is green but everything from the neck down seems pretty normal. He’s wearing a broadcloth shirt and a sportcoat.

         His mouth is like a snapping turtle’s, and it doesn’t open when he speaks. “Where have you come from?” in that multi-tone voice that shivers from the spiracles beneath his clothes. There is a viscous pool of cloudy liquid at his feet, like the baptism puddles of Reverend Alloy. His head scans Annie from forehead to groin. “Ah. Another lad from the bearded maidens perhaps. Then you must be his escort nun?”

         “The mission told us about you,” I admit. “Tol’ us you can heal.” I feel a stirring breeze on my naked back, skin crawling, goosebumps where I’d had hair, because there are suddenly hunnerds of them roach boys filling the chamber behind us. And me without my whiz-bang or no other hidden aces this time.

         The Hottentotsgot beckons a beetle-backed boy to his side and hums, “Yes, we can heal here. We can heal anything just this side of death. But the process is resource intensive.” His right arm unfolds somehow in too many joints to reach out and take the roach boy’s hand. The Hottentotsgot uses the sharp pinch of his pincer to draw a frowny face on each of the boy’s fingertips—eyes and mouth appear in blood-red, a nuclear family of five.

         “Heal anything?” I point to the child. “Even the scabs? How?”

         He dips his foot into the pool between us. “Enzymes.” I trace the runnels to it—the cloudy liquid is running down the walls, dripping on our heads from the ceiling. Dripping from the open mouths of the glowworms and collecting drop-by-drop into the healing pool. “A silkworm will turn itself into liquid, into its base genetic components, and rearrange itself into a new creature. Immerse a sick body into it and they come out a different person.” The Hottentotsgot shows no emotion, though his antennae twitch as his mandibles open, sharp beak edges closing over the sad face on the roach boy’s pinkie. The mouth clips off the fingertip cleanly, moves on to the ring finger, and bites that. One by one, he eats all the heads off the little family.

         I see their faces as they disappear into the jaws—the face of you there, that other one, Devorah. My face, Annie’s face. I check to see how frightened the child is right now, but she’s reaching out to touch one a the glowworms and licks her finger to see how it tastes. Never looking beyond her next meal. Probly not even aware of the pure animal menace around us. Does she understand what it means to be losing all that body mass in the form of dried scabs along the side of the road that led us here?

         “And what if,” I say slowly, “a person who’s not dying dips into that pool? What happens to that body?”

         “The evidence is all around you.” Pointing at the roaches. “The boys come to me, seeking a form that is acceptable to their mothers and sisters. They want to be welcomed back into the convent.”

         “So you turn them into bugs?”

         “The change is driven by one’s own mind. You hold the image of the body you wish to have in your head until the physical form crystallizes around it. The boys go into the wishing pool thinking of the wrong things—they wish for strength, for survivability, for acceptance bordering on hive unity. And this is what they get. A child goes in, there’s little telling what goes on in their minds, and what comes out of it. You, though, you could have any body you like. Most likely already have a very clear picture of what that is, don’t you? A desirable body, one that corrects all the mistakes of birth and genetics, smooths the scars, a form that your society will finally accept.”

         I’m trembling. It’s just the cold, I tell myself.

         “I am a businessman,” says the Hottentotsgot. “You can use this pool, if you pay for the privilege.”

         “Name your price, then.” I have nothing but my battered skin.

         “There is only enough in the pool to transform one person. It takes months, even years to refill it, and while it refills I must feed the worms, the roach boys, and of course myself. So, you give one of your bodies to the pool, and you give the other body to me.”

         I think about it, what it could mean. It could mean no more mater baster. No more damaged offspring who rot on the family tree. Finally, a clean genetic line to pass along to the future. Seeing the future with the clarity of perfect, undamaged binocular vision. I can do this, I think. I think I can do this. I can keep Annie from starving for the six months it’ll take to fill the pool back up enough to cover her diminishing frame. I know she can live on bugs.

         I take one last look at the mantis-headed Hottentotsgot and move to the lip of the pool. He’s buzzing with the anticipation, and the roach boys cluster around to take Annie’s arms. Only then is she starting to panic. “Pap!” she says. “What are they doing? Help me, Pap!” Right at the edge, I hesitate and close my eyes. I am helping her, but I can’t say that out loud. I’m imagining who I’m going to be. Something evolved specifically to overturn rocks and feed off the things that live under there. Something bird-headed, I imagine.

         The water laps at my feet.

Copyright © 2018 Josh Pearce

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Josh Pearce is an assistant editor at Locus magazine and is the host for a sentient symbiant Left Hand. His fiction and poetry appears in several markets including Analog, Asimov’s, and Clarkesworld. Find him at fictionaljosh.com or on Twitter: @fictionaljosh.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Ugg,” by Florent Llamas

Florent Llamas is a freelance artist based in France. He specializes in concept design and illustration, with over a hundred works to his credit. See more of his art online at Tumblr, ArtStation, and DeviantArt.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2018 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share 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.